Dachau
What moved me the most in Europe.
A Irish man named Sean and his family sat across from me and Tyler on the Liverpool Express. The express was quickly filling up so we condensed seating, and low and behold a conversation started.
Sean, his wife Bernice and his daughter Emma, were inbound to London, to go see a play for Emma’s 18th birthday. Sean was a father no doubt, jet black hair with gray hair skirting the perimeter of his brow combined with the body of a man who works in finance. We told him that our journey would end in Munich.
To which he replied “How coincidental, it is Oktoberfest isn’t it?” Everyone laughed, and Sean said he had been twice in his earlier days and gave us a basic run down on what to expect.
“It is really quite amazing, how orderly they are when it is closing time. The whole festival is empty by 10:15 pm.” Sean advised.
We talked about politics and North American Football. Sean pays extra to get the NFL in Ireland. Patriots are his team. One of the last things he told us before he departed was to go to Dachau.
I took his recommendation to heart and made the trip solo, Tyler went up to Frankfurt to see his friend from back in the states.
The weather was ideal for the tragic place I was going to. It was a bit cold, and the sky was overcast. In addition to the news I had received about a girl who didn’t want to see me anymore. I was feeling pretty broken, but I made my way to the train station around noon.
Dachau, is only a few stops away from Munich. Once you arrive you exit the train station and wait for a bus to take you to the first concentration camp in existence. The first bus to arrive was filled to capacity and flooded with American accents. I didn’t want to be cramped in so I waited for the next bus to arrive. When it did arrive, I took my seat in the very back of the bus. The conversation I eavesdropped on was about Big Bear’s Oktoberfest and orange county. Funny how you can travel across the world and still find reminders of home.
Fate would have it the last stop is Dachau Memorial site. The dirt and gravel pathway to the camp is edged by some homes to the left. How eerie that must be to live there?
There was guided tours departing every 30 minutes, I did not wait and went to explore the camp by myself.
The Jourhaus, was the primary entrance into this atrocious place.
The gate had the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei written in the wrought iron, however the one I saw was not the original gate, as someone liberated that slogan from the gate when the Americans liberated the camp in 1945.
As soon as you walk into the camp, on your right you will see the roll call area in front of the maintenance building. Then to your left you will see 3 recreated barracks followed by 35 rows of concrete foundations were the barracks existed when the camp was in operation. The camp is walled in with seven guard towers. The camp underwent three iterations, when it was liberated it held 40,000 people. Only one person had escaped from Dachau in 1933. After which security became much more intense.
Roll call was taken twice a day, morning and night. Everyone in the barracks had to be there otherwise punishment was given, which meant that there were times when dead bodies were dragged to the assembly area. Jews and Russians had the barracks all the way in the back, meaning they had to walk the farthest twice a day, on top of the forced labor.
In the early years of the camp, each prisoner survived on 1300 calories a day, by 1944 they only had 500 calories. The five hundred calories would come from a small cup of scraps of scraps soup, which the US army did an assessment of and found the soup had only 50 calories in it, the remaining calories were from highly salted bread and foraging whatever they could find. The Jews were subject to the harshest and most physically demanding labor, such as working the quarry which on average burned 3000 calories a day.
The camp did have a gas chamber, and crematoriums. The gas chamber was not used to the extent of the chambers in Auschwitz, because this would be the place where they would perfect Zyklon B a temperature activated poison gas.
When they first started using the pellets, it activated too soon. The guards who administered the gas began committing suicide at such a rate that the SS could not recruit and train them fast enough.
They were doing this because when the gas hit the right temperature, the people in the chamber began to scream thus traumatizing the guard. The revised Zyklon B had a higher activation temperature. What this allowed was the guard who administered it would be relieved of his duty for the day go home and sometime later when the screams had subsided another guard would see the final product of a room filled with corpses.
1943 was the last year the crematoriums would be used by the Nazis due to a coal shortage. When the camp was liberated the bodies of the prisoners were stacked outside of the barracks, which meant the Americans fired up the ovens again. The Americans also lengthened the height of the chimneys to prevent the exhaust of burning flesh from drifting back into the camp.
SS were good Catholics living in Bavaria. This meant that the prisoners had a day off every week, and of course Christmas and Easter. Unfortunately the sabbath would not last when the camp entered the second and third phase of operation. It was seven days a week of hard labor.
The maintenance building was where a prison started his experience at the camp. He was first stripped of his belongings, clothes, and dignity. All hair was removed by rusty razors and clippers, then the person was told to jump into a vat of disinfectant. The hair cutting process left small incisions where the prison barber got careless meaning that when they bathed in the disinfectant the open wounds would be chemically burned by the caustic disinfectant. The halls of the maintenance building echoed with the screams from that process. After that process it was time for their first shower in the camp. Sounds nice right? WRONG. The water had two temperatures depending on the time of year, scalding hot in the summer, and ice cold in the winter. The temperature variations also held true in the central heating of the barracks the heater was active during the summer months at night, and in the winter no heater would be used.
After the shower, the interned would be getting their prison clothes the infamous striped pajamas. Dachau had only one purpose to instill the most suffering, and the uniform selection process was no different. The prisoners only had 15 seconds to select their clothes, otherwise they were beaten. What this meant was uniforms were often mismatched to their recipients. Heaven help you if you were tall, because this meant you had to deal with improper fitting clothes for your time in the camp. Shorter people alter their uniforms to fit more accurately. Remember the disinfected bath they had to take? Well the clothes they were receiving was not. Meaning the pain they went through to become clean was an exercise in futility. The thing about Dachau was you did not want to attract attention to yourself, if you had discrepancies in your clothing you became a target for the SS officers.
One commandant of the camp always had his eyes looking for someone he did not like. If you were targeted by the commandant Hans Loritz, you were pulled from the ranks and told to lay face up on the concrete assembly area, then 14 others were instructed to do the same seven to the left and seven to the right of the original offender. Then Hans drove a tractor through the Jourhaus gate and over the kneecaps of the prisoners on the ground. The sound of bones cracking and screams resounded throughout the assembly area. After the tractor was done breaking legs, Hans dismounted and told the injured to stand up. Obviously they couldn’t and a prisoner who can’t work is useless in Dachau so Hans shot them in the head.
Pole hanging. In the same room where the showers sprayed hot and frigid water was another source of torture and death. The shower room was large and had arches at the foot of each shower bay. Across these arches were a large wooden beam with metal rings attached to it. The Spanish inquisition also used pole hanging for suspected witches and infidels. The Nazis revamped the torture methodology by bounding the wrists on top of each other and behind the back of the prisoner. Then the prisoner was suspended in from the wooden pole. The stool used to step up to the wooden beam was then kicked out, meaning the arms of the prisoner were contorted in such a dislocating way and told to hold that position. There were ways for them to prevent the arms from becoming dislocated by holding muscle tension and remaining perfectly still. This angered the guards and so they sprayed freezing water on the suspended person causing them to shiver. If that didn’t work the guards would release their ferocious attack dogs to bite and gnaw on the toes of the person being pole hung. Few survived this. Many were killed because their shoulders were dislocated, and what good is a prisoner if he can’t work?
After the camp was liberated the Americans found photos of pole hanging. Three in particular would be used in the Nuremberg Trials. The photos are in succession of a man being pole hung and a guard hanging on the torso of the tortured. The next photo is the arms remaining on the pole, but the prisoner bleeding on the floor. The last photo the guard is standing with his boot across the throat of the dismembered prisoner smiling. The guard was later caught hiding in a nearby forest. He stood trial and claimed innocence. A lot was lost in translation, but he was asked why he was able to do that to another human being. A rough paraphrasing of his answer revealed how dehumanized the guards looked at their captives. He thought he did nothing wrong because society kills animals all the time.
Atrocities happen to this day, as we have witnessed with the recent synagogue shooting. We focus on what divides us, on what makes us different, instead of what makes us human. From those divisions we are able to make it a case of “us” versus “them.” However, there is no “them” we are all one.
