Hello my dear readers,
Be you few and far between, I know that my post have not been consist lately I hope you have also been checking facebook for the photos that I have uploaded. Today will not be my usual cheerful recollection of the events of my travels rather I am writing today about my trip to Dachau. So be warned my reader for today my thoughts are sad.
This concentration camp is what was once an ammunition depot during WWI forced closed by the treaties signed by all parties. This place was thus ideally for a prison camp it had rail lines in and old building abandoned meaning that only a few renovations were needed to make the place into what it became. This camp was not a death camp. This camp is not Auswitz where extermination was the goal, nor was this camp Mauthausen where prisoners were expected to hoist 50 kilo rocks up a hill until they collapsed and if they were injured and their malnourished bones snapped they were shot on the spot. In fact for a few months this camp closed and 1,600 prisoners went to that camp and 400 returned. This camp was one for humiliation. This camp is one with more minor tortures, persons hung with their wrist bound behind them for 60 minutes, or beaten 25 times as the prisoner counted aloud in German. One mistake they began again. Many Poles, Russians, and others who did not speak German died upon the block beaten to death often by other prisoners under the eyes of even more brutal guards. These were the punishments administered for those who left dirt on the floor or failed to make their bed in a manor that satisfied the guard.

The magnitude of the Holocaust the care and consideration of his schemes where overwhelming, this was a systematic elimination of his opponents. And as I stand on the gravel of the quiet courtyard unremarkable as it is this is ground that feet bled onto in the Winter and prisoners collapsed during the infamous 17 hour stand while the gaurds sought a single man who escaped. This is the camp where Shiller conducted his famous experiments on prisoners, inducing death by extreme pressure and tempiture changes. This is where the children of Franz Fredinand whose assination spurred the Great War his sons were here.
The camp was built for 6,000 when liberated it held 30,000 and the year before it 80,000 with 20,000 people dying in a single winter from Typus. The official record sites 32,000 deaths but how many POWs were shot or prisoners never registered? Simply executed. The crematoriums were beyond capacity and mounds of bodies where finally discovered by allied troops. Estimates are as high as 42,000 people, greater then the population of the neighboring city of Munich.
Seeing the torture rooms the spot for the bars to hang prisoners and the whipping block now abandoned. My heart splinters at the thought of such sadness. Such grief. A testament to what happens when evil is allowed to take hold in the hearts of men, for any person with an understanding of the atonement of Christ’s sacrifice for each of us, can not help but feel the pain.
The entrance to the camp translates to “work will set you free,” and at first this may have been true, a few prisoners were released with the understanding that if they deviated if they failed to report on a daily basis they would be returned to the camp and as the lowest of the low-a repeater-they would not survive long. This sign adorned every concentration camp. But ultimately it came to mean that when you worked till death then you were truly free. For once their useful years expired prisoners where killed. They survived on four bits of bread, vegetable soup that was mostly water and worked 12 hour days. To weak to rise against their captors work kept them alive, kept them from being a part of the final solution.
For 12 years this camp operated, during that time a red cross inspected the camp and wrote the German government a letter asking why everyone complained about these concentration camps. That it was a perfect camp, no complaints. It was during those years that Hitler was named man of the year by Time magazine, he took over Poland, Austria and France. It was during those last years that Hitler finally died by his own hand, rather than face an angry world and the public hanging that awaited him. He was never imprisoned never once was he stripped of his identity and assigned a number, for him until his last breath he was free. But this man took a culture a society that was advanced and western and within a few years eliminated it. The stated goal of that camp was to strip each prisoner of his human dignity something that the Fuhr was never subjected to.
I stand in the courtyard and I like those before me I promise never again, and I offer a prayer for peace.
It is on this day that I am ever more grateful for my family, my faith, and my country. To have been born in a time of peace, to have worries that are so few, and complaints so simple, to have such moments of joy in my life, to worry about eating to much food.