How visiting Dachau can change your life

I spent the day at Dachau concentration camp today, and to call it a moving experience would be a great understatement. The camp is now a museum to show the atrocities of genocide.




It is a place that you see the worst behaviors of human kind, and understand that we continue to have the possibility of this in the present and in the future. It is too easy to state that this could not happen again. Instead it takes place today. Over the past 15 years we have had ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rawanda, and still today in Darfur. As we did 60 years ago, the majority of our population turns our back on this until we can no longer deny and save face without contributing to ending the atrocity.





The practice of indoctrinating young impressionable youth that do not have other opportunities was put into place by the National Socialist party (Nazi). They did this better then most and trained the elite at Dachau to stip the prisoners of their identities, possessions and their dignity. Fortunately dignity is not something others can control. Many prisoners showed the utmost dignity for their fellow prisoners. Many gave their lives for others. The SS gourds were trained at Dachau and then sent off to open up additional camps. This was the main teaching place for the extermination of over 6,000,000 jews and another 1,500,000 non Jews. (Including over 150,000 gays, but I will get to that later) Today this practice takes place by terrorists, gangs, Somalian pirates and many others. Were there are oppressed despaarte folks, there will be others who will look to take advantage of them for the wrong reasons.





To understand the scope of the camp there were 250,000 prisoners that came through Dachau. 45,000 were killed at Dachau and burned at the crematorium. Most of the rest were sent on to other camps and killed there. Only about 4% survived. This included the 14,000 prisoners liberated in 1945 by US troops. Unfortunatly, even after liberation another 3,000 died due to malnourishment and disease within the first 6 weeks of being free again.





To see the gas chambers, the torcher rooms, the barracks and the crematorium is devastating. The barracks were designed for 200 prisoners each. By 1944 there were over 2000 people in each barrack. During the last few months Germany ran out of coal. This was needed to fire the crematoriums. When the US liberated the camp there was a pile of human bodies as high as the building. The building is about 20 feet high. In addition there was a train car fuill of dead prisoners as well. This constituted 4000 bodies, dead but not cremated that the US found. This was one of the first camps liberated and uncovered the extent of the atrocities of the Nazi party.





Right before I left I unfortunately experienced something that has me truly rageful and despondent on human nature. In 1968 there was a three part monument erected to promote tolerance. One of the pieces is an abstract of all the different badges that the prisoners had to wear. The artist included all badges. The Board of Directors, comprised of former prisoners, German officials and camp preservationists, instructed the artist to remove the pink triangles and the black triangles as homosexuals and criminals should not be represented. So, the people who should promoting tolerance discriminated against gays and criminals. A big "GO TO HELL" from me to them on this one. It just goes to show how much work is still left to be done.





There are a few pictures from this trip. The most important is the sign built into the front gate that states that "Work will set you free" This was obviously not the case here at Dachau. It is now my hope that the continued efforts by those who work at this camp, and those who visit this camp, will work to ensure that this type of atrocity will not take place in the future, and that this work will set us free from genocide.

More pictures:

http://www1.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=610782002/a=21881784_21881784/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=comcast2/