Day 23 - Munich and the Dachau Memorial

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Day 23 and our trip to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial is a difficult day to write about. I want to share it with everyone back home, but at the same time it is hard to do that in a way that doesn't belittle genocide into my simplistic understanding of what happened in WWII.

The Dachau concentration camp was the main reason we organised to come to Munich. It wasn't something we were excited about seeing, but it was something that we felt we needed to see. Especially after travelling through Europe for the last few weeks.

We went on a tour as Dachau is a little bit complicated to get to, and we thought it would be a lot easier to go with someone who goes almost everyday rather than try and find it ourselves. This was a very good move, we used the same company we used in Berlin, and the guide was very informative and really helped us to get a lot out of the trip. I think if we had gone on our own we probably would have just stood in the middle of the giant empty courtyard area (for lack of a better word to describe it) staring and not doing much else.

He gave us some good perspectives on things, like the fact that a lot of the people in Dachau were actually German, and how misguided it is that Germans are so often looked upon as being the bad guys (as an entire nation) in this whole thing. In Psych a few terms ago we studied this experiment in which someone tested whether people would follow orders to the point of killing another person. From what I can remember, it was conducted in America, and in the last 50-100 years. Ask me about it sometime if you are interested, but basically, they found that the large majority of people actually ended up believing they were going to kill someone by following orders, but continued to follow them anyway, some even after the person had died. Anyway, I know this is a bit of a tangent, but from studying this I understand a little bit that a lot of people, even those who tend to be quite judgmental of the actions of the Nazi's, will obey the orders of someone in authority, even if it means killing another person. It makes me question what I would actually do if put into that position. I think that we are so used to deferring to authority that sometimes we forget to question if what they are telling us to do is right or wrong.

Despite having studied this, read about it, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, standing in the places where people had been tortured, shot, had killed themselves... it was pretty overwhelming. That was possibly the hardest thing for me, was the realisation that almost everywhere I stood, everywhere that I walked, someone had been killed.
We saw the torture cells, that was very full on; the replicas of the buildings where they had slept, where people had woken up almost every morning to find that the people who had gone to sleep next to them were now dead; and the courtyard where they were forced to stand to attention for at least an hour every morning and an hour every night... Without the people there, without photos or video or something to see what it was actually like, it just seemed so empty and silent.
The sleeping quarters were built to fit about 200 people, and even that would have been very squashed. At the height of the war, there were over 2000 people in one of the buildings, and over 1000 in every other one.

After this we walked around to the crematorium. Although they claim that the gas chambers here were not actually used for mass murder (only for small groups at irregular intervals, like that makes it better??), they were gas chambers all the same. Disguised as showers, and the gas taking up to 15 minutes to kill everyone in the room. Why choose a method that took so long? Especially if they were only using it for small groups of people. I think that was one of the things that really made me wonder, especially after seeing the torture rooms. Why torture these people? I always thought that this kind of treatment was reserved for people who have something or some knowledge that you want. But these people didn't know anything that the guards wanted to get out of them, and they didn't have anything. At all.
So why torture them? I understand that war, to an extent, means killing people. I don't understand killing in this degree, and I really don't understand why they felt the need to torture them.
The ovens were also a very overwhelming thing to see. Once they couldn't keep up with the death toll by burying the victims, they built a big crematorium with several ovens to cremate the remains.
Out the back is the place where they would bury the ashes, and it now has a small garden with a sign saying, 'the grave of thousands unknown.'

In his opening speech, the guy in charge of this camp would say to the new inmates that in Dachau there is no reason to laugh. No one laughs there except for the devil. And he is the devil.
Scary guy.

We left with more questions that we came with, but in a good way, and with the sad knowledge that this wasn't the end of genocide, or the only time that it had happened.

Well, that is sufficiently depressing, but hopefully you can get a bit out of it as well, it was a trip that I am very glad we made, and a reminder that we can't just be cocky and arrogantly believe that it won't ever happen again.

One last thing I just remembered:
Our guide was telling us that when the new guards came to Dachau to be trained, they were lined up in the courtyard, facing the prisoners. They were asked, "If you see anything between yourself and these animals in front of you that is equal, step to the left" - only a few ever did, and they were immediately imprisoned as well. They were also treated worse because they were identified as being guards who couldn't do their job.
I like to think that if I had to choose between killing someone else, or even hurting someone else or being put into their place myself, that I would be brave enough to "step to the left" but it is very easy to say that when you aren't in that position, and can't even understand what it would be like to go through that.

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