Anecdote – Heading for Dachau

Posted on by Opher

Heading for Dachau

The four of us headed to Dachau in a VW van. It was 1972, twenty seven years after the war had ended. We were young, idealistic, naïve and had much to learn about life, yet we felt we knew a lot already, as is the way of young people.

We wanted to look at the depths that mankind could sink to. We were looking for the concentration camp.

We had no plan or map. I’m not sure what we were expecting to find or how we were going to find it. We drove to the town and mindlessly circled round. Perhaps we thought we might stumble upon it, or see a signpost that said – ‘Concentration Camp – This way’.

We might have aimlessly wandered all day if a car had not waved us down. A young man had seen our GB plates and surmised that we were looking for the camp. He was friendly and casual and somehow his assumption that we, as British, had come here to visit the scene of such depravity, made us feel embarrassed. He, being German, might feel implicated.

He directed us to the site. It was out of town and unsignposted. We would never have found it without assistance.

The camp was not intact. They had left the perimeter fencing, barbed wire, gate and signs for the electric fencing; they had left the main buildings with the gas chambers and ovens, but they had disposed of all the rows of wooden barracks rooms where the prisoners had been housed. They had been burnt to the ground. All that remained was the concrete bases of those large huts. They had been incinerated in order to deal with the pestilence. Even so it was a site which still housed the horror of their purpose. This was the place where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children – Jews, gypsies, disabled and mentally ill – had been shipped to meet a gruesome calculated fate.

We were shown rooms of hair, cases, shoes and clothes. They were probably a fraction of the ‘booty’ but they served to give a visual impact to the enormity of the crime. Numbers were merely numbers but rooms of hair brought the numbers to life; they were real people who had lived, loved and died in terror.

We looked at the ledgers. They were chilling. The meticulous planning was so cold and unemotional. These were units to be processed; not human beings. These were cargo to be shipped, inventoried and disposed of. The task was as mechanical as if recording a shipment of coal. The amounts were recorded. The journeys noted. The arrivals recorded and the departures planned and executed.

We followed the journey from the rail-head to the shower rooms. We could imagine the sorting that took place – the ledgers with clerical soldiers writing names; the division into left and right – those deemed worthy being arbitrarily selected to proceed to the right where they would be worked to death and those to the left being directed straight to the shower block.

Our silent imaginations filled in the missing details. We could visualise the shuffling lines, the divided families, the anguish and the uncertainty. It was that uncertainly that had made them so compliant and robbed them of reason. The process had been so matter-of-fact, so methodical. They had stepped forward to give themselves up to a casual vetting and allowed themselves to be assigned to their fate.

We could see it.

I stood and surveyed the place where it had taken place. I wanted to shout back through time and urge those exhausted travellers, who had spent days locked in cattle trucks, in the heat without water or food, packed so tight that they could not sit, arriving so fatigued they were dead on their feet – Run!! Fight! – Better to die now from a bullet! To die fighting! Yet that was already in the past. They were too exhausted they had already given up. They were already dead.

They were directed. They shuffled off to the huts or showers. They were stripped, shorn and ushered into the long chambers. They must have stood fearful, yet hopeful, not allowing themselves to believe the worst, waiting for water to come from the showerheads. Instead canisters of xyclon B – rat poison – showered from the ceiling.

My mind wandered through the accounts. I looked into those shower rooms and could imagine the mothers clutching children to them as the gas hissed into acrid clouds around them, choking and stinging, the mad clawing for the door. They say that the terror produced a frenzy to escape as people trampled and clawed at each other to get out, piling up at the door, evacuating bladder and bowels in terror.

When it was over, and the poisonous fumes vented, the doors would be opened and the agonised stricken corpses shifted along to the ovens for instant cremation. One could not help but wonder if they were all dead? Or did that matter?

The victims were also those prisoners used to empty the shower-rooms and the guards who witnessed the events – dehumanised by the cruel repetition.

What really brought it home to me were the windows.

The gas-chambers had been designed by an architect.

Some well educated person, sitting in an office, far removed from the action, had drawn up the plans. They had their remit. They had built in the fake shower heads to reduce panic in the clientele so that they could be induced to enter the death chamber without fuss; they had designed the airtight doors and traps in the ceiling through which the xyclon B canisters could be delivered. They would have been under no illusions as to the use of the chambers. These were to be used for cheap, effective vile mass execution. The most chilling aspect was that they had built in long viewing windows, not small functional observing ports. These were not designed to merely note when the gas had done its job; the architect had designed the viewing window to take into account that the guards outside might wish to watch the gruesome desperation and terror unfurling inside the chambers.

27 thoughts on “Anecdote – Heading for Dachau”

  1. The most vile, depraved, arrogant pigs for human beings that ever existed in the modern world.
    The sheer outrageous calculated audacity these people possessed in the deluded concept that they were in any way, shape or form a cut above anybody else was staggering. Considering Germany had such a lousy, backward and uninspiring home bred culture in comparison to France, Italy and Britain, renders this illusion even more laughable. Laughable only at the liberty of the proven fact that 95% of Germans in 1933 were such easily led retarded fools. The propaganda films of 1933-34, tell the whole story. Evidence very much suggests that it wasn’t just the Nazi Gestapo divisions that rounded up all the non-100% Aryan subjects for dispersal, but the co-ordinated combined work of the nation as a whole. Almost the entire adult population turned out to be savages. Yet for some insane reason, come the ultimate destruction and defeat of the German peoples, there existed an unexplainable amount of sympathy for their plight.

    Personally, I would have bombed Germany into dust and taken it’s hell hole off the face of the earth. Bomber Harris was only prevented from doing so because Churchill had other ideas for Germany, although he subsequently back out of these, too. A very big mistake in my opinion.
    Britain should never have allowed any local German interference with the due process of the legal system in the subsequent trials of thugs and deviants. This was all the ancillary stuff considered of too little import in relative terms to the Nazi Nuremberg trials. Consequently, countless thousands of these vicious bastards got away with it.
    The UK was ever the gentleman and even went so far as treating these Nazi pigs with some level of respect. No so with our US counterparts, whom quite intentionally proceeded to hang these bastards with piano wire so that they suffered as much as possible and for as long as possible.

    It’s now 70 years on from WW2, but there are still many countries in the world where the hatred of Germany and it’s peoples has not dissipated at all.

    Btw, it was Zyklon B – as was written on the tin.

    1. That’s right – Zyklon B – I could not think what it was! Thanks for that Andrew.
      I think they knew exactly where all those Nazi bastards fled. They could have dealt with the lot of them.

      1. I wasn’t referring to the Nazi’s – we know all about them, but the average German, the thugs that did their utmost to assist the Gestapo. So many of them were not properly dealt with later in the courts. However, what did happen was that many who were identified as seemingly getting away with it were subsequently executed by very ordinary people. Just random street killings, or visits to their homes etc. This was all completely separate to the activity of the Israeli’s. This continued into the early 1960’s. The authority’s began to stop ignoring these revenge killings around the time of the Berlin wall.

  2. I have read so much about the Holocaust, been to the museum in DC three times. You know what got me the most? It was a pile of children’s shoes. Hundreds of them just lying in the exhibit. It totally undid me… I seriously doubt I could go to Dachau. Couldn’t make myself walk through the gate.

    2. I know that really brings it home. Numbers don’t mean anthing but when you see mountains of glasses or hair it makes it real!

      1. Have you ever read “The Last Jew of Treblinka” by Chil Rajchman? He ended up doing a little bit of everything at Treblinka even though he was Jewish. It was quite eye-opening to consider the daily workings of the camps. It’s a very short book. Made me shudder.

  4. Geez Opher! I can’t even imagine…well your words paint an accurate picture – but actually seeing it. How it must have hurt your heart. So hard to wrap our heads around that kind of inexplicable horror, and then that people might enjoy watching the devastation. What soul-less, heartless slime. They say we all have that cruelty inside of us – that any of us could snap and not see what we are doing. I want to believe we have evolved past this….but look at politics right now.

      1. Yup! People as a species, I don’t particularly like or have much respect for. But the ones I love, I REALLY love! There is so much beauty, caring and love out there….I don’t know. I think we probably need to go, though. Give the planet a chance to heal.

  5. Very moving memory, Opher. These were terrible times but I would still blame the Nazi ideology and then those who are easily led but for many Germans it must also have been a difficult and frightening time. Unfortunately fascism seems attractive to some as with the youngsters who have gone to join Daesh. Let’s not forget there are so many people struggling for peace in Syria and other challenging places. Take care!

  8. The other commenters pretty much said it all. I just feel numb. The Holocaust was the unit of study I hated teaching the most because it never failed to stir up terrible feelings within me. I honestly can’t imagine visiting one of those camps, Opher. As you say, there is hope. There are many beautiful and loving people in this world. Lest we forget.

    1. There is hope John. There are more caring people than uncaring people. It just seems that the problem people create problems that are greater than their numbers. It is easier to destroy than to build.

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