My wife and I just returned from vacation in Germany and Austria. Other than never needing to see the word “schnitzel” on a restaurant menu again, the trip was quite memorable, and I have several stories to share with you this week.
One of the highlights — though it seems odd to use that word — was a tour of Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis opened in 1933. Even though I had no relatives who were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered there, walking through and around the Dachau camp was a chilling experience.
Our guide (an Irishman named Jamie who really knew his stuff) told us several things I never knew, including that for the first five years it was open, the camp wasn’t filled with Jews. Rather, its prisoners were political opponents, members of the media, suspected Communists, homosexuals, Romani, and others who Hitler believed were aligned against him. Much of the propaganda his acolytes spread has echoes in the words of Trump and his cronies — revenge against the “enemies of the people,” who were opposed to him, not the citizens of Germany.
That all changed on November 9, 1938, when Kristallnacht marked a new campaign by the Nazis, who destroyed Jewish homes, schools, hospitals, stores, and synagogues. They arrested 30,000 Jewish men, one-third of them transported to Dachau. Even in those years, only about 25% of the prisoners were Jewish, because that part of Germany had a Jewish population of only about 2%. Meanwhile, the killing camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau were in eastern Europe, including occupied Poland, where the population of Jews was much larger.
Dachau hadn’t been built to house that many people, so the rows and rows of barracks had four men crammed into each bed. The food rations, which were already meager, were reduced even further, so the men had very little energy to do the slave labor they were assigned. At one point in the middle of World War II, the Nazis brought in female prisoners, who were forced to work in a bordello, where male prisoners who did a good job were rewarded by being allowed to rape the women. But the men were so starved and weak that they were impotent, so the plan didn’t last very long.
Having grown up watching World War II prisoner-of-war movies like “The Great Escape,” “The Colditz Story,” “Stalag 17,” and “Von Ryan’s Express,” I expected to hear stories of escapes (or at least attempts) from Dachau. But those movies were about servicemen from the US, UK, and elsewhere, who were treated very differently by the Nazis than their counterparts in concentration camps. In the latter, the men wouldn’t have had any energy for digging tunnels or planning escapes. Even if the prisoners had gotten out of Dachau, they would’ve found themselves in the SS training grounds on one side of the camp or the heart of Nazi Germany on the other, with very little chance to get away.
In fact, only one man did escape from Dachau (Hans Beimler), and that was in its first year when the walls hadn’t even gone up yet. Once they did, anyone who got close to the walls or barbed wire would have been killed by electricity running through the fence or guards in the towers who were told to shoot to kill anyone in that area, then given bonuses for doing so.
Those who weren’t shot by the guards weren’t going to live long anyway. As we walked through the crematorium, we saw the rooms where 150 people at a time were stuffed after being stripped naked (they were told they were going to get cleaned). However, the showerheads were only there to disperse the poisonous Zyklon B gas that was released into the air. And once they were all dead (in a mere 20 minutes), they were taken down the hall and shoved into brick ovens four at a time. Sometimes there were so many dead, they were just piled up outside. And the ash pits from the burned dead remain.
On the day I was there, there were a lot of school groups, because learning about this and visiting the place are mandatory in German schools. That wasn’t the case in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, when Germans acted like nothing ever happened. Now they teach about it, put up memorials, and honor the dead.
But I’m not sure the horrific stories impacted all of the students equally. On my way out, I stopped to take a photo of the front gate, with its notorious “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”) propaganda message, which stood in marked contrast to the forced labor and dehumanizing conditions inside. Dachau was the first camp to use the slogan — a similar sign was later put up at Auschwitz.
Before I could take the picture, a teenage boy was getting a shot of two of his buddies as they posed in front of the gate — with big smiles as they gave the double thumbs up sign. Because that’s what you do in the Instagram generation. Especially when you don’t read the room.