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Rantomatic #10: Dachau Does Not Believe in Tears

To say Trump is Hitler, America is Germany in 1933, or a grimy detention facility is a concentration camp means you have never been to Dachau.

You think, after all that reading and those museum exhibits (and it is a thorough education, much more than an Instagram collection of artifacts, and oh look, a real prisoner’s uniform, honey!) you understand something. But not yet. You have really just arrived and in front of you is Dachau itself, the ground, the air — the same ground they saw and air they breathed — and you have a choice. Many visitors turn back toward the snack bar, falsely satiated after an hour thinking they saw Dachau and anxiously trying to remember if the shuttle bus runs back to the station on the hour or the half-hour.

But if you wait for them to leave, now you can see Dachau.

Most of the place is empty, acres of crushed stone with flat markers showing where the now-missing barracks where. The trees lining the central road bisecting the camp are old. They were here when Dachau was working. You can match up an individual tree from a 1942 photo with the one in front of you and touch it. The sun is warm this day, a beautiful late summer afternoon with those wonderful tickles of early fall around it. A day to be alive grandpa would have called it. There must have been days just like this in 1942 here. Were there afternoon moments when for the length of time one could close one’s eyes the prisoners left the camp?

Yet while CNN works to convince viewers silver mylar blankets instead of comfy quilts for migrants means there are concentration camps in America, Dachau reminds physicians here dissected human beings alive as part of medical experiments. Just as is taught in beginning writing courses, truth comes from showing not just telling. For those who think there is little significant difference between Germany 1933 and America today, there is Dachau to visit….

RTWT AT Dachau Does Not Believe in Tears | Hooper’s War – Peter Van Buren

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Harry September 7, 2019, 12:09 PM
  • Kevin Dickson September 8, 2019, 8:04 AM

    People tend to forget…we did once had a president who put thousands of people in concentration camps. He also stalled anti-lynching legislation, rejected refugees that were experiencing ethnic annihilation, and refused to desegregate the armed forces. This man put people in REAL cages in the Arizona desert.

    That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  • butch September 8, 2019, 10:58 AM

    I stopped when I got to “Hungry people weren’t tricked into a strongman because of Facebook or some Electoral College fluke, they demanded one.”

    Like a dollop of dogshit on an ice ream sundae.

    Fuck him and his TDS.

  • RKV September 8, 2019, 11:30 AM

    When the author says “For those who think there is little significant difference between Germany 1933 and America today, there is Dachau to visit.” he’s only getting half the story. He’s got that much right, but that said, how about the Poles who took arms and fought the Nazis and got killed rather than wait around for someone else to deal with the evil of Nazism? Can we praise the heroes who risked it all above those who waited around for others to save them? I think that is fair and just to do. And just to be very clear it is my contention, that goy blood is worth the very same as jewish blood. IOW quit whining. Others have suffered quite as much as you have.

  • Aggie September 8, 2019, 2:10 PM

    Thank you for that. As a youth I worked in a resort catering to rich New Yorkers, many of them survivors, some of Dachau. The ladies sometimes had bracelets with numbers fashioned out of diamond clusters, mimicking the tattooed number they wore on their wrist beneath the bracelet. All the same, they would crunch their chicken bones to get at the marrow. Being mostly New Yorkers many of the guests were obnoxious – but the survivors were always the kindest.
    The problem with forgetting history is usually a self-correcting one, unfortunately for us.

  • Fred September 8, 2019, 3:12 PM

    I have been to Dachau.
    I have seen the gates (Arbeit Macht Frei), the barracks, the ovens, the barbed wire, the torture posts.
    The evil still seeps up from beneath the gravel, and the very earth cries out in pain.

    It is AWFUL.

  • John the River September 9, 2019, 7:43 AM

    Not going to let them steal this election.

    Not going to. Hitler was voted into power. And there’s no America in our world to gear up and come to our rescue.