Dachau

Concentration Camp

This is a picture of the crematorium.
And this is the gas chamber where they were murdered.

While on our trip to Germany to find what we could about my ancestors, we made some side trips; one being to Dachau, Germany, to see the concentration camp. I know the older of us are aware of this history, but for the younger readers, this was a very notorious place during World War II (1941-1945 for US soldiers). The Nazi warriors from Germany under the leadership of Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler first imprisoned here, beginning in 1933, Hitler’s ideological foes. In later years, however, as the Nazis refined their program of Germans being the master race, they sent the Jews, the mentally ill, priests, the homosexuals, the Roma (gypsies), criminals, artists, and the physically deformed. They cleaned out asylums, hospitals, and complete villages.

The goal of course was to purify the white race, to get free labor for their war, or just revenge on anybody they didn’t like. They also wanted to get rid of intellectuals, professors and such. Maybe they just didn’t want to keep anyone with a brain, smarter than them. The majority of inmates were Jews. I use the term “inmates” loosely, due to the fact that by 1944 and 1945, the captives arrived on a train, and many went straight to the gas chamber then the crematorium. This included men, women, children, babies, and the elderly. This was only the first off many such camps. The best movie I have ever seen about this is Schindler’s List with Liam Neeson.

After the Nazis had satisfactorily cleaned out Germany, they moved on to Poland, France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and approximately twenty other countries. They wanted, mainly, to kill the Jews, from everywhere. By the time US and Russian forces arrived in Germany to end the war, the estimates of the total number of Jews murdered ranged from a low of six million up to eleven million. And there are still some people today who think this was not true, a hoax, like Covid 19. And there are still Nazis.

They gave this evil a name. The Holocaust. And I found both Hitler and Himmler are on a list, along with Vlad the Impaler, of the fifteen most evil people in the history of the world. Hitler is Numero Uno.

Dachau is in southern Germany, now being a suburb of Munich. When we arrived, our bus let us off in the area of East Dachau, and we walked a few blocks to the camp. It was eerily close to the houses. The people always said they didn’t know, but they had to smell it. The fear was just too great of speaking out and meeting the same fate.

After the war, the site was used to incarcerate former Nazi SS who were the head of the camps and rampaging murderers of US captured troops as well.

Also after the war, the people from local towns, maybe just Dachau, were walked out to the camp to haul the dead and reeking bodies that were left by the runaway guards. Ladies in their nice clothes and shoes had hankies over their mouths. Now they for sure knew what was going on I betcha. I’ve tried to look for these characteristics in the Germans I know. None in my family, very nice, gentle and genteel people. And the people I met on my trip, as I said in the book, they were exceptionally helpful. It just had to start with Hitler. Then he collected those like him. There are always evil people wherever you go; Idi Amin; Stalin, Ted Bundy, Putin. It depends on you to beware of smooth-talking psychopaths. Don’t be a victim. You are smarter and nicer than that.