From the soaring heights of the Bavarian alps, we visited Neuschwanstein castle’s classical beauty. Our travels then took us to the Concentration Camp Memorial at Dachau on Sunday, May 22.
Since the International Baptist Church’s English service was scheduled to meet at 4:30 p.m., we decided to pay a Sunday morning visit to one of the most well-known of the Nazi concentration camps.
After passing through the information center, we approached the main gate. As we observed rusted train tracks still in place after all these years, and beside them a crumbling concrete platform, the reality of what had happened there became more than academic. They bore mute witness to the thousands of prisoners offloaded like cattle from boxcars. Each person whose feet fell there represented a myriad of tragedies too numerous to list and too awful to tell.
Jim White
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The crunch of gravel beneath our feet seemed connected somehow to the echoes of similar sounds heard here long ago. Down the road we walked, just as they did, from the train station to the main gate.
Apprehension must have gripped every prisoner who marched this road, but none could even imagine the horrors that lay in store for them collectively and individually.
One survivor recalled years later that the sun shone brightly in a beautiful sky the day he took that walk. He removed his coat and draped it over his arm as though he were “taking a walk through a park in Paris.”
Many were Jews, of course, as Hitler’s “final solution” was being implemented with vigor; but many others were Christian clergy — Catholic priests and Protestant ministers in addition to the Jewish rabbis. In fact, five of the 30 barracks devoted to housing prisoners were reserved for clergy.
Nazi records show that nearly 250,000 prisoners came through those gates. In Dachau, two-thirds of these were not Jewish. The majority were Polish Catholics.
Included in the quarter-million figure were 16,000 who were brought to the camp specifically to be executed and were never registered. Half of these were Soviet soldiers killed by firing squad.
It is impossible to know exactly how many deaths occurred during Dachau’s 12 years of operation, but according to a study conducted by the International Red Cross, a total of 31,951 died, with 13,158 of those recorded in the first four months of 1945. The camp was liberated by American troops on April 29, 1945.
In the month of May 1945, an additional 2,226 Dachau prisoners died after the camp was liberated, in spite of the excellent care given to them by American military doctors. There were 196 more deaths in June before the typhus epidemic (responsible for much of the increase) was finally brought under control.
Pausing at the gate, someone read the iron words that formed part of the gate: Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes Free). Not at Dachau. Here, work made one malnourished. Prisoners expended more calories in their hard labor than they received in their food rations. Some literally starved to death while many others were made susceptible to disease or sores that became infected due to their malnourished states.
I stood in a reconstructed barracks and imagined the bunks filled with prisoners. Row after row after row of wooden troughs side-by-side and three levels high held straw mattresses upon which prisoners slept. The camp was built for 6,000 men but held 30,000.
But surely there were times they couldn’t sleep. Too weary to find rest, or too worried to find relief, they must have lay there finding privacy only in their communion with God. Oh, what prayers were uttered in this place?
One prisoner recalled Psalm 17:8, “Hide me beneath your wings.” Surely prayers for wives and children about whose whereabouts and conditions they new nothing, were voiced from these makeshift altars.
The Nazis recognized the danger of hope, so instead of mingling the clergy in with everyone else, they separated them. They did not want their encouragement and words of hope infusing the beaten-down inhabitants with the will to resist! But they could not keep these prisoners from seeking the Lord. Undoubtedly, like the psalmist, they asked, “How long, O Lord?” Perhaps, like Job, they laid out their complaints before the Lord much like a prosecutor building his case. And, perhaps like Job they heard God say, “Where were you when I created the mountains and the sea?”
Many observers assume that a God who is all loving and all powerful would have exercised his love to free them or his power to eliminate their captors. But God is God and God continually confounds us with the unanticipated. He chose to use both his love and his power to save them.
I walked to the far end of the camp past the rows of barracks whose foundations are marked with concrete where three chapels (Protestant, Catholic and Jewish) were constructed when the camp was opened as a memorial. The Catholic chapel, The Church of the Mortal Agony of Christ, reminds us in its title that Jesus, too, understood suffering at the hands of cruel soldiers. He, too, knew the injustice of maltreatment, a hasty death sentence and a torturous execution. In the midst of his suffering, he, too, cried out from his wooden platform, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
But God had not forsaken. He was planning ahead for all those who in their suffering cry out to him, that he might say, “Here, in my Son, is hope and peace and everlasting life.”
When the American troops endeared the camp, to their horror they discovered the bodies of the dead thrown in a pile like firewood. There were so many in those last months that the Nazis didn’t have coal enough to incinerate them in the crematoriums.
The story of Dachau’s tragedy begins long before prisoners arrived, of course. It had its roots in decades of innuendo, suspicion, propaganda and limiting the freedoms of the people.
Baptists, you are still needed to protect the rights of those who have no legal standing and who cannot speak for themselves. You are needed as wise spiritual counselors to keep your heads while others get caught up in the paranoia of the day. And you are needed to bring hope and peace and everlasting life to those existing in the shadow of death.
Jim White is editor of the Religious Herald.