Dear Editor,
Last December I had the pleasure of traveling to Austria, Germany, and Switzerland to visit and shop at the Christmas Markets. Forty-two people from a host of different countries, nationalities, and backgrounds traveling and touring together for a common holiday adventure.
During my days in Germany, I took a break from shopping and made a point of visiting the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial of WWII near Munich, Germany. I had been hearing so much in the United States about how the holocaust was not real, a myth, no evidence that it occurred. It was something I have never doubted, but I had to see for myself. Seeing it with one’s own eyes puts things into their proper perspective.
Dachau is a town in Bavaria approximately ten miles southwest of Munich. Our tour to the camp was led by a Dachau native. On the bus, our guide explained the importance of understanding how Hitler had come to power in Germany, and ended up convincing a population into believing an entire group or race of people as being to blame for all the problems befallen the German people.
The irony in all this is that Jews and Germans had been living in relatively peaceful coexistence for years, working together side by side, conducting business, children attending school together with minimal conflict. It wasn’t until Hitler started screaming at rallies, demonizing Jews as having the blood that was polluting the people and the country of Germany that Germans started to turn against their neighbors. A fascist government always needs a group of people to blame, and in Germany’s eyes, Jews served that purpose.
Dachau was the very first Nazi concentration camp, opened in 1933 and one of the last to be liberated in 1945. It was originally built to hold political prisoners, but later would hold Jehovah’s Witnesses, Democratic Socialists, Romanian gypsies, Poles, Catholic priests, homosexuals, and later Jews. Actual criminals were also housed there and were trained to help monitor the other groups and report and spy on the other inmates. Dachau was a training camp for SS soldiers assigned to Hitler’s 44,000 camps throughout Europe.
Dachau was designed as a “work camp” for men only. Women were housed elsewhere in another camp and children were killed because they served no useful purpose. Dachau was not classified as a “death camp,” but that really did not matter because most prisoners were marked to die of starvation.
Prisoners were either marched or transported to nearby businesses to work each day. Each prisoner was issued ¼ loaf of bread daily, and occasionally a very thin soup with little nutritional value. Rations were decreased weekly. The average life span of a Dachau prisoner was 9 months and the average weight of a full-grown man at time of death was about seventy pounds. Bodies were disposed of at the crematorium.
New prisoners arrived daily to take the place of those who perished.
When townspeople inquired about what was going on behind those walls, the German propaganda machine explained “We’re taking bad Germans and teaching them how to become good Germans.” Still, believing something bad was happening, nearby residents would throw food and fruit over the walls in the cover of night, not wanting retribution from the soldiers.
On our tour, as we walked through the front gate of the camp we saw the barracks, and we entered in the same entrance where prisoners were ordered to strip down for communal showers. Heads were shaved to remove any indication of individuality. It didn’t matter their occupation or status. To the Germans, they were all just filthy Jews and not worthy of any respect or dignity.
We next found ourselves standing in a room with a wooden planked floor—the actual shower room where prisoners were de-loused, then issued their striped uniform with the designated colored patch to identify their “crime.”
We visited the area where medical experiments were conducted, photos so graphic we had to look away, but the most graphic and disturbing images were the photos taken by the liberators of the camp. I thought I had seen pictures of all the atrocities, but these were beyond anything I ever could imagine.
I am writing this letter because of all the recent talk about candidates running on a holocaust denial platform and denying our children to learn about history. History is nothing to hide, even if it is ugly and painful, even if it might make us feel uncomfortable, lest we end up repeating it.
Today in Germany, school children are required to visit at least three different concentration camps before they are allowed to graduate. The day of our tour, there were busloads of children and teenagers on school fieldtrips to Dachau. The German government does not want is children to ever forget what was done to 11 million people by a monster, a madman so full of hate and lies that he could manipulate and brainwash an entire population of people to buy into that hate.
In all of this, there must be a lesson somewhere. The question is, are we going to learn that lesson, or will we allow it to happen again?
Ann Taylor, PsyD
Oakwood, Texas
