Eighty years after the liberation of Dachao concentration camp, witnesses remember
Informally known as Bud, Gookered Gahs was a 20-year-old soldier in the U.S. Army who had fought for a year when he first entered Dachau concentration camp outside Munich in 1945.
His troops – the 42nd Infantry Division – have seen painful battles since they began fighting in France. However, he said, the Liberation Concentration Camp was completely different.
Mr. Gas, 100, told the crowd, including survivors, families and VIPs. On Sunday, we really got to know the people we were fighting and until then we really understood what we were fighting. ”
As he and his unit crossed the gate, Mr. Gas encountered prisoners so malnourished, sick and abused that they seemed to be alive. On the way there, soldiers found a pile of bodies inside the train van.
Jean Lafaurie, 101, survived her arrest in a French village on Sunday, talking about the sadistic treatment that prisoners were forced to endure.
Currently, the thoughts of other survivors. Mario Candotto, 98, survived the camp but lost four of his brothers and parents, said: “I heard about talking about weapons and nationalism, and the thought happened to me: What did people not learn?”
The 80th anniversary of the end of the Nazi era and the anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps were critical periods for the Germans.
The last survivors, liberators and perpetrators died in old age and with any memory of their life of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the right-most right has been established. According to some polls, while Germany or the AFD alternative, its leaders have downplayed the Holocaust several times, once a fringe party, but are currently Germany's most popular party.
“We are really living in turbulent times; I am commemorating the sites, especially in Dachau,” Gabriele Hammermann, director of the Dachau memorial site, told the New York Times. “It acts as a seismometer.”
The anniversary also follows a clear change in relations between Germany and the United States. Although Washington has played a role in promoting responsibility and commemoration culture, President Trump’s administration is very clear about the AFD’s preference.
In January, Vice President JD Vance shocked the German leader when he told a group of people in Munich that they should stop avoiding the AFD. Last week, German intelligence agencies were “disguised tyranny” after U.S. domestic intelligence secretary Marco Rubio formally declared the AFD as an extremist party in a social media post, adding that German border policy is a problem of “extremism” in the country.
Anti-Semitic hate crimes have also increased in Germany. In a country that has long advocated the motto “Never Again”, many fear liberal democracy is threatened. In a poll conducted last year, 69% of respondents said they believed populism was a threat to democracy.
Even those who run the memorial sites in the concentration camps have noticed the rise in theft and the disturbing rise in criminal offenders. In 2019, far-right video blogger and provocateur Nikolai Nerling, convicted of inciting video, interviewed Dachau tourists and promoted each other's Nazi crimes. Last year, the thief stole items in the camp's gas chamber.
Just a few weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Dachau camp was initially a political rival. This is a model for future camps, at the formal training site where paramilitary SS units were sent, and then they were sent to a new camp built in Germany at the beginning of the war. More than 40,000 people died in Dachau, and over 200,000 prisoners have been killed in the past 12 years.
It was built less than 10 miles outside Munich, and it was also separated from the battalions later built in the late period of the regime outside the borders of the empire. It is not easy for the general population to ignore the injustice and atrocities committed in Dachau camp.
The American soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the Liberation Camp were the first Americans to witness and record the terror of the Nazi regime. The scenes they encountered entering the camp 80 years ago changed many people's lives. On Sunday, most of the families of the Liberator attended the ceremony.
Most of the survivors who arrived on Sunday were their 90s and 100s, suggesting that this might be the last major anniversary, involving first-hand memories of the camp. The youngest is Leslie Rosenthal who traveled from Canada. Born three months before liberation, Rosenthal recently celebrated his 80th birthday.
“As time goes by, survivors and witnesses will soon decrease,” he said, noting that in the last months of liberation, he and seven Dachau-born babies will soon become “the last life connection to the Holocaust.”
