Two Days of Death

I had several hours to waste on Sunday morning before the Dachau tour, so I went to the Jagd und Fischereimuseum on an impulse. I visited less because I’m an avid sportsman (ha!) and more they had a giant bronze statue of a catfish out front.

Luckily for me, the museum wasn’t the NRA shrine I feared a hunting museum might be. It instead displayed artifacts used in hunting and fishing from Paleolithic to recent times. The only guns in sight were ornate muzzle-loaders, complete with powder-horns, tamping rods, and little molds for making your own lead balls. Many of the other hunting accruements were far stranger—spears for hunting narwhals, crossbows, chariots carved like dragons, Pringles can-like contraptions for storing your war-ferrets, or 4-inch wide iron hunting dog collars covered in barbed spikes. Paintings and tapestries of chest-high dogs running down massively over-muscled deer and rabbits covered the walls. One hall was lined with taxidermy animals, or non-animals, as one case displayed about a dozen Wolpertingers. Wolpertingers are German Jackalopes—composites of various stuffed animals, such as the head and body of a rabbit fitted with a fox tail, and a hawk’s wings and claws.

The Jagd und Fischereimuseum also had a temporary exhibit on auruchs covering how the wild cattle were hunted to extinction in the Middle Ages and how modern breeders are attempting to recreate them, or so I assume, since the exhibit was entirely in German.

That afternoon, I crammed onto a bus with 40-odd other English-speaking tourists to visit the Dachau memorial. At the former concentration camp, it was the little details that were the most disturbing. The line of poplar trees and the gravel fields, laid out just as they were while the camp was operating, were extremely disconcerting. I could not wrap my mind around the scale of the badness that had happened in that place. For instance, on a sign outside the crematorium is a picture showing what that exact spot looked like while the camp was in business—as in, there was a pile of several hundred naked, skeletal bodies, right where you are standing to look at the sign. Horrors like that belong in black and white photos, they can’t leach out into the real world where the sun is out and birds are singing.

Two days later, I was back in the world of barracks and barbed wire fences at another concentration camp memorial—Sachsenhausen. Whereas Dachau had been transformed into a memorial for the people murdered there, Sachsenhausen had been refitted as a celebration of how great Red Russia was. A phallic monument glorifying Russian soldiers dominated the center of the roll call field. Much of the rest of the camp had been allowed to fall into disrepair due to lack of funds—weeds and crabgrass dotted the field, and some of the buildings were deteriorating.

However, the most effective parts of the memorial remained. In a basement used for peeling potatoes, captives had been allowed to paint landscapes and still lifes on the walls. I hope the prisoners found some comfort in the beauty they created in their ugly surroundings. Prisoners held there during the time the camp was run by the Soviets added cartoonish vegetables slicing and cooking themselves. One of the more disturbing displays was the hundreds of scraps of shoe leather that had been dug up on the site. Trainloads of shoes collected from the extermination camps out east arrived at Sachsenhausen and the prisoners were put to work reclaiming the leather and wondering over the fate of the shoe’s former owners.

The most obvious signs of the atrocities which had happened there remained mostly intact. The firing range and the torture chamber known as the “medical” building with its mortuary tables were still standing. Of Station Z, where ten thousand Soviet POWs were murdered, only the foundation and the cremation ovens remain. Like at the crematorium at Dachau, at Station Z murder was employed in assembly-line fashion. Living people enter one end, ashes come out the other. Of course, with the volume of murder they were committing, the killing machine started to break down. The ovens didn’t have the capacity to burn all the remains completely. At Dachau, there were accounts that prisoners couldn’t be hanged fast enough and were sometimes burned alive.

Like at Dachau, I just cannot imagine the amount of suffering and death that occurred where I was standing, and that it had happened recently enough that still survivors and perpetrators still live.