June 25, 2009
Written June 28
Friends and Families ,
 Some
tourist destinations are more sobering than others. Dachau, just
north of Munich, is as serious as there is and visiting it on
a cold, gray day seemed appropriate. |
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We walked through the same
gates that all the prisoners entered between 1933 and 1944, first
political prisoners and later prisoners of all sorts who were systematically
worked to death or killed outright. |
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Inside the gate was the large assembly ground where prisoners were counted morning and evening. On one side, the old work shops have been reconstructed as a museum to their original purposes. It was here that prisoners were stripped of belongings, clothes, and, most importantly, any personal dignity. Originally built in 1933 for about 6,000 political enemies of the National Socialists, the prison population later reached over 30,000, almost filling this assembly ground. |
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Inside the museum, the story
of the Nazi work camps and death camps was told, but in a context
of life in Germany at the time. The campaign poster proclaiming
Hitler as "Our Last Hope" was chilling. A rapt audience watched the
grainy old black and white films showing the rise of Nazis power
and the descending conditions inside Dachau. |
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Outside, a pair of prisoner
barracks have been reconstructed, but for me the most disturbing
display was the floor plan of the "infirmary" showing not places
to make prisoners well but to pens where their response to threat
and disease was tested. Malaria, typhus, altitude sickness; each
had space in the five infirmary barracks. |
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In
1933 and 1934, the barracks were not unlike military barracks of
the time with about 50 or so political prisoners crowded into three-tier
bunks. There were adjoining locker rooms where tables, stools,
and clothes were kept properly arranged. Indeed, it was the
meticulous rules for cleanliness that provided the largest excuse
for prisoner punishment, with the penalty for an improperly made
bed being beating or hours of hanging from arms twisted behind
the offending prisoner's back.
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 By
the end of the war, these same rooms held up to 2,000 prisoners
on bunks that were little more that shelves for dying. |
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Escape was not an option. The prisoner area was
surrounded by electrified barbed wire, a sloping wall, a water-filled
ditch, and a grassy killing field. Guards in border posts were
under orders to shoot any person touching the grass and patrols
would occasionally throw a prisoner's hat onto the field and order
him to go get it, a certain death sentence.
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Disposing of bodies required Teutonic efficiency.
Initially, a small two oven crematory kept up with the work, disposing
of 11,000 bodies before the end of the war. But this was not enough,
so "Barracks X" with twice as many ovens was constructed and kept
busy.
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Barracks X also housed a
gas chamber, normally a feature of death camps but not of work
camps such as Dachau. Perhaps like the rest of Dachau, it was simply
a prototype for camps throughout the Third
Reich. Reich efficiency called for proper prototyping but ruthless
prejudice called for Death Camps to be located only in eastern
Europe, so the victim remains were kept off German soil. |
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Overall,
Dachau is a memoriam to the people who suffered and died here and in
the hundreds of work and death camps throughput the Reich. And, they
serve as a constant reminder of the danger of demons who claim to be
"Our Last Hope".
John and Marianne