Weimar, Germany
The day that I visited Buchenwald, I was sad and angry. I was more sad and more angry as the day progressed. But the anger stayed with me. The anger was worst a few hours after I left the Buchenwald when I visited the castle at Marburg.
Clearly, I should not have visited Marburg the same day as Buchenwald, but I did not know that when the day began.
This motto is on the Buchenwald gate.
Jedem das seine: To each his own or To each as he deserves
the literal German translation of the Latin suum cuique.
Cruelty and cruel jokes are part of the Nazi belief in their superiority.
Buchenwald is the first large concentration camp. Mass shootings were the primary means of execution, although more prisoners were worked to death than killed by shooting. The bodies were disposed of by cremation in ovens, but there was no gas chamber at Buchenwald. There were hideous medical experiments that killed thousands of the 54,000 killed at the camp.
All of this is numbing when visiting the camps: clean, orderly displays of artifacts can never convey the reality--the terror, the smell, the hate, that permeated every moment in Buchenwald.
I felt so sad trying to imagine the terror of the victims, and so angry imaging the guards who tormented and killed the prisoners.
Memorial to murdered Russian POWs
Around the grounds and in the museum were monuments to the various groups tortured and murdered. In addition to the Jews, the Roma people, homosexuals, Russian Prisoners of War, and political prisoners were victims of systematic murder.
Tabulation of deaths
Even the location of the this camp was hateful. It is on a hill above the city of Weimar. The camp could be seen, smelled and heard in the town below. The location is to literally shove the stinking reality of Nazism in the face of the place where the last democratic government of Germany was set up before the Nazis took over. As with the horrible joke on the gate:
Jedem das seine: To each his own.
Cruelty and cruel jokes are part of the Nazi belief in their own superiority. Torment, torture, it's all part of being a Nazi.
Equipment from American liberators of the camp
Inmate uniforms
After seeing the markers, the memorials, the displays, the clear evidence that everyone in Weimar knew what the camp was and what happened in it, I felt rising anger. I knew that the Nazis would kill anyone who opposed them and that most of the people of Weimar were just hoping to stay alive, but one third of Germany voted for the racist wretch who would lay waste their country.
It was for them, the Hitler voters, the Hitler supporters, the people who cheered at the Nuremberg rallies, they were the focus of my anger. Hitler's supporters in 1932 did not know their country would be razed and ruined and a smoking pile of rubble before they would vote again.
And my anger was compounded by thinking of the Americans who voted for Trump knowing exactly the sort of racist scum he is. They saw more danger from Hillary Clinton. What a joke that is now. Whatever Clinton's faults, she did not want to be a tyrant.
It will be the cruelest irony if the country that liberated the death camps and defeated the Nazis falls into tyranny by voting for a racist pig. I have offered to bet more than one Trump supporter he will not leave office if defeated. No one has taken the bet.
And then my feelings were worse at Marburg Castle. The tour guide said Marburg is one of the best German castles and the home of St. Elizabeth, a saint so true to the Gospel she was canonized in record time. I lost it at that point. The last thing I wanted to hear about was one German who actually lived according to the Gospel 800 years ago whose distant countrymen expelled Believers who were Jewish by birth from their Churches in 1935. Nearly all of them were killed.
Forty years ago when I walked the streets of Wiesbaden in 1976, I would look at people who were in their 60s or older and wonder, 'What did you do when the Jews were rounded up, turn your back or shove them in the rail cars.' I was not angry in 1976 and really enjoyed living in Germany, but this trip, I was angry.
Of course, in 1976, no American leader would ever call Nazis "fine people." Democracy is under attack everywhere, but in America the attack is personal. I defended this country. I did not enlist to support tyranny.
In 1976, I was forty years closer to the Holocaust in time, but I saw it as horrible history. Now I see it as looming threat.
