The day we visited the Dachau Concentration Camp, it was fittingly dreary. The camp is not in some far-flung suburb of civilization; the city of Dachau is all around it. There’s a Burger King one mile down the road. And it’s only 45 minutes from downtown Munich.
Obviously, we didn’t need to visit a concentration camp in person to know about Hitler’s atrocities and the Holocaust, but it seemed like an important thing to do while we were in Germany and enjoying a little bit of frivolity at the Christmas markets. And until you’ve been in the physical space, it’s really hard to visualize and understand what they were. Seeing the empty rows where “dorms” once stood gives you a sense of scale you can only get from walking paces yourself. And walking around the physical infrastructure– the train tracks, the gas chamber (which was apparently infrequently used at Dachau), and the crematoria– really drove home the systematic and deliberate nature of the Nazis’ murders. Someone had to design and plan this place. Workers had to construct the dorm rows, the ditches, the barbed wire fences. There was so much complicity, when we left the camp and drove through suburban Dachau back to the highway, I couldn’t help but feel angry with Germans, even though most of them weren’t even alive when it happened. How could they let this happen in their own backyard? But also, deep down, it made me wonder if I would have had the courage to risk my life resisting the Nazis if it had been me.
The memorial was very well done, and throughout the camp there were placards in plain, unemotional language that whitewashed nothing. Dachau’s main purpose was as a labor camp to hold political prisoners and other people the regime considered undesirable or dangerous, such as homosexuals and members of the clergy. Shockingly, this camp opened in 1933– well before the beginning of the war– and was liberated by U.S. troops in April 1945. Tens of thousands of people died there. And lest we wonder whether it is necessary to see or visit such places, when I was trying to round up some facts about Dachau to work into this post, the vast majority of the webpages that came up when I googled “Dachau concentration camp” were either Holocaust denial pages or attempted to minimize the suffering that took place at Dachau and other camps in Germany. Shameful.
