Thank you for the history share shipmate PO1 William "Chip" Nagel

I am Ashkenazim from the Lithuania, Latvia & Belarus region of eastern Europe on my mother's side. Thankfully the Russians drove them out in the late 1800s. Never, never forget.

January 27th , 2020 marked the 75th Anniversary of the beginning of the end of the Holocaust as the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. It was 1945 and the first of the many slave labor and extermination camps to see the scrutiny of the world at the end of the Second World War. The retreating German Army tried to obliterate the evidence of the mass murder of a million human beings in the Birkenau Subcamp where the gas chambers and crematoria were located but hiding the murder of a million people was too great a crime to conceal.
Freight trains of Jews from all over Europe would arrive at Auschwitz where the “selection” process would take place. Nazi SS Officers would “inspect” the arrivals and with a callous “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”, your fate as a prisoner was sealed. Thumbs Down and you were marched off to the gas chambers. The able bodied would live for a time until worked to death in the adjacent slave labor factories. Babies, children and the aged and infirm were ripped from their mothers and families for immediate extermination. No mercy was shown. A million murdered! What did the allies know has been a persistent question of historians? Auschwitz was not the only extermination or concentration camp but has come to symbolize the Holocaust and the so-called “Final Solution” of the Nazi’s – a coordinated plan to exterminate an entire religious and cultural group of people – namely the Jews of Europe. Auschwitz itself, was not destroyed in the war but remains as a memorial to what happened there – the inhumane “selection process”. My wife and I have been there. It’s a place of ghosts and extreme pain and fear. We have seen the piles of eyeglasses, luggage, bales of hair like hay, shorn from the victims and the most poignant – thousands and thousands of shoes. The electric fences that killed on touch, the cross bars with hooks for hanging victims and the sign over the gate: “Arbeit macht Frei” – “work makes you free” adds a unreal title to what went on beyond that gate.
The original word used to label the Holocaust was Shoah which means catastrophe in Hebrew. The famous author and concentration camp survivor, Elie Wiesel was apparently instrumental in popularizing the term Holocaust in the 1950’s to represent the mass murder of 5 million European Jews. Wiesel, the author of a powerful memoir titled “Night”, has been a major spokesperson for the world to be reminded that such a tragedy should never happen again. “Night” has been required reading in many schools since its publication to educate young people as to what happened between 1938 and 1945 in Germany when an educated, cultured technological country transformed anti-Semitic prejudice into an official governmental policy of genocide. The unanswerable question since WWII has been “How” did an educated people allow this to happen and support the “final solution” by not reacting or responding? When I was a high school history teacher, I taught a class for seniors entitled “Germans and Jews” with the main objective of asking, researching and trying to answer this question: How and why? We looked at the excuses and German rationale: “It happened far from us”, “we didn’t know”, “by the time, we had suspicions, we didn’t dare speak up”, “the Nazi’s were too powerful and in total control”. Germany had lost the First World War, forced to accept guilt, suffered a brutal economic depression and inflation that devastated every family. Besides there were a few hundred thousand unemployed and often homeless ex-soldiers who became prime candidates for the budding Nazi Party. The turbulent twenties saw the rise of Hitler and his right wing party that by the early thirties had taken over a substantial slice of the electorate. 1933 was the year that Hitler was able to corrupt the budding German democracy and establish totalitarian rule. By 1938 when the most strict anti-Jewish laws and regulations were enacted, Jews were excluded from all segments of German society, business, education and had been made non-citizens. Hitler and the Nazi elites envisioned the “eradication” of European Jewry which began in the East under what they called” Nacht und Nebel” – “Night and Fog” when more than a million Jews were murdered by “Sonder Kommando” – special SS killing squads in Western Russia and Eastern Poland. With German occupation across much of Europe, it was easy to control what was happening in the Soviet Union far from the eyes of any press. By 1942, Germany controlled all Europe except Britain emboldening Hitler to put his “Final Solution” into official but secret policy. The Wannsee Conference in January 1942 created the top secret plan to organize massive resources to exterminate the estimated 11 million Jews of all Europe.
Dachau was the First!
There were many other “camps” dating back to the establishment of Dachau in the early years of Nazi rule for the incarceration of political prisoners and then so-called “socially deviant” prisoners and enemies of the state focusing on communists and anti-Nazi clergy. Dachau, the camp and the town were located near Munich in Southern Germany and had the distinction of being the first. 1933 and Hitler had barely come to power having subverted the infant Weimar Republic in his push to make Germany great again. Between his speeches energizing his “base” and his “storm troopers” terrorizing the doubting population, enough neutral Germans came to support the Nazi’s looking for economic and social stability to get him established when he took power illegally and managed to get away with it. He found officials in German towns and cities willing to overlook violations of civil rights of citizens who were targeted for discrimination and marginalized from mainstream society. Muscle was provided by the SA – uniformed storm troopers, militia’s of the Nazi Party. German police collaborated with the Nazi’s; the army stayed out of any discussion. Many Germans thought that it was a “phase” and that Hitler would moderate or “go away”. The industrialists who supported Hitler thought that they could control Hitler but they were wrong – deadly wrong.
My introduction to Dachau was a brief look at the camp in 1958 or 59 only 13 years after the war while a young soldier stationed in Germany. The town of Dachau was on the way between Central Germany where I was stationed to the ski areas of the German and Austrian Alps. My buddies and I were avid skiers and members of the 507th Ski Bums ski team. We stopped in the former camp for gas at the US Army gas station there. Dachau Concentration Camp had become Dachau Camp of the US Army. My next experience with Dachau Camp came in the early 60’s. My first wife and I were living in Munich where I was an Army Reservist in an Intelligence School and a security staffer for Radio Liberty broadcasting the “truth” in 35 languages to the former Soviet Union. We were part of the Munich Community Players, a theater group hosted by the USO providing performances to military bases in the Munich area. We traveled to the bases by bus with all our costumes and props. Our infant daughter Tracy, born in Munich, traveled with us and would sleep in the costume trunks backstage where we could keep an eye on her. Dachau Camp was one of those bases. We performed in the club of the former SS Guards that had not been destroyed in the War. In fact, while the prisoner barracks, crematoria and similar structures lay in ruins, the main camp with guards barracks, administration and the club survived largely intact and were being used by the US Army. When first at Dachau as a teenage soldier in 1958, the impact of the site had not made a significant impression, but this time, performing on the stage where prisoners performed to stay alive was different and having our baby on that stage made a powerful impression. You could just feel the ghosts of pain and fear. It was unnerving and we couldn’t wait to finish our performance and leave. The club was used as the NCO (Non Commissioned Officers) Club and they provided a big spread of excellent food for the visiting cast. The thought as we enjoyed the food was the haunting memory of the starvation that the prisoners would have suffered in that very place. We left Dachau Camp with the strong opinion that the US Army did not belong there and shortly thereafter, the Army did move out and the Camp became the memorial site to the Holocaust that it should have back when it was liberated by the US Army in April 1945.
Years later, while teaching in New Hampshire, my wife, Alice and I took a group of students to Austria on a ski trip, flying in and out of Munich. By this time in 1985, the word Holocaust had become cemented into the popular lexicon and everyone clearly understood what it meant. Germany was becoming more open about confronting it’s dark history of the Third Reich, locations of terror and oppression were being transformed into memorials. Maya’s parents who were Jewish, had reservations about their daughter visiting Germany. They had family lost in the Holocaust at the hands of the Germans. They would agree with her going on the ski trip if I took Maya to visit Dachau to appreciate what the Jews and her family had gone through. She and I went by ourselves on the local train from Munich, the very train line that carried prisoners to the Camp between 1933 and 1945 – most for a one-way trip to their deaths. Arriving in town around lunch time, we found a local Gasthaus that obviously had been a “pub” when the Camp was active. Old men sitting at the Stamm (regular’s table) were locals, some of whom would have been there when the Camp was active and might even had worked in some capacity in support of the Camp. It was eerie even after so many years. The tour of the Camp was depressing. Reading the little signs marking mass graves, how many victims were incinerated in the crematoria, the execution block where prisoners were hanged, shot or beaten to death – all overwhelming!
Was Maya moved? Absolutely! Was I reminded that absolute power corrupts? Was I reminded that an educated, cultured and highly developed technological country can create an official plan to attempt the extermination of 11 million people? Yes! And in the words of the German artist Kaethe Kollwitz in her famous drawing reflecting on the War and the Holocaust: “Nie Wieder” and echoed by Elie Wiesel: “Never Again!” But we must remain vigilant!!
Footnote: While a young soldier stationed in Heilbronn, Germany, I had a brief girlfriend, also named Maya, who was Jewish. I was 18 years old and pretty naïve. It never occurred to me until later to find out how she survived the Holocaust and was still living in Germany when most of the Jews were dead or had been able to immigrate in time. As I reflect on Maya as an old man, I am encouraged to remember that Maya was just another regular of our teenage social club of young American soldiers and teenage Germans all caring for each other and looking forward to a better world.
Originally published in the Machias (ME) Valley Observer to mark the 75th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.