It's day 7 of our tour and we are now at the Concentration Camp known as Dachau. So far on our trip, the weather has been beautiful so it seems only fitting that when we walk up to the camp entrance it starts to rain and it rained, and it rained and the clouds rolled in, and it rained some more.
During my career in the Army, I had one job -- establish and run enemy prisoner of war camps. I would suspect that a very minuscule percent of the American public, or even the military community for that matter, knows what is involved in operating an EPW camp. Our main job was to secure these EPWs, and in order to do that we had assigned to us everything that a modern US city would also have -- medical assets, doctors, dentists, nurses, hospital facilities, electricians, engineers, carpenters, sanitation experts, firemen and their assets, security units, etc., and tons of equipment. We adhered to the mandates of the Geneva Convention so other than confinement, their life wasn't too bad (relatively speaking). I Know what we do in camps, and having done lots of research on concentration camps, I wanted to see a camp first hand.
When the tour company published its itinerary for our trip, I was very much looking forward to seeing this camp as Dachau was the first of the concentration camps and was not originally set up as an extermination camp. Rather, it was to be a labor camp. The original occupants were not exclusively Jews, rather this was set up for enemies of the Nazi system. They were here to work, and work would "set them free."
When a group I headed up (Vets to DC) was taking Veterans to Washington to see their memorials, one of our Veterans was a Soldier in Third Army and his infantry unit was one of the units to liberate this camp. I got to talk to him about this during the trip and certainly learned some things.
The town council of the town outside the camp really didn't want this camp to be such a landmark, so they decreed that the camp should be torn down, a way to erase this horror. Fortunately they were stopped before the camp was entirely dismantled.
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| This was a sculpture done to represent the bodies caught up in the wire fencing around the camp. The bodies were left there to discourage others from trying to escape. |
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| This picture shows hooks/rings that had ropes running through them and big hooks on one end. The Germans would hang bodies on the hooks while others were fed into the ovens. |
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| This picture is inside the "reception/shower" area and is one of the drains from a shower area. |
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| This picture of two of the remaining ovens used in this camp are right where they stood while being used in the camp, and the |
Below are some links -- to all of the pictures I took while there, and to some sites that will give you a better idea of what this camp was.There are some ads in the YouTube sites so you will have to click through them. I also have to apologize for not being as attentive as I should have been to taking more pictures, but while walking around this place, the atmosphere just beats you down and sucked all of the enthusiasm I had built up during the trip right out of me. I constantly found myself comparing the two systems of EPW camps, ours and Hitler's. Sure had lots of worrisome nights after this...obviously not as bad as those Soldiers who liberated this place, and not as bad as those Soldiers who liberated the extermination camps.
Dachau (my pictures)
“My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.” ()
Hooah
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