Merkel joins survivors, US vets to mark Dachau liberation
Last edited Sun May 3, 2015, 02:27 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: AP
DACHAU, Germany (AP) It was a shocking, horrifying "beautiful day."
Survivors and liberators alike recalled on Sunday the horror of the Dachau concentration camp and the overwhelming relief of its liberation 70 years ago. German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes and give no quarter to present-day discrimination or anti-Semitism.
Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp the Nazis set up a few weeks after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. Before it was liberated by U.S. troops on April 29, 1945, more than 200,000 people from across Europe were held there and over 40,000 prisoners died.
"When we entered the camp exactly 70 years ago, it was a terrible shock to see how much you, the survivors, had suffered from starvation, disease, brutality and freezing conditions," Alan Lukens, who entered Dachau as a U.S. army private in 1945, said at the anniversary ceremony at the former camp.
FULL story and photo gallery at link.
Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/e67726566d144caa977da4141fbd3256/merkel-joins-survivors-us-vets-mark-dachau-liberation
Correction. See reply #5. 12 million
Pooka Fey
(3,496 posts)sarge43
(28,941 posts)GGJohn
(9,951 posts)I always tear up at that episode.
You're right, lest we forget and history repeats itself.
Good to know I'm not the only one who tears up.
appalachiablue
(41,145 posts)At this time 70 years ago my father was liberating Dachau with his unit as a 24 year old 1st Lieut. AAA in the 7th Army. He was in the Rhineland Campaign and the Army of Occupation. For taking over when his column was crossing a border and spotted and fired on by German 88s, he was awarded the Bronze Star. I have his medal and it is my avatar.
Thank you for sharing your story. You must be so proud of your dad!
sybylla
(8,514 posts)12 million went through the concentration camps.
6 million were Jews
6 million were political prisoners, prisoners of war, Roma, Gays, sympathizers, etc.
We tend to focus on the number of Jews, because this truly began as a Jewish solution, but it conveniently worked on many other classes of society as well.
First Speaker
(4,858 posts)My Dad was a tail-gunner in a B17...and to the day he died, he choked up at the very mention of Nazism. The real horror of Hitler and the Nazis was they were, in a sense, nipped in the bud. It all happened in a few years. What if they had won the European war, and had the time to create "mature Nazism"--the same length of time that, say, the Soviet Union was given? What could Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, Mengele have accomplished had they had the time that Stalin and Beria had? A second Wannsee Conference, for starters--to make lists of American Jews? Palestine purged? Africa turned into one giant slave state/charnel house, a super Belgian Congo? Thank God for the fortitude of the people of the world, especially the Russians, that they stopped this madness.
shenmue
(38,506 posts)Behind the Aegis
(53,959 posts)It was an on-going process, not an overnight event. Soon, they will all be gone.