Dachau

No cheeky titles or wordplay today, guys, because its not really appropriate when you're talking about a place that was simultaneously a prison, a torture chamber, and a mass grave. Fair warning, this is not a particularly light and happy post.

I'm talking, of course, about Dachau, the only concentration camp to be open for the entirety of the Third Reich. Originally an ammunitions factory, Dachau caught Hitler's eye because it was an already-fortified campus, it wasn't being used for anything at the time, and it was a quick train ride from Munich, the center of the Nazi government's power.

I, like many other people, have been fascinated by the history of the Nazis and of Hitler's rise to power. How did a failed Austrian painter who didn't even embody the Aryan "ideal" he championed convince an entire government to participate in widespread murder, torture, and persecution?

I didn't expect a solid answer to that question, but I really felt that touring a concentration camp would be a way to grapple with these really difficult concepts in a way that was not as sanitized as many history books' way of presenting it. I booked a tour with Sandemans again. It was a good choice, because I think an experience like that, where you're forced to confront a lot of truths you'd rather not have to think about, is definitely different when it's shared among others.

When we arrived at the camp, the sky was gray and overcast and it was threatening to rain, which seemed appropriate to the subject matter. Our guide told us about the history of the camp and its origins as an ammunitions factory. The first prisoners at Dachau, he said, were not Jewish people or gypsies, two of the groups most often associated with Hitler's "purification" efforts, but political opponents of Hitler. Basically anyone who had voted against the Nazi party was deemed an enemy of the state and was sent to Dachau to be "re-educated."

As time went on, however, the camp was used to hold men and boys over fourteen who were "unsuitable" for a number of reasons: they were Jewish, gay, Jehovah's Witnesses, Slavic, Roma, or criminals. (The last category was particularly sketchy, as Hitler had achieved his campaign promise of cleaning up the streets of Munich by simply throwing all vagrants in jail. Of course, this overcrowded the prisons, and the prisoners were moved to camps. Often, the "criminals'" worst crimes were simply being homeless or drunk in the wrong place at the wrong time.) And of course, political enemies of the Reich continued to be thrown into concentration camps.

One thing I didn't realize was that the camp wasn't immediately emptied and shut down following the end of the war. Dachau was a refugee camp until the 1960s. This is so hard for me to wrap my head around--how people had to live in the same camp under still-horrible conditions even after the war was over. Obviously the Nazis were no longer there killing and torturing them, but these people were forced to live in the same barracks where they'd been starved and exposed to the most unhygienic, unhealthy, uncomfortable conditions...and they were still encountering a lot of the same food shortages and unsanitary living conditions. Every day they looked out into the square where the Nazis had lined them up and, guns in hand, told them that they were subhuman. They lived a stone's throw away from mass graves containing the ashes and bodies of family members and friends, and every day they passed the places where they had been tortured and their loved ones killed.

It must take incredible strength of character to preserve a place like this, a place that has seen so much tragedy and darkness and injustice, in the name of educating future generations. When American soldiers arrived to liberate Dachau, they wanted to blow up the buildings that had been the site of so much horror--the gas chamber, the crematoriums. The camp survivors insisted that the buildings be kept as they were: "Honor the dead by warning the living," reads one memorial in Dachau, just steps away from the gas chamber where entire groups of people were sent to their deaths.

I can't tell every story I heard on my tour--they were nearly all horrifying, appalling reminders of what human beings are capable of. It's enough to say, in a fairly family-friendly blog, that thousands of people were tortured for no reason other than the amusement of their captors. That the Nazis would keep prisoners locked in tiny cells for months at a time--or even a year--only to take them outside in to the sun, blind them, and shoot them. To put it another way: the Nazis would invest the time and expense in keeping someone alive for a year knowing full well that they were going to kill them. They weren't murdering people to spare the expense of keeping them imprisoned. They weren't killing them in the heat of battle. They weren't even doing it for ideology anymore. They were doing it for fun. The idea that people like that have existed at all on this planet is terrifying, but to remember that they were in positions of power--and that they held these positions a mere sixty-odd years ago--is truly chilling.

Despite all this, I did not have the reaction to the camp that I'd expected. I've heard from many people that visiting sites like the Holocaust Museum or concentration camps are very, very difficult emotionally and even physically--some people have very visceral reactions. I did not. I knew this was horrible, I understood its significance, but there was a disconnect between this knowledge and my emotions. I could not wrap my mind around the fact that these events were real, that they happened not long ago, and that I was standing in the middle of the camp where they had taken place. I knew it, but I couldn't feel it. This, of course, makes me feel like a truly awful human being. How can anyone encounter evil like this and not be completely, utterly floored by it?

It seems odd to spend a chunk of your vacation wishing you could feel sadder and more depressed, but it feels somehow disrespectful to not be haunted by this experience every minute of every day. (Also, it makes me a bit worried that I'm a sociopath and have no capacity for empathy.)

There was however, one thing that triggered a gut reaction of sheer fear and despair, and that was the gas chamber. Dachau did not use gas chambers in the same way as many other camps; it was in fact a testing facility to determine the best, most efficient way to kill the most people. (I hate that I had to type that sentence. I hate that there were--and still are-- people whose horrible actions gave me a reason to type it.) The Nazis tested a number of variables in the gas chambers at Dachau--how much poison? Should it be pumped in as gas or sprinkled on the floor in another form to be converted into gas by raising the temperature once the prisoners were in the room? How could they most effectively poison loads of people from as safe a distance as possible? Those are the questions the Nazis encountered.

This is the reality that their victims met: The gas chamber at Dachau was made to look like a shower. The men were told they would get a hot shower. They were led into a room with towels hanging on the walls and told to undress. They were then sent into the chamber, which was fitted with shower heads to really sell the illusion. If they asked why it was so hot, they were told that it was the hot water coming up through the pipes. The doors were closed, and the men who had entered would never leave. Their bodies were unceremoniously burned in a crematorium located in the next room, and their ashes were dumped into unmarked mass graves.

Even as a perfectly safe and healthy tourist in 2013, standing in the gas chamber was like standing in a nightmare. The room was dark and low ceilinged and gave the impression that it would crush you if you stood there long enough. It felt claustrophobic even though the doors were open and I was practically the only person in there. And I started to tear up.

I tried to imagine the pain, the suffering, the fear these people faced as they realized they were being poisoned to death. I tried to imagine the horror of being the last living person in the room, surrounded by the bodies of friends and strangers alike. But I couldn't even fathom what that might be like. I can't even fathom how a situation like that could be possible in the first place.

It sounds a little overdramatic, I think, but if there's anything you're allowed to be ashamed and horrified and appalled and depressed and overdramatic about, it's the Holocaust. And this is really difficult for most people. Our guide, who's been leading Dachau tours for four years, sent us into the building by ourselves while he waited outside. "I've only been in that room once," he said, "and I have no desire to ever go back." I heard stories of other tour guides who stopped leading Dachau tours after a year or so because they could not deal with the pain and horror of visiting the camp three or four times a week.

But, as our guide pointed out, it's important and even impressive that Germany has made these sites so accessible. The site is 100% open to the public: no admission fees, no tickets, no line to get in. Schoolchildren from Munich visit about once each year. Members of the German military also visit frequently as part of their duties. Germany is committed to making sure atrocities like the ones at Dachau never happen again. As our guide pointed out, how many countries would put the darkest parts of their history on display like this? The United States, for instance, is no stranger to racism and genocide, but we do not acknowledge these darker parts of history in the same way that Germany has acknowledged the tragedies in its past. We try to whitewash American history by ending with a "happily ever after" sort of conclusion about how all men are created equal and therefore we must all be equals--hooray, America! But this is our ideal, not our reality, and somewhere deep down, we all know it.

I'm not trying to pick on America or hold Germany up as a model of the perfect country, because there is no "perfect country," just as there is no perfect society or perfect race. World history, not just American history or western history, is fraught with hatred, murder, prejudice, and injustice. It's just something I feel like I think a bit differently about now, and that's what I'm trying to convey.

But it's discouraging, to say the least, to live in a world where hatred still exists. On a large scale, it's evident in the fact that Hitler's genocide was only the third largest in the twentieth century. Only. The third largest. In the twentieth century. That there were two other instances of mass extermination of human life is horrible enough in and of itself. (In reality, there were a lot more than just two.) That these two managed to knock HITLER and the HOLOCAUST into second and then third place is even more disheartening and tragic.

On a smaller scale, hatred is still evident in this memorial at Dachau. It's modeled after the badges that prisoners were forced to wear to indicate their "crime." For instance, just as Jewish people had to wear yellow Stars of David, gay men wore pink triangles, criminals wore green triangles, and gypsies wore black or brown. The monument pictured below is a memorial to the victims and survivors of Dachau, but you'll notice that some colors are missing.

The colored glass was smashed by other camp survivors, who didn't feel that some of the groups represented deserved to be memorialized alongside the "real" innocent victims of Dachau. The memorial has never officially been fixed. I say "officially" because our guide told us about a former Dachau guide, a friend of his. The night after this guy stopped being a guide, he broke into Dachau and replaced the empty triangles with high-quality plastic pieces that looked just like the original glass. When he came back in the morning to check out his handiwork, the new tiles had already been removed.

To leave things on a slightly less depressing note (although I feel like a post about Dachau is allowed--nay, expected--to be a downer), in the years since the war, a convent has been built adjacent to the camp grounds. The sisters wanted the entrance gate to the convent to be through one of the old guard towers at the far end of the camp, near the various religious monuments, but the Powers That Be (the earthly ones, I mean) kept saying no. "The problem was solved," our guide told us, "by a sixty-two-year-old nun with a sledgehammer"--thus confirming my belief in the inherent badassery of nuns everywhere. The power of Christ compels you, indeed.

No legal action was taken against the nun; a group of Roma people (gypsies) backed her up and lent their support to the convent's unorthodox building plans. And the gate to the convent remains there (after a bit of touching up...sledgehammer holes aren't that pretty) to this day, a symbol that Dachau is no longer an enclosed prison, but an open memorial site.

So I guess the takeaway from this post is that some people are unimaginably horrible, some people have the most inspiring and incredible strength of character, and some people are kick-ass nuns who get shit DONE.

"Honor the dead by warning the living."