Your destiny, my fellow Americans, is indifference and fear.
I traveled overland through Europe last summer for my 6th book, "My Fabulous Fascist Summer Vacation." I visited the former "Brown House" Nazi HQ, now the superbly curated Nazi Documentation Center, in Munich, then the Dachau Concentration Camp, a short half-hour train ride to the north.
In the end, Hitler won by wearing down and corrupting his fellow Germans. It will happen here in our good old USA too. If you let it. From the prologue to the book:
Dachau Concentration Camp
The horror leaks into my body as I float between resistance to and full embrace of the moment. I want to open my heart and mind, to empathize, to feel. But the scale of the cruelty and terror is too much, so the body shudders.
The rage and astonishment overwhelm my sense of balance. The grief enters my viscera and I can no longer manage it. I start to weep openly. Embarrassed, I turn away from the other visitors. It was here that the prisoners were cremated after being murdered by asphyxiation in the nearby gas chambers. I am standing in front of one the ovens. The accounts on the walls detail the intentional cruelty of the camp guards and officers. The soldiers who liberated the camp, many of them Americans, were overwhelmed with disgust and grief when they arrived here in April 1945. They forced the local residents to enter the camp and view the crematorium, to see what they had allowed to happen, had even cheered on, all those years. There were piles of corpses, an estimated 3,000. There are photos of the dead on the walls, emaciated, skin and bones. Members of the NSDAP (Nazi party) were required to assist in burying the dead.
Most said they didn’t know. Of course they knew.
Concentration camps, forced gatherings of people stripped of their rights and humanity, have been used by colonizers for centuries. The U.S., the country I was born in, rounded up, murdered, and isolated native Americans, contained African slaves in ships and market pens, and more recently put asylum seekers in cages, separating thousands from their children, intentionally, sometimes permanently. Each outrage is different – gas chambers were a German innovation - but the similarities are what instructs us. Humiliation, incarceration, cruelty, brutality, murder. Dachau was an early model, converted from a munitions factory in 1932, a place where the Germans experimented with all manners of torment. If you thought differently, you were sent here. If you dared to dissent, you were sent here. If you were considered subhuman due to race or nationality, you were sent here, though the early occupants were political opponents rather than Jews.
My emotional immersion in this monstrosity began with a visit to Munich’s Nazi Documentation Center. I admire the Germans for trying to face what they or their forebears have done. Each floor pulled you in further. WWI, the 20s, the 30s, Kristallnacht, the camps, the slaughter, all expertly documented. What overwhelms me is the curation of the personal stories. Esteemed Jewish citizens paraded through the streets, humiliated, stripped of assets, then shipped off for extermination. I saw a photo of Jewish, Russian, and German inmates on a rainy street on April 26, 1945, in striped prison clothes and blankets, despondent, desperate, hopeless. SS officers forced some 8,900 to march through the communities of Allach, Pasing, and Gauting from the Dachau camp to certain death. Exhausted prisoners dropped dead along the road or were shot. The caption shook me. ‘Many Germans who witnessed these death marches reacted with indifference and fear. Very few people tried to help the prisoners.’
And you and I, when do we become versed in the art of indifference?
“My Fabulous Fascist Summer Vacation : A Journey Through Europe’s Hearts of Darkness” is available as print and ebook at https://amzn.to/3NxJd5K. You can have it as a free PDF at https://bit.ly/MFFSVpdf.
For more on my books and my creative work helping people tell their life stories, visit https://electric-memories.com
