Yesterday we went on an excursion to Dachau, the first and longest running of the Third Reich's Concentration Camps, or "Konzentrationlager". It was trying to snow the whole day but couldn't stick. It was a feezing cold morning and kept trying to snow, jusrt to stop again. It was nice to have food in my stomach and warm clothes, unlike the camp's inhabitants. You just get off a bus then walk down a gravel road through some beautiful trees wrapped in Fall colors. Then suddenly on the right there is a bridge going over a stream, beyond it is a gate with offices and a watch tower up top. On the gate are three words "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" meaning "work makes one free" and beyond is the huge assembly area. More than 30,000 people died there between 1933 and 1945. Dachau has a gas chamber and a crematorioum, although it was not an Extermination Camp and was primarily used for housing political opponents and the like, with only approx 20% of it's inmates being Jewish. Standing in the gas chamber was one of the eeriest things that I have ever experienced, I felt physically ill standing there in the presence of 30,000 souls screaming out in agony. It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. First you stand in the waiting room, then there is the "shower room," then the room where the bodies are stacked and picked through for gold teeth and such, then the room with the ovens where they used to hang individuals (usually trouble makers) from a beam in front of the oven where they were going to be incinerated. The only thing I can compare it to would be the torture chamber I saw in Regensberg. Even though it too was just a room, I could feel the suffering as though the empty rack before me had a herectic being stretched on it.
The buildings where the SS was housed and had it's offices at Dachau is now used by the Police and is a cause of some controversy, as are all things related to National Socialism. There is a continuous question of what to do with old buildings that were used by the Nazi's and are now associated with them, even if they weren't built by the Nazis. What are they to do, tear down the buildings, build new ones, and pretend nothing happened? Liberals in Germany are overly sensitive about the issue and would say yes, but most don't want to let the Nazis stigmatize everything in Germany. At the other end are Neo-Nazi groups and ultra-right nationalist parties, which are really just the old National Socialist Party (now illegal) in a different form. A week ago I a had drunken neo-Nazi tell me to fuck off and go back to America in the Subway station and flash me the Nazi salute, which is illegal along with displaying the Swatztika. There are always police stationed outside of synagouges and Jewish schools. I asked why, assuming they wanted to deter vandalism, but was told it was in case of "people throwing molotov cocktails or driving cars into the building." Wow.
The dream of National Socialism and the Third Reich is so much more real to me now that I am in Germany. They truly wanted to reshape the European world like only the Romans and Christians had done before. Places like Dachau were at the heart of it. Before the Germans started exterminating Jews and slavs at places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were cleansing their own population. The mentally and physically retarded, homosexuals, and deviants of all kinds were killed to purify the German race. There was no room for those people to slow down or hold back the "glory" of the new Reich. You never get bothered by Gypsies in Germany begging for money, because there are none, not any more.
Well moving on to other, less depressing things...
I finished my first week of classes. I am surprised to say that I will be taking both of the classes at the University that I checked out. So this semester I have my religion class "The Devil and Demons" and my History class "Ludwig of Bavaria" at the University, then my German grammar course at the Lewis & Clark Institute, and then an art history course that is held entirely in Munich's Museums. I saw Albrecht Duerer's portrait of Jesus on Friday, it was captivating. Im really excited about taking classes actually at the University; my religion class probably has 50 people in it, while my history class has only 15 or so. So for now my challenge is to understand the thick accents of my Bavarian professors, one of whom is one of the widest men I have ever seen, "the Fridge" comes to mind. Soon I am going to have to begin working on my big semester papers because I will need lots of time to write and especially edit them. If I have enough time I will try to find a job because it is so expensive here that I will have a hard time scraping together money to travel. It just so happens that I have a marketable skill, complete English fluency, which will hopefully make up for my German speaking limitations.
The buildings where the SS was housed and had it's offices at Dachau is now used by the Police and is a cause of some controversy, as are all things related to National Socialism. There is a continuous question of what to do with old buildings that were used by the Nazi's and are now associated with them, even if they weren't built by the Nazis. What are they to do, tear down the buildings, build new ones, and pretend nothing happened? Liberals in Germany are overly sensitive about the issue and would say yes, but most don't want to let the Nazis stigmatize everything in Germany. At the other end are Neo-Nazi groups and ultra-right nationalist parties, which are really just the old National Socialist Party (now illegal) in a different form. A week ago I a had drunken neo-Nazi tell me to fuck off and go back to America in the Subway station and flash me the Nazi salute, which is illegal along with displaying the Swatztika. There are always police stationed outside of synagouges and Jewish schools. I asked why, assuming they wanted to deter vandalism, but was told it was in case of "people throwing molotov cocktails or driving cars into the building." Wow.
The dream of National Socialism and the Third Reich is so much more real to me now that I am in Germany. They truly wanted to reshape the European world like only the Romans and Christians had done before. Places like Dachau were at the heart of it. Before the Germans started exterminating Jews and slavs at places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were cleansing their own population. The mentally and physically retarded, homosexuals, and deviants of all kinds were killed to purify the German race. There was no room for those people to slow down or hold back the "glory" of the new Reich. You never get bothered by Gypsies in Germany begging for money, because there are none, not any more.
Well moving on to other, less depressing things...
I finished my first week of classes. I am surprised to say that I will be taking both of the classes at the University that I checked out. So this semester I have my religion class "The Devil and Demons" and my History class "Ludwig of Bavaria" at the University, then my German grammar course at the Lewis & Clark Institute, and then an art history course that is held entirely in Munich's Museums. I saw Albrecht Duerer's portrait of Jesus on Friday, it was captivating. Im really excited about taking classes actually at the University; my religion class probably has 50 people in it, while my history class has only 15 or so. So for now my challenge is to understand the thick accents of my Bavarian professors, one of whom is one of the widest men I have ever seen, "the Fridge" comes to mind. Soon I am going to have to begin working on my big semester papers because I will need lots of time to write and especially edit them. If I have enough time I will try to find a job because it is so expensive here that I will have a hard time scraping together money to travel. It just so happens that I have a marketable skill, complete English fluency, which will hopefully make up for my German speaking limitations.
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