So, Dachau...

So on my last full day in Munich, I took the tour of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. To say it was shocking would not be proper. We know how cruel humanity can be, but we're all pretty good at ignoring it. Sometimes though, you have to confront the darkness. That's what was so remarkable about Dachau. It was a complete confrontation of evil. If you ever get a chance to go to a place like this, even if as you read this you're saying "I could never do that", go. It can make you a stronger human being.

This was on the entrance. It means "Work Will Set You Free", more or less. I don't think it's on every concentration camp entrance, but I know it's at Dachau and Auschwitz (which I now have decided I have to go to before I leave Europe). It, like many things at a place like this, was a cruel joke.

I suppose I should explain what Dachau was. It was an actual concentration camp (not a death camp), one of the first (if not the first), opened in 1933. It originally housed political prisoners (aka COMMUNISTS) while Hitler was taking power. After the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), it started to have Jews. It eventually had Slavs, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other prisoners. People were sent there to work, but if they were deemed unfit to work, they were sent to death camps. Still, at Dachau, between 25,000 to 35,000 people are believed to have died. Over 200,000 were imprisoned there total. It's hard to determine the deaths, because in the last few years of the war, they no longer recorded Jewish or Slavic deaths in camps.

The first part of the tour was more of a museum. This is an example of the propaganda from that era. While a lot of people supported the Nazis, it's hard to remember that they were living in fear and desperation. Think of how many rights people give up when security is considered to be at stake. Things like Kristallnacht and the anti-Communist propaganda were done to terrify people into believing that there were enemies everywhere, and if we don't stop them they'll stop us. I wish I could say things like this don't happen anymore, especially in the western world. Unfortunately, humanity doesn't learn its lessons very quickly.

In the museum, they showed us a few methods of punishment in the camp. The SS were the main guards, and if you stood out in any way as a prisoner, you could be punished. Unfortunately, some of us just stand out. Even after losing their names (assigned a number) and given no identity (uniforms that may or may not fit), they were punished.

One form of punishment involved the prisoners whiping each other here, under monitor, until the prisoner being whipped could count his lashing to 25 in German, even though there were a lot of prisoners who didn't speak German here. It was designed to prevent fraternization.

Another punishment was called a "tree", where the prisoners would hang, chained to a beam on the ceiling. Originally, they would actually hang them from a tree, but when it was discovered that it gave them something to lean on, they moved it inside. After thirty minutes, your shoulders would never be the same. You had no support. After four hours, you'd be dead, but it was agony as all the bones broke. While this sounds like a form of torture, I as an American unfortunately am not comfortable calling it that, as we have been using it as an approved "advanced interrogation technique" in the War on Terror. Hmm, maybe we did learn something from World War II after all.

After that part of the museum, we went into the bunker, which was actually the most horrifying part of the tour to me. I knew what to expect from other parts, but this was where they sent people to endure the worst without killing them. The odd part is that this is also where the "special" prisoners were, the priests and others who were a bit more powerful than the average Communist, Slav, or Jew. In other words, Catholics. Martin Neimoller famously composed this poem:

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

He was at Dachau.

The bunker is where they would lock people in complete darkness, feeding them every four days with small pieces of bread. At one point, the SS was not allowed to kill people, so they would try to force suicide, which usually works, except for one escape attempt. They also forced people to stand for any amount of time (also considered an advanced interrogation technique by the Bush administration).

After that lovely place we checked out the living conditions. The camp had three phases, and none of them were very pleasant. However, I must say: the beds are a lot like summer camp. The difference is that the beds here were usually quite overcrowded and spread a lot of disease.

After this, we headed to the scary places. This is a picture of the shooting area where they would kill people by firing squad. Unfortunately, the Nazis couldn't kill people fast enough. This was the first crematorium, which wasn't so much horrifying as it was just weird:

But yes, after that quaint little barn we went to one of the most terrifying symbols of the concentration camp system.

I don't think there are words to describe the emotions you get when you walk through a gas chamber. This was something developed to annihilate an entire race of people, because shooting them was too messy and took too much time. Officially, this building had a death count of 0 people. However, I should reiterate that by the time this thing was built, they had pretty much quit recording Jewish and Slavic deaths.

It had an eerie assembly line fashion to it. First, there was the entrance, where they would lead people in and have them take off their clothes for a "shower."

The doors only had handles on one side. When they went into this room, they were all gassed to death. All the vents were closed, and prisoners had to clean out the room and make it look like a normal shower. This is where I quit feeling horrible the way I had before, because at this point there's no humanity in anything anymore.

Look at the lack of a doorknob for the inside. Do you think anyone could open that thing if they tried?

This is the factory-esque crematorium. It's hard to really imagine it being put to use on any regular basis.

Outside of that death factory, this statue stands. He's not of any race or creed, he's just an anonymous prisoner. The words there translate to something along the lines of "To honor the dead, to warn the living." Places like this are preserved as a reminder of human failure. Whether anyone wants to think about it or not, we all possess the same genetic structure as the kinds of people who did these horrifying things. We also possess the same genetic structure as the kinds of people who suffered these horrid things. But we need to be beyond them both.

This is the Jewish Memorial. It's what made the place feel kind of hopeful. As you go down there, you realize that it's almost complete darkness. However, there's still a bit of light in there. In spite of the fact that the Nazis tried to annihilate an entire ethnicity and religion, they failed. And the Nazis are gone.

I have to give the Germans credit for coming to terms with their horrific past. We all know that it was horrible, but every nation does horrible things. We all know that the US has had several concentration camps. We had "relocation camps" for Japanese Americans during World War II. I know somebody's going to tell me that they weren't as bad as the ones that the Nazis had, but where's the evidence? I'm not saying they were as bad, but isn't taking someone against their will into a forced imprisonment without a trial bad enough? Has anyone ever toured a camp set up by our government? Do you think anyone will tour Guantanomo?

You have to make peace with your darkness before being able to move beyond it. It's painful to think about, but it's something that you have to do.

At Dachau, there's a memorial that says "Never Again" in five different languages. But atrocities are still being committed around the world. Why do we feel that it needs to be that way?