Thirty years ago, the Battalion Chaplain took each platoon of the 54th Engineer Battalion on a tour of Dachau. Five companies, four platoons each - twenty trips to Dachau. I don't know how he did it. Thirty years ago, when I was nineteen and visited Dachau for the first time, it was a life changing event for me. I grew up on a diet of John Wayne movies, and thought battlefield was where one found glory, where a boy became a man. Where the heroes never died, and good always triumphed over evil.
After Dachau - I knew that that was all a lie. War, and places like Dachau exist because evil often triumphs over good. I often wonder how the Chaplain was able to go through such a horrible place so many times. Acting as our tour guide, telling us of the atrocities the Nazis had committed. Walking us through a museum that documented the torture, that documented the evils of mankind - day after day for twenty days. During our European trip, I took my son on a tour of Dachau - so he could see the horrors of the holocaust first hand. As we toured the museum, and the barracks, the gas chamber, which was mercifully never used in Dachau, my normally cheerful, thoughtful son grew quieter and more withdrawn. I could see the impact this tour was having upon him.
The sculpture in the photo above depicts prisoners being tangled in the electrified barbed wire fence that encircled the camp. The prisoners were not trying to escape - they were committing suicide. It was their only escape from the constant, never-ending torture that was performed upon them. Death was preferable to them. The SS even took that away from them - they dug a moat around the fence so that the prisoners could no longer fling themselves at the electrified fence and die a relatively painless death (painless as compared to being tortured day in and day out).
In the barracks you see the progression of cruelty, at first the prisoners had an area about the size of a twin mattress, albeit, they were all crammed together. As the years of systematic killing went on the size of the beds shrunk, until finally they were literally sleeping on top of each other.
Above is the entrance to "the showers" at Dachau. As a part of the tour you have to walk through them. While this room, mercifully, was never used at Dachau, rooms like it were used at camps throughout Europe. As you stand in the room where you would have undressed you have to wonder what the victims were thinking - did they think it was an actual shower as it said above the door? Did they know it was their death? Did they welcome death after the abuse they suffered at the hands of the Nazis?
Then you step into the shower room - I cannot describe the feeling. All I knew was that I wanted out of that room as quickly as possible.
From the gas chamber you enter the room where the bodies were held prior to going into the crematorium. Then you enter the crematorium - which was operated by prisoners (even though the gas chamber was not used, they still had a large number of dead to cremate). The prisoners running the crematorium were separated from the general population of the camp, and every 4-6 weeks the prisoners running the crematorium were killed so they would not be able to tell the other prisoners what was happening.
The inscription in the photo above is, loosely, “To honor the dead and warn the living." After walking through Dachau a second time, and I hear the rhetoric from America's right-wing, I have to ask, has humanity learned nothing? This is where hatred, fear, and xenophobia leads us, and that is what I hear from America's right-wing. They fear everything, feel they must carry a firearm to protect themselves, they fear immigrants, especially of one religion, and they have irrational hatred for those whose views oppose their own.
I expect to be bombarded with hate filled messages on my Twitter feed telling me how I am wrong, and how I am the hate filled one - the hypocrisy in their posts will be lost on them. It is up to us to make sure what happened in Germany of the 1930s does not happen again here - we must never allow this to happen again, anywhere.