Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come

Well, not all of European history or travel is cheery. After a pretty inspirational trip to Wittenburg, we prepared ourselves for a depressing trip to Dachau, the town of 40,000 to the northwest of Munich. The town's chamber of commerce likes to pretend that there are other reasons to visit the town (like its castle or church), but whether it's advertised or not, the real reason we remember or visit Dachau is because it was the site of the first German concentration camp.

When we got off the train at Dachau station, the lack of any acknowledgement of the camp made it a bit awkward for us - we didn't come to see the castle either, after all. Not speaking German or wanting to ask a bus driver where we could find a concentration camp, we ending up just following the other tourists (mostly Americans) onto a bus that ended up taking us to the entrance to the former gunpowder factory that later became the Dachau camp.

Laura took the audio guide when we entered through the visitor's center, but I declined, afraid of the sensory overload that too many concentration camp stories in one day might create. It turned out that by the end of the day, we were both absolutely overwhelmed, and we didn't even come close to seeing everything there.

The Prisoners Memorial, on the main assembly ground

The camp was created primarily for political prisoners in 1933, and it would become the template for the other concentration camps built by the Nazi regime. While many of the other early camps were closed, Dachau remained open until it was liberated by the US 7th Army in 1945. Over those years, Dachau housed about 200,000 prisoners, of whom 25,000 died, mostly from disease and malnutrition consequent of its abysmal living conditions.

The museum has more infomation than I could take in in a day; it begins with a long exposition on the rise of the Nazi regime - the radical revolts and uprisings that plagued the Weimar Republic from the left and the right throughout the 1920s. Eventually the Nazis gained the upper hand over the Communists and began to seek the elimination of their political enemies. Despite the Weimer Republic's consitutional protections (similar to those of the US Constitution), after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the Nazis were able to put forward a number of measures aimed at hunting down their political enemies. Since most of those were not killed (and, in the first years, many were eventually released), they needed a place to put them, which led to the founding of the Dachau camp. The title of this post was a jingle sung by German citizens as they watched their friends and loved ones get carted off for unpopular political stances, religious views, or ethnicities.

Note that Dachau was not an extermination camp in the tradition of Auschwitz and Bełżec in that it was not intended to simply kill its prisoners. Conditions gradually worsened as supplies shortened during the war and more prisoners came, until the sleeping conditions made a submarine look spacious. A set of gas chambers were built toward the end of the camp's use, but there is no evidence that mass exterminations were ever carried out there. The largest killing recorded at Dachau is that of 500 Soviet soldiers being killed by firing squad in the camp's last days. If that sounds like a justification, please believe that it is not. There is not a thing about visiting Dachau that makes you feel good, but I have heard that in terms of nausea and general pessimism about the human condition, Auschwitz is even worse.

But I can only speak from my own experience, which is that I can't remember feeling quite as sad as I did when going through Dachau. Seeing the showers where prisoners were tortured, the "Work makes you free" sign over the entrance, the crematorium where corpses were burned, it's a pretty chilling experience. When the camp began admitting female prisoners, some were brought to the male prisoners' quarters and forced to prostitute themselves, under the assumption that this would make the prisoners better workers.

By the entrance gate to the camp

I think everyone who visits a place like this finds a story that sticks with them the most - for me this was a song called the Dachau Anthem, written by two musicians being held at Dachau in its early years. The music is posted in the museum, and as I sung through the dissonant melody with its hopeless-yet-defiant lyrics, I felt a bit of solidarity with them, as though they were there with me singing. I don't know if art can molify the pain that places like this created. Maybe nothing can. But it's pretty powerful stuff.

I had always had a vision of prison camps in terms of "The Great Escape" - barbed wire, guard towers, and the inevitable tunnel under the fence. Dachau had the fence, and the towers, and a line (inside the camp) which prisoners would be shot if they stepped over. But there was no tunnel. And I felt none of the old romanticism within me about how I would have planned my escape had I been there. All I could feel was that this place was too much for me. It overwhelms me just seeing its ruins, and I cannot begin to imagine what its prisoners felt.

We took the bus back into town, and stopped in Munich for supper before taking the train back to Ladenburg. Just stepping out of the camp made me feel better - the air seemed fresher, the colors deeper. But the memory did not leave me completely, and I hope it does not. It's a terrible memory, but maybe there is good that can come from terrible memories.

As my brother said, "It's the kind of place you don't want to visit, but you feel strongly that everyone should visit it, if there's a chance that in so doing we will prevent the future from creating another Dachau."