Dachau

I was 11 when I pulled my parents’ copy of Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich off the bookshelf. I remember thinking at the time that this was not an appropriate book for someone my age, but I couldn’t put it down. When I finished, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, just as Diary of Ann Frank was assigned reading in school. Those books made me first ask the question: “what would I do if an authoritarian regime took over in my country?”  I spent many hours in my early adolescence (I was an only child) fantasizing elaborate scenarios where I would have to carry secret messages for the resistance, hopeful that my status as a child would put me beyond suspicion, but recognizing that my actions could just as easily lead to imprisonment or death, as they had for my age-peers in Nazi Germany, some of whom died at Dachau. Dachau symbolized to me – and to many others – the cost of resistance, and the terrible face of Nazi extremism. I realize now that those childhood fantasies shaped my adult life, and helped to create the activist I became. 

Yesterday, we visited Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp where political opponents, dissidents and “undesirables” were imprisoned, starved and killed from 1933 until its liberation by American soldiers on April 29, 1945. While the gas chambers at Dachau were never used, execution, murder, suicide, exhaustion and starvation took the lives of more than 40,000 people there. It was this camp, attached to an SS training center, where the principles of concentration camp operations were first developed and used across the Reich.

Survivors described the casual, gleeful cruelty in the language and actions of the guards, the constant efforts to dehumanize and degrade them. Some of their descriptions reminded me of the current Nazi wannabes, fascists and white supremacists who have visited Charlottesville, verbally and physically attacking their opponents with apparent delight.  What does it take to make a human being treat another human being that way? What did it take for slaveholders and those who supported them to accept the treatment of African Americans in slavery for generations in the United States?  What does it take for us to accept that black men and women continue to be disproportionately imprisoned and denied basic civil rights in our own day?  

I believe it is shortsighted for us to say, “There’s just something wrong with those people who act like that. They’re crazy or defective in some way.” If that is the case, why does this continue to happen? Surely there is something inherently human in the comfort of finding fault with the “other” – whether it is the dissident, or the Jew, or the white supremacist.  The name calling I’ve heard from both ends of the political spectrum seems to reflect that basic human impulse to find justification in who we are not – in vilifying and dehumanizing those who are not like us.  Of course we don’t all use violence and imprisonment to act out our “othering”, but the “othering” is still a dangerous part of who we are. 

Dachau remains today a memorial to those who refused to participate in the Nazi regime, as well as those the Nazis found to be beneath them – communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and repeat criminal offenders.  It is a call for us to witness to that other great human impulse – love – in our opposition to any regime that treats some people as less than others.  It reminds us that sometimes that opposition can have terrible consequences, and that we should strive to be the kind of people who would be willing to risk those consequences to protect our fellow human beings and stand up for peace and freedom. 

A plaque erected at Dachau after the liberation says “May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they helped to resist Nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men.”

Another reminds us that we are the ones who shape the background of history. Let us shape it well.