*Apologies for the choppy writing. The camp was so disorienting that all I’m left with is a feeling of intense sadness and confusion. So I tried to collect my thoughts in the most comprehensive way but it gets a little short here and there. Read on for my experience in Dachau.*
I think the only way for me to even remotely try and put words to the atrocities I saw would be to just start with what I learned and saw and then try and explain what I was thinking throughout my trip there.
My tour guide, Gordon, started off by telling the 3 of us in the group that Dachau was the model concentration camp. Compared to Auschwitz and other infamous camps, Dachau has a “clean” reputation that somehow has people convinced it was more humane than most, or that it was less harsh on the people.
This was never the case. Dachau was cruel in its efficiency, cleanliness, and precision. It was the camp that all other camps aspired to look like.
We first walked into the camp with the infamous slogan “Work will set you free” wrought into the gate. Seeing it in person was revolting. That a couple of guys had the rest of the world convinced that they were doing something ethical and inspiring positive change by chaining up another man was a heartbreaking way to start the tour.
We walked into a wide open square with bunkers on either side and a large monument set off to the right. Gordon had to explain to us that a memorial was not about “recreating” the atrocities of the camps. Instead, Dachau survivors came back and created this memorial as a way to reclaim the camp as theirs. Rather than allowing the SS uniform to be on display, or to leave behind remnants of the horrors that once existed, the survivors chose instead to come back to this place that killed their friends and family and used it to highlight the lives of those lost, instead of those responsible for the loss.
So what did this mean for my experience?
Everything was very neat and orderly. There was no hint of the suffering that went on there except for through the pictures and fact that the camp existed in the first place.
I learned that Dachau was the PR front that the Nazis paraded on display for the rest of the world to see. International press came to this place of death and applauded it for its civil nature and its humane treatment of its slaves. In the eyes of the law, as far as the world was concerned, everything that happened beyond the gates was entirely legal.
It didn’t matter that Dachau wasn’t as dirty, scary, or chaotic as Auschwitz. When you walked in you were hit with the sterility and this clean facade that hid so much death and suffering behind it. To me, that was worse.
We continued on into the museum which displayed the room where prisoners were first brought in.
I stood in the same place that prisoners were told to give up their documents. To take off their clothes. To shower off any remains of the outside world. To stand still. To give up their dignity. Identity. Hope.
I stood in the room where there were hooks implanted in the ceiling. Where prisoners were lined up, after stepping out of line or fidgeting when they should have been still. These prisoners had their hands strapped behind their back. They stood on chairs. Had the chain attached to the hook above them. And then the chairs were removed and the prisoners dropped, breaking their shoulders.
The SS would wait until they had 40 prisoners who had misbehaved before breaking 80 shoulders. In unison the men would drop and the screams would be heard throughout the camp – instilling fear in all the men outside, promising that this could be them.
The psychological warfare that was being waged was brutal.
At that point I was standing there in shock. Of course it bothers us to think about how long these camps operated with no resistance from foreign forces or even the Germans who didn’t subscribe to any Nazi belief system. But seeing just how regimented and “perfect” the Nazis got down the process of terrorizing people was absolutely sickening. They were so careful and calculating that nobody even thought to interfere with the “process”. It was a systematic genocide that had people convinced that it was okay.
I think more than anything I was terrified that if it happened so subtly a few decades ago with the use of some pretty words and a catchy campaign, it could happen again with a modern government.
That so few could control so many is terrifying to consider.
After the museum portion of the camp we went in to watch a movie with footage from the camp and accompanying pictures.
There were so many limbs and so little flesh. The rows and rows of men standing with their bones sticking out where they shouldn’t be was hard to look at.
The piles of the same men a few weeks later was harder to look at.
After watching the movie I felt a little detached. We went to look at where the prisoners slept, which were wooden platforms where 500 men would sleep at night, sharing disease and body warmth.
I could stomach that.
But when we made it to the gas chambers I almost had to leave.
I hadn’t realized the tactics that the Nazis had used to make sure the murder of the prisoners went as smoothly as possible.
First, the SS never brought in the inmates from Dachau to be gassed in the Dachau gas chambers, because they would instantly know something was wrong. So inmates from other camps would be shipped over to Dachau.
They would be told that they were being cleaned and to take off their clothes for a shower (a standard procedure when moving around). Then they would enter into the next room and would see shower heads, to trick them into thinking that they were receiving a shower. The next room told them to prepare for cleansing. The third door would close behind them, and a guard would insert a canister of chemicals from the outside and the room would begin to steam, and one by one the inmates would be murdered.
I walked through the first 2 rooms and I stopped in the 3rd room, where so many lives were taken.
I stood there for a minute and tried, just for a second, to understand the exhaustion these prisoners must have been feeling at this point. They would have been starving, tired, and their bodies physically broken. They would have been just going through the motions of being “cleansed”. Then when they enter the room where they would never leave, then what? After making it so freaking far, that had to be their fate? In this cold and sterile room? Watching your friends and fellow sufferers go down right before you and realizing that you had finally, finally run out of any hope you might have had.
Because one group of people said your blood was dirtier than theirs? Because some business men saw a good cash opportunity to profit off of war? Because a government wanted to maintain power over the people?
I couldn’t stand in there for much longer than a minute because it was an overwhelming feeling to be there in that room, 60 years too late to help any of them.
Our last stop was at the memorials set up to honor the dead prisoners. There was a well groomed garden to honor the thousands of peoples’ ashes who had been buried or scattered in the area. Although Gordon said he would prefer if the memorials remained universal, with no identification of race, religion, or lifestyle, I appreciated the fact that the memorials had the different places of worship and sites of those who were persecuted. I thought it showed that an individual should be able to practice whatever faith or lifestyle he or she chooses without fear of persecution. I think taking these peoples symbols away would do a disservice to those who died because of that very identity, so I appreciated that there were monuments offered to those of different types of people, and finally one that goes out to the “unknown soldier”, who stands for every single man and woman who wrongfully died during one of the worst periods in human history.
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It was a very sobering afternoon and one I don’t think I will forget any time soon.
The worst thing a person can be is a bystander while wrong doing is happening around them. That it took so long for action is an embarrassment to mankind and countless lives were lost because of our reluctance to voice our concerns or to actively stand against injustice.
Beneath the unnamed soldier in the memorial park there is a plaque that reads:
“Honor the dead and warn the living.”
I’m so glad that in the midst of the horrors of Dachau the survivors were able to find comfort in reclaiming the place that condemned so many of their friends and family to warn the future generations of what can happen so as to prevent this magnitude of death from ever happening again.
Running in Rome 