Today is the anniversary of the opening of the concentration camp at Dachau.
I finished not long ago (as part of my insomniac reading) an inter-library loan copy of Bruno Heilig's memoir Men Crucified. Ghastly stuff. Heilig was lucky. Relatives bought his way out of the camp -- and Germany -- early, before the Final Solution clamped down and he survived to write about it from Britain.
See also: Ghosts in the Sun: Hitler’s Personal Photographer at Dachau, 1950.
6 comments:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/21/colo-gun-club-drops-goal-of-becoming-100-percent-nra-after-city-threatens-eviction/
This should give all the NRA haters on Sipsey Island a nice hard-on to play with tonight.
I wonder if the city would have evicted the club if they had required 100% membership in the ACLU?
UH, They weren't "camps" in the 1930's, they were part of the German prison system. At the time Dachau was no worse ( and no better) than many of the prisons here in the states.
Ironic that this story would immediately follow the one on the neo-nazi Shumer. The message between the two stories may well turn out to be prophetic.
In a moment of defining and inexcusable ignorance, Anonymous wrote: "UH, They weren't "camps" in the 1930's, they were part of the German prison system. At the time Dachau was no worse ( and no better) than many of the prisons here in the states."
Bullshit. Read the memoirs, read the records. Examine the death rates.
I had a chance to visit Dachau in 1998 while working a few weeks in Munich.
Scary and spooky place.
What i found most interesting is that residents of the town would actually turn their heads away from it when walking past it.
Dachau wasn't just "a" camp; it was *the* camp. It was not only the first camp, it was the template for all the ones that followed.
True story: shortly after they built the place in 1933, a couple of local lads were caught peeking over the fence. The SS kindly arranged for the youths to spend a few days inside...and the kids emerged so shaken by the experience that everybody else proceeded to mind their own business...until, of course, the advancing American Army threw the gates open in '45 and started shoving the locals inside for good, long looks of their own.
I toured the place myself in '89, while TDY in Munich. Spent an afternoon there and left with a lifetime's worth of nightmare fuel.
It's not only shunned by the locals, as exsanguine said, but as one local resident later told me, area residents who travel elsewhere are loath to tell people where they're from.
--Wes S.
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