Fascism Is Still in the Building

This is the final essay in a six-part series. Read the previous entries here.

The sign on the Buchenwald gate, “Jedem das Seine,” faces the inside of the camp. This was so the inmates could look up and be reminded of the slave camp’s guiding philosophy: Everyone gets what he deserves. The Nazi equivalent of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the Stones song that mysteriously closed Trump rallies last year. Something I only mention because between yesterday morning and today Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.

Which I can handle, really. I just need to lie face-down on the floor for 26 hours or so and I’ll be fine. The parallels between Adolf and Donald have been marched out everywhere. It’s not just that both men boast alarming hair and exude gamy charisma. In the beginning, except for a handful of racist maniacs and World War I vets, everybody in Germany thought Hitler was an assclown, too.

That said, you haven’t lived until you’ve visited Munich during its annual beer festival, Oktoberfest. I’d had the peculiar thrill of getting lost during this shitshow at dusk, while a bunch of drunk-off-their-ass Hermann Göring lookalikes in tight leather short-shorts and feathered dunce caps blocked the street to break into a spontaneous can-can. It makes weird sense that Hitler got his start where beer-shitting your lederhosen is a badge of honor. In one bad moment I found myself cornered in an alley and thought, This is how it ends. Mauled to death by a bunch of gone-to-fat Sound of Music goons in soiled hotpants, so close I can smell their Lowenbrau gusts. Were they really hissing Juden, or was I imagining it?

But back to Buchenwald! Our guide, Greta, a lovely young millennial who keeps flinging wisps of hair out of her eyes, very Kate Winslet, explains that Buchenwald was not an extermination camp. Inmates were worked to death, used as slave labor. Horrific enough, but now that I’m writing this up I can’t help but think Donald Trump supposedly didn’t pay his workers, either! But never mind. 

The macro horrors of the camps are well known. Back to back, they can be numbing. But the specifics of state torment are haunting. Greta leads us to the pathology lab of the crematorium, in which a doctor’s measuring stick has been mounted along the wall in the corner. “When the camp was primarily Soviet POWS, Hitler had a directive that the Commissars—that’s what he called them—were all to be shot in the back of the neck. So,” says our guide, as we gather around the tall measuring stick,  “look closer.”

Our guide leads us out of the room, to a tiny booth behind the wall where the SS slid their guns through a slot and shot the inmates in the backs of their necks. Which, horrifically fascinating as it is, is not even the most fascinating detail.

The macro horrors of the camps are well known. Back to back, they can be numbing. But the specifics of state torment are haunting.

Listen: “The Kommandant knew that shooting a man point blank, when he’s looking straight at you, could do some psychological damage to the shooter. So they invented the Measuring Room. Prisoners were told they were being measured for camp uniforms.”

The murderous misdirect, of course, was a death camp staple. Like SS telling new arrivals at Auschwitz they were headed for the showers, going so far as playing valet and telling victims to remember the number of the hook they hung their clothes on so they could find their things later. Then leading them to the “showers,” locking the door, and gassing all of them with Zyklon B. 

“By the way,” Greta adds, “none of the guards were compelled to join the murder squad. The higher-ups knew that if they were ordered to kill, the men might resist. Might resent. But if they volunteered, they were motivated. They wanted to be “a man among men.” There was, you might say, a subtle psychology involved. What today we might call their ‘management style.’”

The commandant of Buchenwald was Karl-Otto Koch, who is more famous for his wife, Ilse, AKA the Bitch of Buchenwald. Ilse, Greta tells us, liked to ride her horse through the camp wearing tight sweaters and little else, taunting the starving inmates. “Sometimes,” our guide continues, “she would crook her finger and bring one back to her bed. Afterward she would have him shot.”

Ilse was also obsessed with tattoos. It’s been said that when she spotted a tattooed prisoner, she would have him skinned, then keep the skin. In evidence at Nuremberg were items the Kommandant’s wife allegedly made with human skin. Among them were lampshades, a detail familiar to people who know little else of the Holocaust. 

No doubt it’s Bad Tourist Behavior, but after listening to Greta I’m moved to ask why she, a clearly capable, charismatic young woman, chose to work at a death camp. Visibly uncomfortable at my question, the guide takes a moment and plays with a strand of her hair. “When I was little, my grandfather told me a story about a farmer in town. The farmer, my grandfather told me, was a very kind man. He’d also been a Nazi. One day my grandfather asked him, ‘You seem so nice, why would you follow Adolf Hitler?’ ‘Because,’ the old farmer told him,  ‘who else would give me 20 slaves?’ I think this is something people don’t understand about the Nazis. For regular people, there could be enormous benefits.”

I wait a beat, half-expecting her to add “and that farmer was my grandfather’s father, my great-great grandfather. This is penance.” And drop the mic.

Instead, she simply shrugs and replies, with simmering conviction, “I believe people should know.”

Before I can ask a follow-up, Greta steps away, finds the rest of the group, and asks if they all know where the cafeteria is.

I cannot eat at the Buchenwald cafeteria. I can, however, walk slowly by, after going to the men’s room, and make a point of staring at the diners disapprovingly and flagrantly taking pictures. Look at me, I’m thinking . I’m too noble to eat here, but not too noble to walk by taking pictures and judging you amoral carnivores. (In hindsight, it was a total douche move.) I stomp out of the cafeteria, fast, to show I am so sensitive it bothers me to see people eating where so many suffered.

And then, BAM. Like a fucking idiot, I walk at full-speed into a plate glass sliding door. I cut my forehead and have to trot back in, past the diners, to the death camp men’s room—much nicer than the crude facilities at Auschwitz (that’s Germany vs Poland, right there)—where I grab a fist-full of wet paper towels and try to staunch the blood streaming over my unibrow. The realization that, even here, at the Axis Mundi of My People’s Agony, I have managed to make an ass out of myself is not a great feeling.

Ten steps from rope to inferno. From our point of view, this is sadistic. From the Nazis, it was efficient.

By the time I get to Dachau on day 11, I feel like going to death camps is my job. I get on the bus in the morning and go to work. Surprisingly, this does not make me jaded. It makes me more attentive to the particulars of horror. A kind of accumulated moral and sensory horror at once exhausts and turbo-charges awareness. Which leads me to the Dachau crematorium. And forgive the abrupt transition here, but the niceties of narrative crumble in the face of details. Specifics. The little thing that makes the big thing  real. Like, say, the hooks in the crematorium at Dachau. 

Yes. There are hooks in the ceiling of the crematorium at Dachau. When I see them I realize two things: that the SS hung victims in front of the ovens so they could see what was coming, and that it was someone’s job to stand on a ladder, drill holes over his head, and screw in the hooks. 

The noose, tied to the hook, slipped around the victim’s neck as he or she faced the flaming maw. Extending from the ovens is a sliding tray, like a tongue, with long handles on the end for the sonderkommando to slide the newly dead into the fire. A sign on the wall says “Each of the four furnaces could cremate two to three corpses at once. The ovens were connected to the chimney by an underground canal.”

Ten steps from rope to inferno. From our point of view, this is sadistic. From the Nazis, it was efficient.

Toward the end, there was not enough coal to fire the ovens, and bodies were left outside the building, piled up in mounds, or dumped into holes.

The sight and stench, according to Dachau’s American liberators, induced vomiting, trauma, and rage. Call it the dead’s revenge upon the living. The US later forced local townspeople and Nazi party members to come to Dachau and help dispose of corpses. Naturally, they were all shocked. They had no idea.

***

Flying home to imminent Trumpland, all the parallels are there. (Unlike Trump, Hitler actually brought jobs to the fatherland. War will do that, and death camps don’t build themselves. Of course, there was also slave labor involved—but never mind.) 

It occurs to me that if we go to war with Australia and NATO and Mexico and god knows who else, we’ll need plenty of armaments, not to mention our own camps. For “illegal aliens,” Muslims, and—who knows—maybe even the Jews.

It’s not like this is a great leap. Or even original. As I mentioned earlier, it’s well known that a lot of Hitler enablers were under the impression the Fuhrer was a clown with creepy hair they could easily control. The lesson being: never underestimate a creepy clown.

As I write this, CNN is running a story whose banner reads:  Hate on display:  Rise in crime against Jewish centers, synagogues… There’s video of a masked man smashing the window of a Chicago temple and jumping back in his car, conveniently parked out front. Think Kristallnacht, with security cameras. 

This bit of business is followed by footage of the founder’s statue at Rice University in Houston, vandalized with a swastika drawn below the word ‘Trump.’ In January, dozens of bomb threats were reported to Jewish community centers throughout the country. The phrase “new normal” is being marched out.

The truth is that Trump makes me miss Dachau. Horrific as that was, it’s over. Trump is just beginning, and that’s a real terror. 

It’s hard to find a Jew without one relative or another who died in the camps. My own grandfather was killed in a pogrom in Vilnius, Lithuania when my father was two.  On my mother’s side, great aunts and uncles who expired in concentration camps were rarely discussed, as if mere mention of their names would summon the demons who killed them. 

But facism, and anti-semitism, have been in the building for years. In fact, they never left. The demons only needed to be re-summoned. Nazi-loving Charles Lindbergh promoted “America First” during World War II, when even Roosevelt turned boats full of Jews away. Meat-faced patriots like Bannon and Trump have simply picked up the banner.

Illustration by Koren Shadmi