Socialist Workers Party of Germany. The German Press thought they were pretty awesome.
I had the opportunity to visit it again a few months later. I went somewhere else instead.
State Regents Looking To Keep Lessons From The Holocaust, WWII Relevant For New York Students
“The unsuspecting prisoners were marched in formation to this room which was supposed to be a shower room. Inside, the ceiling was all fixed with sprinklers nicely polished which had never beem used for water but nice jets of chlorine gas were forced through controlled by an S.S. guard who had a little window through which he could look over the victims without them seeing him … After five minutes there wasn’t one of them alive, or if there were it was just tough luck because all the bodies were thrown in the next room next to the crematory and a minutes they were all burned. That ‘Shower Room’ could hold 250 persons at one crack.”
Except the Dachaua gas chambers were never used....
I visited Dachau back in 2018 during my two week Band of Brothers Tour, Dachau was one of the stops...
It is a very eerie place, the crematorium especially....one interesting thing I saw during my visit....I would guess a couple of dozen groups of German school kids were visiting..I would say they were about Junior HS age children....
bmp
Was there as a kid sometime around ‘90. I didn’t fully grasp what was around me at the time. I need to go back at some point now that I can appreciate it.
Unspeakable horrors what man can do to other humans - not unlike the millions of little baby girls and little baby boys that have their arms and legs ripped off by "doctors" while they are still alive.
Right here in America. God help us.
Mass Murder
Hitler and Stalin considered it all collateral damage.
If these Marxist bastards ever get in total charge here in this beautiful country they’ll do the same as the Nazis. Remember that FBI undercover agent that infiltrated the Bill Ayers group? He heard the leaders say they would have to kill 25 million of the refusenicks. Sick,Godless subhumans.
Which, sadly, in this day of cancel culture and political correctness, encompasses far too many Americans.
If the communists ever gain power here, that will happen to people like us.
How did the Nazis get sane German citizens to participate in the insane inhumane horrible murder of 6,000,000 human beings? The same way you get people to take part in Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots for the purpose of wrecking, looting and burning a American city.
Also coming into Dachau that afternoon were elements of the 42nd ID (Rainbow) whose Assistant Division Commander Brigadier General Henning Linden met with a Swiss Red Cross representative and several Germans claiming to be relief commanders of Dachau and wanting to surrender the camp. The number of guards and prisoners became near unknowable with prisoner executions happening almost to the end and guards departing by orders and desertion.
What is undeniable is that there were post-surrender killings of some German guards, especially ones found in the corpse-filled railroad cars and near the execution chambers. The count of these deaths is disputed as a single eyewitness author put the number in the hundreds while almost every other account goes no higher than 70.
There was strong pressure to press forward with a court-martial of Lt.Col. Felix Sparks and subordinates on these offenses but General George Patton, new Military Governor of Bavaria following Hitler's suicide on 30 April and German Surrender (VE Day ) on 8 May, quashed those efforts. In followup investigations it was found that several guard deaths were by the prisoners and some were killed when actively attacking GIs, ie. not surrendered!
Recommended book on Felix Sparks, retired as Brigadier General and later Colorado State Supreme Court Judge, is Alex Kershaw's "The Liberator". NB: My Dad was 45th HQ Staff and went through Dachau at that time but was only transiting on way to Munich to setup a Division Command Post. He chose the German Beer Hall that was Hitler's HQ for the November 1923 failed revolt, a fitting reversal.
Netflix has a new movie - The Eichmann Trial just came out, it is heartbreaking and amazing to hear what happened in Germany at that time.
I visited Dachau in 1976. What struck me the most was that, unlike sites like Auschwitz and Sobibor in the East that German citizens would not be close to and could claim they didn’t know what was going on there, Dachau was in suburban Munich surrounded by nice houses that looked like were of pre-war construction. And while it wasn’t a mass extermination camp, if you lived down the street you couldn’t plausibly say “oh, nothing bad is going on there” since the crematorium was up and running.
I visited Dachau in May 1990.
a) I was told by a care taker that there was a ravine about 5 km away where the guards would take a truck load of prisoners every day for target practice.
b) I got locked in the crematorium area by myself at closing time while, unbeknownst to me, the care taker went around to lock up the crematorium buildings. He finally came back to let me out. For 5 min or so I thought I was in there for the night; not a happy memory.
The horror is unimaginable.
So horrible was it that I had a brief, transient psychotic episode: Staring from one of the barracks windows, I was afraid to turn around for fear that I would find the nightmare real and my wonderful life an illusion.
The human mind cannot grasp the horror.
In 1942, the crematorium area was constructed next to the main camp. It included the old crematorium and the new crematorium (Barrack X) with a gas chamber.
There is no credible evidence that the gas chamber in Barrack X was used to murder human beings.
Instead, prisoners underwent “selection”; those who were judged too sick or weak to continue working were sent to the Hartheim “euthanasia” killing center near Linz, Austria.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau