In Europe

one has ever tried to disguise that, it was a part of the city's commercial life. When it was built, the
Dachaer Zeitung
spoke of new ‘hope for Dachau's trade and industry’, an ‘economic turning point’ and the ‘start of happy times’ for the town. Shortly afterwards, one reads, the first twelve prisoners were killed. The paper reported that the guards had acted ‘in self-defence’ and that the victims ‘had sadistic tendencies anyway’.
    Today, some sixty-six years later, the local press reports on a council meeting in Waakirchen, a village south of Munich. In early May a memorial service will be held there for the ‘death marches’ from Dachau, in which a great many prisoners died just before the camp was liberated. Two former inmates have been invited to the ceremony. The request to pay for their lodging has been refused by the town council. ‘We have already generously allocated municipal ground for a memorial,’ says Mayor Peter Finger. ‘And don't forget, we'll also have to plant new flowerbeds for this memorial service.’
    Dachau sees the camp's remains primarily as a public-relations project. Emphatically absent here are the names of European sister cities, something one sees everywhere else in Europe. No one wants to be friends with this town.
    In the 1950s, a number of attempts were made to raze the old complex, and the first temporary exhibition there was actually removed by the police. According to the mayor of that day – who had been deputy mayor of the town in wartime – all the excitement was completely exaggerated: the camp had been occupied primarily by common criminals and ‘political subversives’. Today, at the camp's exit, there are large signsdrawing the visitor's attention to Dachau's true attractions: a lovely church, an old castle, pleasant restaurants.
    But other voices are also heard: ‘I am probably the only one of you who actually saw the death marches and the emaciated concentration camp prisoners with their linen uniforms and their wooden shoes,’ Waakirchen SPD councillor Michael Mair said. And Sepp Gast of the CSU actually became emotional: his own father had been in Dachau. The two men have announced that they will pay part of the guests’ expenses out of their own pockets.
    Entering the camp, one finds oneself in a huge courtyard in the middle of a
carrefour
of barracks. As it is now, the entire camp is more like an education centre, a museum to be leafed through like a book, a useful, lively history lesson from which all the death and stench have been scrubbed away.
    I see the wooden gallows. It stands there with all the obstinacy of a tool, its wood scratched and worn, its pedestals dented. In the exhibition halls one sees the familiar images: the starvation, the executions, the so-called ‘altitude tests’. A series of photographs: a man is being placed in a little booth, a lively face, dark eyes, a Frenchman perhaps? Then the air pressure is lowered, or raised. You see his horrified look, see him raise his hands to his head. Then he collapses. The pressure is brought back to normal. A new session. At last the man is dead. The final photograph: his skull, cut open. Other tests were done to see how long a person could survive in ice-cold water. Some people were still alive after a day. Liver punctures were performed on other patients. Without an anaesthetic.
    On display is a letter to the camp supervisors from Dr Sigmund Rascher, MD, Troger Strasse 56 in Munich, dated 16 April, 1942: ‘After a respiratory arrest, I brought the last experimental patient, Wagner, back to life by raising the pressure. Because experimental patient W. was earmarked for a terminal experiment, because further experiments would produce no new results and because your letter had not yet reached me, I immediately began a new experiment that patient W. did not survive.’ Rascher had an urgent request of his own: might he be allowed to photograph the autopsy specimens in the camp, ‘in order to document the rare structure of a multiple lung embolism’?
    Prisoner Walter Hornung provided a glimpse of camp life in Dachau in the year 1936. The SS comes stomping through the camp:
    When the knives are dripping with Jewish blood,
    Then you know we're feeling good!
    Then comes the roll-call. Prisoners are selected for heavy labour. Different categories are made to step forward each time. ‘Parliamentarians and secretarial personnel to the front!’; ‘Editors and journalists to the