Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell

29. The Townspeople

29 THE TOWNSPEOPLE Dr. Kuci once said it was no coincidence that Hitler committed suicide on April 30. He believed that the act inevitably followed the liberation of the camp the day before, just as the opening of the camp twelve years earlier had immediately followed Hitler's assumption of power. One could not exist without the other. The camp was the symbol of the dictator's philosophy . Kuci, as well as many of the inmates, considered "Hitler" d "0 h " an ac au synonymous. The purpose of the camp was to deter anyone from opposing the Fuehrer, hence news of the punishments and deaths in the camp was deliberately spread throughout Germany: the fate of those who even thought of resisting the Nazis. Have no illusions about the residents of the town of Dachau, said Kuci; they knew about the camp's activities. Malczewski agrees. Many inmates talk about the townspeople. Some say they were sympathetic to the prisoners, that they offered food to them but the SS guards were hostile. However, in recent months this attitude changed to some extent-the guards sometimes permitted the prisoners to accept gifts from the residents. We are glad to hear about these offerings because everyone in the camp has hardened in his attitude toward the Germans. The evidence of Nazi cruelties is so tangible and the causes so unfathomable that we seem to have no alternative but to react emotionally with condemnation of all things German. Perhaps this is unfair, but we are soldiers, men of action, not philosophers , and it will be a time before sufficient detachment and perspective develop so that we can distinguish between Nazis and Germans. We wonder about the people in town, living so close to the ovens. What do they have to say? We do not know; our few I 221 relations with them continue to be nonfraternizing, businesslike. However, members of a Press World Bureau Section of 7th Army have been interviewing German civilians, and have published their material in Dachau, a G-2 publication. The investigators believe they have identified three distinct civilian groups. Within the first group were people who found it profitable to associate with the SS. They admitted that they had occasionally seen prisoners passing through the town under guard and had noted brutal treatment of townspeople by the SS guards. They usually stated that the Nazis had lied to them about everything. And they seem surprised to learn of the large number of deaths in the camp. They denied seeing the boxcars pass through the town, jammed with starved and dying people. The transports passed through at night, they said; the doors to the cars were sealed. They presumed that the cars were filled with loot from the occupied countries. A second group consisted of people who claimed to be antiNazi , whose attitude was expressed by the question, "What could we do?" They resented the SS men because they misbehaved toward the civilian population and prevented them from helping the prisoners. These people were too terrified to say or do anything; they were frightened by the horrible things going on in the camp; they were afraid to watch the arriving transports . The investigators decided that the most outspoken anti-Nazis were those whose income did not depend on contact with the SS. A third group was limited to a few people who had protested for many years, who believed that most of their neighbors had profited from "the blood of innocent human beings" by doing business with the SS. They had seen the transports rolling through the streets, their gruesome cargoes evident. One person described the increase in the number of boxcars entering the camp. After 1938, they arrived by the thousands: the Jews, then the French, their bodies decaying, and later the Poles: when the car doors opened, those still alive scrambled out and "ate grass and drank out of puddles." One of the men in this group, a person who had defied the Nazis, refused to join with them, and survived, said that the German people were cowards and had only themselves to blame. "They didn't want to risk anything, and they lost everything , and that is the way it is through Germany," he said. An222 I The Turning Point other man with the same convictions opposed the Nazis, but, as the years passed, secluded himself for fear he might talk too freely. The investigators were aware of the problem faced by the residents of Dachau...