An atrocity of history
On April 30, 1945 an American soldier fighting in Germany wrote
a letter to his wife that began,
”
Sweetheart: I wish to God that I could burn the last 24 hours
from my mind forever. We left a war and walked into Hell.
”
An atrocity of history
On April 30, 1945 an American soldier fighting in Germany wrote a letter to his wife that began, “Sweetheart: I wish to God that I could burn the last 24 hours from my mind forever. We left a war and walked into Hell.”
He was among the soldiers who the previous day had liberated Dachau, the concentration camp outside the city of the same name. It was not the first camp liberated but was the model for all others in the previous decade.
They found a contingent of German soldiers who had been left behind to turn it over to the Americans. They also found hundreds of emaciated bodies in boxcars, and in massive piles throughout the facility. The stench hung like a cloud over the camp. As they walked through it, strange creatures began to emerge. They were human beings but unlike any the liberators had ever known. They were hardly more than skeletons, lice-ridden, clad in rags and indescribably filthy. They cried, laughed and prayed. They reached out to touch their hands and faces of their liberators.
After several Americans, including an officer, shot some of the German guards in revulsion at what they had seen, the others were placed under heavy security.
No one intervened when hundreds of prisoners rushed three men and tore them apart, fellow prisoners who had informed on them to their captors for more food and better treatment.
Most of the Americans had been in combat for months and even years. They had suffered extreme elements and a continual lack of sleep, they had seen their friends blown to bits and had been shelled and shot at. They were battle-hardened, yet many wept openly at the depravity of what human beings could do to their fellow mortals. Millions perished there over 12 years. Their crime? They had been “undesirable” in the eyes of Adolf Hitler, the German chancellor. They included political activists, Gypsies, cripples, members of royalty, doctors, poets, philosophers, homosexuals, and, of course, Jews.
Their dignity was never considered. They were their captors’ slaves and playthings, and many died horribly in “medical” experiments. Most were systematically starved and tortured.
When they could no longer work, they were herded into what they thought were shower rooms, where lethal gas emanated from the spouts. After gold fillings were extracted from their teeth, their bodies were burned in crematoria, and the ashes made into soap or fertilizer.
Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker the following day to escape retribution for the 11 million internees who had died in the camps. The war in Europe ended a week later. For decades many of those responsible were tracked down and brought to justice.
More than 60 years later, many elderly people still scream helplessly in their sleep as nightmares of what they suffered when they were young return.
It is a lesson that should never be forgotten: what can happen when arrogance coupled with a sense of destiny blinds a nation’s leaders to common decency.
