A SUBURB OF MUNICH
Mayer, Milton
A suburb of Munich And the bands played on Milton Mayer All in all, Munich is probably the loveliest town in Europe. And the liveliest. "... In no other city in Germany are as many festivals...
...Who even bothers to go to the family plot in the cemetery nowadays...
...is under what conditions____" We know Dr...
...Konzentration came into use on March 20, 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler came to power and eleven days after the country boy "Heinie" Himmler was appointed gemuetlich Munich's Police Chief...
...In every language it asks the passersby, who point to the Number 3 bus...
...We know that exactly 31,951 registered prisoners died there they had been registered in, so they had to be registered out but perhaps half again as many (or as many, or twice as many) unregistered, including the approximately 6,000 Russian prisoners of war transported to Dachau between October 1941 and April 1942, and shot on the SS rifle range outside the wall...
...A Sunday afternoon chop-licking rubberneck tour to see what somebody else did...
...At the end there were 1,600 prisoners in every barracks built for 200...
...The train to Petershausen is crowded on a sunny Sunday afternoon, but the conversations are in every imaginable language but German...
...The sign is attractively lettered in four languages German, French, English, and Russian...
...epidemic was uncontrollable, and in the last winter of the war typhus carried away as many as 200 prisoners a day in Dachau...
...Is it gone...
...Or My Lai...
...Did it go...
...Something singularly German...
...And why should we, when we weren't even born then...
...In 1978, a year of so many anniversaries, the fortieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, passed generally unobserved...
...Did it take Hitler and 6,000,000 Jews and 60,000,000 gentiles to produce Brown v. Board of Education ? A high price to pay, but at least we got a little something for our money...
...What would have been done with Hitler if he had been caught...
...November9, 1941, report of Gestapo Chief Mueller, who adds: "One can not prevent the German inhabitants from noticing such things...
...youth...
...But the enormousness of the A"-Zand extermination operations were too much even for German record-keeping...
...the grass is green (but not picnic green) around the edges...
...were placed under water...
...Number 3 has a special sign in its windshield...
...Was it Europe, Europe the world's slaughterer and slaver...
...Munich loved music in 1938, just as it does (so the Chamber of Commerce blurb assures us) in 1978...
...Since no K-Z inmate had any right or redress of any kind against a guard, and since Dachau's Jews were much worse treated than other inmates, very few of the relatively few Jews who went to Dachau survived...
...Or was it Man as an unsuccessful experiment of an empirical God...
...What we don't know is Dachau, and we don't know it by making a Sunday rubberneck tour...' Coming to the end of the sidewalk the babbling visitors stand before a wide gate, open, and their babble subsides...
...The gravel there is the white of dry bones, inside the preserved foundations of the barracks...
...Was it the impious fraud of Christianity as cover-up, of Sweet Jesus as crucified, risen, and conscripted as patron of slaughter and slavery and beatific unconcern...
...The gate is topped by massive barbed wire, and beyond the gate stretching out for a mile or more is an immense rectangle enclosed by a wall...
...Was there ever a worker made freer than the particular subject...
...Or do we owe him something for dragging the skeleton out of the 'Was it religion, any religion, every religion, deferring judgment and, therefore, justice?' closet so that never again can we pretend that "separate but equal" means anything but separated out, segregated, and supremacy and subjection...
...Where did it go...
...The March 21 Voelkischer Beobachter, announcing the establishment of the first Konzentrationslager &i Dachau, said that "all Communist Party officials and, as far as the security of the state requires, those of...
...The smart saint who said, "Nobody cares about the poor except the poor,'' might have said that nobody cares about the rich except the rich, or about the Gypsies or the whites or the blacks or the Jews or the gentiles except the Gypsies or the whites or the blacks or the Jews or the gentiles...
...And doing what, in the 1200-year-old artist's centre of Dachau...
...Approximately six million Jews, or four million, or two million, or eight million, all over Europe, unregistered, unrecorded...
...they count and they measure and they measure and they count and record and compare and compare and record, and we are the better informed because so many of them could not bring themselves to destroy their records even when those records were incriminating...
...what's there to attend to...
...What could have...
...A man's, we know, because man alone is syntactical...
...is how...
...What we'd like you to look into is if...
...To determine whether the severe psychic and physical symptoms described under No...
...recreation for the people of Munich, only minutes away____" But one of the six lines of the S-Bahn, the S-2 to Petershausen, doesn't seem to have a Muenchner on itor a German...
...What was it that happened there...
...What we don't know is Dachau, and we won't know it by making a Sunday afternoon rubberneck tour of the magic landscape reached by the S-2 suburban line from festival Munich where the bands played on, the Philharmonic, the State Orchestra, the Bach Choir, while...
...Was it the Criminal State made criminal by being made God...
...Nor is the K-Z itself a German invention, any more than conscription...
...And at the last, too late to be used, as a gas chamber, disguised, as always, as a shower room, was added to, naturally, the crematorium...
...Enormousness diminishes enormity...
...Just before the sidewalk endsas if to beguile the visitors from the gate there is the replica of the handsomely decorated sign they might or might not have noticed in the passage from the train to the station...
...K-Z Gedenkstaette means Concentration Camp Memorial...
...Munich loves music...
...Prisoners were excused from work and sent to the infirmary barracks when they had a temperature of 104 degrees or more and were unable to stand...
...The stench of death at Dachau has given way to the greater stench of the dead...
...The guest book at Dachau tells the story: Page after page with only here and there a recognizably German name...
...And the bands played on, the Munich Philharmonic, the Bavarian State Orchestra, the Munich Bach Choir...
...Was it religion, any religion, every religion, deferring judgment and, therefore, justice...
...Rascher, we know him in the very shallows of his soul...
...Why not...
...On the bus I ask an Italian (in German) what he thought of the K-Z Gedenkstaette and he says (in English), " I couldn't get out of there fast enough...
...but which man...
...The American Jews are the vicarious survivors of the Great Pogrom...
...Something to do with German Ordentlichkeit reduced to systemization and derived from being in the geographical (and therefore historical two-front, three-front, four-front) pressure-cooker, something to do with German terror derived from black forests, with German deadliness derived from Luther, with German banality derived from German deadliness...
...The immense crematorium at the back of the camp is still there, and it must be seen...
...In a word, a suburb if ever there was (or is) one...
...Ask rather what you can do for your country...
...Germans, as they were the world's first sociologists, are its most intrepid...
...Why must it be seen ?) It had to be built to supplement the original two-burner...
...particular subjects...
...The Jews were Nazi Germany's niggers, after 1939 its gooks...
...7?is still there, too...
...Their free-lunch flagellanteism is sufficiently gratified by their infliction of college seminars and TV soap operas on their countrymen...
...rented out the slaves to private companies which, though the rates were favorable, insisted, like the American slaver of old, on healthy stock...
...And so they died and died...
...In no other city in Germany are as many festivals celebrated...
...40 per cent of the Muenchner are under thirty____" And the spick-and-span suburban line, the S-Bahn, runs smooth-as-silk in six different directions from the city center to "magic landscapes and quaint villages...
...And what is the German State, or the American...
...It was the French Directory that devised conscription in 1789 and the British butcher Kitchener who refined the ancient horrors of the concentration camp in the Boer War...
...Everything, the wire included, seems to be new...
...The prisoners liberated at Dachau on April 29, 1945, represented thirty-odd countries...
...The sign reads K-Z Gedenkstaette...
...Or simply servitors of curious fellows: mechanics, hired hands...
...And page after page with still fewer recognizably Jewish names...
...And the "40 per cent of the Muenchner under thirty...
...Conditions in the winter of 1944-1945 had deteriorated to the point where deutsche Ordentlichkeit itself suffered...
...Ordentlich means variously properly, decently, orderly, systematically...
...Relatively few Jews passed through or, more precisely, into Dachau after the Kristallnacht roundup, and after 1939 German Jews, who were less than 1 per cent of the population, were mainly "resettled," that is, gassed, in the extermination camps of the East...
...The English version reads...
...Milton Mayer, The Progressive's Roving Editor, wrote "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945...
...SS Lieutenant Dr...
...But even then the transcendent German virtue was tenaciously maintained: Every barracks had to be cleaned every day by the able-bodied prisoners...
...3 are due to the formation of pulmonary embolisms, particular subjects, before they gained consciousness, but after they had recovered somewhat from this type of experiment, were placed under water until they expired...
...Visit Dachau The 1200 year old artist's centre with its castle and surrounding park offering a splendid view over the country...
...The cleaning of the barracks included the infirmary barracks, which had grown from two buildings with a total capacity of seventy places (not beds) to fourteen with a capacity of3,400...
...placed under water...
...Or our fathers if (as in Munich) maybe a third of them, maybe half of them, are still alive and enjoying, we hope, Gesundheit and Gemuetlichkeitl The German fathers are thought to have repressed Freud's word, verdraengen means "push aside" the whole Nazi thing, twelve cataclysmic years of a nation's history, plus prelude and aftermath, leaving its bones to be picked by the historians and the radicals and the filmmakers, all of whom, in Germany, are much more remote from the Volk than they are in, say, France...
...The anniversary, too, of the days that followed the Kristallnacht, the first time the Jews of Germany were rounded up without distinction or discrimination and transported to K-Zs all over the country ten thousand from the vicinity of Munich to Dachau alone...
...Dachau SS Lieutenant Dr...
...And yet again...
...the Social Democrats will be interned at Dachau.'' The Lager's 5,000 inmates would, of course, be ordentlich guarded by the ordentlich Bavarian State Police...
...Do we visit the scenes of our fathers' crimes the Haymarket gallows or the graves of Sacco and Vanzetti or Sitting Bull or Scottsboro or the Birmingham Church...
...Or anywhere else, in or out of Nazi Germany...
...Was there ever such banality as the words Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes You Free, inscribed over the K-Z gates...
...A few minutes from the station the crowded bus comes to the end of the line and the babbling riders all get out and walk along a pleasant broad sidewalk with manicured fields on either side, following the signs that read K-Z Gedenkstaette...
...Is it different from Germany, or America, different from "the Germans" or "the Americans," and if so, how...
...Fifteen minutes from Munich's Central Station, and two stops before Petershausen, the train disgorges its babel at one of those kitsch-quaint villages, a typically slumless little Bavarian town with its castle on the hill, its flower gardens everywhere, great old trees, young mothers wheeling babies in shiny baby-carriages, children on their ten-speed bikes, young folk and old enjoying the autumn sun in the garden cafes...
...Like so many German words, Konzentration is not a German word at all...
...true, they couldn't work, so they did not have to have much energy...
...But there were a thousand Raschers, ten thousand, millions, everywhere, always have been, tinkerers, curious fellows...
...so we know only that approximately 206,000 prisoners went to Dachau between 1933 and 1945...
...absolute precision: The transport which left Compeigne, France, on July 2,1944, and reached Dachau on July 6 consisted of 2,251 prisoners, 984 of whom were recorded dead on arrival...
...Approximately...
...Munich Gemuetlichkeit...
...More and more prisoners died as their number became unmanageable and supplies dwindled with the progressive German collapse...
...Siegmund Rascher, empirical scientist, investigator, researcher, scholar, pursuer of truth, follower of the gleam: doctor: teacher...
...Was it the "sign of the end'' spoken of on the Mount of Olives, when love shall wax cold and many shall hate many...
...What was Dachau, really...
...It does not extend to the memorialization of those German gentiles who had a choice and chose to resist, nor to the systematic extermination of the Polish intelligentsia (some 10,000 transported Poles died in Dachau), nor to the Gypsies, who were generally murdered on the spot, nor to the Italians and the mentally handicapped Germans who were used for medical experimentation at Dachau .and elsewhere, nor to the Russian prisoners of war sent to Dachau to be executed, of 'Do we owe (Hitler) something lor dragging the skeleton out of the closet so that never again can we pretend...?' whom "5 to 10 per cent arrive dead or half dead____In marching from the train station to the camp a not insignificant number of war prisoners collapse on the way...
...He owes us each a death...
...They do not much come to Dachau (or to Germany...
...Piling out of the train the babbling babel takes the passage under the tracks into the station and out to the street, where the town buses terminate...
...the German State (Germany...
...And few had surviving friends or relatives in Britain or America (whose humanitarian governments held the line on immigration and, in doing so, condemned tens, or hundreds, of thousands to death...
...Was it technological man, the "savage beast" Freud's term of Verdun...
...Was it the West, that is (kurz und gut, in one word) the white man who saw men not as men but as batches, black, red, yellow, brown...
...There seem to be no attendants...
...Nobody cares about the Czechs except the Czechs (or about the English except the English...
...Everything is clean...
...But Dachau was not an extermination camp, and in midwar its care of its inmates actually improved when it became in part a processing center for subsidiary camps and slave labor projects around Munich (the home of the Munich Bach Choir...
...What was Dachau...
...Because of the cleaning requirement the patients all had to spend the days out of doors, and Dachau has a northern winter...
...Medical care and food obviously selbstverstaendlich, as the Germans say had to be provided the soldiers and industrial workers on a priority basis...
...Let the dying bury the dead...
...Whose words were these...
...What will prevent it...
...Why would their elders...
...Why would they visit Dachau...
...The past isn't prelude it's past...
...Was it Twentieth Century Man, the first man to be arrogant not here and there in princely estate but as Man...
...So the patients in (and out of) the infirmary were patients without doctors and, since their priority was even lower than that of the healthy prisoners, they were given half-rations...
...But why the babble, the babel, why the foreign visitors out of season...
...for their money, rather, and the little something we got would never have been made available if it hadn't been for Hitler...
...In the course of the evening of November 8, 193 8, the word went through Germany, orally, by telephone, from one SA post to the next: "Heutegehen dieSynagoguen hoch...
...Botched, a monstrosity: Homo homini lupus, Man is to man a wolf...
...K-Z means Konzentrationslager...
...But in 1978 (so the blurb assures us) 40 per cent of the Muenchnerwsre born after 1948...
...Where did it come from...
...And where are the Germans...
...Neville Chamberlain came back from Munich in 1938 another anniversary to assure his countrymen that the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia "a faraway country of which we know little" would guarantee them a hundred years of peace...
...Near the bus stop is a garden restaurant crowded not with foreigners but with Germans, their cars, many of them Mercedes and BMWs, parked in the lot behind...
...The crowd doesn't know how to get to wherever it is that it wants to go...
...There is an odorless stench of a dead world turning in space, still turning, still turning...
...We all take the Number 3 bus back to Dachau, the 1200-year-old artist's centre with its castle and surrounding park offering a splendid view over the country...
...The wall (topped by massive barbed wire) is broken every hundred yards by a tower with windows all around...
...The German order that almost broke down completely never quite has been restored...
...is whether...
...we Americans who visit Dachau in greater numbers than any others must we wait a while until General Westmoreland tells us all about free-fire-zones and search-and-destroy and Ex-Director Colby of the CIA tells us all about Operation Phoenix...
...There were 30,000 of them few of them Germans, still fewer Jews in a penal institution designed for 5,000...
...The great monument outside the museum at Dachau has the words on it and no others in all languages: Never Again...
...Tonight we burn down the synagogues...
...SiegmundRascher to SS Commandant Heinrich Himmler, May 11, 1942...
Vol. 43 • February 1979 • No. 2
