The march of time becomes sobering with 80 years passing since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp near Dachau in southern Germany, and 50 years since my wife and I visited it in the mid-1970s.
This past May 4 a memorial event at Dachau noted – celebrated just doesn’t sound right – its liberation on April 29, 1945, by the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry Division. The event included a plaque honoring the rescuers, who found about 30,000 prisoners still alive. Of the 200,000 total imprisoned there from 1933 to 1945, about 41,500 died.
When we visited in the mid-1970s, it was difficult to find. No big signs or billboards announcing a tourist attraction. With World War II still fresh in the memory of Germans over the age of 40, they didn’t seem eager to see tourists there. Former prisoners initiated the memorial foundation in 1965, with support from the Bavarian state.
We were discouraged from taking pictures, and just as well because what we saw, while sanitized, was not pleasant. I still can envision the large cremation ovens at Dachau for incinerating corpses from disease, accidents, escape attempts, executions, or heinous medical experiments conducted there. An iron gate carried the words, Arbeit Macht Frei – Work will make your free, a cruel sight for prisoners entering.
About 10 miles from Munich, Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp. While not used for human mass extermination, it was a model for developing the other KZ – Konzentration – camps, and “as a ‘school of violence’ for the SS men under whose command it stood.” Memorials at the former Nazi concentration camps proclaim Nie Wieder – Never Again.
Gearing up Guantanamo
That admonition must have applied only to Germany. Today we see the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, gearing to imprison as many as 30,000 – immigrants, criminals, detainees – people? So far only several hundred have been incarcerated at Guantanamo.
As were the prisoners at Dachau, the prisoners today are human beings, individuals with families, friends, careers, ambitions, creative talents. Apart from the relatively few today who may have serious criminal backgrounds, their only crime is to have become ensnared in the U.S. immigration and deportation process, have brown skin, and perhaps some tattoos.
“As of March 9, 2025, approximately 50.1% of individuals detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had criminal records, while 49.9% had no criminal convictions. Many detainees with records were convicted of minor offenses, such as traffic violations. Serious crimes like homicide or terrorism are exceedingly rare among detainees,” says ChatGPT.
Maybe someday in the future one of the immigrant detainees will follow the example of Viktor Frankl. A survivor of several Nazi KZ camps, Frankl is most well-known for his 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He contends that most of those who survived also likely had a strong purpose in life. He came to a firm belief in God, and the reality of hope.
“Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose,” says a Goodreads review. “… a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of what we find meaningful.”
For a moving fictional account of the same, I have read and recommend The Spark of Life, published in 1952 by Erich Maria Remarque. He is more well-known for his World War I classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.
About The Spark of Life, Goodreads says: “For ten years, 509 has been a political prisoner in a German concentration camp, persevering in the most hellish conditions. If he and the other living corpses in his barracks can hold on for liberation—or force their own—then their suffering will not have been in vain.”
Domestic detention
To avoid becoming too self-righteous, American history includes another incarceration of innocent people, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The current episode of detainment and deportation has their descendants seeing history repeating itself.
In a May 13, 2025 article in Christianity Today, “We Should Not Be Silent This Time,” Raymond Chang writes about leading a “civil rights tour” of an internment compound in the California desert. About 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds U.S. citizens, were forced from their homes and often lost all their property.
For a fictional account of such an experience, I recommend reading Snow Falling on Cedars, a 1994 novel by David Guterson. Goodreads again: “Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric… a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American is charged with his murder… Above all, San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.”
In all cases, innocent people are being punished, brutalized, just for being on the wrong side of the current political regime. As a 98-year-old Dachau survivor attending the memorial event said, “I hear talk about weapons and nationalism, and the thought occurs to me: Have people learned nothing?”
There is obvious irony in seeing news coverage of J.D. Vance’s visit to Dachau in February, not long after he “shocked German leaders when he told a crowd in Munich that they should stop shunning the Alternative for Deutschland…. officially labeled an extremist party by Germany’s domestic intelligence unit,” reports the New York Times.
In the small Midwestern town where I live and work, immigrants have been a part of the community for more than 50 years. In the early years many were from Mexico. In the 1990s we started seeing more immigrants from Somalia. Over the decades all have become an integral part of the community and local economy.
In 1987 the local newspaper ran a series of articles about the influx of ‘Hispanic Americans’ that helped provide a more accurate perspective and pushed back against race politics and negative stereotypes. We would much rather celebrate Cinco de Mayo, than face future memorials about detention camps.
An editorial concluding the series reads: “A century ago our great-grandparents settled in the area in hopes of finding a better life… Today we see Hispanic Americans trying to do the same thing… Those who succeed will be better off, as will the communities in which they find their success.”
