Meg's Musings

Dachau

This is a pic of the new people oven used for cremating dead bodies. Yes, that's still people ash in there. Off to both sides are rooms, about the size of a Lansing Parks & Rec. bathroom, that had bodies stacked to the ceiling because of the number of deaths and a shortage of coal near the end of the war. The allied soliders brought int the townspeople and made them carry out the corpses and bury them. That's one of the stunning things about the camp. It's not as though it's really out on its own or unnoticeable. It's a field away from town on one side and closer on the others, and was at the time of WWII. A trade road leads right past the open gravel square where prisoners were forced to stand exposed to the elements for hours. it's not as though the people of town could plead ignorance.
This is the old people oven (as opposed to the new, not the young). It interested me that Dachau was not an official death camp--it was a concentration and internment camp. Still, conditions were so bad, torture and experimentation so prolific and the commandants deemed sucessful by the turn over of theri prisoners (by shipment to Auschwitz, death by exposure, etc.) that it seems that was only a difference in terminology.

posted by Me @ 13:36