On Visiting Dachau, July 4, 2010

First, I need to get a few things off my chest:

What Jews, Catholic priests, political dissenters, gays, intellectuals, Roma, and prisoners-of-war endured at Dachau and camps similar to it between 1933 and 1945 must never happen, again, and to me, there is no price too high to pay to ensure that it does not.

To say that such a thing as the Holocaust could not happen today, in the 21st Century, is short-sighted and naïve. When ugly, bigoted rhetoric, especially in hard times, turns into a so-called mainstream political position--and is reinforced by the election to the government of leaders who hold and promote such hate-filled positions--the 1930s and 40s teach us, clearly, that we are capable of the most barbarous conduct toward our fellow man. I am saddened that we have not learned to be more careful with words, especially in our political discourse, in the wake of the bloody 20th Century.

Whether or not they consider themselves so today (or ever did) the GIs who liberated Dachau--the men of the 42nd US Infantry Division and the 20th Armored Division--and their counterparts all over Europe, are and always will be heroes. This doesn’t mean they have to be considered perfect: they weren’t, and to view them as such is to lessen the particular hell they had to endure. In the midst of the horror they found at Dachau, a few of these young men gave into their rage and exacted a deadly vengeance some would struggle to come to terms with later. But while they remained vulnerable to the most basic of human emotions--shock, empathy, sadness, rage and grief--these GIs risked their own lives for the freedom of people they didn’t even know. When they arrived, all over Europe, the continent’s most vulnerable, weak, sick and suffering men, women and children understood what that meant: life and freedom.
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Visiting Dachau is not something one shakes off so easily. Located about ten miles north of Munich, it’s about a twenty-minute train ride to the town of Dachau, born in the Middle Ages. The station at which you arrive is the same station prisoners would have passed through, prior to be force-marched to the camp, beaten and kicked by guards all the way. Falling out meant the possibility of instant death. To the Nazis, this was a work camp, after all, and if you were not capable of marching to the camp, chances are you would be worthless to the Fuhrer as a munitions worker, and therefore the state actually benefited from your death at that point, saving the meager cost to cloth and feed you a diet to keep you alive and working for about nine months.

Today’s twenty-minute ride between Munich’s Hauptbahnhof and Dachau doesn’t begin to capture the distance in mindset one travels during that period. You arrive not knowing how to act, what to say, what to do. And it’s so quiet. It’s as if you’ve ceased to be you, and have lost--gradually, as you get closer to Dachau--the ability to communicate thoughts and feelings. I suppose it’s as it should be: what could you possibly say or do that could capture the enormity of the loss here? At least 30,000 lives cruelly destroyed forever in the most painful, gut-wrenching ways imaginable, all for an ignorant, stupid theory: some of us are born with more inherent value than others, and therefore do not deserve freedom, opportunity, fulfillment, or even life itself. A dull, unoriginal, utterly ridiculous God-dammned theory--and 6,000,000 are dead. Words matter. Ideas matter. And sometimes, when we’re careless or disengaged or desperate, maniacal demagogues matter, too.

Dachau was a "parent" concentration camp created by the Nazis in 1933 to serve as a model and training ground for a system that grew to include 20,000 work and extermination camps of various sizes throughout fascist Europe. Because of its role as a parent camp, anything that happened anywhere in the system--including deadly medical experiments, the gassing to death of prisoners (not common at Dachau, but it happened), torture during Gestapo interrogation, the execution of prisoners-of-war, and more) happened at Dachau.

At the time of its liberation on Sunday, April 29, 1945, American soldiers found 30,000 people in a camp that was constructed to hold a maximum of 5,000. They also found railroad box cars filled with corpses; bodies piled high by the crematorium (the Nazis were short on fuel to keep the ovens burning); gas chambers; mass graves; and prisoners so malnourished and sick, that 3,000 Dachau prisoners died of illness after being liberated.

Death marches--including the forced marches from the train station--claimed the lives of many, but at Dachau, a slave camp supporting munitions production, most were worked to death to maximize their value to the state. A Dachau accountant calculated that each prisoner, based on a nine-month life span and considering his production, clothing, and meager food expenses, was worth the equivalent of 900,00 Euros in today's currency (about $1,165.00 U.S). Human life reduced to figures in a chilling mathematical calculation.

In the hours and days after our visit to Dachau--on 4 July, our Independence Day in America, of all days--Dana and I found ourselves struggling to carry on with our site-seeing in Munich, attributing it to weariness near the end of a long fifteen-night European holiday to London, Cambridge, all through Austria, and, at the end, Munich, Germany.

Looking back at it now, I think we also found it hard to continue our journey unsure of how to come to terms with our visit to Dachau--and I don’t think we’re any more capable of doing so now than we were two weeks ago. Maybe that’s why preserving a terrible place like this, at least preserving aspects of the physical grounds as much as possible--survivors often comment about how sterile and serene the place seems, post-war--is so important, even if it is unpleasant for the people of the small town of the same name who would like nothing more than to move on, to put this dark chapter in German and local history behind them. I don’t judge those people. Most weren’t even alive at the time, and like us, they just want to live their lives fully, looking to the future. As far as their grandparents and great-grandparents go, if I was a resident of Dachau in Nazi Germany, could I summon the courage to risk my own life--and, more dear, that of my entire family--and stand up to the SS and Gestapo at that camp on the edge of town? Having a sense of what kind of brutality was going on there, and on what scale?

The answer to that question scares me. And Dachau scares me. Not only because it happened, but because I think it’s possible that something like Dachau could happen again in this world. I’ll say it, again: once you’ve visited, this is not an easy place to shake-off.

And it’s not supposed to be.

NOTE: Click HERE for Gio's short film on visiting Dachau