First published in The Journal Gazette
On an early November morning in Dachau, Germany, I stood outside the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial as a cool breeze blew fallen molten-red leaves across the land. The fast-moving gray clouds and a hesitant sun delivered a gloomy day.
That type of day reflected the mood of this tour. It was hard to believe that this beautiful land was where so many horrifying events occurred. But they did. On March 22, 1933, the first prisoners entered through an iron gate with the mocking words Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”) at the top. The prisoners exited into what was then the Dachau Concentration Camp. This is where many people permanently closed their eyes and took their last breaths as they were worked to death.
“Prisoners lose their property, identity and dignity when they entered this camp,” tour guide Ralph Lunstroth said. “Prisoners were always thinking about survival.”
This concentration camp was used as training grounds for young SS (abbreviation of Schutzstaffel, “Protective Echelon” in German) guards.
“Some people wonder how guards can behave the way they did,” Lunstroth said. “They were treated better. If they performed well, they were promoted. Their families were treated better.”
In the museum, there is a wooden trestle which prisoners were strapped over and whipped by two SS guards. The prisoner would have to count the blows aloud and if the prisoner lost count, the guards would start over. Prisoners that did not speak German often found themselves strapped over the wooden trestle because they couldn’t understand guards’ commands, and a prisoner that did not follow a guard’s commands was punished.
The concentration camp was also used for medical experiments. Prisoners were placed in compression chambers to measure how long a human body can survive high altitudes before losing consciousness and then dying.
There was a crematorium area which was separated from the former prisoner camp. The first crematorium was too small to handle the increasing number of prisoner deaths. The next crematorium was built a year later. It was bigger and had four furnaces, a chamber for clothing, and a gas chamber disguised as a shower. The gas chamber was never used.
As I walked the camp, I read the exhibits, and I toured the crematoriums. I couldn’t help but wonder what if I were an SS guard or prisoner. How would I have behaved? It’s easy for me to say I could never do this to people, or I would never find myself in this position. But if I could turn back time to August 18, 1934, the day before Adolf Hitler became president of Germany, and talk to the guards and prisoners that would be at the Dachau Concentration Camp and tell them about their future, I wonder what they would have said to me.
People often tell themselves that they could never display malevolence toward others, but history tells us otherwise. People often say they would never surrender without a fight, but the best way to avoid a fight is to surrender.
No book or movie about the Dachau Concentration Camp could provide me with the same experience as walking through the memorial. And that feeling was shared among other people in my tour group as the tour ended.
We got on a public bus to the Dachau train station. We got on the S2 train and 20 minutes later I was at Munich Central Station, and I took the escalator up to continue my visit of Germany’s third-largest city.
I went to the famous Hofbrauhaus. It’s a large beer hall that can seat 1,000 people and has been around since 1589. It has long tables for large-format dining. The thing you need to know about this restaurant is that if the number of open seats at any table matches the number you need, sit. The restaurant fills up fast. You will be at a table with strangers. There was a band dressed in authentic Lederhosen. I drank the Hofbrau Original and ate braised beef cheeks with bread dumplings. I’m a meat and potatoes kind of guy, so I was happy.
Next, I walked to the Eisbach Wave. It is a free and popular tourist attraction where people stand on the side of the Eisbach River and watch people surf. It’s year-round and the river has been open to surfers for more than 40 years.
Close by the Eisbach Wave is the famous Bavarian National Museum. It has a large collection of artifacts from the Middle Ages to the late 1800s. There are more than 40 rooms. You can spend hours in this museum and still not see everything.
Then I went to the Villa Stuck Museum, which had exhibits to mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka, a Jewish novelist and writer from Prague. It featured works by other artists that reference Kafka.
Some people who visit Munich may skip the Dachau Concentration Camp because it’s not an uplifting experience. It’s soul crushing. It’s not exciting like watching a city surfer or going to a beer hall or getting lost in a museum. But traveling opens doors to different world events – the good and the bad. You can’t grow as a person when you travel only to see good. Don’t skip the bad.