Munich Walking Tour and Dachau
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2008
1
11
13
Trip End
Jul 31, 2008
Munich,
Germany
Friday, July 18, 2008
In the morning, Elaine and I assembled for our excursions with other english speakers in the main plaza of Munich called the Marienplatz. It is the home of the most impressive building in a city of truly impressive buildings: the Rathaus, the central government building.
Munich is 850 years old. We knew this because our guide informed us that the very next day there is to begin a two day celebration of this anniversary. Munich was ready to party; and also ready to tow away cars, bikes, and people if they were in any way obtrusive to officials or official vendors.
About thirty of us followed our first guide through the streets of the city center. This was the tour called "Hitler's Munich". The guide regaled us with stories about the horrible conditions of post-World War I Bavaria and the subsequent rise of the National Socialist Workers Party. People caried their money around in wheelbarrows, the currency was so devalued, and there was a new violent government takeover every few months or so. Someone new was always in charge in this brand new democracy decreed by the Treaty of Versaille that ended the Great War. It was a shock to every German's system after having been ruled by monarchs for, well, since the beginning of time.
Some Germans appreciated the change, politically, since the Socialist and Communist Parties were quite popular. However, as the workers finally achieved their dream of taking over the means of production, they simply forgot the fact that a large majority of Germany was quite conservative, had enjoyed the pre-war prosperity and stability under the Kaiser and the everyday benefits of the industrial revolution, and wanted that feeling back. Democracy was new, in Germany ineffective, and this style of self-rule had become with the constant anarchy in the country-side and the machine guns roaring in the city streets, frightening.
Plus, there were the insurmountable war-debts Germany had to pay to France, Great Britain, and America. The Deutche mark was in free fall in 1923. Every day the currency was worth less and less. Soon it literally took a hundred pieces of paper to buy an egg. And each day, Germans spent all the money they had because who knew what the mark would worth tomorrow? Inflation got so bad that a legendary story tells of a woman who brought her salary with her to the market in a large basket. Yes, the basket was a strain, and she put it down, reluctantly, afraid someone might steal her hard-earned cash. Soon, manuveuring along the shelves she suddenly remembered to check upon her burden and flew back to the place where she had left it. Yes, someone had stolen it--- the basket that is. The thief had unceremoniously dumped the near-worthless marks on the floor.
It was against this background that the future Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, began honing his immense public speaking skills in front of the large numbers of inebriated veterans drowning their sorrows in Munich's beer halls. One hall in particular, the Hofbrau House (still around and ready to sell you a hefen-weisen to this day), was situated in the middle of a tight little plaza not far from the Marienplatz. The reverb is excellent. I could imagine that, after a few beers, Hitler's gruff, authoritative pitch must have sounded like your best friend: making problems simple, making solutions even simpler. The Jews were the problem! The Jews controlled the wealth of the world! They controlled the bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh... The Jews in Russia were bleh, bleh, bleh, sending their Communist minions to the Fatherland to bleh, bleh, bleh, undermine the strength of the German people! National Socialism is the party of the working class, the proud German people! We will send you back to work! Bleh, bleh! Bleh! Bleh! BLEH!!!
And as a soon-drunk, penniless left-over from the "heroic" battlegrounds of an epic lost cause, where the issue of life and death was once cut and dry one second to the next, and now few wanted to know or to understand you, what would you say?
"Hey, the Nazis are buying. Why not sit around and listen a few more minutes? It sure is rowdy and fun here at the Hofbrau! Yeh, the Jews DO seem to own a lot of the shops around here... and they don't give us CREDIT! Fraulein! Another Weisen! Yes, the Jews are involved in the government too! Yes, Lenin and Trotsky are Jews AND Communists!!! HEIL!!! HEIL!!! Um, what was that about a job?"
We walked at a pretty quick pace around the inner town. Every so often we would stop and Rolfe, our guide, would inform us with anecdotes and history about the place we were standing upon. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, Nuremburg's Teutonic history was taken advantage of and became the National Socialist playground and annual spectacle for party rallies. Munich, however, was the Nazi Party headquarters. The buildings housing the Party and its auxiliaries (the Hitler Youth, the Women's Organization, the German Labour Front, the Propoganda Office, the Gestapo, the SS, even the German League of Aryan Physicians) are all withing walking distance of each other. People loved the Nazis here.
And they hated the Jews. Most of these buildings were bought well below market value or simply taken from the Jewish population. Out of a population of 6000 registered Jews in 1938, only three hundred survived. The rest were murdered or lucky enough to emigrate out.
Very few of the buildings from the time of the Third Reich are left today for viewing on this tour. Munich was left in rubble, like many German cities, from Allied bombing raids and street to street fighting. There is one building that remains that, at the end of our tour, brought some measure of satisfaction to Elaine and me. The Nazi Party Headquarters, the Brown House, expropriated from a Jewish owner early in 1934, is now a music conservatory. Inside the spacious front foyer with a dramatic marble staircase, one could hear a small chamber quartet practicing in what was once Hitler's office.
The Dachau walking tour was certainly as powerful as Bergen-Belson; probably more so because we had an extremely knowledgable guide and, visually, the camp has been reconstructed somewhat and has several well-known monuments.
Dachau Concentration Camp was created in 1933. Because therewere just too many political prisoners piling up in the jails across the Fatherland, Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's top SS man in Munich, took over an old army depot in Dachau and set up a camp that got a lot of press and propoganda in Germany. It was a place where the German people knew "terrorists" would receive justice. It was also given a high profile to warn the citizenry against oposing the new regime of National Socialism.
Dachau is much older than Munich. Dachau was established back in 1050 AD, and thrived as a trading market for southeastern Bavaria. It never really got huge in size, but it did become a mecca for artists in the late 1800s. There was a German art school developed there that concentrated on landscape painting in the late 19th century impressionist style (Pizzaro, Monet...). In the 1930s, however, Dachau's name became synonomous with quite a different legacy.
Like Sachsenhausen, SS troops were trained here in all the vicious arts of oppresion. Prisoners were rolled in here on trains, beaten immediately off the train, beaten into formations for roll call, beaten for looking at an SS soldier, beaten for not knowing German, beaten for any miniscule reason. Thousands died here and the living never knew what was being cooked up for them from one minute to the next. The inmates were part of an approved Nazi program of labor until death. The prisoners were to work until they dropped. When they did drop, they were executed with a bullet to the head seconds later.
Dachau was sinister for me because I actually walked into the gas chamber which might have been tested, but had not officially been used like the extermination camps. What a claustrophobic nightmare THAT was. The chamber was a small rectangular room with a low ceiling punctuated by round metal plates with holes punched in them. Inmates were told that these were the showers. Here the SS used cyanide gas, unlike the extermination camps where zyclon-B, an insecticide used for roach control in warehouses, was preferred.
Suffice to say that, by the end of the war in 1945, there were so many bodies in the huge room next to the crematorium in Dachau, that U.S. soldiers liberating the camp described them as being stacked high and tight like tobacco. By the end of the war there was just no more coal left to burn the bodies.
I walked around in that room, filming. I like to think that I'm really sensitive to "spirits" or feelings of past people. I usually get some sort of vibe from where I am based upon what has happened there. In that room where the dead accumulated, I felt nothing. I knew I was in an actual room where the bodies of hundreds of murdered people had been entangled like socks in an over-stuffed drawer. But I couldn't feel a thing. Maybe that's what scared me so: the fact that the SS had sucked the life out of so many prisoners, to the extent that there was zero memory, physical or spiritual, that these humans had ever exhisted on the planet.
