"Work will set you free"
The "shower" rooms 
The electric fence with the guard tower
The parade ground
The crematorium
The main entrance from the interior
Memorial wall
Crematorium
Monument
View from outside the fence looking in
Crematorium
Plaque honoring the American liberators
View from the outside
The gate againThe eerie feeling of human suffering hit me as soon as I stepped off onto the platform. Whether it was carried in by the flock of tourists also exiting the train – anticipating what they were about to experience – or whether it exuded from the place itself, I’m not sure. It could have just been my own intuition mentally preparing me. Whatever the reason, Dachau never really felt right to me from the very beginning.
My anxiousness was confirmed as I wandered out of the tunnel in the train station and into the sunlight. Directly off to the right, on a plaque right next to the train station, stood the first memorial to the thousands of people that died there between 1933 and 1945. Suddenly I realized why I had felt that eerie depression as soon as we arrived – we were walking through the same station that the Dachau Concentration Camp prisoners did almost 70 years ago. As we boarded the bus for the 15 minute ride to the camp, we rode the same path that the prisoners were marched through. The prisoners were paraded down the street respectfully as a sign of good faith – the brutality didn’t begin until they were safely inside the walls.
On the Sunday morning of our trip to Munich, the group and I headed about 10 miles north of the city to the little town of Dachau. We didn’t come to the small village to see back country Germany or to experience German travel. We came, as hundreds other tourists a day do, to see firsthand the reality and brutality of the German Nazi regime during WWII.
Dachau was the first, and by that standard, the model for all of the concentration camps throughout Europe. Opened in 1933, Dachau was originally an old ammunitions factory that had since left the small struggling town. In the beginning, the families of Dachau supported the idea of an internment camp, believing that the influx of soldiers in the small town would bring in more revenue. The first prisoners were political prisoners that rivaled Hitler. With Munich being the place where Hitler got his start, it was fitting that Dachau would be the first place he organized a concentration camp.
As we arrived at the memorial site, we got off the bus and headed up a gravel road toward the entrance. Step by step, taking the same route the prisoners took. Slowly that feeling of despair I described earlier turned into a borderline nauseating sensation that hung with me throughout the rest of my tour in the camp. “Arbeit macht frei” – was entwined into the steel frame of the gate which swung slowly open as each tourist entered. “Work will set you free” – is the translation from German – it was one last bit of hope for the prisoners that walked through the passage. In reality, it was a sick joke and a mind game. The Nazi's intentionally gave prisoners hope - to them there's nothing more satisfying than crushed optimism. Of course the creaking gate with the letters above it was only the beginning of the cruel treatment that the Nazi soldiers played on prisoners.
Despite the warm autumn sun, and virtually no overcast, human suffering and pain hung over the camp like a darkening storm cloud. You could sense it, still feel it, as you walked into the camp. My mind was pulled back and forth the entire day between a need to learn and see, and a desire to see no more. It’s amazing how adept human beings are to the emotions and feelings of a place. How I could still sense the universal suffering of this hell on earth. If I could sit here 70 years later and still get that feeling in the pit of my stomach, it made me wonder how the Nazi soldiers could do it. How could they see what they saw every day? If what I was feeling was a universal human emotion, were those Nazi soldiers even still human?
On the Sunday morning of our trip to Munich, the group and I headed about 10 miles north of the city to the little town of Dachau. We didn’t come to the small village to see back country Germany or to experience German travel. We came, as hundreds other tourists a day do, to see firsthand the reality and brutality of the German Nazi regime during WWII.
Dachau was the first, and by that standard, the model for all of the concentration camps throughout Europe. Opened in 1933, Dachau was originally an old ammunitions factory that had since left the small struggling town. In the beginning, the families of Dachau supported the idea of an internment camp, believing that the influx of soldiers in the small town would bring in more revenue. The first prisoners were political prisoners that rivaled Hitler. With Munich being the place where Hitler got his start, it was fitting that Dachau would be the first place he organized a concentration camp.
As we arrived at the memorial site, we got off the bus and headed up a gravel road toward the entrance. Step by step, taking the same route the prisoners took. Slowly that feeling of despair I described earlier turned into a borderline nauseating sensation that hung with me throughout the rest of my tour in the camp. “Arbeit macht frei” – was entwined into the steel frame of the gate which swung slowly open as each tourist entered. “Work will set you free” – is the translation from German – it was one last bit of hope for the prisoners that walked through the passage. In reality, it was a sick joke and a mind game. The Nazi's intentionally gave prisoners hope - to them there's nothing more satisfying than crushed optimism. Of course the creaking gate with the letters above it was only the beginning of the cruel treatment that the Nazi soldiers played on prisoners.
Despite the warm autumn sun, and virtually no overcast, human suffering and pain hung over the camp like a darkening storm cloud. You could sense it, still feel it, as you walked into the camp. My mind was pulled back and forth the entire day between a need to learn and see, and a desire to see no more. It’s amazing how adept human beings are to the emotions and feelings of a place. How I could still sense the universal suffering of this hell on earth. If I could sit here 70 years later and still get that feeling in the pit of my stomach, it made me wonder how the Nazi soldiers could do it. How could they see what they saw every day? If what I was feeling was a universal human emotion, were those Nazi soldiers even still human?
By the end I was emotionally and mentally exhausted. It was something I had never felt before. A reality I knew so much about, but one that I had almost no desire to see up close. I knew what happened there. I had read about what the soldiers did, how the prisoners were treated, the quarters, the guards, the crematorium, the killing, the pictures – I knew it all. But I had never really felt it like I did on that early October morning.
I walked around the camp and saw all of the major buildings, the barracks, the offices, the crematorium, the parade grounds. I watched videos of older gentlemen telling stories of the horrors they undertook. I viewed black and white photographs from American journalists first on the site. I heard soldiers’ accounts of what they first encountered when liberating the camp. It almost seemed unreal, and that it happened just over half a century ago, just seemed too close. Though I’m a generation or two away from the actual experience, it still seems mind boggling to me that something like this could happen at that time period.
What really got to me was the museum on the grounds. That’s where the reality of the entire situation set in. I saw pictures and videos and pieces of artwork done years later by prisoners, describing the perfection of torture, the scientific experiments that doctors performed on prisoners, the games the guards would play with human life. The work was meant to humiliate and dehumanize the prisoners, such as carrying piles of dirt at full speed back and forth from one pile to another, then back again.
The terror, that’s what the Nazi’s perfected. The meaningless extinguishment of human life was what terrorized the people of the camp. It brought a whole new meaning to what Machiavelli preached centuries earlier. They started with the circulation of rumors, about the torture, tales too horrifying to believe. The whole purpose of it was to completely annihilate any type of interior opposition to the Nazi regime. As a result of this phobia by the end of the war, 200,000 prisoners had passed through the camp, and when the camp was liberated it held 32,000 people – though it was only designed to hold 6,000. Overall there were roughly 31,000 recorded deaths, with an estimated 4 or 5 thousand more suicides.
What scared me the most wasn't to think about what it would have been like to be a prisoner, but what if I were in Germany at that time. What would I have done? The terror that the Nazi’s instilled in the world they occupied is immeasurable, and if the situation came down to me or the next guy, where would I draw the line? What scared me about this realization isn’t that I said I would have tortured a man to resist being tortured, but that I didn’t have an answer that immediately came to me. That I had to think about it, even if I knew what was right, but still couldn’t just do it, that’s what hit me. Or more importantly would I believe in what I was doing? I’d like to think not. There was a story of the commanding officers in charge of the concentration camp going on trial for the deaths of thousands of people. And when he was asked to defend himself, he said, “I didn’t kill people. I killed Jews.” What a scary reality it is that a man’s mind could be warped so much to believe that. To believe in what he was doing and to internally justify it. These types of thoughts sprinted in and out of my consciousness as I wandered the camp aimlessly.
As I finished my touring and walked back out of the Concentration camp, I happened to glance up and catch sight of the plaque that was on one of the walls of the main entrances – honoring the American troops that liberated the camps. A slight gleam of patriotism broke up my feelings of nausea and despair. When I got home, curious about the experiences of these soldiers, I did some research on their experiences upon finding the camp.
There are stories, actually court cases, that later never were investigated by General Patton, about what American soldiers did when they first entered into the camp (and if you’re curious just Google “Dachau” and a number of different accounts come up) of Dachau. Some of them were so horrified by what they saw – the human suffering, the piled up bodies, the crematorium, the scientific experiments, the train cars full of people being evacuated – that they lined up already surrendered German soldiers and shot them down. One soldier’s account claimed that his fellow soldier mowed down 20 Nazi’s with his machine gun before he was wrestled down by his fellow countrymen.
“The massacre at Dachau” is the name they gave to those solider's reactions. That doesn't quite seem fitting based on what went on inside the camp before they even arrived. But after seeing what I saw at the Concentration camp, my mind ran to what would I have done? What if I was the first one on sight and witnessed what they saw? I cannot condone their actions – because in reality they shot hundreds of soldiers who were under orders whether they believed it or not, and most of the men in charge of the decision making process had already fled – but I also cannot imagine what it must have been like for these 17, 18, 19 year-olds walking into a camp full of walking skeletons.
Again, similar to my experience with Normandy, I have a fond appreciation for what was asked of these soldiers’ day in and day out. Guys my age and younger called to a foreign land that they knew little about to fight a war whose reality they knew even less about. It may seem odd, but over the past month and a half, traveling to WWII sights in Europe, has made me more appreciative of what my grandparents’ generation of American soldiers went through. What was asked of them by their country, and what they were forced to endure for the cause of the greater good. Ironically enough, it took me a trip to a foreign land, to greater appreciate what is right back at home.
In conclusion, sorry that I didn’t really have a witty story to tell for this one, and I’ve struggled to write this article purely over the idea that words and pictures can’t possibly do it justice. I mainly separated it from the rest of my tale about my escapades through Germany because I couldn’t in my right mind justify putting the stories side by side.
And I don’t hope to fully reflect the attitude and mindset I had when visiting the concentration camp, because to be honest, it left me speechless. My goal in this writing was to try and bring you as close as I can with my entire experience while visiting the camp. What I saw, what I felt, what I thought, how my mind raced. I know that some of my thoughts are a little scattered brained and that this hasn’t been my most fluent article ever written, but I hope to at least have reflected to you some of my experience of what it was like to visit Dachau. My hope is that by reflecting my feelings and emotions vividly and graphically that, in some minor small way, I can pay a little tribute to all those who suffered so greatly.
I walked around the camp and saw all of the major buildings, the barracks, the offices, the crematorium, the parade grounds. I watched videos of older gentlemen telling stories of the horrors they undertook. I viewed black and white photographs from American journalists first on the site. I heard soldiers’ accounts of what they first encountered when liberating the camp. It almost seemed unreal, and that it happened just over half a century ago, just seemed too close. Though I’m a generation or two away from the actual experience, it still seems mind boggling to me that something like this could happen at that time period.
What really got to me was the museum on the grounds. That’s where the reality of the entire situation set in. I saw pictures and videos and pieces of artwork done years later by prisoners, describing the perfection of torture, the scientific experiments that doctors performed on prisoners, the games the guards would play with human life. The work was meant to humiliate and dehumanize the prisoners, such as carrying piles of dirt at full speed back and forth from one pile to another, then back again.
The terror, that’s what the Nazi’s perfected. The meaningless extinguishment of human life was what terrorized the people of the camp. It brought a whole new meaning to what Machiavelli preached centuries earlier. They started with the circulation of rumors, about the torture, tales too horrifying to believe. The whole purpose of it was to completely annihilate any type of interior opposition to the Nazi regime. As a result of this phobia by the end of the war, 200,000 prisoners had passed through the camp, and when the camp was liberated it held 32,000 people – though it was only designed to hold 6,000. Overall there were roughly 31,000 recorded deaths, with an estimated 4 or 5 thousand more suicides.
What scared me the most wasn't to think about what it would have been like to be a prisoner, but what if I were in Germany at that time. What would I have done? The terror that the Nazi’s instilled in the world they occupied is immeasurable, and if the situation came down to me or the next guy, where would I draw the line? What scared me about this realization isn’t that I said I would have tortured a man to resist being tortured, but that I didn’t have an answer that immediately came to me. That I had to think about it, even if I knew what was right, but still couldn’t just do it, that’s what hit me. Or more importantly would I believe in what I was doing? I’d like to think not. There was a story of the commanding officers in charge of the concentration camp going on trial for the deaths of thousands of people. And when he was asked to defend himself, he said, “I didn’t kill people. I killed Jews.” What a scary reality it is that a man’s mind could be warped so much to believe that. To believe in what he was doing and to internally justify it. These types of thoughts sprinted in and out of my consciousness as I wandered the camp aimlessly.
As I finished my touring and walked back out of the Concentration camp, I happened to glance up and catch sight of the plaque that was on one of the walls of the main entrances – honoring the American troops that liberated the camps. A slight gleam of patriotism broke up my feelings of nausea and despair. When I got home, curious about the experiences of these soldiers, I did some research on their experiences upon finding the camp.
There are stories, actually court cases, that later never were investigated by General Patton, about what American soldiers did when they first entered into the camp (and if you’re curious just Google “Dachau” and a number of different accounts come up) of Dachau. Some of them were so horrified by what they saw – the human suffering, the piled up bodies, the crematorium, the scientific experiments, the train cars full of people being evacuated – that they lined up already surrendered German soldiers and shot them down. One soldier’s account claimed that his fellow soldier mowed down 20 Nazi’s with his machine gun before he was wrestled down by his fellow countrymen.
“The massacre at Dachau” is the name they gave to those solider's reactions. That doesn't quite seem fitting based on what went on inside the camp before they even arrived. But after seeing what I saw at the Concentration camp, my mind ran to what would I have done? What if I was the first one on sight and witnessed what they saw? I cannot condone their actions – because in reality they shot hundreds of soldiers who were under orders whether they believed it or not, and most of the men in charge of the decision making process had already fled – but I also cannot imagine what it must have been like for these 17, 18, 19 year-olds walking into a camp full of walking skeletons.
Again, similar to my experience with Normandy, I have a fond appreciation for what was asked of these soldiers’ day in and day out. Guys my age and younger called to a foreign land that they knew little about to fight a war whose reality they knew even less about. It may seem odd, but over the past month and a half, traveling to WWII sights in Europe, has made me more appreciative of what my grandparents’ generation of American soldiers went through. What was asked of them by their country, and what they were forced to endure for the cause of the greater good. Ironically enough, it took me a trip to a foreign land, to greater appreciate what is right back at home.
In conclusion, sorry that I didn’t really have a witty story to tell for this one, and I’ve struggled to write this article purely over the idea that words and pictures can’t possibly do it justice. I mainly separated it from the rest of my tale about my escapades through Germany because I couldn’t in my right mind justify putting the stories side by side.
And I don’t hope to fully reflect the attitude and mindset I had when visiting the concentration camp, because to be honest, it left me speechless. My goal in this writing was to try and bring you as close as I can with my entire experience while visiting the camp. What I saw, what I felt, what I thought, how my mind raced. I know that some of my thoughts are a little scattered brained and that this hasn’t been my most fluent article ever written, but I hope to at least have reflected to you some of my experience of what it was like to visit Dachau. My hope is that by reflecting my feelings and emotions vividly and graphically that, in some minor small way, I can pay a little tribute to all those who suffered so greatly.
Maybe Germany would have won the war if they had only put the Dachau prisoners to work in factories, for example, a factory for manufacturing rifles. Instead, they humiliated the prisoners by having them carry dirt from one pile to another. They didn't even allow them the dignity of carrying rocks from one pile to another, just dirt.
ReplyDeleteYour writing was riveting. I was able to feel the emotion that you experienced as you walked through there, horrified, scared, unsure...ALthough the story and the experience was depressing, the writing was done well.
ReplyDeleteYou hadn't talked about this part of your trip when we spoke...blogging is such a good way to get your feelings down as well.
Love,
Mom
very cool, i feel like i just took a virtual tour of the camp...i found your blog while researching for an article on dachau, which i just posted to my blog today...i hope you'll take a minute to read the history of the camp if you don't already know it...hey, thanks for posting your experience there!
ReplyDelete