Dachau Memorial

Everyone should visit the Dachau Memorial. The former concentration camp is the perfect example of pure, unacceptable, corrupting evil.

If you can afford to, visit with a tour or an educator. As much as the word tour doesn’t sit well with me as it trivializes what you’re there to do and see, it’s the best word to attach to your search when you’re booking your visit.

Forest and I knew we wanted to visit Dachau when we planned our trip for Germany, and thankfully we had a wonderful guide who was extremely knowledgeable, non-judgmental of ignorance, and gracious in the face of hard questions. The company he works for is Munich Walking Tours.

Dachau was once a labour camp run by the Nazi regime, specifically by the SS. As one of the first concentration camps the Nazis built, this was a testing ground for their ideas as to what should happen in their other camps. SS members were also trained in the buildings which surrounded the camp, which were built by the labourers inside.

Among those imprisoned in the camp were members of the Hebrew nation, communists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Poles, Romani, those who were differently abled or neurodivergent, and anyone Nazis deamed ‘racially or physically impure’. These people were either worked to death at Dachau or sent to be “euthanised” in Austria. Euthanasia isn’t a word that sits well with me either. It’s origins are from the Greek words ‘Eu’, meaning good, and ‘Thanatos’, meaning death. To be euthanised means to have a good death. There are no good deaths to be had in any sort of gulag, Nazi or otherwise.

Dachau recorded roughly 32 000 deaths during it’s entire operation. Most were due to disease, labour injuries, starvation, or death from having been experimented on. None of them, to my knowledge, are recorded as being deaths by gas, however the guide said that they would have had to test the chambers to make sure it worked. Dachau wasn’t an extermination camp as we have come to stereotyped them. It was extermination by exhaustion rather than Zyklon B.

It isn’t enough for Nazis to break bodies, though; they want to break minds and spirits too.

The entrance to the camp carries the notorious slogan “Work sets you free’, and in the administrative building within the camp there is a prominent sign painted on the walls saying that ‘smoking is forbidden’.

This last I didn’t understand, but had enough sense to know it was out of place. I still have vague recollections of ‘smoking sections’ in restaurants, and knew full well that smoking indoors was commonplace in Europe during the war. With no munitions around to set fire, and no library to burn, I had to wonder what fire they were trying to prevent.

“Why have they forbidden smoking?” I asked the guide.

“To further degrade the people who came into the camp,” he explained. “They would already have been stripped of their personal possessions, including their clothes by the time they got here. What cigarettes could they possibly have?”

People describe places like Dachau as sobering. It is, but I suspect not in the way most people imagine.

I expected that the Dachau Memorial would be a stern reminder of the past, and what evil can accomplish when not enough people stand up to it. I also expected it to be a somber and still place.

It’s not.

When Forest and I visited the sun was shining. It was warm, there was a breeze which rustled the leaves of the trees which surround the us. People live right next to the camp, their backyards butt up against the concrete barrier which surrounds it. A school group, they looked to be in about grade 6, was taking a break near the reconstruction of the barracks houses. A few of them were tossing rock a between each other as though it was a ball.

I wondered if they knew the significance of where they were playing. I then wonder if I knew. They might have been playing in a mass killing ground but I had literally just missed a huge sign of institutionalised racism in a concentration camp. I’d visited expecting a grey atmosphere, as though sunlight could never exist in a place like this.

It does, and too many of us are forgetting that.

We can write never again on a wall as many times as we like, but until we start educating ourselves and standing up against xenophobia, racism is just a plague that will keep coming back.

So study history. Keep up with current events. Know that the Nazi Holocaust is not the only holocaust that has happened, nor is it the most recent.

Write ‘Never Again’ on every corner of the world with your acts of kindness.

Wash your hands, wear a mask, support your fellow human beings, and stay safe gentle reader.