A Memorial at Dachau

On the cold Sunday morning of April 29, 1945 my father liberated the Nazi concentration camp (KZ) at Dachau. “The Band of Brothers” episode from the HBO miniseries on the liberation of such concentration camps is called “Why We Fight” http://www.hbo.com/band/landing/why_we_fight.html and from my story below, you’ll see why. The images I’ll describe are harsh and memorable. As I’ll explain at the end, there is a reason why we must remember.

When I visited the camp recently, the first thing I noticed as I entered the camp was a palpable sense of sadness, but then something else… a sense of anger. How could people have let this happened? Did not the local townspeople see the trains full of prisoners, could they not smell the stench of death?

KZ Dachau was the first concentration camp, set up some forty days after Hitler rose to power. It was originally set up as a political prisoner camp on March 21, 1933 for just one hundred and twenty prisoners. But after the Nazi SS took over in 1935 it became something more. By 1938 following a rebuilding, it housed 5,000 prisoners. It was not a death camp, an extermination camp, like Auschwitz. Rather, it was a work camp, or more accurately, a slave labor camp where prisoners were hired out to businesses. The ironic words on the gate of the camp were “Work Makes Free.” Nevertheless, tens of thousands died here. More ovens were built in Barrack X as a crematorium to handle the bodies. When my father arrived, there were still 2,000 bodies stacked up in and around Barrack X waiting to be processed.

This KZ Dachau was a model camp, the first and the longest lasting of the Third Reich. An SS camp four times the size of KZ Dachau was set up next to it, and KZ Dachau became the training camp for the SS who were to run other camps. Dachau was the prototype upon which all but a few of the camps were patterned. When my father arrived with the 42nd Rainbow Division, along with the 45th Infantry Division and the 20th Armored Division, they found over 30,000 prisoners still alive at the liberation. But my father also brought back photos of the train box cars filled with bodies. During its 12 year run it is estimated that 206,000 prisoners went through KZ Dachau, and records suggest 32,000 were killed -- but the prisoner numbers were rotated to newly arriving prisoners and many documents were destroyed before the end. From 1942 onward, for example, the deaths of Jewish and Russian prisoners were no longer recorded.

Prisoners were given 30 minutes to wake, clean, eat, and assemble for “roll call” at the head of the camp in the morning… then again at night. Those of lower status were housed farther away. There were 34 barracks. There were originally two medical barracks but this grew to nine as the medical experiments increased. The clergy were kept in Barrack 24. The Nazi view of Christian clergy was particularly low. 94.8% of the clergy were Catholic. Non-German clergy were in Barrack 26, farther away. After the fall of fascist Italy and the death of Mussolini, Barrack 29 was set aside for the Italians.

The nearby city of Dachau was originally embarrassed by the memorial. It was hid behind trees, and the city redirected urban development. The survivors insisted that the camp be turned into a memorial, and so it was in 1965. Today, busses bring visitors to the camp.

The memorial here is different than the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, which was designed for emotional impact. At Dachau, I saw large tours of student groups from all over Europe who would rather play hackysack than listen to their tour guide.

As the students crowded around me in the Jourhaus, the gate house and only entrance into the camp -- where the final brief firefight occurred between the SS and the liberators -- I found the plaque of my father’s group which read “In honor of the 42nd Rainbow Division and other U.S. 7th Army Liberators of Dachau Concentration Camp April 29, 1945 and in everlasting memory of the victims of Nazi barbarism.”

Throughout Europe you’ll find memorials in town squares that say “Lest We Forget”. In the Appellplatz, the roll call square of the Dachau Concentration Camp is found this memorial in Hebrew, French, English, German, and Russian:

“Never Again.”


        Bill Petro, your grateful neighborhood historian
www.billpetro.com/johnpetro