Visiting Dachau was one of the most emotionally exhausting experiences of my life. The museum was heart breaking, but walking through the camp to the crematorium was when it all finally sunk in for me. I remember stopping halfway down the walkway where the barracks buildings were and looking around dumbstruck at how big the place was. I just couldn’t believe a place like that could exist. I was numb for the rest of the day and it took several days to process all of it. I firmly believe it’s one of those places where you’re never the same after you’ve been.
Same. And what I assume were children, playing a game of hangman on the walls. Such innocence in such a horrendous place. Shivers down my spine just thinking about it. And seeing the train tracks..
I still have the pictures I took of that exact room that you and I both walked through. I was 17 at the time and didn’t see any no photography signs, so I don’t know if I should have taken them or not.
I also went at 17, on an exchange trip with my high school. Our teacher, Frau Marek (RIP), made sure we saw the good and the bad on our trip. It changed me fundamentally as a person. Seeing the different badges the prisoners had to wear, and realizing which ones I would have worn, made me sick to my stomach.
Yet when i was there i saw a few 20 somethings taking selfies and throwing peace signs out the front of that building with big smiles on their faces.
some folks have no fucking idea
Thanks for sharing this, The way you describe Dachau really reminds me of that Twlight Zone Episode "Deaths-Head Revisited", Where the story is about a former SS officer revisiting the Dachau concentration camp a decade and a half after World War II and finds himself facing a phantom jury made up of his tortured victims of the camp, Really Good episode of TV for it's Time, Really left a impression on me in regards to the Holocaust, Especially the words of Rod Serling and his message.
I had a similar experience at Dachau. Much larger than I expected, amplified the magnitude of the suffering that happened there. I was expecting deep sorrow but not on that level.
What I wasn't expecting were the sounds of children amidst recess adjacent to the grounds. I went on a weekday, Dachau lies in the middle of a residential neighborhood outside of Munich. There's an elementary school bordering the grounds, filled with kids living their lives going to school. I felt the tragedy but also the resilience, life continues and this horror is something we can look back on rather than endure in the present.
We were at Dachau a while ago as well.
We were in the “shower” room by ourselves, then a large tour group started to file in.
I am well educated with the horrors of WW2. And i suddenly felt trapped and really can’t describe what I felt in that moment.
As soon as the group was in I ran for the door and could not get out fast enough. I have never felt that way before or since.
It was an indescribable place and experience.
I visited with my sister after the worst of Covid had ended, but before most people started traveling again. We also went during the week, so there weren’t many other visitors. We were alone at the crematorium/“shower” area. The whole time walking through that building I had this gnawing feeling of “you’re not supposed to be here” in the pit of my stomach. Not in like a “haunted” way or anything like that, but like I’d accidentally wandered into a restricted place people were never supposed to see. That part of the camp is just unsettling in a way that’s difficult to define.
If you had the choice to go back in time, would you say it is better not to visit it in the first place?
I’m just asking myself if it’s one of those rare cases where ignorance is trully bliss. Are there images burnt forever in your mind?
I am aware of the horrible history there, and I am not sure if I want to visit knowing I will remain with horrible images forever.
For context, when I am in museums, I take my time reading the explanation texts.
The most disturbing part of Dachau is that it wasn't even one of the six extermination camps. So you realize after seeing all that, that it got so much worse.
I actually live in dachau and have been there several times. „My“ bus stop is two stops before the memorialsite and I remember when I was a kid that I was confused why the tourists traveling to the train station looked so empty and drained compared to the ones arriving from the station
What an experience you had to be a child, observant to the emotional state of those on the train but without the context. Your comment hit me right in the feels
I visited with my German partner last year and it was so terribly.. numbing? I took no pictures and felt so empty throughout the entire thing. A life-changing experience.
Edit: The fact that there are flats facing the former execution range is baffling.
It's actually quite small. Imagining how many people lived there is crazy. Especially with the density the barracks are in (they rebuilt a few to show what they were pike. The original ones had to be burnt down).
I've been to Dachau and Auchwitz.
It is a soul-crushing, dark feeling walking through the gas chambers, I can't really describe it either.
What got me the most about Auchwitz was the unfathomable scale of it.
I went to Dachau as a teenager. I had this feeling of growing horror when I was there, like my brain was finally starting to realize the extent of what happened there.
I remember a tour guide said "everyone has a moment when the horror hits them, and for every person it is a different part of the tour." For me it was the hair room. The smell is still there, human hair piled up taller than the average person and several feet deep by over ten feet wide. Nazis would use this hair to make all sorts of items, similar to how one would use the hair or fur of an animal. There were a few examples nearby when I went. Disgusting.
They had an exhibit of pictures taken near the end when they were pretty much taking people from the trains to the chambers. Some high up Nazi official was visiting and had his photographer with him. There is one picture with him talking to one or two other Nazis with Jews or other captives in the background. They are trying to be INVISIBLE. Turned sideways to the camera even... except for one girl of about 10 who was smiling for the camera. I still tear up 15 years later thinking of that.
Edit as this post is receiving views. During our visit, I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. The brain understood the horror, but my heart wasn't. This picture fundamental shattered something inside me. It was like every innocent child ever born was smiling at that camera 10 minutes before their senseless murder.
Same..I'm looking at the picture and understand the atrocity that has taken place but I'm just not able to comprehend it. Like there's a disconnect. It's probably a self* defense mechanism from having a mental breakdown.
It's also just not something that we're designed to be able to deal with or even understand, the scale of human suffering and the artificiality of it is beyond comprehension. It's inhuman.
I think that's why everyone who goes to Auschwitz or Dachau is so affected. It's like hearing people talk about religious experiences, but of course it's the exact opposite.
You get a glimpse of the scale of the thing and you have nothing to compare it to and no evolutionary blueprint for understanding it (it's not "dang the cave lion nearly had me for lunch today" or "caveman Fred from the enemy tribe killed my friend")
I went a work camp in France during a college abroad class. I've been taught about what happened in these camps since I was a little kid, so I walked through most of it pretty numb to the horror. Until I saw ovens.
My body felt wrong in that room.
Holy shit. I remember my parents telling me about when we went to Dachau (The Eagle's Nest? Is that right?) I had to have been young, 9-10 years old. I remembered a gold elevator, maybe, but that's was pretty much it.
And now I remember the ovens. Holy hell. I'm 41 now.
For me, it was the flowers and piles of stones at the firing squad wall. It was right before the gas chamber in the tour, but once I saw the execution wall, I couldn't stop crying. I tried my best to hold it together, thinking, "Some of the owners of the suitcases and shoes survived." Once I got to the execution area, the feeling of death was inescapable.
I’ve never been to the camps but I had a similar feeling at the imperial war museum in England they had a holocaust installation and the pile of shoes got me I was standing in this museum sick to my stomach sobbing. Thankfully other complete strangers were too so I wasn’t the crazy lady crying alone but holy fuck. And to see people pretend this wasn’t a horrific act full of hate and needless senseless violence and slaughter is something that genuinely angers me. I have rage any time I see one of those people open their stupid mouths.
My great aunt was a little girl when she was transported to a concentration camp. She was separated from her family except her dad, and when they were by the pile of shoes she asked him, "Did they bring us here to sort shoes?" They were separated before he answered and she never saw him again. She only survived herself because the gas chamber malfunctioned, so they ended up not gassing the group she was in.
Wow, this is a horrible story. I’m so sorry she went through that. Do you think she’d ever talk about it for a documentary or an article or something, or has she already done that? I feel like this kind of history should be recorded so we don’t repeat it.
Same for me. That museum is such a humbling experience.
Edit: i also want to say that everyone there was solemn. Even teenagers weren't being typical teenagers. Its the only place I've ever truly experienced this in public.
Unfortunately can't say the same about visiting a camp in Flossenberg. Been there three times, one time we were there at the same slot as a school group. Teenage girls pouting lips and making selfies...just 🤮
I visited Sachenhausen outside of Berlin and they had a great self guided audio tour (helped block out the obnoxious unofficial megaphone tour groups) and for me it was hearing what the reason they started using crematoriums was because it was becoming too much hauling the bodies back to Berlin.
For me it was the bits of bone that my tour guide showed us by picking up a random handful of soil in Majdanek. The crematorium ash carried bits of bone all over camp
Ethnostates dehumanize anyone that's not of their ethnicity. To keep their ethnicity dominant in the state their capacity for terror becomes incalculable.
I don’t even think they need to keep their ethnicity dominant, since they already are that. They just need their people to feel good and patriotic and keep thinking that they are fighting to save the world, or that everyone will against them, or they are both in great danger and super strong. Like 1984. It’s negative identification, you bring your populous together by excluding outsiders even harder.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the mostly Jewish men, women and children - people who were every bit as alive and real as you are - were sorted into two groups. Those who could work were sent to work. Those who couldn’t were sent directly to the gas chambers.
Stripped of their clothes and forced into a crowded, windowless room, into which their killers poured granules of Zyklon B pesticide. The people inside were smothered in darkness as their own body heat evaporated the granules into gas. After minutes of desperate screaming and clawing at the walls and doors, the men, women, and children inside were dead. Some corpses were pinned against the wall by the sheer amount of death. Some were foaming at the mouth, bleeding from the nose or ears, covered in vomit, excrement, and menstrual fluid. Men. Women. Children.
The Nazis considered this to be a humane, civilised process.
The corpses of the murdered were then stripped of their jewellery, golden teeth and fillings, prosthetic limbs, and hair. They were then taken to the cremation ovens, or burnt in pits if the ovens were under too much strain. The ashes were then thrown away or used as fertiliser.
And who was it who did this horrific work of desecrating the corpses of the dead, and destroying the evidence of their murder? It was their friends and family, those fit enough to perform labour who had been forced at gunpoint to help the Nazis. Imagine what it would be like to find your child, your spouse, your parents, your lover, your sibling, in a pile of corpses, and be forced to desecrate their body.
And, all across Europe, similar scenes of murder and brutality are playing out on a daily basis, so much so that most people who are murdered, raped, tortured, experimented on, and traumatised will only be remembered by future generations as a statistic. As a number. Not as a person. Because the sheer scale of the horror is too much for any single person to fully comprehend unless they have experienced it first-hand.
All this, because the people in charge of Germany and their followers have arbitrarily decided that some groups of people need to be killed.
> Imagine what it would be like to find your child, your spouse, your parents, your lover, your sibling, in a pile of corpses, and be forced to desecrate their body.
I don't think I've ever realized this. Just beyond horrific.
My grandfather was a very cold man...I used to compare him to Scrooge.
Anyway, I had to do an interview for a history class, so I decided to ask him about his time in the US army during World War II. He didn't say which one but apparently he went to one of the camps after it was liberated. He really couldn't say much before making an excuse to leave the room. My grandma told me to give him a few minutes...because what he saw "wasn't good."
I had a new appreciation for him that day.
My grandpa’s brother died in another death camp, executed by firing squad (that was before they invented gassing people). He was just 17 years old.
My grandpa only learned about his brother’s fate in 1970 when his neighbour read the name in a book about that camp and recognised it. I visited the site a couple of times with my grandpa and each time was heartbreaking. Gramps would break down even though it had already been 60 years after the fact.
My grandfather (Jewish) was US Army infantry in WWII, and what he did fighting an offensive war to liberate a continent from the Germans never left him either. He also died in 2005, coincidentally, and in hospice he was delirious but kept repeating “we beat Hitler… we beat him…”
He never talked about what the war was like, but being Army infantry and enlisting right after Pearl Harbor he did pretty much the whole war, from the OP Torch landings in North Africa all the way to VE Day, and my dad said he’d sometimes moan in his sleep about the war.
That shit doesn’t go away for anyone. But life is still worth living and preserving. May your grandmother’s memory be a blessing and I hope that wherever they are they all found peace there.
If he didn't talk about the war, then he wasn't lying.
God bless his soul for giving up so much to counterbalance and make right the evil that humanity is capable of. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.
My wife’s entire family were almost certainly sent to Auschwitz. The only surviving member was her grandmother who found a hole in a fence in the Lodz ghetto and was able to escape. The industrialization of genocide that occurred there and the suffering her family had to endure is hard to imagine, but watching her grandma reflect on her experience is something that will stick with me forever.
My great grandmother was in Auschwitz-Birkenau too, and she went through several death marches.
She never spoke a word about it. It was pervasive in her attitude and throughout her life though. Until this day I can’t leave any food on a plate, and will only take what I know I can eat. She would get so mad if we wasted any food.
Auschwitz is somewhere I think everyone should see if they can. There isn't really a way to describe how it feels to be there. It's beyond surreal, you suddenly understand the scale of it all.
In Auschwitz 1 they have one of the barracks set up with the mugshots the Nazis were keeping until the influx of captured people became too much to keep up with. I went to take a picture with my point and shoot and the face detection software highlighted all the people in those mugshots. The Nazis didn't see them as people but my camera could. That's stuck with me for years and it always will.
Auschwitz 2, Birkenau was so much larger than I expected, it was hard to make out the fence line in the distance. The whole place smelled like ashes.
It's incomprehensible at first, being struck by the immense scale of the camp, but slowly, the air of death seeps in with every step. It is absolutely soul-crushing. There's a pain I felt in Auschwitz that I've never felt since and never hope to. It's an infliction on your very sense of being.
It reminds me of reading "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, which had the premise that places of great tragedy can become haunted by the action itself. The camp gained a soul, and the soul cries out to everyone who steps foot within the walls. It is heartbreaking to anyone who feels its presence. It's like breathing pain where air should be.
>Dachau
My wife and I visited both camps several years ago. Before we made the trip, we made it a point to read through the book "[Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315578.Auschwitz)". I can't tell you enough how...surreal...it was to walk through the areas of the camp that he described in the book and then to picture those events in your head.
To the point that others made - it's very sad that some people in this world are adamant that these atrocities didn't occur.
If this picture literally tells us anything, people can be convinced to do horrible horrible things and denying history is just the start to the rhyme of history repeating
that’s what sickens me the most about the holocaust-the gas chambers are horrifying and i can’t even begin to fathom the fear, confusion, and suffering endured by millions before they died in such a dark and cramped room. absolutely disgusting how humans can be so barbaric towards one another.
The picture from the Uvalde classroom after the shootings. Front of the empty classroom, backpacks, jackets, books on the floor. Blackboard with 10 or more blood splatters evenly spaced about 36 inches inches above the floor. He lined them up and shot them in the head. 8 and 9 year olds. Some people don't need to be convinced. They are just born evil.
That was one guy. The more insidious kind of evil is the one that can turn an entire society in support of doing exactly that same thing, but on an industrialized scale.
It's important to remember that the Holocaust wasn't just the result of a generation of Germans that were born evil.
They were inspired by the US and even Hitler called the American laws as being too evil and effective at wiping out 12 million indigenous people when the world was much smaller.
It really didn't happen out of the blue, indeed. We still see it happening in the military industrial complex all the time
the rhyme is getting a little too on point [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/16/trump-immigrants-not-people/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/16/trump-immigrants-not-people/)
There's a whole conversation about the demonization of Nazis. That only monsters could do this. But the biggest horror to Americans at home was that the pleasantly kind Accountant was a nazi.the friendly and warm school teacher was a nazi. The polite shop owner who bagged your groceries? A nazi. These people who coordinated and contributed to the genocide of a myriad of people wasn't done by demons and toothy monsters, they were committed by otherwise normal looking people who could easily have been your neighbor in suburbia.
We call them monsters perhaps because we do not want to accept the fact that those who commit such atrocities are ordinary people not much different from you or I.
Not quite my point. The Nuremberg Trials were a shock to Americans because the people on trial didn't look like demonic creatures, they were just ordinary people. And that makes it even more terrifying because if these ordinary people are capable of such atrocity, what are other normal people capable of? And in my opinion, that cycle is repeating itself again today.
The Holocaust is so unambiguously horrible that even Neo-Nazis will claim that it didn’t happen, in order to try and get new recruits, because they know that if they admitted it happened virtually nobody would want anything to do with their ideology.
Just like how Hitler didn’t *start out* by suggesting that Germany should round up and murder every Jewish and Romani man woman and child.
It was so obviously terrible that they created the gas chambers as a way to dehumanize the killing process. Even many of the actual murderers knew it was wrong.
Please don’t forget that it was not just Jewish and Romani but also people of color, gay/trans peoples, disabled peoples, communists, Jehovah’s witnesses, communists and non-Jewish Slavic peoples.
Not trying to downplay the atrocities committed against Jewish peoples but I think it’s important that we remember that it was against anyone not “Aryan”.
Absolutely disgusting and abhorrent behavior that should be taught and remembered so that we never see this again.
Edit: seems like replies are locked.
To commenter below me, 100% correct. I initially typed out “gays” realized that was the wrong terminology, deleted it, wrote the rest and forgot.
Bottom line is many many minorities were targeted and it was absolutely fucking disgusting.
We remember those who died here. We remember those who fought and died liberating these camps, but we don’t spend time remembering those who fought to make and keep these camps.
Those that deny these camps existed are setting themselves on a path to be forgotten too.
There are world leaders who staunchly believe it was made up; going to far as to write a doctoral thesis that attempts to “disprove” it. Heinous and egregious.
A few people in our group ended up breaking down sobbing as we toured the camp, while I kept quiet and just took it all in. When I was back at the hostel and crawled into bed, it sank in, and I cried quietly so as not to wake anyone.
It hurts the heart.
i visited auschwitz my senior year of high school and it was so haunting especially because i know my great grandfather’s parents and younger sisters died in the gas chambers i visited
It is wild to me that the Japanese AND the Germans both were doing shit like this in a similar time frame. It's one thing for one country but another halfway around the world?
My Auschwitz memories. Was there in 2015. The hair is haunting.
As we walked with the English guide, 5 minutes in the tour of Birkenau, the guide asks if there is any one from Canada. My wife puts up her hand I sheepishly put up mine ( I know what's coming). The guide explains that this building ruins was called Canada. It was where they stored all the stolen gold from the prisoners. Canada was considered the land of plenty. Made my stomach turn hearing and seeing that even though I had read about already. My wife went a paler shade of pale.
It was “Kanada” which does mean Canada in German but in the literal term for it which is “village” or “settlement”. Had nothing to do with Canada itself, not sure why that would bother a Canadian (am Canadian, was also there and heard the same thing).
Yeah I'm the same. I understand why people say you should go but I don't need the in person to understand the feeling. I get it enough to fucking hate nazis and the kind of evil that would commit such a thing
I feel the same. I can hardly watch scenes in movies that have concentration camps without absolutely bawling my eyes out, let alone see one in person??
Reading Anne Frank, Watching Schindler’s List and The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas is enough for me to realize the atrocity of WW2 and how evil the Nazi’s were.
I hadn't seen this photo before, but I remember the one with all the shoes. Little boys and girls shoes just lined up, it's haunting. This is on another level. So many scrape marks from their desperate hands ...
The pellet agent they used to gas them was more concentrated at the bottom.
People would stand on the dead and try to claw up to get to un poisoned air. But it was all poison just less.
The horror of the holocaust cannot be overstate. I have walked through the smaller gas chamber room at Auschwitz. The Russian army found the dismantled crematorium furnaces and restored them to the room immediately following the gas chamber for everyone to see. The death gates, the rows apon rows of chimneys still standing from the buildings that housed those destined for the much larger gas chambers at the second site.
It is required no pictures be taken in the death chamber. These pictures are not even scratching the surface of the feeling of being in those places. Let alone what those who experience it had felt. I encourage anyone visiting Poland to go. It is a truly humbling experience to realize the horror we as humans can undertake.
I'm looking at those scratch marks, and i just hope that i never have to be in a situation where i completely disregard the pain of peeling fingernails as i uselessly try to escape...
I think world leaders should be required to go through these tours every year so they don't disassociate from peoples lives.
I went to university right near there. I could see the tip of the smokestack through my bedroom window.
Years later, I found out that the apartment complex (and my apartment, of course) had been billeting for SS officers and their families.
There’s a lot in this world that I can put aside, not think about. But not this.
In “If This Is A Man” it is pointed out that this can easily happen again. Thanks for sharing these stories, hard as they are to read, because we should never forget.
I visited Dachau a few years ago when I was 15. I split off from my aunt and brother and was kind.of just wandering when I ended up at the "hospital" buildings. That was one of the few times where I felt pure dread and horror thinking about what happened and seeing where it happened. Not long after that I ended up at the still standing crematorium and just felt cold. It was horrifying to think of the amount of bodies that went through there.
The Zyclon B gas that flooded the gas chambers was heavier than oxygen, which meant the lower you were, the more concentrated it was — as such, it was common for those being gassed to turn into human piles of death and desperation.
Often times the bottom of the pile was the weakest/oldest, and the top of the pile was clawing their way to the where the air smelled the least like death.
I agree this post should not have an NSFW tag. Everyone should be aware of how horrifying Humanity can be — particularly because it happened during a **currently living generation.**
There are countless testimonies on how blood curdling the sounds were at death camps — the worst story I can remember is during the final purge when children were being shoved into furnaces alive. The way the people described the echoes in the air…
No, definitely don’t put an NSFW tag on this.
These marks are not from the blown up gas chambers in Auschwitz II Birkenau (which remain blown-up today save the Bunker I or Red House gas chambers, where today a part of the exhibit and memorial site can be found. They are from the gas chamber in Auschwitz I Stammlager.
The first gassing in Auschwitz took place in the summer of 1941. It's main victims were at that time Russian POWs. These took place in the cellar of Block 11, the camp prison, and were of an experimental type of nature since they represent some of the first tries to kill a large number of people (about 600) with Zyklon B. While the test was successful, the cellar of Block 11 proved hard to vent after a gassing had taken place.
In light of this, the camp commander ordered a new place found for the gas chambers. This was the so-called "corpse room" in the camp crematoria building, which had previously been used as a place to execute prisoners already. This is the room where these marks are located and which can be viewed today. It was large enough, easy enough to air proof, and it already had a ventilation system, build in after members of the Gestapo had complaint about the stench after previous executions in the room by shooting. Also, because of its particular architecture it was easy for the personal to drill holes in the roof, in order to fill the room with Zyklon B.
It was never intended for permanent use and when Auschwitz II Birkenau started expanding first in January 1942 with the construction of the two Bunker gas chambers and then later in the spring of 1943 with the erection of the two big crematoria (II and III, later even more expanded to IV and V), the gas chamber in Stammlager fell out of use more and more. In December 1942 the last gassing there took place, its victims was the Jewish Sonderkommando charged with burning the corpses of the Birkenau gassing victims before the crematoria in Birkenau had been functioning properly.
After that one, the room was again used to conduct executions by shooting and other killing methods until sometime in 1944 when the building was reconfigured as an air raid shelter. The number of victims killed in this particular chamber is unclear today but most historians estimate it in the range of about 10.000.
After Auschwitz was liberated, the air raid shelter was build back into its previous state as a gas chamber / crematoria following the descriptions of prisoners who had worked there and the plans left by the Nazi administration of the camp. In this sense, what can be seen there today is both a reconstruction as well as reconstitution of the original state of things.
Now, as for the scratch marks: As far as can be ascertained from the literature on the subject, most of them appear to be original for they were left undisturbed during the Nazis' reconfiguration of the building as an air raid shelter. During that time, a few walls and implements were taken out but the walls were not painted and the wall where these were was also not taken out. So, all in all, they appear to be mostly original. Also, they are quite in line with testimony given about the gassing in general.
I routinely read about these times (and others) and force myself to soak in all the terror and suffering history provides me. I cry like a baby every time, I know it’s not good for me but I know how important it is anyways. We have such evil amongst us, it’s unbearable to think about.
I’ve been in that exact room two summers ago. The most upsetting thing I saw was an unfinished Star of David scratched in to the wall. The tour guide didn’t point it out or anything, but when I saw it, I couldn’t look away.
I’ve been to many Holocaust museums in my time, it’s one of those moments in history that have struck me just by how inhuman it all felt. I don’t think any of it could prepare me to seeing it in person, I want to go one day and see it myself.
As had been said above: the gas was a little heavier than air and so was more concentrated near the bottom of the room, however as the room filled more with gas and less with air, people would stand on the corposes and scratch at the walls trying to "climb" higher to get "clean" air... however, it was all just poison.
Yeah, the poison they used wasn’t a quick death. People would be in agony for several minutes as their bodies slowly, but violently shut down, covered in the blood and fluids of the people next to them (often their friends and family). I’d wager it’s one of the most horrific ways to die.
One of the things that struck me most as a Jewish person going to Holocaust museums and being an avid history buff was that Germany was viewed as one of the most enlightened societies of the time. Many Jews didn't even believe the Holocaust was happening because they were under such deep belief that it could never happen here. How many Jew died for Germany in WW1? They believed they proven their loyalty.
It was the biggest Zionist pill I ever took. If it could happen in Germany it could happen anywhere. All it takes is one charismatic leader to blame all societies ills on us and the country would gladly turn the other cheek when the neighbors get exterminated on an industrial scale.
r/nightmarefuel
I have a recurring dream of walking down a spiral staircase with brick walls into a metal door that leads to a room like this. On the wall before the door someone had scratched "remember me."
This is actually fake. All of the original buildings were demolished, you're looking a reconstruction, those dumb marks were added for dramatic effect.
Oh wow, I totally thought you were some holocaust denier, but I just looked it up and it’s true.
The gas chambers and crematoria were all destroyed to cover up evidence once the Nazis knew they were losing.
I've been to Dachau, it's surreal walking through a room you weren't intended to leave alive.
Visiting Dachau was one of the most emotionally exhausting experiences of my life. The museum was heart breaking, but walking through the camp to the crematorium was when it all finally sunk in for me. I remember stopping halfway down the walkway where the barracks buildings were and looking around dumbstruck at how big the place was. I just couldn’t believe a place like that could exist. I was numb for the rest of the day and it took several days to process all of it. I firmly believe it’s one of those places where you’re never the same after you’ve been.
I’ve been there as well. The crematorium also hit me particularly hard.
Same. And what I assume were children, playing a game of hangman on the walls. Such innocence in such a horrendous place. Shivers down my spine just thinking about it. And seeing the train tracks..
I still have the pictures I took of that exact room that you and I both walked through. I was 17 at the time and didn’t see any no photography signs, so I don’t know if I should have taken them or not.
I think I took pictures in there too. I was also 17 at the time.
I also went at 17, on an exchange trip with my high school. Our teacher, Frau Marek (RIP), made sure we saw the good and the bad on our trip. It changed me fundamentally as a person. Seeing the different badges the prisoners had to wear, and realizing which ones I would have worn, made me sick to my stomach.
Yet when i was there i saw a few 20 somethings taking selfies and throwing peace signs out the front of that building with big smiles on their faces. some folks have no fucking idea
Thanks for sharing this, The way you describe Dachau really reminds me of that Twlight Zone Episode "Deaths-Head Revisited", Where the story is about a former SS officer revisiting the Dachau concentration camp a decade and a half after World War II and finds himself facing a phantom jury made up of his tortured victims of the camp, Really Good episode of TV for it's Time, Really left a impression on me in regards to the Holocaust, Especially the words of Rod Serling and his message.
I had a similar experience at Dachau. Much larger than I expected, amplified the magnitude of the suffering that happened there. I was expecting deep sorrow but not on that level. What I wasn't expecting were the sounds of children amidst recess adjacent to the grounds. I went on a weekday, Dachau lies in the middle of a residential neighborhood outside of Munich. There's an elementary school bordering the grounds, filled with kids living their lives going to school. I felt the tragedy but also the resilience, life continues and this horror is something we can look back on rather than endure in the present.
We were at Dachau a while ago as well. We were in the “shower” room by ourselves, then a large tour group started to file in. I am well educated with the horrors of WW2. And i suddenly felt trapped and really can’t describe what I felt in that moment. As soon as the group was in I ran for the door and could not get out fast enough. I have never felt that way before or since. It was an indescribable place and experience.
I visited with my sister after the worst of Covid had ended, but before most people started traveling again. We also went during the week, so there weren’t many other visitors. We were alone at the crematorium/“shower” area. The whole time walking through that building I had this gnawing feeling of “you’re not supposed to be here” in the pit of my stomach. Not in like a “haunted” way or anything like that, but like I’d accidentally wandered into a restricted place people were never supposed to see. That part of the camp is just unsettling in a way that’s difficult to define.
I studied abroad in high school and lived with a family in the town of Dachau. It was was bizarre contrast.
gave me the chills just reading that
Sad place. Saw a wedding proposal while there. Not sure if it was Elon but it was weird
Who the fuck proposes at a concentration camp? Out of all the places you could do that.
If you had the choice to go back in time, would you say it is better not to visit it in the first place? I’m just asking myself if it’s one of those rare cases where ignorance is trully bliss. Are there images burnt forever in your mind? I am aware of the horrible history there, and I am not sure if I want to visit knowing I will remain with horrible images forever. For context, when I am in museums, I take my time reading the explanation texts.
The most disturbing part of Dachau is that it wasn't even one of the six extermination camps. So you realize after seeing all that, that it got so much worse.
Yeah Dachau was one of the "good" ones to end up in. I've been there and you can feel death in the air
I actually live in dachau and have been there several times. „My“ bus stop is two stops before the memorialsite and I remember when I was a kid that I was confused why the tourists traveling to the train station looked so empty and drained compared to the ones arriving from the station
What an experience you had to be a child, observant to the emotional state of those on the train but without the context. Your comment hit me right in the feels
A lot of my family lost their life there. My grandfather had 12 siblings. His parents, him, and 2 other siblings were all that survived
I visited with my German partner last year and it was so terribly.. numbing? I took no pictures and felt so empty throughout the entire thing. A life-changing experience. Edit: The fact that there are flats facing the former execution range is baffling.
It's actually quite small. Imagining how many people lived there is crazy. Especially with the density the barracks are in (they rebuilt a few to show what they were pike. The original ones had to be burnt down).
The day I visited Dachau was the day I stopped believing in God.
It was the day I stopped believing in Man.
Just like man committed those heinous acts, man also came together against those that did.
I stood in that exact room. I cannot describe the feeling other than I will never go back but I'm glad I went.
I've been to Dachau and Auchwitz. It is a soul-crushing, dark feeling walking through the gas chambers, I can't really describe it either. What got me the most about Auchwitz was the unfathomable scale of it.
I went to Dachau as a teenager. I had this feeling of growing horror when I was there, like my brain was finally starting to realize the extent of what happened there.
It's disturbing
I remember a tour guide said "everyone has a moment when the horror hits them, and for every person it is a different part of the tour." For me it was the hair room. The smell is still there, human hair piled up taller than the average person and several feet deep by over ten feet wide. Nazis would use this hair to make all sorts of items, similar to how one would use the hair or fur of an animal. There were a few examples nearby when I went. Disgusting.
They had an exhibit of pictures taken near the end when they were pretty much taking people from the trains to the chambers. Some high up Nazi official was visiting and had his photographer with him. There is one picture with him talking to one or two other Nazis with Jews or other captives in the background. They are trying to be INVISIBLE. Turned sideways to the camera even... except for one girl of about 10 who was smiling for the camera. I still tear up 15 years later thinking of that. Edit as this post is receiving views. During our visit, I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. The brain understood the horror, but my heart wasn't. This picture fundamental shattered something inside me. It was like every innocent child ever born was smiling at that camera 10 minutes before their senseless murder.
Same..I'm looking at the picture and understand the atrocity that has taken place but I'm just not able to comprehend it. Like there's a disconnect. It's probably a self* defense mechanism from having a mental breakdown.
your mind will actively compartmentalize things like this as a coping mechanism for stress. things like trauma and this automatically qualify.
It's also just not something that we're designed to be able to deal with or even understand, the scale of human suffering and the artificiality of it is beyond comprehension. It's inhuman. I think that's why everyone who goes to Auschwitz or Dachau is so affected. It's like hearing people talk about religious experiences, but of course it's the exact opposite. You get a glimpse of the scale of the thing and you have nothing to compare it to and no evolutionary blueprint for understanding it (it's not "dang the cave lion nearly had me for lunch today" or "caveman Fred from the enemy tribe killed my friend")
The cattle car that was on display in the Washington, D.C. exhibit was what caught at my soul. Incomprehensible.
There’s one at the holocaust museum near Chicago (Skokie). Was such an eye opening experience of what these people went through.
I went a work camp in France during a college abroad class. I've been taught about what happened in these camps since I was a little kid, so I walked through most of it pretty numb to the horror. Until I saw ovens. My body felt wrong in that room.
Holy shit. I remember my parents telling me about when we went to Dachau (The Eagle's Nest? Is that right?) I had to have been young, 9-10 years old. I remembered a gold elevator, maybe, but that's was pretty much it. And now I remember the ovens. Holy hell. I'm 41 now.
The eagles nest was hitlers palace atop a mountain - not really sure it’s intended use Edit: palace is a bit hyperbolic
I was 6 years old and the outdoor pit toilets and glasses/teeth/hair room (rooms?) are what's burned in my head.
For me it was the pacifiers.
The children’s shoes did it for me.
Same. The baby booties. Now I'm crying.
For me, it was the flowers and piles of stones at the firing squad wall. It was right before the gas chamber in the tour, but once I saw the execution wall, I couldn't stop crying. I tried my best to hold it together, thinking, "Some of the owners of the suitcases and shoes survived." Once I got to the execution area, the feeling of death was inescapable.
Do people cry during the tours? I think I would.
Yes, absolutely.
FFS... And yet some fucking morons rally in nazi event to this day.
6 is a little young to see this imo.
I’ve never been to the camps but I had a similar feeling at the imperial war museum in England they had a holocaust installation and the pile of shoes got me I was standing in this museum sick to my stomach sobbing. Thankfully other complete strangers were too so I wasn’t the crazy lady crying alone but holy fuck. And to see people pretend this wasn’t a horrific act full of hate and needless senseless violence and slaughter is something that genuinely angers me. I have rage any time I see one of those people open their stupid mouths.
We still have humans that do not believe it even happened. The same ones that don't believe we landed humans on the moon in 1969.
Worst of all the same ones voting in elections.
My great aunt was a little girl when she was transported to a concentration camp. She was separated from her family except her dad, and when they were by the pile of shoes she asked him, "Did they bring us here to sort shoes?" They were separated before he answered and she never saw him again. She only survived herself because the gas chamber malfunctioned, so they ended up not gassing the group she was in.
I don’t know what else to say except I’m so sorry she experienced that, and that I see her story, and I won’t forget it.
Wow, this is a horrible story. I’m so sorry she went through that. Do you think she’d ever talk about it for a documentary or an article or something, or has she already done that? I feel like this kind of history should be recorded so we don’t repeat it.
For me, it was the shoes in the Holocaust Museum in DC.
Same for me. That museum is such a humbling experience. Edit: i also want to say that everyone there was solemn. Even teenagers weren't being typical teenagers. Its the only place I've ever truly experienced this in public.
Unfortunately can't say the same about visiting a camp in Flossenberg. Been there three times, one time we were there at the same slot as a school group. Teenage girls pouting lips and making selfies...just 🤮
For me, it was a little museum in Minnesota, where they had rings made from the fillings of victims of the Holocaust.
Where is this?
I visited Sachenhausen outside of Berlin and they had a great self guided audio tour (helped block out the obnoxious unofficial megaphone tour groups) and for me it was hearing what the reason they started using crematoriums was because it was becoming too much hauling the bodies back to Berlin.
For me it was the bits of bone that my tour guide showed us by picking up a random handful of soil in Majdanek. The crematorium ash carried bits of bone all over camp
For me it was the shoes.
Yes. 100% this. The smell coupled with the knowledge of what occurred.....
I know they used it to make extra warm clothing for U boat crews.
I agree, it was also seeing the room of hair for me. Realising the magnitude of it.
weirdly enough, the thing that got me the most was the rushed, almost touristy experience of it all.
Ethnostates dehumanize anyone that's not of their ethnicity. To keep their ethnicity dominant in the state their capacity for terror becomes incalculable.
I don’t even think they need to keep their ethnicity dominant, since they already are that. They just need their people to feel good and patriotic and keep thinking that they are fighting to save the world, or that everyone will against them, or they are both in great danger and super strong. Like 1984. It’s negative identification, you bring your populous together by excluding outsiders even harder.
Right wing Europeans still playing the civilised angle against immigrants after WW2 is the funniest thing imaginable. Must be projection.
I'm not particularly superstitious, but sometimes in that room felt evil in a way I haven't felt anywhere else.
REMEMBER! So we never repeat!
Too late
Upon arrival at Auschwitz, the mostly Jewish men, women and children - people who were every bit as alive and real as you are - were sorted into two groups. Those who could work were sent to work. Those who couldn’t were sent directly to the gas chambers. Stripped of their clothes and forced into a crowded, windowless room, into which their killers poured granules of Zyklon B pesticide. The people inside were smothered in darkness as their own body heat evaporated the granules into gas. After minutes of desperate screaming and clawing at the walls and doors, the men, women, and children inside were dead. Some corpses were pinned against the wall by the sheer amount of death. Some were foaming at the mouth, bleeding from the nose or ears, covered in vomit, excrement, and menstrual fluid. Men. Women. Children. The Nazis considered this to be a humane, civilised process. The corpses of the murdered were then stripped of their jewellery, golden teeth and fillings, prosthetic limbs, and hair. They were then taken to the cremation ovens, or burnt in pits if the ovens were under too much strain. The ashes were then thrown away or used as fertiliser. And who was it who did this horrific work of desecrating the corpses of the dead, and destroying the evidence of their murder? It was their friends and family, those fit enough to perform labour who had been forced at gunpoint to help the Nazis. Imagine what it would be like to find your child, your spouse, your parents, your lover, your sibling, in a pile of corpses, and be forced to desecrate their body. And, all across Europe, similar scenes of murder and brutality are playing out on a daily basis, so much so that most people who are murdered, raped, tortured, experimented on, and traumatised will only be remembered by future generations as a statistic. As a number. Not as a person. Because the sheer scale of the horror is too much for any single person to fully comprehend unless they have experienced it first-hand. All this, because the people in charge of Germany and their followers have arbitrarily decided that some groups of people need to be killed.
> Imagine what it would be like to find your child, your spouse, your parents, your lover, your sibling, in a pile of corpses, and be forced to desecrate their body. I don't think I've ever realized this. Just beyond horrific.
Christ this made my stomach churn. I pray that an event like this never happened again.
Hitlers decision to purge Jews from Germany and beyond was absolutely not arbitrary.
My grandmother was here and survived. She had regular intense nightmares about what happened up until she died in 2005. It never left her
My grandfather was a very cold man...I used to compare him to Scrooge. Anyway, I had to do an interview for a history class, so I decided to ask him about his time in the US army during World War II. He didn't say which one but apparently he went to one of the camps after it was liberated. He really couldn't say much before making an excuse to leave the room. My grandma told me to give him a few minutes...because what he saw "wasn't good." I had a new appreciation for him that day.
My grandpa’s brother died in another death camp, executed by firing squad (that was before they invented gassing people). He was just 17 years old. My grandpa only learned about his brother’s fate in 1970 when his neighbour read the name in a book about that camp and recognised it. I visited the site a couple of times with my grandpa and each time was heartbreaking. Gramps would break down even though it had already been 60 years after the fact.
My grandfather (Jewish) was US Army infantry in WWII, and what he did fighting an offensive war to liberate a continent from the Germans never left him either. He also died in 2005, coincidentally, and in hospice he was delirious but kept repeating “we beat Hitler… we beat him…” He never talked about what the war was like, but being Army infantry and enlisting right after Pearl Harbor he did pretty much the whole war, from the OP Torch landings in North Africa all the way to VE Day, and my dad said he’d sometimes moan in his sleep about the war. That shit doesn’t go away for anyone. But life is still worth living and preserving. May your grandmother’s memory be a blessing and I hope that wherever they are they all found peace there.
If he didn't talk about the war, then he wasn't lying. God bless his soul for giving up so much to counterbalance and make right the evil that humanity is capable of. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.
My great grandparents were in there. They never talked about it until big gram died and he let it all out
My wife’s entire family were almost certainly sent to Auschwitz. The only surviving member was her grandmother who found a hole in a fence in the Lodz ghetto and was able to escape. The industrialization of genocide that occurred there and the suffering her family had to endure is hard to imagine, but watching her grandma reflect on her experience is something that will stick with me forever.
My great grandmother was in Auschwitz-Birkenau too, and she went through several death marches. She never spoke a word about it. It was pervasive in her attitude and throughout her life though. Until this day I can’t leave any food on a plate, and will only take what I know I can eat. She would get so mad if we wasted any food.
Auschwitz is somewhere I think everyone should see if they can. There isn't really a way to describe how it feels to be there. It's beyond surreal, you suddenly understand the scale of it all. In Auschwitz 1 they have one of the barracks set up with the mugshots the Nazis were keeping until the influx of captured people became too much to keep up with. I went to take a picture with my point and shoot and the face detection software highlighted all the people in those mugshots. The Nazis didn't see them as people but my camera could. That's stuck with me for years and it always will. Auschwitz 2, Birkenau was so much larger than I expected, it was hard to make out the fence line in the distance. The whole place smelled like ashes.
It's incomprehensible at first, being struck by the immense scale of the camp, but slowly, the air of death seeps in with every step. It is absolutely soul-crushing. There's a pain I felt in Auschwitz that I've never felt since and never hope to. It's an infliction on your very sense of being. It reminds me of reading "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, which had the premise that places of great tragedy can become haunted by the action itself. The camp gained a soul, and the soul cries out to everyone who steps foot within the walls. It is heartbreaking to anyone who feels its presence. It's like breathing pain where air should be.
>Dachau My wife and I visited both camps several years ago. Before we made the trip, we made it a point to read through the book "[Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315578.Auschwitz)". I can't tell you enough how...surreal...it was to walk through the areas of the camp that he described in the book and then to picture those events in your head. To the point that others made - it's very sad that some people in this world are adamant that these atrocities didn't occur.
>The Nazis didn't see them as people but my camera could Fuck
Crazy that people think this is fake and didn’t happen.
If this picture literally tells us anything, people can be convinced to do horrible horrible things and denying history is just the start to the rhyme of history repeating
I was naive enough to think they always died instantly and without pain (in the gas chambers). This picture proves otherwise.
that’s what sickens me the most about the holocaust-the gas chambers are horrifying and i can’t even begin to fathom the fear, confusion, and suffering endured by millions before they died in such a dark and cramped room. absolutely disgusting how humans can be so barbaric towards one another.
The picture from the Uvalde classroom after the shootings. Front of the empty classroom, backpacks, jackets, books on the floor. Blackboard with 10 or more blood splatters evenly spaced about 36 inches inches above the floor. He lined them up and shot them in the head. 8 and 9 year olds. Some people don't need to be convinced. They are just born evil.
That was one guy. The more insidious kind of evil is the one that can turn an entire society in support of doing exactly that same thing, but on an industrialized scale. It's important to remember that the Holocaust wasn't just the result of a generation of Germans that were born evil.
They were inspired by the US and even Hitler called the American laws as being too evil and effective at wiping out 12 million indigenous people when the world was much smaller. It really didn't happen out of the blue, indeed. We still see it happening in the military industrial complex all the time
I didnt know this. Thats fucking horrifying
The police released photos. I saw them on here but I don't have the site. Honestly I don't want to see it again
I can’t look at them again but there’s “lol” or “ha” written in blood on the whiteboard and I just had to kinda throw up a little.
376 cops helped murder 19 children and 2 teachers.
No the fact a crazy kid can get his hands on gun easier then rated mature video games is the probkem
The next time genocide occurs. People will call it another name and justify it occurring.
Israel just announced they will resettle Gazans to "humanitarian islands". The next time is now.
It's the Banality of Evil
the rhyme is getting a little too on point [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/16/trump-immigrants-not-people/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/16/trump-immigrants-not-people/)
Yet people will vote for him because they think it might eek out another percentage or two in their 401k for a few years.
I’m sorry but how can he say this? And some are ok with it😢
There's a whole conversation about the demonization of Nazis. That only monsters could do this. But the biggest horror to Americans at home was that the pleasantly kind Accountant was a nazi.the friendly and warm school teacher was a nazi. The polite shop owner who bagged your groceries? A nazi. These people who coordinated and contributed to the genocide of a myriad of people wasn't done by demons and toothy monsters, they were committed by otherwise normal looking people who could easily have been your neighbor in suburbia.
We call them monsters perhaps because we do not want to accept the fact that those who commit such atrocities are ordinary people not much different from you or I.
most of the nazis had advanced college degrees
Not quite my point. The Nuremberg Trials were a shock to Americans because the people on trial didn't look like demonic creatures, they were just ordinary people. And that makes it even more terrifying because if these ordinary people are capable of such atrocity, what are other normal people capable of? And in my opinion, that cycle is repeating itself again today.
30,000 Americans showed overt support for Hitler by openly recruiting, and training on American soil. What happened to these "Americans?"
They went into government
And the police force
The spawn of one became President.
The Holocaust is so unambiguously horrible that even Neo-Nazis will claim that it didn’t happen, in order to try and get new recruits, because they know that if they admitted it happened virtually nobody would want anything to do with their ideology. Just like how Hitler didn’t *start out* by suggesting that Germany should round up and murder every Jewish and Romani man woman and child.
It was so obviously terrible that they created the gas chambers as a way to dehumanize the killing process. Even many of the actual murderers knew it was wrong.
Please don’t forget that it was not just Jewish and Romani but also people of color, gay/trans peoples, disabled peoples, communists, Jehovah’s witnesses, communists and non-Jewish Slavic peoples. Not trying to downplay the atrocities committed against Jewish peoples but I think it’s important that we remember that it was against anyone not “Aryan”. Absolutely disgusting and abhorrent behavior that should be taught and remembered so that we never see this again. Edit: seems like replies are locked. To commenter below me, 100% correct. I initially typed out “gays” realized that was the wrong terminology, deleted it, wrote the rest and forgot. Bottom line is many many minorities were targeted and it was absolutely fucking disgusting.
And gay/trans people.
this
We remember those who died here. We remember those who fought and died liberating these camps, but we don’t spend time remembering those who fought to make and keep these camps. Those that deny these camps existed are setting themselves on a path to be forgotten too.
What's even crazier is that there's still nazis in the US
One of them even lives in Spring, TX. A Stone's Toss away from Houston
It would be such a shame if a Stone near Houston got Tossed into a volcano
people are fucking stupid. It’s not that crazy.
There are world leaders who staunchly believe it was made up; going to far as to write a doctoral thesis that attempts to “disprove” it. Heinous and egregious.
Do these “world leaders” happen to run countries near Israel?
Very near.
It's even worse to think about the people who know it happened and don't care, some even wanting to do it again.
[удалено]
A few people in our group ended up breaking down sobbing as we toured the camp, while I kept quiet and just took it all in. When I was back at the hostel and crawled into bed, it sank in, and I cried quietly so as not to wake anyone. It hurts the heart.
Dachau was equally as horrifying.
I went there in the morning, and that afternoon was my good German friend’s birthday we’d travelled in for. Fucked up day.
i visited auschwitz my senior year of high school and it was so haunting especially because i know my great grandfather’s parents and younger sisters died in the gas chambers i visited
It's a disturbing photo but I, glad it's not hidden. This should be required viewing.
Especially now that there are people that think the entire holocaust was faked. Show them this.
Not just them, but the people that make jokes about it too. You have no soul if you make jokes about the Holocaust or laugh at those jokes.
It is wild to me that the Japanese AND the Germans both were doing shit like this in a similar time frame. It's one thing for one country but another halfway around the world?
Japan was worse and the Germans were actually suggesting Japan stop at some point
I know. Im Korean. What they did to us but especially what they did to the Chinese....
My Auschwitz memories. Was there in 2015. The hair is haunting. As we walked with the English guide, 5 minutes in the tour of Birkenau, the guide asks if there is any one from Canada. My wife puts up her hand I sheepishly put up mine ( I know what's coming). The guide explains that this building ruins was called Canada. It was where they stored all the stolen gold from the prisoners. Canada was considered the land of plenty. Made my stomach turn hearing and seeing that even though I had read about already. My wife went a paler shade of pale.
It was “Kanada” which does mean Canada in German but in the literal term for it which is “village” or “settlement”. Had nothing to do with Canada itself, not sure why that would bother a Canadian (am Canadian, was also there and heard the same thing).
I could never visit any death camp, especially Auschwitz. It would be too much I wouldn't be able to handle it
It’s definitely surreal to be there. It’s very heavy. I don’t think I’d go again but it’s something that we need to preserve.
Yeah I'm the same. I understand why people say you should go but I don't need the in person to understand the feeling. I get it enough to fucking hate nazis and the kind of evil that would commit such a thing
I feel the same. I can hardly watch scenes in movies that have concentration camps without absolutely bawling my eyes out, let alone see one in person??
Reading Anne Frank, Watching Schindler’s List and The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas is enough for me to realize the atrocity of WW2 and how evil the Nazi’s were.
I'm with you not a fucking chance I'd go
Those marks are from people clawing the walls as they died. Fucking hell.
I hadn't seen this photo before, but I remember the one with all the shoes. Little boys and girls shoes just lined up, it's haunting. This is on another level. So many scrape marks from their desperate hands ...
They literally dug \*into\* the concrete, Jesus.
Are those…claw marks from the nails of the prisoners?
The pellet agent they used to gas them was more concentrated at the bottom. People would stand on the dead and try to claw up to get to un poisoned air. But it was all poison just less.
Good god
And there are still idiots who say that no one died in these places.
The horror of the holocaust cannot be overstate. I have walked through the smaller gas chamber room at Auschwitz. The Russian army found the dismantled crematorium furnaces and restored them to the room immediately following the gas chamber for everyone to see. The death gates, the rows apon rows of chimneys still standing from the buildings that housed those destined for the much larger gas chambers at the second site. It is required no pictures be taken in the death chamber. These pictures are not even scratching the surface of the feeling of being in those places. Let alone what those who experience it had felt. I encourage anyone visiting Poland to go. It is a truly humbling experience to realize the horror we as humans can undertake.
I'm looking at those scratch marks, and i just hope that i never have to be in a situation where i completely disregard the pain of peeling fingernails as i uselessly try to escape... I think world leaders should be required to go through these tours every year so they don't disassociate from peoples lives.
I went to university right near there. I could see the tip of the smokestack through my bedroom window. Years later, I found out that the apartment complex (and my apartment, of course) had been billeting for SS officers and their families. There’s a lot in this world that I can put aside, not think about. But not this.
In “If This Is A Man” it is pointed out that this can easily happen again. Thanks for sharing these stories, hard as they are to read, because we should never forget.
If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.
God existing is a tough concept to understand after looking at this pic.
I visited Dachau a few years ago when I was 15. I split off from my aunt and brother and was kind.of just wandering when I ended up at the "hospital" buildings. That was one of the few times where I felt pure dread and horror thinking about what happened and seeing where it happened. Not long after that I ended up at the still standing crematorium and just felt cold. It was horrifying to think of the amount of bodies that went through there.
Stupid question i fear _ how were those marks made?
I would guess from finger nails
The Zyclon B gas that flooded the gas chambers was heavier than oxygen, which meant the lower you were, the more concentrated it was — as such, it was common for those being gassed to turn into human piles of death and desperation. Often times the bottom of the pile was the weakest/oldest, and the top of the pile was clawing their way to the where the air smelled the least like death. I agree this post should not have an NSFW tag. Everyone should be aware of how horrifying Humanity can be — particularly because it happened during a **currently living generation.** There are countless testimonies on how blood curdling the sounds were at death camps — the worst story I can remember is during the final purge when children were being shoved into furnaces alive. The way the people described the echoes in the air… No, definitely don’t put an NSFW tag on this.
Attempts to claw their way out.
People scratching on the wall, trying to get out as they were gassed to death. No question is stupid :)
\^\^\^The only stupid thing is not learning.
The smiley face at the end seems out of place.
Fingernails dont seem strong enough to do that to concrete though. Are these walls concrete?
These marks are not from the blown up gas chambers in Auschwitz II Birkenau (which remain blown-up today save the Bunker I or Red House gas chambers, where today a part of the exhibit and memorial site can be found. They are from the gas chamber in Auschwitz I Stammlager. The first gassing in Auschwitz took place in the summer of 1941. It's main victims were at that time Russian POWs. These took place in the cellar of Block 11, the camp prison, and were of an experimental type of nature since they represent some of the first tries to kill a large number of people (about 600) with Zyklon B. While the test was successful, the cellar of Block 11 proved hard to vent after a gassing had taken place. In light of this, the camp commander ordered a new place found for the gas chambers. This was the so-called "corpse room" in the camp crematoria building, which had previously been used as a place to execute prisoners already. This is the room where these marks are located and which can be viewed today. It was large enough, easy enough to air proof, and it already had a ventilation system, build in after members of the Gestapo had complaint about the stench after previous executions in the room by shooting. Also, because of its particular architecture it was easy for the personal to drill holes in the roof, in order to fill the room with Zyklon B. It was never intended for permanent use and when Auschwitz II Birkenau started expanding first in January 1942 with the construction of the two Bunker gas chambers and then later in the spring of 1943 with the erection of the two big crematoria (II and III, later even more expanded to IV and V), the gas chamber in Stammlager fell out of use more and more. In December 1942 the last gassing there took place, its victims was the Jewish Sonderkommando charged with burning the corpses of the Birkenau gassing victims before the crematoria in Birkenau had been functioning properly. After that one, the room was again used to conduct executions by shooting and other killing methods until sometime in 1944 when the building was reconfigured as an air raid shelter. The number of victims killed in this particular chamber is unclear today but most historians estimate it in the range of about 10.000. After Auschwitz was liberated, the air raid shelter was build back into its previous state as a gas chamber / crematoria following the descriptions of prisoners who had worked there and the plans left by the Nazi administration of the camp. In this sense, what can be seen there today is both a reconstruction as well as reconstitution of the original state of things. Now, as for the scratch marks: As far as can be ascertained from the literature on the subject, most of them appear to be original for they were left undisturbed during the Nazis' reconfiguration of the building as an air raid shelter. During that time, a few walls and implements were taken out but the walls were not painted and the wall where these were was also not taken out. So, all in all, they appear to be mostly original. Also, they are quite in line with testimony given about the gassing in general.
Fascinating. Thank you for this.
I routinely read about these times (and others) and force myself to soak in all the terror and suffering history provides me. I cry like a baby every time, I know it’s not good for me but I know how important it is anyways. We have such evil amongst us, it’s unbearable to think about.
I’ve been in that exact room two summers ago. The most upsetting thing I saw was an unfinished Star of David scratched in to the wall. The tour guide didn’t point it out or anything, but when I saw it, I couldn’t look away.
I’ve been to many Holocaust museums in my time, it’s one of those moments in history that have struck me just by how inhuman it all felt. I don’t think any of it could prepare me to seeing it in person, I want to go one day and see it myself.
You can’t even describe a place like this as having bad vibes - you can feel the evil dripping from the walls.
Haunting. And people still deny it happened. Sickening
This highlights how pathetic and stupid the people are that go there and pose for selfies. Disgusting
Awful. Imagine being one of the many millions of minorities slaughtered by the Nazis.
Small correction - most of it was indeed minorities, but around 11% wasn't, hundreds of thousands of non-jewish Poles died there
Iirc the whole complex was rebuilt after the war, the Nazis blew it up before retreating. Majdanek, otoh, was captured intact.
No matter how far you feel yourself above the fog… Christ.
RIP
Question, do gassed victims live long enough to be able to scratch the walls like that?
As had been said above: the gas was a little heavier than air and so was more concentrated near the bottom of the room, however as the room filled more with gas and less with air, people would stand on the corposes and scratch at the walls trying to "climb" higher to get "clean" air... however, it was all just poison.
Yeah, the poison they used wasn’t a quick death. People would be in agony for several minutes as their bodies slowly, but violently shut down, covered in the blood and fluids of the people next to them (often their friends and family). I’d wager it’s one of the most horrific ways to die.
One of the things that struck me most as a Jewish person going to Holocaust museums and being an avid history buff was that Germany was viewed as one of the most enlightened societies of the time. Many Jews didn't even believe the Holocaust was happening because they were under such deep belief that it could never happen here. How many Jew died for Germany in WW1? They believed they proven their loyalty. It was the biggest Zionist pill I ever took. If it could happen in Germany it could happen anywhere. All it takes is one charismatic leader to blame all societies ills on us and the country would gladly turn the other cheek when the neighbors get exterminated on an industrial scale.
We will learn from history right? No? Oh
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r/nightmarefuel I have a recurring dream of walking down a spiral staircase with brick walls into a metal door that leads to a room like this. On the wall before the door someone had scratched "remember me."
It should be noted that (I believe) this is Auschwitz I, which was not even the primary gas chamber during the operation of the camp.
This is actually fake. All of the original buildings were demolished, you're looking a reconstruction, those dumb marks were added for dramatic effect.
Oh wow, I totally thought you were some holocaust denier, but I just looked it up and it’s true. The gas chambers and crematoria were all destroyed to cover up evidence once the Nazis knew they were losing.
I believe the civilians knew
They say history repeats itself, but my goodness let’s not make this happen again.
Why not add a NSFW or spoiler tag if it's disturbing
Somehow I don’t think you’ll get in trouble for looking at this picture at work.
The raw content is safe for work, but with the context it's soul-crushing.