Yesterday, May 8th, was the anniversary of the end of the war and with it the end of the Nazi dictatorship. Dachau is a special kind of memorial site for the end of the Nazi dictatorship. The Dachau concentration camp was one of the first in Germany. The Nazis locked people up there as early as March 1933. In Dachau, the camp commandant Theodor Eicke developed a “camp order,” which he later transferred to the other concentration camps as “inspector of the concentration camps.” Dachau was the organizational “model” for the concentration camps in Germany.
In April 1945, the SS sent thousands of prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp on death marches to prevent their liberation by the Allies. On April 29, 1945, the remaining prisoners were freed by US Army units.
Also at the end of April 1945, Dachau citizens tried to put an end to the Nazi administration in the city. An SS commando in the city, possibly accompanied by Oswald Pohl, the last “inspector of the concentration camps”, violently ended the uprising together with SS men from the concentration camp on April 28th; six insurgent Dachau residents were shot.
In her memory there is a memorial plaque at the Sparkasse in the old town. The inscription reads: “Friedrich Dürr, Anton Hackl, Erich Hubmann, Anton Hechtl, Hans Pflügler, Lorenz Scherer were shot at this point by the SS in the liberation struggle on April 28, 1945.”
However, many Germans did not experience the end of the war as liberation, but rather as defeat. A few meters further, in front of the Church of St. Jacob, there is another remembrance: there you can read on a war memorial: “To protect Dachau and you / the heroes went into the field / thanks are due for this / great as the sacrifice once was”.
On the left side of the stone are the years 1914-1918, on the right side the years 1939-1945. The “heroes” do not mean the insurgents, but rather the war dead, victims and perpetrators at the same time. They did not “go into the field” to protect Dachau, not in the First World War and not in the Second World War. During World War II, they helped implement Hitler’s plans for murder and conquest in Europe. No thanks are due for this, at best a reminder that some of them certainly became perpetrators unwillingly – and that Putin’s soldiers are now condemned to repeat this story.