“To Honor the Dead, to Warn the Living”

I wrote this after visiting the site of Dachau concentration camp. It was the first of the Nazi concentration camps and was opened in 1933. It went on to become the model on which future camps would be created.

By the time it was liberated, at least 188,000 people were imprisoned there and at least 41,500 had been murdered. They were sent there because they were Jewish; because they disagreed with Nazi politics; because they were in a trade union; because they were queer; because they were disabled; because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses; because they were Catholic; because they were Romani. They were sent there because they weren’t part of the Nazi vision for how Germany should be.

The Dachau site is a vast, sprawling space. It is full of reminders of what happened there and warnings that it could happen again.

There is no way to tell the story of Dachau without being graphic. No way to walk around without feeling the shadows of those who had walked there before. Scenes of torture, of murder, of human medical experimentation. Mass graves and gas chambers. People with gold teeth marked out on arrival to that they could be extracted and sold after their death. Hundreds of thousands subjected to a world built on cruelty, hatred and meanness.

The heart of the story, for me, is what is possible when politicians, emboldened by public opinion, decide that people are not people. They decided that those who were taken to the camps were “Untermensch” — or “subhuman”.

What happened to those who were taken to the camp didn’t seem like othering, or marginalising. It seemed so much darker. Those who took them there, who beat them there, who murdered them there didn’t think that they were dealing with people at all. That turned the unthinkable into daily routine.

Meanwhile the Nazis used the media to churn out propoganda. They staged photos of content prisoners in gleaming conditions. They planned show trials to contradict reports of what was really happening. They created a narrative that those who were against Hitler were against Germany. And many members of the public just believed what they wanted to believe.

It was a visit to one of the churches, the Church of Reconciliation, built on the site in 1967, that presented the thought that has struck me most. There was an invitation on the way in to consider how much the church did not feel like a church. That was correct. It was a peculiar building, with a strange entrance and interior.

It looks like this because the architect didn’t want any right angles in the church. He viewed them, and the cold order they created, as a symbol of the Nazi murder system. I thought this was a stunning reflection.

There was absolutely no thought, no warmth, no consideration given to the conditions at Dachau. The camp, the foundations, the boards people were tortured on, the three storey wooden bunk beds were all at right angles. The entire site was set up only for efficiency. The people there were not deemed worthy of design.

The Holocaust and hatred of Jewish people are not abstract. They are real.

An entire political movement, founded on the cynical framing of certain people as dangerous subhumans is not abstract. It is real.

The need for the living to unite for the defence of peace, freedom and in respect for our neighbours is not abstract. It is so, so real.