Dachau: The Harrowing of Hell

PREFACE

PREFACE For twenty-five years I was unable to think about my experiences in Dachau, about the spring of 1945, when Allied forces were fighting their way into Germany, and I was medical officer of the small team sent into the concentration camp the day after its liberation from the Nazis. Our assignment: to reclaim the lives of the more than 32,000 prisoners still there. Recently my nightmare began to recur, exhumed by violence in our troubled country. I wondered: Is the malignancy of Nazi Germany, which we thought we eradicated a quarter of a century ago, growing in America? At last I tried to remember details. I opened a frayed box and took out the souvenirs of Dachau. Letters I had written home. A map. A blue-and-white album of photographs, made of convict's cloth, a gift to me from inmates. A Death's Head insignia. A blue notebook with mortality figures and faintly remembered names and places. This book is about the world of displaced persons, their struggle to stay alive, the strange situations that arose as they rediscovered their identities and nationalities-those who could, that is. Many were beyond help-the thousands who died of starvation and disease in the days following our arrival. Those who lived taught us that in a police state human rights and freedoms do not exist, and individuals are not protected by law; that a concentration camp is the ultimate achievement of a police state, a place of darkness in which a human being's life counts for nothing. We learned these truths from a Frenchman who said he willed himself to live so that he could tell the world what had happened ... from Xlll a Catholic priest who sent us each a copy of his autobiography, The Church in the Bonds of Dachau ... from a Pole who whispered as he died, "Remember us" ... from a Jew (few survived; only 8 percent of the prisoners we found in Dachau were Jews) who asked if we were Jews or Germans. This is also the story of DP-Displaced Persons-Team 115: ten U.S. infantrymen hastily trained to feed, clothe, treat, and repatriate some of the millions of displaced persons in Germany at the close of the war. As civilians imbued with a spirit of fair play, tolerance , equality, and sympathy for the underdog (although those attributes were not always evident), our soldiers-and the team was only a small example-fought as earnestly to save the lives of Germany's slaves as they did to crush the troops of the 55. I became convinced that our forefathers had excellent judgment when they stressed the importance of a civilian army. When I showed the manuscript to another doctor, one of my colleagues, he commented that I wrote about the experience clinically , as though I were observing a patient. Yes, I said, that is the way it was: I could not have kept going without trying to be impersonal , even detached. But your remoteness was only skin deep, he continued; you were shattered by the visible evidence of genocide; your mind was unable to function, and you banished the experience from consciousness. Perhaps you wrote the book to rid yourself of the stench in your subconscious. Now it is out of your system. I denied it at the time, but perhaps he was right. Now, when charges of censorship of the press, civilian surveillance , and police brutality fill the air, when people rally around slogans rather than reason, when bigotry, intolerance, and religious wars are common through the world, when fires of racism, ultranationalism , and totalitarianism still burn, consuming the minds and souls of men because they have forgotten-or never knew-it seems useful to permit this repressed material to surface, to publish this account of the aftermath of fascism. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it," said Santayana. Other philosophers say that a knowledge of the past has no saving power. But it is our only hope. XlV Preface I would like to thank my wife, Carol, for keeping my letters, and for her innumerable helpful suggestions. I am grateful to the archivists of the United States Army, the General Services Administration , the American Red Cross, the International Red Cross, the International Tracing Service, and the Dachau Concentration Camp for their assistance, to Doctors Richard M. Angle and Rudolph Kieve for their invaluable comments and criticisms, and to Mrs. Ruth Jackusch, Mrs. Luri...