Dachau

On February 13, 2025, J.D.Vance visited the Dachau Memorial Site, posing with a Holocaust survivor and dutifully talking about being moved and the unspeakable evil.

The very next day he accused Germany of not having freedom of speech.

He was not talking about the over-eagerness to stop any discussion about the actions of Israel in Gaza. What he meant was the German penal code that bans the production, distribution, and public display of propaganda material and symbols of NS organizations.

What he was complaining about was the law against Volksverhetzung, which translates to incitement of hatred, hate speech, and sedition. He was criticizing the ban of the Hitler salute, now so popular in his government circles, the ban of SS logos, the swastika, the South African triskele, the white nationalist Celtic cross, and (inconceivable for his adopted Southern mind) the sun cross of the KKK. 

Dachau is a pretty little town in Upper Bavaria. It has a historic center with a castle, churches, museums and comfortable pubs.
I lived two stations down on the Würm for a few years but it was never just another town to me.

On a cold morning in 2023 I found myself squeezing into the bus to the memorial site with groups from Spain and Italy. My last visit had been when there was still a nondescript entrance and no other visitors, everything now is prepared for much bigger crowds.

I took pictures but wasn't sure what to do with them. I would have wanted to revisit, to look closer, but have to work with what I got to tell the story now. 

Once upon a time on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler, a convicted felon who had only become a German citizen through some shady deals in 1932, was made Chancellor of Germany in a coalition of NSDAP, DNVP and other right-wing nationalists. The industrialists and noblemen felt they could use and control Hitler and his useful thugs.

Alfred Hugenberg, the DNVP leader, was the Rupert Murdoch of his time, he owned publishing companies, newspapers and film studios, and had been undermining democracy for years through politics of catastrophe and fake news. He headed a super ministry to introduce tariffs, dismantle workers’ rights and purge public servants.  

He lost his cabinet post in June 1933 already and was pushed out of public life. His media empire was subsequently taken over by NSDAP companies, but he was never held responsible or showed any remorse for his actions. 

On February 27, the Reichstag was set on fire by a Dutch communist. If and how he managed to do that on his own is still discussed. The result was the Reichstag Fire Decree, nullifying civil liberties, legalizing imprisonment of any opponent, and suppression of any non-friendly publication.

Even this did not give the NSDAP the majority in the March elections. They needed the complicity of the centrist parties, a ban on the KPD, and had to arrest many SPD members of the Reichstag to kill democracy with the Enabling Act. The SPD was the only party to vote against this act and I wish they would remember how brave and committed they once were. In April the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service followed which removed all non-Aryans, Jews and political opponents from civil service, education and law.

On March 22, 1933, the first transport of 200 prisoners arrived at a camp set up on the grounds of a disused gunpowder and munitions factory in Dachau. Most of these men were Social Democrats, communists and union members. The guards were police and SA. The media openly publicized the camp as a place where politically misguided men were being trained to become good citizens through drill and work. 

It was the central row of leafless trees that caught my eye. The stark, reaching, black shapes and the symmetry made me sad and feel sick in my stomach. How they would strike me in a different season and if the prisoners had paid attention to them.

Would the incongruity have been overwhelming? Could there have been hope in nature’s steadfastness or would the detached immovability have increased despair?

Prisoners had to plant Lombardy Black Poplars in precise rows at many concentration camps. The ones at Dachau were replanted after the war, Auschwitz has a dwindling number of original trees. 

A poem about the trees written by former Auschwitz prisoner Halina Birenbaum:

Many, like I, confessed to the trees here, beseeched remembrance
Wanted to climb to the top and fly away
All traces of them vanished, they were swept away
And the trees saw it all, the trees heard
And, as is their custom,
Grew, sprouted leaves, remained silent.

(Drzewa milczą, Oświęcim, 1982) 

http://www.zchor.org/birenbaum/halina.htm

Dachau was the prototype for the concentration camp system, but it was never an extermination camp. “Dachau” became a warning, a threat, meant to inflict terror, compliance and obedience, Germans were meant to know about it. 

Lieber Herrgott mach mich stumm, dass ich nicht nach Dachau kumm.

Dear Lord God, make me dumb [silent], That I may not to Dachau come, was a well-known ditty. 

The carnival floats around the country joked about sending anyone complaining about anything to Dachau. Der Stürmer-style Jewish bankers and their puppets were featured prominently on those.

Calling people Soros-financed communist-libtards therefore always lacked a certain degree of originality. 

Dehumanization was the be-all and end-all.  

“We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings as we are, but as second-class people.” 

SS leader Johann-Erasmus Freiherr von Malsen-Ponickau to arriving SS men on May 11, 1933.

From the very beginning prisoners were tortured to the point of murder or suicide.

In a misguided assumption that laws still existed and courts would uphold them, a Bavarian state official and a medical examiner investigated the suspicious deaths. The first commandant of Dachau, Hilmar Wäckerle, was transferred and continued his career in the SS. The report disappeared and the officials and the AG who had initially read the report were demoted to provincial positions. 

Theodor Eicke, who went from security guard at IG Farben via Italy and a mental asylum to concentration camps inspector and head of the SS Division Totenkopf, brought ‘discipline and order’ to the brutality and soon got rid of the SA. The training school for SS Totenkopfverbände was established right next door to the camp.

Even the released men were destroyed men. As my grandparents said of some colleagues who had been in Dachau, “they didn’t live long.” 

The camp was expanded to hold 6000 inmates in 1937. The prisoners had to build 34 barracks and the huge maintenance building that is now the documentation and exhibition space. The barracks were built for 200 people each but held 2000 inmates at the end of the war.

Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, catholic and protestant clergy were soon incarcerated as well. Anyone deemed ‘asocial’ from beggars and drug addicts to pacifists could end up in a camp. Violent felons were also sent to Dachau to mix things up. Colored inverted triangles, ‘Wimpel’, let guards know who to abuse most and who to make into functionaries, encouraging denunciation and extortion.

In 1938 opposition leaders and Jewish people from Austria and the Sudetenland arrived in Dachau. After the November pogroms, over 11.000 Jewish men from all over Germany were sent to Dachau to encourage emigration. By 1939 the concentration camp system was so established all over the Reich that transfers of prisoners to Flossenbürg, Mauthausen and Buchenwald became routine.

Arbeit Macht Frei (Work makes free) was the slogan put on the entrance at Oranienburg, then Dachau, later Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Theresienstadt and Flossenbürg. Jedem das
Seine was the motto at Buchenwald concentration camp.

Scandinavian neo-nazis have a penchant for stealing these signs. The door from Dachau was stolen in 2014 and recovered in Norway in 2016, the one from Auschwitz was cut into three pieces by a Swede and his Polish accomplices in 2009. 

Jury Soyfer, an Austrian cabaret writer, composed the Dachaulied after being arrested in 1938 and sent to Dachau. He died in Sachsenhausen in February 1939 aged 26.

Stacheldraht, mit Tod geladen, ist um unsre Welt gespannt.
Drauf ein Himmel ohne Gnaden sendet Frost und Sonnenbrand.
Fern von uns sind alle Freuden, fern die Heimat, fern die Fraun,
wenn wir stumm zur Arbeit schreiten, Tausende im Morgengraun.
Doch wir haben die Losung von Dachau gelernt und wurden stahlhart dabei:
Sei ein Mann, Kamerad, bleib ein Mensch, Kamerad,
mach ganze Arbeit, pack an, Kamerad, denn Arbeit, Arbeit macht frei!

Barbed wire, loaded with death is drawn around our world.
Above a sky without mercy sends frost and sunburn.
Far from us are all joys, far away our home, far away our wives,
when we march to work in silence thousands of us at the break of day.
But we have learned the motto of Dachau and it made us as hard as steel:
Be a man, mate, stay a man, mate, do a good job, get to it, mate, for work, work makes you free!

With the beginning of World War II, prisoners from occupied Europe came in. Dachau became the dedicated camp for clergyman. 95% of the over 2700 inmates in the priest barracks were Catholic. 

Niemöller was liberated in South Tyrol in April 1945. After the war he was one of the few Germans who talked openly about their experiences and their guilt, most famously in “First They Came.”

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me

The US Holocaust Memorial leaves the first stanza about communists out completely. Solidarity - just like acknowledging genocidal tendencies outside of the holocaust - is hard. 

In 1941 Dachau became an execution site for Soviet POW. Over 4000 were murdered in the first few months of Operation Barbarossa. It was especially the Russian prisoners that were used for medical experiments, hypothermia tests, “Versuchsreihe Unterdruck” - high altitude experiments for the Luftwaffe - and malaria injections.

Around 2500 prisoners with disabilities were sent to Schloss Hartheim to be killed by lethal gas as part of the T4 Euthanasia program around the same time.

All Jewish prisoners from Dachau were sent to the death camps in the East in 1942.

In 1944 those death camps were ‘liquidated’ and evacuated. Many transports arrived in Dachau and the camp was overcrowded with 30.000 prisoners. Typhus ran rampant.

Over 200.000 people were held in Dachau camp system. A third of the 41.500 who were killed, died in the last six months of the war.

Dachau was the name of a forced labor network with over 160 subcamps in 1945. All Nazi architecture projects were built by slave labor, and private companies could order prisoners at the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt.

The prisoners from Dachau were forced to work in surrounding factories like BMW, Agfa, Messerschmitt, Dornier, or the Porzellan Manufaktur Allach that produced china for the SS and knickknacks for the Nazi regime. These are still extremely popular in certain circles because they can be displayed openly but feature a SS logo on the bottom.

While slowly walking around the vast and empty grounds, groups rushed by asking about the way to the gas chambers. Is it just me or is there an underlying excitement, an anticipation of frisson in Holocaust tourism? They shuffle through the very big and very thorough exhibition space but don’t seem to read or understand much.

Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, these camps stand for a system of terror and a forced labor economy that started long before the industrial mass murder. There is a Brausebad, a small gas chamber built in 1944, that seems to have been ‘only’ (how callous and terrible that sounds) used for training and small scale experiments.

Is the memory of humiliation, beating, exhaustion, disease, hanging, shooting, suicide not enough? 

The crematorium was overwhelmed without Zyklon B.

Dachau had a section for special prisoners, international hostages to be exchanged for money, and after the 20th of July, 1944, a growing number of family members and contacts of those associated with the assassination attempt.

Among the VIP prisoners were Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s former first cabinet mate, minister of economics, and president of the Central Bank. He became disenchanted with the Nazis because of their economic ignorance, and the open violence against Jews when forced emigration in his civilized mind would have been sufficient.

He was joined in Dachau by Fritz Thyssen, another industrialist who had financed Hitler’s rise but later claimed to be surprised by Kristallnacht, the persecution of Catholics, and the war...

In April 1945, a Death March started from Dachau to the South. Thousands died in full view of the German public.

In the last weeks of the war a couple of prisoners escaped the camp. Some tried to contact the Americans, some tried to organize. An uprising by the Bavarian Freedom Action in the town of Dachau ended in SS officers murdering six people on the 28th of April.

On April 29th, 1945, the 20th Armored Division of the US 7th Army liberated the camp that had been taken over by the International Prisoners Committee during the night. A Swiss Red Cross official and two lower ranked SS officers surrendered.

The International Committee of the Red Cross acknowledges that "the ICRC's efforts to assist Jews and other groups of civilians persecuted during the Second World War were a failure."

A report by Major Alfred L.Howes of the 7th Army including pictures, statistics and interviews can be read in the Eisenhower Library. It includes this introduction to the Liberation Chapter:

There are no words in English which can adequately describe the Konzentrations-Lager at Dachau.

In spite of the fact that one had known of its existence for years, has even spoken to people who had spent some time there, the first impression comes as a complete, a stunning shock.

One had always had – in the back of one’s mind – the reservation “But surely it is impossible for human beings to do this to other people.”

https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/holocaust/report-dachau.pdf

The first thing the approaching Americans saw was the Death Train. It had started three weeks earlier with over 4000 prisoners in Buchenwald, stopped in Nammering and left 800 dead behind, and arrived at Dachau on the 27/28th of April. The survivors had been taken into the camp but hundreds of dead and dying were left in the wagons outside.

It is surprising that not all the guards were killed that day.

Dachau was used as an internment camp for Nazis and SS before the military tribunals from 1945 until 1947. The Dachau Camp trial in November and December 1945 ended with 40 out of 40 convictions and 36 death penalties of which 28 were carried out. Most of the later trials were hampered by amnesia, repression and politics, and ended in mild sentences that were hardly ever followed through. 

In 1948 the camp site was returned to the Bavarian state and became Wohnsiedlung Dachau Ost, a residential estate for expelled Germans from the East. Half of Munich was in ruins, people could not be choosy about accommodations. 

In the last decades, comfortable houses have been built right up to the fence of the memorial site. 

Is this symbolic of a new complacency with the past?That we have neatly packaged it into our memory culture, acknowledging it in a way that does not interfere with the present and the future too much? 

In the 1950s the Comité International de Dachau demanded that the site be turned into a memorial. They could stop the planned demolition of the crematorium. The barracks that had been remodeled too many times were torn down in 1962 and two replicas were erected instead. 

Nandor Glid’s International Monument was inaugurated in 1968. Glid lost all he knew to the Holocaust but escaped a labor camp and fought with the partisans. After the war he became a sculptor and professor and created monuments for Mauthausen, Dachau, Belgrade and Salonika.

The Catholic church built a chapel in 1960 and opened a convent in 1964 where Carmelite sisters pray for atonement and forgiveness.  A protestant church and a Jewish memorial followed, in 1995 a Russian Orthodox church was built. More victims’ stories are being told now. 

In 2018 the AfD leader Gauland got in trouble for calling  the 12-year Nazi dictatorship "just a bird poo" that should be ignored in a thousand (!) yearlong glorious German history. Today the AfD more than flirts with neo-nazis, nazi language and nazi symbols. Trump says Hitler did some good things, and wants generals just like him. Elon Musk tells Germans that there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

'Never forget' means standing up to these demagogues, calling out their lies and corruption.

Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize Speech 1986 said: There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Toni Morrison declared in a 2008 interview: Slavery can never be exhausted as a narrative. Nor can the Holocaust; nor can the potato famine; nor can war. There is nothing in those catastrophic events of human life that is exhaustible at all.