I was eight or nine years old, an American officer’s son, when I walked through Dachau.
I remember the ovens. I remember the showers. I remember the stains still on the walls. I remember the ash piles — this was 1954, nine years after liberation — and the ash still hadn’t disappeared. It had not yet soaked completely into the dirt.
If you think eight years old is too young to remember something like that, you don’t know a child whose memory is a video recorder without an erase feature.
As I grew older I could never understand how the German people had allowed it to happen. How ordinary men and women watched it unfold and did nothing. How a civilization that produced Beethoven and Goethe looked away while the ovens ran.
I am getting a better understanding these days.
Ignorance and apathy go a long way. Distance from history plays a large role as well. And the road has to stretch far enough that the people who remember are gone before the circle closes.
But not all of us are gone.
My father was stationed in postwar Germany, Army Corps of Engineers officially. When you read through his documents as an adult he appears to have played larger roles — why else would his pancreatic cancer have been attributed to White Sands testing? He was 6’2″, quiet, decorated. Purple Hearts. Bronze Star. Never talked about any of it.
Dachau was probably a Saturday or Sunday outing. Dad, Mom, my brother and I. Before the monuments, before the cleanup, before the ash was removed or fully absorbed. Just the ovens and the showers and the stains and the silence of a place where the horror was still present enough to touch.
We went home afterward. I honestly don’t remember if we were still driving the 1952 red Ford convertible my mother had bought when my father turned his back and left for Germany, or the new 1955 Austin Healey — all red, red leather, red top. Either way there were four of us, none of us small, a full sized long haired dachshund, and a very little car touring a lot of postwar Germany. One of us boys on the padded hump, the other between Mom’s legs, the dog on the floorboard. I don’t remember any of us complaining much.
But I am drifting from what brought me here.
A brief history is in order.
On February 27, 1933, the German Reichstag building burned. Within hours Hitler’s government blamed the Communists. The following day the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties across Germany. Within weeks political opponents were being arrested for using their voices to warn about the man in power.
Whether the fire was set by the Nazis themselves remains disputed. What is not disputed is what they did with it. The crisis — real or manufactured — became the mechanism. The emergency became the justification. And by the time people understood what was happening the machinery was already running.
We don’t need to know who fired the shots at the White House Correspondents Dinner. What matters is what came immediately after.
The White House Press Secretary — who by any reasonable standard should have been on maternity leave — delivered remarks that directly attacked the First Amendment. What we say going forward will not be treated as political commentary. It will be treated as slander. As sedition.
This was delivered shortly after the Department of Justice had been instructed to explore reinstating firing squads as a form of capital punishment.
I am not speculating about the shooting. I am not attributing motive. I am simply observing the sequence. Crisis. Immediate response. Threats against speech. Escalating consequences for dissent.
I have seen this sequence before.
Not in a textbook. In the dirt. In the ash that hadn’t yet disappeared nine years after the fact.
We look at history as a linear line. We open the textbook at the beginning and work forward to where we are standing. But I cannot help feeling, standing on this hill in time and looking at that line from the side, that it has taken a detour and made a circle back onto itself.
The problem is that the road stretched far enough that most of the people who would recognize the circle have died.
But not all of us.
I walked through Dachau at eight years old. The ash was still there.
