Five or so years ago, when both my sons were studying GCSE history I took them on a holiday that included a number of sites that were of potential historical interest. So, we went to Ypres, Passchendaele, Köln and Munich. When in Munich we went to the BMW museum and read about its use of slave labour during World War 2. And then we went to Dachau.
Nothing quite prepares you for the walk through the suburban streets that lead to the gates of Dachau. Those streets were there in 1933 when the camp opened. They still are now. They are the streets through which slave labourers walked from the camp to their places of work.
It's also true that nothing quite prepares you for Dachau. How can it?
My sons and I, as I recall it, went into a reveried silence as we began to read the information boards in the admin block of what was the camp.
The history began in 1933. This was the first concentration camp.
After only a few minutes my elder son came up to me and said “They'd have put you in here, Dad.”
The camp's first inmates were political prisoners, trade unionists, clergy and others who politically opposed the Nazis. Social democrats were amongst their number. Jews, and many others, came later. First, the Nazis cleared out their political opponents.
Was my son right? Who knows? But by the time he made the comment he was very familiar with what I did for a living, what I believed, and who I worked with. And that was his opinion.
Why do I oppose fascism? Because they will eventually come for you. That's why.
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This is the problem fascists face. If you make something the fault of ‘the other’, you need to actually solve the problem. Otherwise, you are going to continually need to find more ‘others’ to blame.
This is why fascism left to spread will inevitably eat itself.
There was a time Craig when that was true.
Timothy Snyder says that Hitler wanted to grab more living space for Germany as a means to feed her because he did not believe in science and how it could help increase the agricultural productivity of the German land it had.
So, he was willing to dehumanise, create enemies and justify the murder of Jews, Slavs and Red Army prisoners to make sure he could feed his Germans simply because did not want to understand science and just wanted more land, farmed the old way.
Now however, in this modern age we have a mixture of REAL threats – global warming and its attendant issues – loss of land, squeezed populations, the need to move perhaps and the need for those less affected to make room for those who are? The grab for resources and wealth too.
All fertile ground for fascism where there will be a confusing mixture of real and imagined foes in the near future and people like you and me trying to discern one from the other as certain politicians try to capitalise on the chaos.
“This is why fascism left to spread will inevitably eat itself.”
I don’t know you, but I’d rather not have to go through the experience. My parents (born in Italy before Mussolini came into power) lived through the fascist era, Italy’s colonial wars and WWII. My older brother was born in 1943. Opposition parties were banned. Opposition leaders murdered or jailed. Black-shirted vigilantes were sent to beat up those who refused to take out the party membership. The press was muzzled and newspapers that refused to print regime-approved news had to close down. Communists, socialists, trade unionists, intellectuals, homosexuals, unmarried men and women, clergymen who refused to support the regime – all were targeted, exiled, imprisoned, forced to comply or worse. Antisemitism came later, when Mussolini decided to throw his lot in with Hitler’s Germany. It “only” lasted two decades. Its pernicious effects on Italian politics and culture are still being felt.
Thanks
And what you describe is what I fear
I have been heavily abused for saying so today, on here (deleted) and others by mail
First they came for the socialist
and not speak out
because I was not a socialist
Then they for the trade unionist
and I did not speak out
Then they came for the jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a jew
Then they came for me
and there was not one left to speak for me
Reverend Martin Niemoller
You never know Richard – you never know.
Many years ago, I was in the suburb of Munich where the Dachau concentration camp lies. Walking on my way there from the train station, I got lost and asked an old lady, in German, where the concentration camp was. She replied that she did not know and had not heard of it. I then asked her, also in German, where the American base was. She knew where that was and directed me straight to it. She, of course, was directing me to the camp. It was no more than a 10 minute walk from where I was. The American army was using it. Army personnel were housed in the German officers’ barracks, constructed of brick, while the part of the camp where the prisoners were housed, made of wood, had been turned into a museum with a guard who would answer visitors’ questions. Some of the buildings where prisoners were gassed along with their ovens were also still there. Like you and your sons, I walked down a leafy street and suddenly was presented with this atrocity, well known gate and all. While I thought I knew a good deal about the concentration camps as a result of extensive reading, nothing prepared me for coming upon it the way I did. Disconcerting to say the least.
Thanks
And so disconcerting
I too have been to Dachau. Many years ago but Ive never forgotten it, or Niemolle’s quote that Gareth reminds us of.
More recently I went to the old KGB headquarters in Vilnius, left pretty much as they had left it in 1989. Smaller in scale but equally shocking in the brutality that it demonstrated.
A reminder that authoritarianism and totalitarianism come at us from both ends
Indeed….
I had a very brief visit to KD Dora at Nordhausen – theconcentration camp where the V2 were built, which was to put it mildly creepy.
In Poland in the late 90’s I drove a TY42, the Post War Polish Built version of the DR Class 52 Kriegslok, (war locomotive) – you see one steaming into Auschwitz in the opening scenes of Shoah.
On a later visit I drove WW2 build version – TY2, absolutley lovely locomotive, but it gave me the creeps. In some ways I was glad we never took it to Konotop, which prior to 1945 was on the Polish/German border and many trains heading East to the camps used that crossing.
I find those locos very difficult – there is one at Bressingham – and all I see if the camp traffic
Fascinating John.
If I had my way, Shoah would be screened on British television every year at around the same time as we celebrate VE day – all of it, with the schedules cleared. I have it on DVD – it’s mesmerising and even though there’s hardly any footage of the camps in it, where it scores is showing how the Holocaust lived in the memories of victims, perpetrators and onlookers.
The fact that there was still a railway junction at one of the camps complete with a small yard when Shoah was made was fascinating.
On holiday in Germany I think in 2018 – at Berlin’s ‘Technik Museum’ – it is built around an old locomotive depot and houses some railway exhibits there – I think one of Hitler’s railcars is there but no Kriegloks (it had a later pacific loco of some sort on display). BTW – there is a tremendous model railway there.
What there was there on my visit was one of the wagons of that period used on the transports and I have to say that you stand there and look at it trying to take in what you are seeing. And you’re wondering if it actually was one of those used. Just like in the black and white films.
Berlin for me was interesting. It’s a place where a great evil once was once centred, and the evidence is all around you – the odd bunker here, brass studs in the pavement commemorating Jews deported East there, a flak tower there. And then there is the pure mixture of cultures all around the City (restaurants, markets) almost repudiating its past.
I know that the Nazi stuff is left there to remind us. But also, it casts a strange pall over the city for me – it’s like a shroud. It takes some getting used to because you are not quite sure if it has gone – that it is dead, rejected.
Or is it just…………………. waiting?
And then there is the Berlin wall and the cold war which made us forget the Nazis.
We have spent so much time obsessed with ‘leftish’ communism that I think we’ve been letting Right wing fascism back in – we’ve taken our eye off the ball. That’s what we’ve done in the West.
Both are a threat
But you are right, we let the right back in
I read this article (https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/09/capitol-riot-united-states-imperialism-trump/) a while ago and a portion of it has stayed with me, especially the last sentence:
Now, the chaos has come back home. This also isn’t new. Ten years after the end of World War II, the Afro-Caribbean writer Aimé Césaire tried to take stock of the rise of fascism in Europe. In his Discourse on Colonialism, he pinned the origins in the Europeans’ experience of their own imperialism—out of the fact that “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word.”
Every time a European shrugged at rape, murder, and torture in their colonies, he continued:
“… civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all … a poison has been instilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.”
Adolf Hitler’s true crime in the eyes of the white world, Césaire concluded, was “the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
In short, fascism is imperialism at home.
Hi Richard
I don’t have access to email at the moment; nor Twitter.
You are obs. aware of @CaroleCadwalla
what about @WriterJackWhite forthcoming book:
“Operation Boris – How the Russians Gave Us UK’s Worst PM”?
All part of **(UK) state capture** ( https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n24/abby-innes/short-cuts )
I believe you’e previously mentioned BBC’s(!)
‘How the Rich Won the Last Decade’;
Gabrial Gatehouse’s ‘The Coming Storm’ re QAnon &c. (on the wireless: BBC /m001324r ) is also well worth a listen.
Thank you for speaking out about the creeping fascism of the UK . The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , by William Shirer , seems to me to be quietly repeating itself without anyone noticing. If I say this to even observant leftie friends they think I’m even weirder than usual .
You are not
And I’ll second that.
If they don’t come for you directly, with all the hate stirred up by the government, one of your neighbours might betray you.