I expected to be horrified, but I ended up perplexed. Dachau is a memorial and not a museum, although there is a museum onsite. As such, it suffers the same fate as Gettysburg or other American battle sites–namely, it is so peaceful, clean, and quiet that there is no evidence as to what really happened there. It is a gun, but there is no smoke. 

Virtually all the buildings that exist has been renovated to the extent that they almost look new. Places that held hundreds of dying prisoners stacked on tiers of rotting wooden “beds” with scraps for mattresses and no insulation or heating, now have newly lumbered bed racks and antiseptically clean cement floors and pasteboard walls. The “dormitories” look more like luggage storage rooms than human housing. And I guess the irony is that from the Nazi point of view  the dorms were for storage of non-human contents. 

You don’t see blood, gore, or gristly remnants. All that is left to see is a life size diorama of the master plan. And maybe that is the greater horror. Killing in anger, or slavery in retribution–these while horrible are not horrific. Humans are animals and sometimes our animal instincts take over. But the camps were constructed and run as a cold-blooded calculated industry. The “final solution” was just that, a mathematical and logistical solution to an intellectual problem. It seems that “extermination” to the Nazis meant the same as it does to us when we call Terminix.

One looks at the “showers.” Well, in those crowded train trips to the camps, wasn’t everyone dirty? Isn’t it so much more efficient to kill masses of people by having them walk into the gas chambers willingly?

And the crematoria: what’s the easiest way to dispose of the bodies? After all, mass graves take up so much space. The French writer Camus said of the Nazis that they substituted efficiency for morality.

There are a number of churches and religious icons on the site, including a Jewish memorial that says “Never again.” But of course, human history since WWII has had similar mass killings on an almost regular basis. Maybe memorials to horror might serve to encourage, rather than discourage, inhumanity. Gives people ideas.

And a last discouraging note: pre WWII Germany was as enlightened a society as any on Earth. Germany was a world leader in music, literature, science, and technology. If such a society could fall prey to the Nazi ethic and process, what hope does any society have of avoiding the same?