April 1945 was one of the turning points in the history of mankind's understanding of itself. That we are a despicable species has been known since Eden; no race anywhere is without a myth about a golden time before the Fall, for Fallen we certainly are. But our understanding of the scope of evil, and its spectacular depravity, could only be understood when unmitigated evil had its unmitigated way.
It had its way in Bergen-Belsen, liberated by British soldiers on a Sunday morning 60 years ago today. Two days later US troops liberated Buchenwald. On Thursday, April 19th, Churchill told a shocked House of Commons what allied soldiers had found. That night, government censors sitting in the three main newspaper offices in Dublin removed all references to Churchill's speech and the concentration camps from the next morning's editions.
Eleven days later, Hitler killed himself; and soon afterwards Eamon de Valera, though fully aware of what allied troops had found at Belsen and Buchenwald, offered his condolences to the German legate, Herr Hempel. A few days earlier, Brigadier Jerry Sheil DSO and Bar, from Co Meath, had been killed by a landmine in the Reichswald Forest. Government censors in The Irish Times duly removed from his death notice all reference to the fact that this Irishman, who had freely gone to fight tyranny, was a British soldier who had served in North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and Germany. Instead, that past was utterly elided.
By this time, the world was learning a vocabulary of purest wickedness: Ravensbruck, Flossenberg, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, Belzec, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Dachau, each worse than the other. But Dachau was special unto itself. It was the first true concentration camp, and its slogan was uplifting and magnificent: "There is only one Road to Freedom and its Milestones are Obedience, Zeal, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Temperance, Truth, Sense of Sacrifice and Love of Fatherland".
It was opened on March 20th, 1933, seven weeks after Hitler came to power, and from its earliest days, its Nazi commandants behaved with unspeakable savagery. Its inhabitants wore coloured triangles to identify them by their taint: red for political offenders, green for "criminals", pink for homosexuals, brown for gypsies, and a yellow Star of David for Jews. Dachau thus became the template from which were shaped hundreds of other camps across the Reich.
Dachau was not an extermination camp, but a work camp: people were usually worked to death, not murdered, though of course many were. It was here SS doctor and homicidal quack Sigmund Rash experimented on prisoners, exploring the consequences of immersing them in liquid oxygen. And each camp produced its own variant of the Dachau franchise. At Matthausen in Austria, the SS had the "Staircase of Death", a 45-degree slope up which long columns of prisoners five wide were made to carry lumps of granite in hods on their back. Over the years, thousands perished on those evil steps, flogged to death or shot or crushed by toppling boulders from above.
It was in this camp in September 1944 that 47 captured allied airman were formally sentenced to the worst punishment of all in the Third Reich: to be deliberately worked to death. It was here also that the last commandant, SS-Oberststurmbannfuhrer Zieries, gave his son 50 Jews for target practice.
Dachau's inmates included tens of thousands of Spanish republicans who had fled to France at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and who were rounded up after the Nazi victory in 1940; only 3,000 were still alive in January 1945 and of these, 2,163 were killed over the coming months.
Such splendid detail! But of course, keeping meticulous records was something the Nazis did so well: Matthausen, for example, had 36,318 executions, and in Buchenwald, 8,483 Soviet prisoners were murdered by being shot in the back of the neck (which was indeed the preferred method of the NKVD at home, and which it had employed on the thousands of Polish officers at Katyn).
When US soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division liberated Dachau, they were confronted by the naked bodies of tens of thousands of dead and dying prisoners, and by the sight of the camp guards surrendering under a white flag. Forty guards were promptly bludgeoned to death by prisoners and 122 were shot out of hand by GIs.
The surviving 346 SS men were then lined up against a wall and systematically machine-gunned to death, while Technician Fourth Class Arland Musser photographed the entire affair.
Later, the US Army court-martialled eight officers and NCOs for their role in the killings. When General Patton, Military Governor of Bavaria, heard about the forthcoming courts martial, he sent for all the prosecution documentation and photographs and burnt the lot in his waste paper basket. The accused men all walked free.
If you think there is rough justice of a sort here, you are wrong. Most of the SS guards who were murdered were newly arrived conscripts, while many of the worst and most brutal villains had already escaped. Thirty-six of these were later sentenced to death, but because of the massacre of guards, all sentences were commuted.
Dachau in due course was owned by the Bavarian Interior Ministry for use as a police barracks. It was from here in 1972, during the Munich Olympics, that the German police launched their abortive operation to free the Israeli Olympics team captured by PLO terrorists, and during which nine of the athletes were killed: 27 years on, Dachau's final Jewish victims.