THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 28, 1996 TAG: 9606280014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A15 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: Keith Monroe
LENGTH: 70 lines
It is a nondescript town of concrete apartment flats, a bank, a grocer, a druggist. Like dozens of other towns it is situated in the midst of rich fields of fodder and vegetable crops. But unlike its obscure neighbors, this town's name is known around the world. Dachau.
It was the site of Hitler's first concentration camp, established shortly after he came to power in 1933. The route for our summer vacation passed through this corner of Germany. We planned to see some of the best that man is capable of, but we felt impelled to stop at Dachau and see one of the worst. It will be the hardest part of our trip to forget.
The signs pointing the way are small and hard to find. The traveler who does not speak German receives no help. But the town is small. One eventually discovers, down the road from a motorcycle dealer and a pizzeria, a long blank wall with square guard towers at the corners. And inside the now-unguarded gate, barbed wire and a moat designed to keep men in, not out.
The camp compound now contains just one of the long, low barracks buildings that housed political prisoners, Catholics, homosexuals, Jews, artists, dissidents and other ``undesirables.'' Beyond it, row after row, stretch the oblong foundations of all the barracks that once filled the vast space.
Dominating the camp is a museum filled with photos documenting the systematic inhumanity of the enterprise. Here the enemies of the Third Reich, real and imagined, were eliminated by being worked from dawn to dusk, fed little, exposed to the elements and in some cases tortured. Most dully expired. The gate to Dachau contains the customary mocking slogan wrought in iron: Arbeit Macht Frei - work makes free.
In one corner of the compound, across a small bridge over a small stream in a grove of trees, stands the brick crematorium. It disposed of all that remained at the end of the concentration process. In 12 years, Dachau eliminated 30,000 souls. But it was a prototype for larger, more-efficient, more-industrial camps built elsewhere throughout the Reich.
A wall-size map displays the sites of hundreds of work camps, prisons, concentration camps, slave-labor camps, death camps that the poisonous Nazi philosophy eventually required. Here, because humans were regarded as vermin or viruses, they were treated like them. Here, the process of ethnic, intellectual, artistic and cultural cleansing was perfected.
The photos are familiar but retain their power to shock, especially blown up to cover entire walls. Men in torment. People reduced to hollow-eyed skeletons. Live humans reduced to stacks of corpses. People pushed beyond endurance who made their escape by hanging themselves or by making futile escape attempts in order to induce the guards to put them out of their misery.
To mourn the dead, several chapels have been built there. Sculptures have been erected. The impulse is understandable, but the effort has been wasted. The monuments are superfluous.
The camp itself is one immense tombstone, one unforgettable rockhard, sunstruck reminder that ideas have consequences, that if people are regarded as pests, the logic of pest control causes men to turn their ingenuity to systematic slaughter.
A guest book showed visitors from European countries, more from farther afield - Japan, Australia, Canada, Israel - most from the United States. Pages of names from California, Texas, Indiana. We added ours from Virginia.
We are a people prone to forgetfulness, largely uninterested in events beyond our borders, more concerned with the days ahead than those gone by. Nor has our country been immune to intolerance. Our country, too, has made a bad habit of regarding some people among us as less than people.
Dachau shows where that kind of thinking can lead. It was terrible to stand where the worst happened in Germany just 50 years ago. It is troubling to realize that similar atrocities are happening now in several places around the world. It is most sobering to understand it can even happen here. It was heartening to see so many American names on the register. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB