You're right, Dachau was not an "extermination camp" in 1933, in the sense that most of us think of when we think about the Holocaust. It was in the beginning an internment camp, but people who went there tended not to come back.
The mental image of the Holocaust, which comes from Hollywood, is one which allows aesthetic distance, just as the Nazis desired, and achieved. Trains, death camps, gas chambers, crematoria, were all later triumphs of the efficient minds of brilliant engineers. The very efficiency allowed everybody involved to feel that it wasn't them who was killing all these people, they were just a cog in the wheel.
In the beginning, it was plain old bullets in the back of the head, very messy. Hard on the sentimental Germans, shooting little children and old people like that. Very time consuming, too.
They didn't even like running the death camps, they made Eastern Europeans do it (except for the upper levels). After all, Eastern Europeans did not have such fine feelings as Germans, they could handle it. |
