Memories of Dachau
When I was a youngster, I joined the US Army in 1985 as a naive 18 year old and went to Basic Training in Fort Leonard Wood, MO. After a summer of brutality (physically and mentally), I was stationed in Hanau, West Germany to the 23rd Engineer Battalion.
The next fall, in 1986, a friend and I took the train from Hanau to Munich for Oktoberfest. Much drinking and hanging out with festive Germans ensued. My fondest memory of that weekend was losing my friend in the mass of people somewhere in Munich and ending up in a massive beer tent learning and singing traditional drinking songs with a bunch of older Germans. I didn't pay for drink or food the rest of the night. The older Germans who remembered the war years loved American GIs and treated me like a king.
Anyways, both of us eventually made our way back to the hostel we were staying at and the next day made our way to the Dachau concentration camp, which is not far from Munich. My visit there was a definite shock to my system for weeks afterwards. 38 years later, I still have random visual and emotional memories of the short amount of time I spent there:
--A metal gate with "Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes you Free)" welded into it:
--Ovens with sliding platforms and wooden handles to slide the body in for cremation:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Dachau_%2843964434752%29.jpg
--Piles and piles of clothes and shoes and personal belongings from the deceased (no pic link).
The experience of visiting a place where so many people were so needlessly killed put me in a funk for quite a while. I realized that whatever "tough" experiences I had experienced in my short life up to that point were nothing compared to what happened in Dachau and other concentration camps. It gave me a perspective in life that I didn't have previously.
I didn't want to make this a post about politics, but it annoys me to no end when a certain political party in the US casually labels the other side as "Nazis" or a certain President as "Hitler" or "worse than Hitler." In my mind these kind of comments minimize the horror of the genocide and other heinous acts that occurred in Nazi Germany during WWII. It's a slap in the face to those who were slaughtered and to their descendants and also to those who survived. It's maybe even more disrespectful to the survivors, since they lived it and have memories of what true evil really is and can be.