BEN STEIN'S DIARY: My Trip to Dachau
Stein, Benjamin J.
BEN STEIN'S DIARY My Trip to Dachau by Benjamin J. Stein SATURDAY H ERE I AM ON A LUFTHANSA FLIGHT from LAX to Frankfurt. I'm in first class and it's quite luxurious. But it creeps me out to...
...I t is a distance about what a good quarterback could throw a football from the town center to the hospital...
...Well, all deaths of innocent people are sad...
...Then they were taken down some steps (I walked this route), told to undress, to put on some old uniforms, and then to go into a holding room...
...I saw the monument to the 6,000 people "gefallen" in the bombing raids ofWorldWar II...
...On the menu was, and I am not kidding here, a "Dachau Burger, made with 100 percent beef...
...Alovely, intelligent woman trained in sociology is curator here...
...I can tell you what I am thinking: the last time distant relatives of my family were transported by Germans was probably in cattle cars to death camps...
...Eliot writes about glowingly, the Starnberger See...
...Later in the war, Jews were brought here to be worked to death or transported east to be gassed or starved...
...I am being transported by Lufthansa first class...
...Hadamar was only briefly slowed down, though...
...continued on poge 64 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 BEN STEIN'S DIARY W E D N E S D A Y L OOK UP HADAMAR ONLINE...
...Her father lost his whole family to the Nazis...
...In Munich, people seem truly happy in a way you rarely see in cities...
...These people were deemed insane...
...Man, respect mankind...
...Again, paraphrasing...
...Most of the headstones and the adjoining synagogue were destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938, but the cemetery has fragments of those stones...
...Do you think maybe the people who ran this place were more insane than the patients...
...It's clean now...
...We walked farther and saw two simply beautiful German policewomen strolling their beat...
...That is where science was then...
...Then we came to a haunting plaza with statues of the goddess Germania...
...I f their shoes were too clean, that showed they had not worked hard enough, and they could be beaten for that...
...Russian forced laborers too tired to work hard were brought here to be killed...
...64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 BENJAMIN J . STEIN A friend who was with me on the shoot asked the curator if she thought the people running the place under Hitler were mentally sick...
...Hitler's first big concentration camp was here...
...They did not scream when I touched them...
...I think Eliot, with his prissy, effeminate racism, would have approved of the whole place...
...Jane worries about whether she has given her daughter a big enough birthday party...
...The men's rooms are immaculate beyond any I have ever seen anywhere else...
...Dachau isn't...
...They brought mentally ill people here from the nearby areas for special treatment...
...They all came through here to be tortured and then to die...
...The curator was a charming fellow...
...We passed a huge plaza near the residence of the royalty of Bavaria...
...Or they just did not exemplify good German habits of hard work, staying on the job, staying in one place, and staying married...
...But I am exhausted and have to sleep...
...But it creeps me out to hear all of these flight attendants speaking German...
...These were people who were referred to by the powers of the Third Reich as "useless eaters...
...The town is so close to this place I cannot tell you...
...The people don't smile a lot, but only in Dachau, at the Dachau burger place did they actually glare at me...
...No," she said, "because mentally sick people could not have organized something this complex...
...After the aria, the singer announced that she was going to sing a "good German song" and sang some oom-pah-pah song that all the diners seemed to know...
...After the shoot, we ate dinner at the best restaurant in the town of Dachau...
...Then we came to an outdoor restaurant where a lovelywoman was singing an aria from La Traviata in a spectacularly good voice...
...Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer in Beverly Hills and Malibu...
...I lit candles in the Jewish memorial, which was a haunting cave structure...
...This is a lovely small town about 80 or 100 kilometers from Frankfurt...
...Why does it take half an hour for toast in New York and ten minutes here...
...Then the doors were locked and a psychiatristyes, a psychiatrist, a medical doctor-turned on the gas: carbon monoxide, not Zyklon B. As the curator explained, it was a hospital, and only the doctor had life or death authority over the "patients?' It took about 20 minutes for all of the people in the room to die...
...It is as good a hotel as I have ever een in...
...HalfJewish children, whose Jewish parent had been killed and whose Gentile parent was at forced labor, were originally sent to orphan asylums...
...What would you say to the doctors who ran this place and who turned on the gas...
...No, not at all," she answered, "they were just doing what they were told to do and they thought they were building an Aryan utopia...
...Eighty people were pushed into this room, with tile walls just like your bathroom probably has...
...Other inmates took out most of the bodies for cremation...
...The funny thing is, I reallyliked modern-day Germany alot...
...Most of the city was flattened by the Allies in World War II, so there are not many old, cute structures to see...
...But Hadamar and Dachau...
...This is what happens when man forgets God and embraces science...
...The bunks were crowded beyond belief, and people died like flies from starvation, overwork, and typhus...
...As I say, this is a haunting place...
...They brought mentally ill people here from the nearby areas for special treatment...
...There are fabulous little roadhouses where they make each meal fresh...
...I stayed a long time at the cemetery, then walked around outside it...
...Some bodies were taken to a dissection room...
...The crematoria ran 24 hours a day...
...Our first hotel, the Bayerischer Hof, was inadequate, to put it mildly, so we moved to the Four Seasons, and it was good...
...They were brought to Hadamar in buses with curtains on the windows...
...Protests from Catholic priests got it stopped...
...This room was at most 20 feet by 15 feet...
...Several of them are ancestors of my friend Jane...
...I am paraphrasing, but that's the gist...
...It is close to perfect...
...There, the skulls were sawed open, the brain removed, and sent in formaldehyde to the prestigious German university medical centers that were studying how the brains of mentally ill people and loafers differed from good Aryan brains...
...They had to keep their bunks perfectly or they could be beaten...
...When the Nazis took over Germany, they turned Hadamar's hospital into a killing center for their T-4 euthanasia program...
...MONDAY A LITTLE TOUR OF FRANKFURT...
...These victims could be chronically depressed, schizophrenic, alcoholics, or they could have just been people who could not hold a job or changed addresses often or even people who had been divorced too often for the comfort of the Reich...
...FRIDAY Ni W I AM AT DACHAU...
...There is a long wall outside it with markers about the size of a deck of cards for each of the Frankfurt-area Jews who were killed by the Nazis...
...For decades, there was a mental hospital here on a hill above the town, which is set in a valley...
...After the euthanasia of the mentally ill stopped, when it was "only" the Jewish children (aged around six to twelve) who were being killed, and the eastern Europeans, no one said a word...
...We passed many fancy car dealers and art shops...
...Oddly enough, this is the most peaceful, quietest, most haunting spot I have seen here in Frankfurt...
...That's the bottom line...
...I saw some of them after they were finished playing basketball...
...From 1943 on to 1945, others were brought here...
...She showed me around...
...In fact, they could not be nicer, but what are they really thinking...
...Our driver took us to the Jewish Cemetery in Frankfurt...
...This turned out to be the only place in Germany where I saw any dog droppings...
...No science is ever perfect, and much of it is cruel...
...Oh, it is not my place to say anything," she said...
...When the Nazis took over Germany, they turned Hadamar's hospital into a killing center for their T-4 euthanasia program...
...Germans walked their dogs and let them relieve themselves on the walkway adjacent to the cemetery...
...They looked just like the people at my 12step meetings...
...I asked her...
...At one near Ohrenbach, I had the best spaghetti bolognese I have ever had...
...Sullen-looking Middle-Eastern young men looked at me menacingly...
...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...This is truly as good as hotels get...
...This euthanasia program at Hadamar ran for about two years, from 1939 to 1941...
...There were no predictable rules, except that you got beaten or starved or shot...
...I touched them and they felt just like ordinary ceramic tile...
...Political prisoners came first...
...To hear it ringing out in the Munich night with those immense baroque buildings nearby was electrifying...
...Only God's love is perfect, and he has shown a very unusual amount to me...
...Russians, Poles, Catholic priests...
...Thank you, God, that I only saw these places as a tourist...
...The gates to the graveyard have to be kept locked to prevent neo-Nazis from coming in to vandalize the Jewish markers...
...I am bound o tell you that I simply loved Munich...
...By the way, the government is still using Hadamar as a place of confinement for mental patients and for criminals who acted under the influence of drugs...
...They were worked very hard, beaten, starved, but sometimes they were let out...
...The women at the front desk are beautiful and smart...
...It dates from the 13th century...
...It is a nondescript industrial town...
...Very sad, I thought, but that was one afternoon at Auschwitz, where the victims did not have shelters or anti-aircraft or ME-IO9's to protect them...
...Again, a QB with a good arm could toss a ball from the cemetery right into town...
...Interesting coincidence...
...What possible words of gratitude are there...
...It's even sort of pretty...
...Her mother survived Auschwitz...
...Plus, there are about 100 very old grave markers from the "baroque" period, which the Nazis did save...
...The German authorities wanted to level it and put up a shopping area and a park, said our guide, but the survivors of the camp insisted on making it a memorial...
...Then my producer for our shoot, Walt Ruloff, and I went for a stroll through the elegant shopping area by the hotel...
...SUNDAY W I AM IN FRANKFURT at a hotel called the Villa ennedy...
...It's amazingly clean...
...I'm here today...
...That is, they consumed scarce resources of food and shelter and did not produce much of anything in response...
...And, again, doctors did the killing...
...Well, no, not nondescript...
...Then they were photographed and had a medical history taken by a doctor or a nurse...
...He said that if the goal of the Ftihrer and Himmler was to create a master race of tall, blue-eyed Aryans, they should have started by killing themselves because they were not tall or good-looking...
...Many were killed in fiendish medical experiments, because the Nazis were very big on science...
...I keep falling asleep but then waking up to hear German and I wonder if they are going to kill me as I sleep...
...You would never guess until you saw the photos that 225,000 people passed through here, most never to be seen alive again by their families...
...Munich is really lovely...
...The cemetery has two Stars of David and a Croatian cross and several other crosses and a memorial that says (in German), "Man, respect mankind...
...Superband ultra fast--room service...
...A lovely clear brook runs through the camp, straight from the lake that T.S...
...I asked her...
...Jet lag is real and it hurts...
...But that was deemed too much of awaste of food, so they were brought here, given a massive overdose of barbiturates in a liquid, killed that way, and then buried in a tiny cemetery up a steep hill from the "hospital...
...FRIDAY A LONG, LONG DRIVE with our fabulous driver, Tom, and his mighty Mercedes, to Paris from Munich...
...So were Croatian slave laborers who had lost their utility as forced laborers...
...I f their shoes were dirty, they could be beaten for slovenliness...
...This is an immense banking hub, with lots of bank buildings and neatly dressed bankers...
...This small city is only about 20-minute drive from Munich...
...They were also poisoned and buried in the small cemetery here...
...Bright, cheery, quiet rooms...
...She seemed insulted by the question...
...I just said, "Thank you, God," for about three hours...
...Then some chamomile tea, and then to bed...
...I feel I belong here...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
