Gates of Hell
The reason I write is to gather my thoughts, and to retain a record of what I see, think, and do. These recollections are sometimes useful to me and, perhaps, may occasionally or eventually be of interest to somebody else.
As time permits, or when I feel too uninspired or lazy to write something new, I retrieve and post accounts from the past, to preserve a digital copy of what was often a written original. I did so yesterday and the day before, and am doing so again now. But I’m doing it reluctantly.
Last year, when digging thru the files, I came across the journal entries I sent the last two days. They were harmless enough – mere travel logs. I would’ve posted them last summer, had today’s entry not been part of the trilogy.
But when I re-read this one, I put them all back in the box. The memory and the subject-matter seemed too sensitive to share. I suppose I could’ve left it aside, posted the other two, and moved on. But that’d be like discussing the Beatles without mentioning Yoko, or recounting the Bourbons without acknowledging the Bastille.
I decided it was all or nothing. Last year, I opted for nothing. But this week, I’ve already shared the first two installments. So, like Columbus realizing his ships had insufficient supplies to return to Spain, I’ve no choice but to press ahead.
Posted below is a recollection of a place I felt I needed to see, but wish didn’t exist. I remember being on the train back to Munich, jotting the notes that became this essay, and assembling them when I returned to the hotel.
I wanted to capture what I saw and felt as soon as possible, so that I’d never forget. Not that I ever could…
Dachau, Germany
May 9, 2007
Our meetings ended yesterday, but Unisys provided an extra night in the hotel so we could enjoy a full day in the city.
But there was another place I thought I should go, tho’ I honestly didn’t know if I’d be able to. Yet I quickly realized I must.
A couple days sampling fine arts, high altars, elegant architecture, succulent brats, and steins of beer carried me just this side of heaven. Today, to balance the scales, I descended into the depths of hell.
For this excursion, I couldn’t go on foot. I had to take a train, which is how most were transported when they made their journey just six or seven decades ago. Only they had no choice, and their accommodations bore no resemblance to mine.
Twenty minutes northwest of Munich is the medieval village of Dachau. The town dates to the Feast of the Assumption in 805. It is superficially pleasant: charming churches, colorful cottages, narrow streets.
Dukes of Bavaria and the House of Wittelsbach kept homes and palaces within its walls, and art thrived here till the First World War. But Dachau will be forever associated with the Second.
Just east of the city is a gate. Inscribed on it in mocking irony, as at similar compounds that sprung up around the Reich, are the words Arbeit Macht Frei: “Work Will Set You Free”.
Unlike those earlier arrivals for whom that condescending message was intended, our passage thru it was voluntary, and reversible. But for many of the souls who preceded us, this would be the last time they’d be on that side of the sign.
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp, and was initially created as a “Work camp”. Extermination camps would come later, and Dachau would (factually, if not officially) be counted among them too.
It opened in 1933, within two months of Hitler coming to power. The first prisoners were his perceived political opponents but, as often happens when such a precedent is set, other dissenters, “enemies”, scapegoats, and “undesirables” soon followed: communists, homosexuals, gypsies, “disloyal” Christians and, of course, Jews.
Being first, Dachau became a “Model Camp”, where the SS would train their henchmen in what they proudly called a “School of Terror”, from which graduates would scatter to run the network of camps that were rising across Nazi-occupied Europe. Among the lessons learned were torture, starvation, and degradation…with advanced degrees in medical experiments and mass execution.
After walking anxiously thru the gates, our tour proceeded in solemn silence across the barren grounds. On either side are rows of squat, dilapidated buildings, which almost certainly look better now than they did when in use. Their walls were used to detain the prisoners, or against which to prop them when a capricious guard decided their time had come.
Appropriately enough, today’s weather was grey and drab. Despite an earlier downpour, and aside from a few drizzles, it didn’t rain much. But there was a persistent pall, which seemed to thicken as we moved thru the camp. In all likelihood, it would’ve been there regardless the weather. Even on a cloudless day, I can’t imagine the sun ever shines on this horrible place.
Indoors is worse. “Sleeping quarters”, if these repulsive rooms could be dignified with that misleading description, were horrendous. Boards are crammed together and atop one another, like planks in a morgue…only without the privacy or the dignity of a crypt’s waiting room. The cells had the distinct feel of an above-ground grave, filled to the rafters with live corpses of indomitable spirit.
What passes for “toilets” are no better (and not much worse), crammed in unventilated rooms as sequential bowls of unrelenting filth. Outside, we saw guard towers, barbed wire fences, and concrete ditches designed to keep the innocent inmates in. Guides pointed to selected spots where sharp-shooting guards summarily disposed of those who tried to get out, or who just happened to wander a few steps from wherever they were supposed to be.
The more extensive killings were conducted against the “execution wall”, which was equipped with a “bullet catcher” to capture the evidence from mass assassinations. The execution wall connected the maintenance building to an ominous edifice known to guards as the detention facility, and to prisoners simply as “the bunker”.
As we walked thru the courtyard surrounded by these structures, a detachment of soldiers dressed in military garb marched toward us…the synchronous stamping of their feet, and periodic barking of German commands, sending chills down our collective spines.
Inside the bunker were offices of the guards, an admission room, an examination room, and an interrogation room, the walls of which were insulated to silence the screams.
Toward the end of the war, the SS installed in the bunker tiny “standing” cells no more than three feet squared, where prisoners endured days of tortuous confinement with insufficient air, meager food, and whatever waste resulted from it.
Over a small bridge and a short distance from the rest of the camp is a brick building with smokestacks, side vents, four furnaces, a disinfection room, and a gas chamber disguised as a “shower bath”. As disgusting as the rest of the camp was, none of us were prepared for how sickening this particular place is.
Dead prisoners had apparently been buried or burned off-site during the early years of the camp. But as the deaths mounted, an on-site facility was built to more “discreetly” dispose of the bodies.
It also added to them. The SS used the crematorium as yet another execution site, hanging victims by the neck, or shooting them in the back of it. For whatever reason, they did not seem to use this “shower bath” for mass poisoning of unsuspecting victims. But that’s not to say it was never used, for apparently some individuals were gassed here in the last years of the war.
Aside from the memorials set up to honor the dead, this was the last stop on the guided tour. Which was good. I couldn’t take any more. Tears filled my eyes, and flooded many faces in our group. Among them, an elderly woman burst into grief as the guide described the chamber, and was escorted slowly from the room. Apparently, her relatives had been there before…and never left.
Like many of us, I’ve read numerous accounts of Nazi atrocities, and seen documentaries and cinematic depictions of many more.
But nothing prepares us for standing within the walls and on the grounds where so many innocent people perished in such gruesome, cold, callous fashion. Yet, as appalling, dispiriting, and disturbing as it was, I still can’t know what it was like.
Thank God.
After all, just a few hours after wandering thru the cells and past the ovens, I am writing about them from the seventh floor of a luxury hotel. Tomorrow, I’ll board a plane, and fly first class across the ocean, back to my family, none of whom are at risk of being taken away in the dead of night, or having to hide in the stealthy attics of kindly neighbors.
But what of the people they’d be hiding from? How did they get that way? How did what happened in Nazi Germany (as well as in Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, and Pot’s Cambodia, among too many other sinister places and times) happen at all? Who enabled it? Who furthered it? And why?
By many measures, Germany in the early twentieth century was the most civilized country in the world. Science, philosophy, religion, art, industry, engineering, music, and economics flourished. If such horrors could happen here, they could happen anywhere.
But how did it happen here? How could so high-minded a people be so susceptible to such lunatic leaders? Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, once said that “the veneer of civilization is paper thin”. He was apparently correct.
After all, there was nothing particularly distinctive about most Germans in the late 1920s that would appear to be so obviously wicked. They weren’t innately different than contemporary British, French, Argentinians, or Americans, but were certainly subject to different incentives and influences.
Most people resist a sudden submersion into overt evil. It’s more often a slow marination, whereby sinister ideas and vile propaganda drip over them little by little, almost without notice, till one day they wake up completely under water, without realizing they’re wet.
Yet that shouldn’t surprise us. The easiest thing to do is to follow directions, get in line, and go with the flow. It takes stern stuff to stand against the passion of the day or the emotion of the mob.
And it’s easy to condemn our predecessors for not doing so. From the comfort of hindsight, we assure ourselves that we’d have been different. Like the misrepresentation of Canute, we’d have stiffened our backbones, steeled our resolve, and resisted the tide.
But would we? What, other than a convenient courage borne of our contemporary convictions, makes us so certain we’d have been a lone tuna against a stream of salmon?
From an enlightened distance, we are certain that…confronted with immoral orders from state officials…we’d consult our conscience, and not do what we are told. We’d be the good guy in all the movies, the steadfast hero at the end of the book. Unlike those benighted Germans, we’d not follow orders, march in step, or parrot propaganda.
Maybe.
Or maybe not. After all, following orders and doing what you’re told is the path of least resistance. The authorities and the crowd…like an off-shore breeze blowing you further from home…are at your back.
By going with the flow, these men, and some women (at Dachau there were 19 females among the enforcers), were assigned to take Jews to work camps or death camps, which soon became indistinguishable.
Among the prisoners were children, the elderly, and the ill. To the guards, these people were inconvenient. They “got in the way”.
Bruno Probst, a member of the notorious Reserve Police Battalion 101 out of Hamburg, testified that while no specific orders were given to shoot, officers “made it clear that nothing could be done with these people.”
On one occasion, many as 1,500 were lined up, and the (overwhelmingly “Christian”) men of the battalion were given the order to kill. As far as they knew, the directive was “lawful”, having come from their officers, who got it from their superiors, who derived it from the wishes of the Fuhrer himself.
What choice did they have? Of the approximately 500 men who were ordered to fire, a mere twelve realized there was one. Only these dozen were unwilling or unable to fire a shot. Is it more shocking that so few had a sense of what was right…or that any of them did?
None of us knows what we would’ve done, because none of us was there. But we assume those who pulled the trigger either felt justified in their actions, or were simply more comfortable following orders than crossing authority or thinking for themselves.
After all, that’s the safe position, at least while you’re awake. But what demons will haunt your sleep?
And when your eyes close for the last time, how will you feel when you learn Hell was no idle threat? And what will you do when you realize no authority will back you as you approach your own infernal gates, beyond which nothing will set you free?
JD
