Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 1, 1995 TAG: 9505040024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press DACHAU, Germany
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On a killing ground where Nazi SS men murdered inmates for 12 years, survivors and their GI rescuers solemnly marked the 50th anniversary Sunday of the liberation of Nazi Germany's first concentration camp.
During prayer services and speeches in a steady rain, they said fascism's crimes must never be repeated, its victims never forgotten.
``Never again fascism, never again war, never again Dachau,'' said Max Mannheimer, a 75-year-old Czech-born Jew who survived the camp.
More than 30,000 inmates died here - murdered, worked to death or simply allowed to succumb to disease. When U.S. Army units of the 42nd Infantry, the Rainbow Division, liberated the camp, they found rail cars full of corpses and bodies stacked like cordwood outside the crematorium - the SS had run out of coal to burn them.
Some 2,000 survivors and their families from at least 16 countries returned for the half-century anniversary along with 95 U.S. veterans and their family members. They were guests of the Bavarian state government and activists who believe in keeping alive the memory of wartime atrocities.
Sheltering themselves with umbrellas, a column of survivors walked past watchtowers, the former site of the medical experiment building, and plots where filthy barracks once stood.
The procession moved past sites where guard dogs ripped prisoners apart and past the moat surrounding the camp where others were shot dead.
The survivors went to the crematorium, where SS guards hanged prisoners from hooks and then threw them into the ovens.
The head of Germany's Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, thanked the American liberators of Dachau. Among the camp's survivors was the woman who would become his wife.
``We bitterly resent those whose arrogance imposed their evil on humanity,'' said John McGovern of Toledo, Ohio, president of the 42nd Rainbow Division Veterans Association. The veterans' group, he added, distinguished clearly between the Nazi war criminals and today's democratic Germany.
``It is only by being aware of past excesses and usurpation of individual rights, vividly demonstrated by 12 years of barbarism at Dachau, that the ever-present threats to your own liberty can be thwarted,'' McGovern said.
Bavarian state Gov. Edmund Stoiber told the survivors and several thousand Germans, ``I feel ashamed that the crimes against those people were perpetrated by and in the name of Germans.''
Adolf Hitler's political opponents were the first to be marched through Dachau's gates on March 22, 1933, a few weeks after he came to power. They were followed by clergymen, the handicapped, homosexuals, Jews, Gypsies, resistance fighters and prisoners of war.
Mannheimer, a painter living in Munich, called the Dachau camp a ``school for killing people'' that ``trained the majority of future commandants of the many camps of the Third Reich and the countries it occupied.''
Dachau's trail, Mannheimer said, led to ``Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka,'' where millions of European Jews were gassed.
The Dachau camp barracks were torn down, but one was rebuilt after the war as a display for visitors.
An 80-year-old former Belgian resistance fighter, wearing the striped cloth hat he wore as a Dachau inmate, sat leaning on his cane inside the building, lost in thought.
``I came back to mourn others in my resistance group who died in this camp. They were all brave men,'' said Emil Crappe.
A total of 1,106 Catholic priests, mostly Poles, perished and were cremated at Dachau, making it the largest cemetery for priests in the world, said Cardinal Friedrich Wetter of Munich. Two of the priests were canonized.
At a Mass, Wetter said that on Good Friday in 1943, an SS man at Dachau whipped a priest with a piece of barbed wire, then wrapped it around the priest's head, shouting, ``Did you know that Christ died today?''
by CNB