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Troops of the U.S. 45th Infantry Division force Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) members to view the bodies of camp inmates found dead in rail cars at Dachau concentration camp. Dachau concentration camp, Upper Bavaria, Germany. 30 April 1945.
My grandson plays violin, I went to one of his practices... one song was an old German folk tune. The teacher was aghast when I told her that it had been co-opted for the Hitler Youth March, but it was true... Die Jugend Marchen.
Wonder if those in the film would have envisaged the horrors of "The Final Solution" in the years to come.
There is still a need to educate people of exactly what horrors went on in the concentration camps and in the wider Third Reich especially to the Jewish community but also other minority groups. I continue to be staggered at some people's total ignorance.
While in grade school we were visited by a monk who was in Dachau - he showed us a picture of a internee in the striped uniform front, left and right view.
The side views show a large nail protruding out of the wall and embedded into the back of the skull ( this was to keep the head still for the photo)
also on the card was the individual number.
He slowly rolled up his sleeve and held the card next to his tattoo to show us the numbers matched.
He defiantly created a life long memory
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My father was stationed in Europe in the '60's.
We visited Dachau in the summer of 1963, I was 10, I had heard stories from one of dad's friends who liberated Dachau, and had seen a couple of documentaries, so I knew a what it was about.
When we got there I was overcome with feeling that the air was heavy, a feeling that the earth was forever tainted with evil there.
I have never been able to shake that memory--a feeling from bad things that had happened 20 years before, that had ended almost ten years before I was born.
I believe that, bizarrely, Hitler gave some sort of "official pardon" to Jewish WW1 veterans who held the Iron Cross so that they and their family were exempt from being deported to a Concentration Camp. Is anyone able to confirm this and provide any further information concerning this, please?
It all illustrates why "morality" (what is right and what is wrong) has been one of the main issues in philosophy for thousands of years. "Right" can change with the society you live in.
I was stationed in West Germany during the middle 70s in the 536 MP Company. In the basement of company headquarters building lived the company tailor, an older Polish Jewish man who had attached himself to the company after being liberated from a concentration camp during WWII. As part of the new guy orientation, we were all introduced to him and listened to his story. He was a sole survivor, having lost all his family members in the concentration camps. Had the numbers tattooed on his forearm. Very sobering to listen to him and what he went through in the concentration camps.
Visited Flossenberg, a "small" concentration camp. I think they only machinegunned and burned 25,000-35,000 people there. Some were captured US and British pilots and resistance fighters.
During that time the Holocaust miniseries from the US was shown on West German Television. It shocked the whole country with many disbelieving it. A German civilian, whom I had befriended, had been a marine in the German Navy during the war. Told me he had always been proud of his service to his country and knew nothing of the holocaust. It was little known about or talked about by any Germans until that miniseries was shown. He was crying, wringing my hands and apologizing to me for what his country had done. I told him I was the wrong one to apologize to.