Horrors of Nazi regime still with us today

Horrors of Nazi regime still with us today

THE train journey from the bustling Bavarian town of Ingolstadt to Dachau takes less than an hour. In just 48 minutes a person can be transported from the bright, lush landscape on the banks of the river Danube into a soulless grey gloom, where birds refuse to take flight.
The approach to Dachau is best served in silence. Idle conversation seems almost disrespectful.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the greens and yellows of the beautiful Bavarian countryside transform to darker shades of grey and blue, but the realisation that it has happened is a stirring jolt to the system.
It is as if Dachau appears out of thin air and sneaks into consciousness like an enveloping mist.
Perhaps it’s the deliberate postponement of dread that comes with anxiousness, but however much one tries to prepare for the grim reality that is camp Dachau, horror still suffocates the approach.
Here, Mother Nature’s disarming charm is notable only by its absence.
A stagnant chill dominates the camp area, even in the height of summer. The sun, uneasy with its task, refuses to shine light into this dark, dreary place. Even now, coming up on 70 years since its closure, Dachau haunts the landscape with the ghost of victims past.

Unspeakable horrors
A walk around the camp is a deeply upsetting experience. The living quarters are pitiful in their sparsity; single wooden planks act as beds where hundreds of prisoners squeezed into claustrophobic rooms. The heat of summer made the stench and humidity unbearable and there was little protection from the icy frost of winter. Disease and starvation were rampant.
Torture rooms still stand where prisoners were beaten and flogged. Standing cells and hanging poles are dotted around the camp, as are the many places of execution where the murders of 32,000 men, women and children were recorded. Thousands more died undocumented.
The unspeakable horrors that took place in the concentration camps under the Nazi regime are littered throughout the many books and films that serve as proof of one of mankind’s worst ever atrocities.
Though many Germans refuse to look back, the camps remain open to visitors so that history will never forget. Today, seventy years after the end of World War II, justice still chases the last remaining survivors of the nazi regime.
The trial of Oscar Gröning opened in Lüneburg this week to much publicity. The frail 93 year-old, walking with the aid of a Zimmer frame, looks so far removed from the stereotypical image of a ruthless nazi officer.

Moral guilt
Gröning admits ‘moral guilt’ from his role in Auschwitz, where his job as a bookkeeper was to take prisoners’ suitcases and steal any valuable contents that were left inside. Though he did not participate directly in the gassing of millions of prisoners in the camp, he faces a charge of assisting to murder in 300,000 cases.
Dragging an old man before a court may seem like a pointless task for many Germans who, according to a recent survey in Stern magazine, are in favour of drawing a line under any remaining links to the nazi party and moving forward under a process of closure.
But for the few remaining survivors of the holocaust itself, these prosecutions serve as closure on their own struggle for recognition and justice.
Germany’s great shame has been compounded by the fact that very few perpetrators during the holocaust have ever been brought to justice. Most of the senior figures involved in the running of the concentration camps escaped without charge or punishment. The faceless killers of the gas chambers passed on in anonymity.
Now, with Gröning finally facing his day in court, some survivors have spoken of the importance of the judicial process itself as a means of attaining some sort of closure.
For most, punishing or imprisoning a 93 old-man will serve no purpose. But the chance to heal through a process of public recognition or a decree of guilt from the accused is perhaps sufficient to allow the healing process to finish.
Last week was Adolf Hitler’s birthday. And so that the atrocities of Nazi Germany may never be repeated, it is vital that the holocaust is never forgotten.