After having visited Dachau, I came away let down at some level because I got there, and it was just "a place", just like any other. It was a sunny warm day, the sky was blue, the birds were singing. If it weren't for my knowledge of what had taken place there, it would have been a wonderful place for a picnic.
This lead me to the "aha!" conclusion, that in spite of the famous names: Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, they are really just places. The physical world is neutral. It was people who did these awful things to other people. And those people, they looked and often acted very normal, just like you and me. If you passed an SS officer on the street (less the uniform), he wouldn't have had any horns growing out of his head. You could most likely have a marvelous conversation with him about art, or music or horses. But then, some how, for some reason, they would go to work the next day and just wreck untold pain and suffering on their fellow man. The same is true today. You can't judge a book by it's cover.
Here's a couple of pictures that my Dad took at Buchenwald on the same day that Eisenhower viewed the camp, just a day or two after it was liberated in April 1945. I believe that Buchenwald was the first of the concentration camps to be liberated by the US Army.
I think that the look on the face of the US soldier in the foreground pretty much says it all.
