Dachau

One of our reasons for switching from Berlin to Munich was the proximity to Dachau, the first concentration camp that was put into use by the nazis in 1933. We felt like it was something that we had a duty to go see while we were here, and espcaially after tourning the city and seeing the places that Hitler and the SS staged speechs or forced citizens to salute to his riegn, we wanted to travel the path that the history of Munich and countless Cather cities followed. After some debate, we decided to head out by ourselves instead of with a tour group since it was a pretty straightforward trip out there and we could take a guided tour with the staff there without fear of being rushed back by the tour guide. With that decided, we planned to go out by train to transfer to a bus to get to the remains of the camp that have been preserved and transformed into memorial site and museum. The disire to go out is hard to describe, because we knew what we would see and we were by no means looking forward to it, but we owe it to those who suffered to learn about the past as much as we can to insure that it never happens again. 


So we woke up to an appropriately cold and rainy morning and made the hour journey to the now suburb city of Dachau. After registering for the guided tour, we leafed through the bookstore and read snips of the histories of those who left behind diaries in the camps or while hiding in attics, or of those who were liberated and wrote memoirs of their experiences. The tour was to go around the grounds, into the administration building now museum, the reconstructed barracks and the crematorium and give us information about the history of concentration camps in general, Dachau, Hitler's rise to power and of the lives of the people that were imprisoned there I've the 12 years that it was in use. 


I think I'm still processing what we saw and learned yesterday. I went in thinking it was a place that was predominately Populated by Jews, but that wasn't the case in Dachau. Because it was the first camp to be built and used, it mostly held prisoners that opposed the SS for political or religious reasons or those that were deemed socially unexceptable by Hitler (the homeless, the social outcasts, the physically or mentally disabled).  I had never viewed the camps as prisons either, but that is what they were. There may not have been bars on every door but they were trapped, oppressed, beaten and tourchered bySS officers and even sometimes fellow prisoners. The information given by our guide and in the museum was terrible. Unbelievable. Unfathomable. Overwhelming. Painful.  To imagine what those sent to Dachau experience, to walk though the blocks that they were held in, stand under the places where they were hung and beaten, see the fence that some ran to, just to end their suffering, it's impossible. And to think that Dachau was a concentration camp, not a death camp or extermination camp as others were, to know that what happened here was multiplied by thousand elsewhere, it's depressing. You just get lost in the darkness. Going there was a painful necessity though. To go is to admit that it happened, to acknowledge that evil exists and sometimes it is found in another human being, capable of murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people for a senseless cause. To see and learn is to honor the memory of those we lost. It's to honor the dead and remind the living. To trace how it happened to see that what we do shapes the future for us and the history for the generations that come after us. The memorial says it best:


"May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933 and 1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and in respect of their fellow man."