Prolouge

I visited the site of Dachau concentration camp in October 1999. This is the entry from my diary for that visit. Un-edited, warts and all. The entire entry was written on the Sunday evening after my visit to the camp, and without reference to notes.

The Story OF My Visit

My tour of Dachau was organized by a small company based in Munich station called 'Radius'. There were 13 of us including our guide, a South African. I don't think the irony was lost on him... Forget about aparteid, you can go back even further to the Boer War when the British pretty well invented concentration camps. So you have a white South African showing an Englishman around a German concentration camp.

It's a strange place Dachau concentration camp; one of the most evil places on the planet attached to a pretty little Bavarian town. A pretty little Bavarian town that wants you to know how pretty it is, and has huge murals on the walls of the railway station to show you how pretty it is... You get from the railway station to the camp by bus (the 724) which announces the site as it approaches: "Concentration Camp" in a flat, slightly tired monotone. The bus deposits you not at the old entrance to the camp with its gates and inscription "Arbeit makt Frei", but at the opposite side of the site where an entrance has been made through the old electrified fence. And so you walk in off the public street straight onto the parade ground between the offices and the old barracks, a space in which people used to drop dead (literally): the main punishment the Germans used to inflict on their victims was to line them up twice per day and count them. If any inmate was missing e.g. dead of typhoid in the barracks, or maybe missing from a work detail, then there they stood until the missing person was found. Perfectly still. In silence. Whatever the weather (minus 20 Celsius or so in the winter, plus 30 Celsius in the summer). Virtually naked. No food. No water. For up to twenty hours or more.

How do you feel when you realize that you are standing in the same spot where only 55 years ago, some poor soul was tortured to death with cold and hunger? How are you supposed to feel? God alone knows. Two American girls in the group made it across the parade ground to the old gates, but no further. They were so distressed they just walked away.

The site wasn't made into a memorial until the 1960s. After liberation in 1945 the camp was first used as a prison for SS guards awaiting trial, and then, incredibly, it was used as accommodation for displaced persons. The original barracks have long since vanished, although their foundations can still be seen. The original offices and punishment block survived however, and are now in better condition than when the camp was first commissioned. I'm not sure how I feel about that; one part of me wants the place preserved as a living reminder of the evil that took place there, the rest of me would prefer to see the place left to rot (and the town was well). There is something essentially tasteless about re-roofing and re-plastering the walls of a torture chamber.
As I said, the old barracks where the inmates lived have long since been demolished, but two of them have been reconstructed (theme-park clean...) One of the positive aspect of the reconstruction is that it shows how conditions in the camp deteriorated between 1933 when the camp opened, and 1945 when it closed. A building designed for 200 ended up housing over 2000. To fit them all in, the bunks where 5 high from floor to ceiling, and were so close together that they were less bunks than separate floors. The nearest I can get to describing them is an old-fashioned coal-seam maybe two-foot-six high, except instead of coal, they were filled with starving disease ridden men and women. Originally two of the 34 barracks were defined as "hospital" barracks. By 1944 over half were given that name.

Dachau had of course it's crematorium, but it was not formally a death camp (yet over 40,000 people were murdered there), Dachau was only a prison camp. And it was the first, the prototype for all others. It was built in 1933 to house political prisoners: communists, social democrats, "anti-social elements", Jehovah's Witnesses (the only religious group other than jews specifically singled out by the Nazis for opposing them: they had a purple triangle. I'll be more polite next time they knock on my door), gays... It was seen by the Nazis as a model camp, and it was here that the SS trained their staff; the more brutal the trainee, the faster he was promoted. So these young 19 year-old SS guards would go looking to cause trouble. Were the inmates shoes too clean? Punishment! Were they too dirty? Punishment! One of their favorite tricks was to grab the cap of an inmate (they were required to wear their cap at all times) and throw the cap onto the 'death-strip' by the electric fence. If the inmate stepped into the death-strip to retrieve the cap, he would be shot; if he didn't retrieve his cap, he would be "punished". Punishment usually took the form of beatings, or being hung from a pole by your hands (tied behind your back). If you were beaten, you were required to count out the strokes, and if you lost consciousness (as often happened), then when you woke up the beating began again from "one". The conditions were so bad that many inmates chose to kill themselves by throwing themselves against the electric fence. When that happened, you would get another "counting" in the parade ground for 12 hours or so as punishment to the living for allowing the death to happen.

As I said, there's a crematorium (actually there are two: people died so frequently they had to build a second larger crematorium to handle the bodies). There is also a gas chamber. The irony of the gas chamber is that Dachau is the only concentration camp to have built a gas chamber and not used it. No-one is exactly sure why, but the most likely reason is that people were dying of typhoid at such a rate that the ovens couldn't handle the extra traffic (they ended up having to take away some of the bodies to bury them). The chamber was however used in chemical warfare experiments on the inmates. In fact a lot of experiments were carried out in Dachau (usually lethal). Barrack 5 was used to test the effects of decompression on the human body, and tests to see how long human beings could survive in cold water. In both cases the experiment was simple: reduce the pressure or drop the temperature and see when the inmate dies. The gas chamber was built by priests who stood up against the Nazi regime (and their own churches), and captured foreign priests. It is probable that the uses of the gas chamber (and the second set of ovens, also built by the priests) was successfully delayed by the inmates. As soon as they were shown the plans (showers with fake shower heads: you can put your finger up into the rose and feel the concrete on the other side), they knew what they were building. Several parts had to be re-built when the shower doors arrived from Berlin (they needed to be air-tight of course) and were discovered to be a different size to the door frames.

Most of the time I just felt numb, well maybe not numb but not quite there. Detached maybe. It seemed almost unreal, except that you could reach out and touch. There is no doubting the reality of the ovens or the gas chamber. I've touched the "shower heads" and seen they were fake. I've worked the mechanism that put the Zyclon-B into the shower room (a mechanism in the wall). I've lifted the gurney that put the cadavers into the ovens. It's strange, you feel the need to reach out and touch everything, just to prove it's real.

Dachau is full of memorials, some religious, some military. But the most powerful is a simple plaque at the entrance to the museum in the old admin buildings: it says "Never Again"; it says this in half a dozen languages. I don't know, maybe I'm just over-sensitive today, but the first language on the plaque is not German. To took twenty years to erect that plaque, and the first language is not German.

I'm still not sure what I expected to find at Dachau. I've been here in Germany now for 10 weeks or so, and for at least five of them, I've spent the weekend in Munich, pretty much avoiding the idea of going to the camp (I saw an ad for it at tourist information the first weekend I was here). I probably wouldn't have gone this weekend either, but the leaflet was on display in the lobby of my hotel; that and watching 'Austin Powers II' on Saturday night. Of all the movies... One of the character in the movie is called 'Fat B*****d' and you're invited by the movie to be disgusted by him. It's not just the usual floor-shaking-when-he-walks joke (though they have that as well), the camera dwells on his arms and legs to remind you of how 'gross' he is. They then show him naked in bed with a thin woman who clearly doesn't want to be there. But he's not just in bed. He's in bed eating and dribbling food, surrounded by half-eaten dishes. What image it brought to mind was the old Nazi propaganda pictures of jews gorging themselves on food whilst people starved around them. Two images, 50 years apart, both saying "Look at these people, see how disgusting they are". And it was that image, more than any idea about paying my repeats to the dead, that was on my mind when I boarded the S-Bahn this morning.

But truly, respecting the dead can be the only reason to allow an abomination like Dachau to survive... One of the many memorials, this one outside the gas chamber says: "By remembering the dead we honor the living". It could just as easily have said "Bear Witness!", and that, if I felt anything at all, was what I was doing. It went with that compulsion to touch, to hold, to be able to say "It's real, it happened, I've seen it".

As I said, Dachau was officially a prison camp, not a death camp, and was the "Model Camp" on which all others were based. It was also the camp visited by the Red Cross. Inmates at Dachau weren't prisoners, they were simply "in protective custody", and went about singing gaily on their work details. The Red Cross apparently believed this... it begs the question: who were the Red Cross representatives who visited the camp, and what made them think that 34 barracks enclosed by barbed wire, a ditch, dogs, and watch-towers was an acceptable way to keep people? And how hard did they try to see all of the camp? How many barracks did the insist on visiting? Recent revelations about Swiss government complicity and connivance with the Nazis leaves a particularly bad taste in my mouth, and really makes me wonder about those Red-Cross visits.

The old administration buildings that used to house offices, kitchen, showers, torture chamber have been converted into a museum of sorts. Mostly it is filled with images of the camp, its inmates and facsimiles of various legal/administrative documents used to run the camp. It's when you realize that there is more paperwork on display than photographs or personal belongings that you start to understand the evil perpetrated here. This was no random brutality, it was ordered bureaucratic, and spiteful. Not every prisoner was recorded in minute detail (especially if you were a Russian of Polish POW, destined for target practice on the SS Rifle-Range next door), but most were. All, of course, were given their number and a color-coded badge: red for 'political', black for 'anti-socials', pink for gays, yellow for jews, purple for Jehovah Witnesses. One of the few items of clothing on display is a uniform with a pink triangle. It has no museum label, perhaps they felt it didn't rate one.

The punishment block is behind the museum. In fact the block held two different categories of prisoner. In addition to those sent for punishment beatings and solitary confinement, it also housed the "Prominents". Prominents in Dachau included amongst others, the man who attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. He was held awaiting a show trial at the war's end (Hitler accused him of working for the British). Sadly for him, once it became clear that Germany was going to lose the war, he was murdered. The cells themselves are as small and bare as you would imagine, the only surprise is that some have radiators. Naturally, the radiators were turned on in the summer and off in the winter: another way to torment people.

I was very quiet on my way back to Munich (actually I was very quiet on the way there too, but for different reasons). I sat on the train clutching my backpack and trying to make sense of the tour, of the place, of my own feelings. I was also desperate to write it all down, to record what I'd seen and what I felt. I needed to do that so much. And the worst of it is that I know I need to go back again, that it's not over yet. I need to be there again, on my own without a tour group. One last time.