Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Lee
Dachau is a bad example for anything Holocaust-related, as it was not an extermination camp and was mostly for German political prisoners. Their gas chamber was also never used. I don't know if it was built for show after the war, but they didn't gas people there. The real bad stuff happened far away from Germany in Poland. Auschwitz is worth a visit. But the Warsaw Ghetto Museum in old town Warsaw is actually a lot more moving and gives you a better sense of what was going on in the occupied territories.
I've been to Buchenwald too, which is near Weimar. But it too was not an extermination camp, but rather one for political prisoners and Russian POW's. They surely did a lot of very bad things there.
I don't think there's anything left of Sobibor or Treblinka. Those were the real extermination centers, the ones that not even the most fervent SS officer wanted to be tied to. I think there's one guy still alive who made it out of Treblinka. It was totally razed before the Russians got to it. In fact, the gas chambers at Auschwitz were blown up before the Russians got to it too. The SS knew they were looking at war crimes charges and tried to cover their tracks.
Also be sure to look at what the Einsatzgruppen did in the Ukraine and Belarus. Looks up Babi Yar.
Seriously, Dachau is the kind of place you send an American exchange student on his first trip to Germany. It's not going to convince a doubter and it doesn't have much to do with the Holocaust at all.
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I understand where you're coming from, and agree that there is often a misguided belief that ALL camps were extermination or gas chamber (a misnomer) camps. But even the work camps were designed and run to literally work prisoners to death. That may not fit squarely withing the framework of the "final solution", but it's certainly part of the Holocaust.
Agreed though, there is often a misrepresentation/misunderstanding about the camps, as though there were all the same. Unfortunately, some of these misrepresentations play into the hands of deniers and nutjobs
Dachau is different, I guess, in that Jews were a minority proportion there. I think there were more frenchmen than Jews