I just visited Buchenwald...

9 August 2006 | Ralph Davis

[AnalogReigns]

Yesterday I visited Buchenwald concentration camp, the largest such camp in Germany (the larger ones Germany put outside of Germany.) Since it is my 4th time in Germany I felt kind of an obligation to visit it...a duty to face the truth in this beautiful land.

Most of the camp is gone, almost all of the prisoner's barracks are. Outside the fence, about half the SS barracks are there--nicely painted yellow, with red tile roofs, resembling ten thousand other German buildings in other places. I had heard that birds don't roost inside the camp , and I think it may be true...maybe just because it is so windy, or maybe because it is so gastly deathly, but ordinary too--that is what is so scarey about the place.

The pretty girl at the reception desk calmly told me the Crematoria was open, but the museums in the camp were not...closed on Mondays you see. The signs on the silent crematoria (the ovens of which look well enough maintained to be started up at any time...) matter-of-factly state "1,100 prisoners were strangled to death on hooks in the basement." The hooks are still there, placed high on the wall next to the ceiling. One really doesn't want to imagine how they used them. There are dissection tables there too...looking well used, but useable still...again, one must tell the imagination to be quiet. I almost got terribly sick in that place, and had to leave it immediately.

The location of Buchenwald is beautiful, a calm serene forest on the side of a mountain with a great view of the valley below. Exactly the kind of place you can imagine a summer camp being. The climate and trees being a lot like Pennsylvania or New York state, I'm sure there are many summer camps in places like that....and with the silence there (the tourist I saw, Germans, didn't say a word--quite eerie) it's easy to tune out the horrors committed in that place.... The literature given is careful to say the Soviets used the camp after the Nazis... and murdered a higher proportion than did the SS there, but still, it is a Nazi camp. The little gate, which looks new by German standards, has "To each his own" bent into the design.

I am glad there is a God who will judge, and there is a Hell.

[AnalogReigns]

There were no birds inside the camp. Really.

[Popman]

SS Barracks on the outskirts of Buchenwald.
Photo credit: Florida Center for Instructional Technology

[Popman]

Link for more pictures

Link

Posted link rather than pictures for those that might not want to see them

[Jaysun]

I've been to Germany several times. I think the whole country is as you described. Quiet. As if in some kind of depressed state.

[Duke of Milan]

Every year in high school(70's) the principle would spend one or two days randomly going from class room to class room showing the pictures(many) he had from when he helped liberate Buchenwald. He would calmly tell of the horrifying scenes and conditions and the dead. He was a quiet man who never spoke of the war except for that 1 or 2 day occasion of the year. Although he never said it, it was as though he wanted the story to never be forgotten and he would always testify as to what he saw and knew of Buchenwald.

[skr]

I don't know if I could visit any of the camps, but if I have a chance, I will make myself do so. Thank you for posting this.

[FrogMom]

Doesn't look like there are any leaves on the trees, either.

I visited Dachau while in Munich, saw the museum and the ovens. They had reconstructed a couple of the "bunk houses" where they stacked the prisoners. They said that the ovens weren't used. Much.

It, too, was eerily quiet. Over the gate was "Arbeit Mak Frei".

[GW and Twins Pawpaw]

He had no choice NOT to tell his story. He was born for that very task.

[MaDeuce]

In the spring of 1945 my father was in a patrol in that area and was one of the first Allied soldiers to come upon that evil place. They thought it was a POW camp. They shot one or two German guards trying to flee.

My father told me of being there and forcing the local residents to walk through the place and help with the body disposal ... like other Allied commanders did to the local folks around other concentration camps in Germany.

He thought he had seen it all, till he saw that place. There is where my father said he realized there is no God (thought he was never really a religious man). Hard to argue that point with him.

[skr]

We loved Germany when we were there. It's a beautiful country, but their famous artists and writers were a moody lot. The folk art and crafts were much more cheerful.

[SoCalPol]

I went past Buchenwald in 1983. Hard to find words to describe.

My great uncle was one of those who liberated the camp.

[tiki]

I read the "Diary of Anne Frank" when I was about 12, I cried so hard I got sick. I think I'd go but I'd cry through the whole thing.

[skr]

A man with a mission. Hopefully most of the students remembered and passed it on.

[river rat]

Long ago, while assigned to a project in the Munich area - I decided to make the short drive to visit Dachau Concentration Camp...

I went alone, since none of the others with me were interested....
After parking nearby -- I entered the Camp.

I am neither Jewish, superstitious or unduly disturbed by being close to death...

But -- immediately upon entering that place, I sensed something very powerful and forbidding......evil and damned scary.

Less that 100 meters into the place -- I reconsidered my interest and left... Couldn't sleep well for weeks after that... A very very bad and sad place -- it's still haunted by the souls taken by evil men....

All Holocaust deniers should be required to visit one of those places - and just walk around...

Semper Fi

[river rat]

Here is a picture tour of Dachau..
Even the pictures exude evil...

http://www.photo.net/travel/bp/dachau.html

Semper Fi

[Pharmboy]

Thanks for your impressions. That place--and places like it--are a lesson for us all. Lesson: no big, all powerful central governments with a disarmed populace.

I am a Jew. I have visited Germany several times and loved the country and the people.

My wife and I have had a German exchange student stay with us for one week in the 1980s (and we learned from the student that they spend one solid week on WWII and the Holocaust during high school).

Allow me to say: the Germans have looked their past in the face and dealt with it. The Germans of today sent no one to the ovens or work camps. We must never forget but we must move on.

[Aliska]

About 15 years ago now, I had just been to a Jewish Synagogue where there was a holocaust memorial with speakers; holocaust denial was gaining adherents, and there was a controlled undertone of outrage by the speakers who told their stories.

Soon after I asked my neighbor if he believed the holocaust really happened. "I was there," he said. He told of liberating at least one of the camps, said you could smell it two miles away. He got a lung shot out.

It is hard to believe the holocaust deniers can tell you it didn't happen with a straight face. I met one at work, was in the military and family were missionaries. His sister and another member of his family had been on a beach somewhere and swept away by a tidal wave. His mother would come to work with him in the summer and work on her garden plot. He handed me a book. I turned through the pages in a sort of stupor wondering about the person who owned the book, this was in a government installation.

I grew up reading about some of the horrors. You never forget it even though you weren't Jewish. I, too, wondered how God could allow such a thing, still do really.

I looked at the photos. They are surreal. Everything so neat, organized and tidy. Sickening. Mass psychosis.

[kylaka]

I got to visit Dachau when I was 9 years old while my dad was stationed in Germany. I've never forgotten it. Never will either.

[ExTexasRedhead]

After the Holocaust when six million Jews were slaughtered, the World said "never again." Well, world, it is happening "again." Europe is making excuses for evil "again." Appeasers are making excuses "again." American Liberals are hiding from evil "again." Too many Americans including members of Congress are pretending it isn't happening, "again."

[ARealMothersSonForever]

Too many Americans including members of Congress are pretending it isn't happening, "again."

BTTT