David Custis Kimball - blog

Of Dachau, by E.R.Kimball M.D., Lt. Col. US Army

History, Uncommon Sense
Comment: I was a little tough on Lutherans, and didn’t mean to ignore Pope Alexander VI, who was trying to murder Luther, and Pope Adrien IV, who kindly gave Ireland to my great… you know Anglo Bro. King Henry II. And all these years, I was just putting my stocking up on the mantel… batteries, socks, and candy…oh my. What’s in your fat envelope in your stocking CEO’s of banks, etc? Freeedooommmmm, it’s that cry you never want to have to make, eh Wallace? But if that’s all that’s left, it’s the only thing to say.

Excuse the text only, the italics and bold are getting wiped for convenience. If you send me a comment, I’ll send you the .pdf version, kapish”

Prelude of Disaster of Dachau:
The following story was lived by my dad, a good doctor, who was tried by the fire of his experiences to be perhaps better than he otherwise had an inclination to be (his self-confession). In fact he may be remembered as a prophetic doctor, who in the auld sense of the word, reported the events of the present to lead persons away from harm in the future. It involves a great faith in honesty and humility in one’s own importance.
That sounds complicated and it is. It is entwined in some 5000 years of human history: the struggle to worship one God the Father, or Baal, a graven image of fertility controlled by deceit and greed. A Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost which is somewhat compatible with a process to experience life to fulfillment or simply as my dad did, “because it brings me luck”.
Within the context of the story and the times that were experienced by most Americans and Europeans, the influence of the Asian culture was accepted and entwined in the Art community , but not the real world, and certainly not understood. Japanese Americans suffered, especially as we learned at the treatment of captured Americans. Japan had no cultural experience or tolerance for a captured person. They would most certainly commit suicide or willingly be killed in that cultural mindset that makes a code of honor all important.
When we confront cultural manipulation of Judaic people, who as Diaspora were scattered a thousand years farther and not to have heard the “radical rumblings” of Jesus, but remained punished under the reformation effects (a kind of cultural/economic apartheid slavery) of Martin Luther and others design. Jews were not allowed into the professions, but rather restricted to the trades, especially the money lending and merchant trades.
We know the story says of the money lenders in the Temple, we know the long history of the many Jews returning to the worship of Baal, fertility, gold and greed: false gods, and if we care to read, the stories have been generally unfavorable to the Jews who forsook God and his covenant in favor of more immediate pleasures. Moses broke the tablets when he realized how many would slide into depravity. He was punished in never seeing the promised land, Israel. We might also consider Jeremiah, who admonished his own people for their greed, and he as king was tossed into the pits. He was clueless as to God’s purpose. Perhaps “Vengeance will be Mine” should have come to mind. There’s nothing original about sin within the Jewish community.
But for nearly 400 years from Luther until 1944, this persecution or scapegoating was practiced on the entire European jewish population. Heinrich Heine, in the late 1820’s predicted a Hitler, a slayer, and professed the process which Jesus revealed, e.g. “Was raschelt im Strah…” (What rustles in the straw?) depicted the birth of Jesus , who from humble beginning defeated the status quo, even at a great price and that an infant of humility would survive and thrive on the spirit and the process of an infinite power.
Germany, because caught in the defeat and unforgiving vindictiveness of the Treaty of Versailles and this resulting abject poverty forced upon the small and surrounded people, would cause them to internalize and seek out the support from those who had profited generously from the culture of allowing a near monopoly on the lending of money and many merchant traders. However it brings them into a schism with reality, and the vicious truth that the slaughter of the Jews along with the robbery of their great wealth, in great measure funded the Third Reich and the War Machine.
The accumulation of wealth by the Jews was considerable, but it is very much understandable that Jews would not very willingly give up all their security, when the basis was so small in terms of freedom to pursue a career. Many persons, e.g. a famous one was Franz Kafka, who held a doctorate in Law, but was only a clerk. All of his writings were published post-humously. So too did the Anti-Christ, Hitler, begin humbly. Not too much of the Sermon on the Mount impressed either Luther of Hitler. Luther was in prison, and full of hate for the Pope and that corruption, and Hitler was struggling to become the great leader that Luther had created as a roll model, and as a Phoenix, bring Germany up through the ashes using the accumulated wealth of Europe’s Jews as his fuel.
There is a consistency in Luther to be a man who of the Bible would create a new language “High German “ that is spoken in all media throughout Germany. This act of Luther’s unified the tribes or fiefdoms of Germany into a nation and this nation was grateful for the unification. The anti-semitic and anti-christian provisions for the segregation of the Jews was given a whitewash and this a justification that the Jews were eager to pursue these ventures, and that Christ had admonished them to make them unworthy of the “Arian Christian”. These actions brought, the loving, forgiving religion into intolerance, hypocricy and the alignment of Luther with ideas of Islam: interest was bad, Jews were cast out of favor, etc. The fact that it was in the temple that Christ was angry about money changing, were overgeneralized to the entire German territory. Luther perhaps thought himself a disciple, though somewhat late. But lets not get into the “Latter Day Saints”.
H. Heine left his family’s Judaism to become a Lutheran as he felt the narcissism of his fellow Jews. He was also a terrible businessman, a wonderful Hegelian poet who understood the nature of growth within the physics and poetics of the Trinity, some referring to it as the Synthesis of and from opposing theses.
Also Ancient Judah, and surrounding area in Jesus’s time were controlled by Roman conquerers, and they installed the hierarchy of the Jewish laws and ritual ceremonies, where animal sacrifice was popular, as well. “Divide and conquer” was well known to the Romans, as was “decimate” and other cruel and inhuman practices; decimation involved impaling every 10th Roman soldier on the road back to Rome when the army lost a battle .
We could argue the facts, the history, the motivation, the quantitative capacities, and more until we are faint, but consider only the Christian ideals of Forgiveness and Loving your neighbor as yourself. There is no justification for Hitler and Luther’s aparteid economic separation of the Jews was cruel and hubristic. However, we also note, yet today, Islam maintains that separation, hate and cruel dishonesty to the Jewish population, and for that matter any other ‘competing’ religion.
Like the golfball with dimples can travel faster and farther than a smooth ball, when confronted with a human scale force, but with a stronger force, a smoother ball is more efficient. Luther’s Biblical justification for his cruelty and bondage of the jews forced inhuman stresses on the Jewish people, their faith and well-being. It made demands that were inefficient and wasted resources. Denying something from a thinking being makes them desire it more…notice today the high concentration of jews in legal and medical professions. Like the punishment of Jeremiah, it was not the German’s obligation to punish even what may be admittedly sins in the temple. There were circumstances; there were many insecurities and pressures to fit into the Roman way which seemed to encourage the demise of the vanquished. It was for Europe and Germany in particular to lead by example of the Christian axiom of Forgiveness and Loving your neighbor as yourself. Lest we think that with a wave of the hand that evil can be forgiven and then love our enemies, that is possible, but by g-d himself. If he is to have vengeance, not man, then he too is the forgiver. We can be agents of this in a trinity process of goodness, righteousness and truth. (Eph.5:9)
Surrounded in good, we can confront evil with right, and from that we can see the truth that g-d intends. Thus man can prepare others for g-d’s forgiveness - ultimately that is the only one that matters. The recent movie ‘Reader’ with Kate Winslet as Hannah was punished more than others ultimately found the goodness in a man, who loved her, but could not forgive or even help her to have justice; she did not help herself. She lived with choosing who would live or die, and she would love them for reading to her, we think. For as long as she understood that sharing pleasure was goodness, when she was immune to behaving beyond orders, taking responsibility, or facing self-righteousness (responsibility), it was too painful, too many secrets exposed, perhaps, or just a weary fear of the unknown that led her to hang herself just before her release.
G-d, like Truth implies a certain separation from the human experience, and we always refer to applied truth as the only substitute that is possible in this world. I am of my father and mother, and they too have there progenitors. The causal nexus that brings us into juxtaposition with each other continues into the inanimate realm. E.g. the cereal box with the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle promotion that covers the backside of the box is a smokescreen for the waste that the box, itself, generates. Not only is it of a shape that wastes over 20%, but the cardboard is unnecessary. The state of existence belies the motivation of its efforts. And it may well be argued that the inconsistency amounts to a fraud, as it creates in the unsuspecting a Gestalt which hardens that person to the elimination of the wasteful box container as a real progression to reduce, reuse and recycle. Many would defend the wasteful box as it was good in its existence in providing cereal all these years, trapped in a Status Quo, like a Nazi prison guard, exploring only around the edges of orders from authority.
We should all practice a lifestyle, intend on wasting less, better design to fulfill what our potential by whatever creator, designed in giving us this capacity. Imagine how joyful, Ben Franklin would be if we really believed his ‘Waste not; want not.’ Now there’s a truth, surrounded in goodness and responsibility or doing the right thing.
However, under duress and irrational stress, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, expressed his conditioning towards self-defeat, by never really taking responsibility or self-righteousness. Speaking of Nazism, Speer laments, “First, I abhorred, then endured, and then embraced.
The blindness that we have discovered in the German vision of humanity manifests itself in every society, and especially in the United States. As we are the conquerors of the victors of the Holy Roman Empire, we face the hubris and inhumanity to others that no other culture has dared.
That part of our society is the young, the newborn, and perhaps the pregnant mother.
From our collective, but corporate and physician profit motivation of diminishing the responsibility of the mother to suckle her young to the injection of neurotropic (like curare) drugs into newborns in case there might be some need, e.g. Gentamycin Sulfate, to protect against the germs generated by the materials in the hospital, usually Gypsum drywall, which creates a feast in its sulfates for bacteria when anaerobic conditions and moisture are present. This often occurs around outside walls and AC ducts where chilled air reaches a dewpoint with the warm interior air, where a high moisture level is mandated by ICU protocols.
Short term gains are usually chosen over a longer term path with some adjustments, especially in employment. Offensive medicine is called “Defensive Medicine”, and no one can seem to recall the Hippocratic oath. As the Japanese, Germans, French, Swedish, and English force American cars to be more quality oriented, the US building industry has succeeded in producing dangerous and unhealthy and expensive procedures to maintain and operate products, especially homes. Other failing elements include: bare hot water piping, leaking and open air conditioning ductwork, and made-to-fail roofing systems.
This prologue, edited for the 2009 financial world crisis, finds no easy solutions as no one seems to be able to take responsibility; we have interceded with ‘insurance’, ‘no-fault’, where you just put in money and someone gets the jackpot. It’s a game, like the pea under the 3 walnut shells, most are unable to speed to a certain conclusion, without being sorely disappointed. War is hell, and the fog of war can let responsibility off the hook. Do we actually plan this, or is it just a game of tag; like robbery, and like murder, when Russian Roulette is part of the ‘fun’? Really it seems to have begun over money, turning the tables over in the Temple. The Germans were the moneychangers this time, and forced in humiliation to be cast out by Versailles Treaty, and striking back both to punish and to fund their efforts. Unfortunately, like Kate Winslet, in the movie, ‘Reader’, the Guards as well as the Jews could not or could not believe that they had to escape from their homes, and so were crucified by circumstance, complicity, poverty and/or numbness to the existential trap which was Germany under Hitler, 1932-1945. Has the US become the moneychanger now with derivatives, insurance of insurance, untracible lines of plausible deniability?
David Custis Kimball April 26, 2009

Foreword
In my dad’s 84th year, and some 50 years after his WWII experiences, he was prodded by his daughter and psychoanalyst son-in-law to narrate this unforgettable and infamous episode in my his life.
I reminded him that I only remember him mention Dachau and its overwhelming feelings of helplessness when we lost our mare Dolly giving birth with foal in a breached position. Only a veterinarian who specialized in dogs and cats was available in the 30 to 40 minute window to save her life. She had forced out most of her intestines by the time the Vet arrived 45 minutes later. Nature can seem so overwhelming, cruel and unforgiving.

Prologue, Forward and following italics were partially discussed as edits with dad, but were the responsibility of me, David, son.

Original editing of Dachau text by a nephew in about 1995.

DACHAU
by E. Robbins Kimball Jr., M.D., Lt.Col., US Army

In World War II, I was an officer with the First Medical Laboratory. We were a mobile Army unit that traveled with the Army headquarters. During our year in North Africa we were under General Patton, in France and Germany with General Patch.
Our unit consisted of eleven officers and fifty men. We had four truck loads of laboratory equipment and six jeeps. One-half of our enlisted personnel were cooks, drivers and mechanics. The other half were well-educated men: school teachers, a headmaster, a pharmacist, and one osteopath. All became excellent laboratory technologists. They were a select group. The colonel and I chose them from many while at Fort Sam Houston and on maneuvers in Leesville, Louisiana in the Spring and Summer of 1942. We all knew each other well and were proud of each other’s abilities.
On V.E. Day we were in Augsburg, Germany. At noon mess we were told that there would be a church service at five o’clock in a big church were Martin Luther had preached. Al, the veterinary officer and I walked along the narrow streets where white flags hung from every house along the way. We would see the Germans like shadows in the background. General Eisenhower had issued the No Fraternization Order.
The going to church was completely voluntary–soldiers came with guns slung over their shoulders and hand grenades in their belts. Most were dirty, tired, unshaven and in messed-up battle fatigues. There was no order to it.
The church was packed with soldiers. The overflow spread out into the street. A communications company quickly set up loud speakers so that the overflow in the street could hear the service, still within sight and earshot of the silent shadows hidden behind the white flags.
“You are better men than your fathers,” said the Chaplain of the 5th Army. “I was in Newport News at the end of World War I. Then there was much celebrating in the streets and back-firing of the trucks, but only a handful were in church!”
After a brief service and prayers of thanks, we all departed. Each going in a different direction–dirty and tired back to his respective unit. No one said a word. There was no cheering, not even a Texas Yell. But the Germans watched our every move. Al and I did not talk, but walked as though we were each ten feet tall.
At supper that evening the colonel told me that the Typhus Commission wanted help in pathology for the drugs they were going to try in the treatment of typhus from which many inmates of Dachau were dying.
I was assigned a truck-load of laboratory equipment, two jeeps and eight men–three drivers and five technologists of the non-commissioned officers who belonged to our unit.
We prepared to depart toward Dachau after breakfast, but not before I did an autopsy on an unfortunate soldier who had the misfortune of drawing guard duty on a large cache of wine waiting for our chemist to test for poison before issuing it to the troops.
Traveling across Europe, the combat troops frequently discovered wines which we tested for poison. It was not uncommon for the Germans to poison the wine as they retreated.
I autopsied this soldier and sent samples of his vital organs to Washington to the Army Medical School for further study. His body was dressed in dress uniform with all his service ribbons on display on his chest. A beautiful bouquet of flowers were in the crook of his arm. He had been in the North African invasion, the invasion of Sicily, Italy and Normandy. The ribbons were all there. It was his misfortune to draw guard duty on V.E. night. This brave soldier could not resist sampling the wine he had been ordered to guard to prevent other G.I.s from drinking it.
The atrocities in Dachau were worse than expected. Inside the main gate, there were about fifteen box cars, like the forty and eight of the World War I fame (forty men or eight mules). Dead bodies were scattered within the box cars, under and all around the railway yard where a row of cars were strung out on a railroad spur.
Himmler had sent a telegram to the camp commandant that the Americans should find no inmate alive. They were being loaded in boxcars to be evacuated, but decided to kill them when they found that they could not get them out fast enough to avoid capture.
The inmates were all in the prison uniform of blue and gray vertical stripes–pants and jackets. Each stripe was almost an inch wide. I had a blazer just like it in high school.
Next to the gas chamber and the crematorium there was a ten foot tall pile of over a hundred naked, emaciated bodies. The pile was about 25 feet in diameter. It looked as though they had recently been gassed and were awaiting cremation. They were about the same age post mortem. On the pile there were four guards dressed in Nazi uniforms freshly killed. Their obese bodies were in sharp contrast to the skin and bones of the inmates in the pile.
The guards had been mutilated with Bowies: their abdomens had been cut wide open, intestines spread around. The one to two inch layers of fat in opened abdominal walls were in sharp contrast to the bony emaciation of the rest in the pile.
The captain of the infantry who commanded the liberating force was so angry at the heinous human cruelty that he took his company and went to the village where he marched the people from town out to the camp to see the atrocities.
The townspeople wept for the guards on the pile whom they knew personally and ignored the hundred starved, naked bodies in the pile and the scores of bodies, uniformed prisoners the guards were attempting to evacuate. The inmates were prisoners–less than human. That attitude lingered with some Germans long after the war.
The camp of about 100 acres was surrounded by a high wire fence topped with barbed wire and electrified. Within the camp there was a smaller compound of barracks and a hospital. Surrounding the inner compound were several rows of one-story buildings about 40 x 80 feet in size. There the inmates worked by day making Nazi uniforms mostly and other military equipment, including a few saddles. They also made lamp shades with human skin. The tattooed brands were visible.
There were about 50,000 inmates. They worked in the “factories” during the day and herded into the inner compound at night. All 50,000 were crowded into the main building of the inner compound. They slept 3 in a 48” wide bunk and four tiers high. The crowding was unbelievable.
When they “got sick”, they were sent to a smaller building which was the hospital–less crowded. I met the French doctor, a dermatologist who had practiced in Paris. He told us that he could do little for the sick patients sent to the hospital because of the lack of medicine and not enough food. He was dressed in the uniform of the inmates, but greeted us with a friendly formal professional manner.
The Typhus Commission consisted of highly motivated majors, captains and lieutenant commanders in the Army and Navy medical corps under the command of a jolly regular army brigadier general who told me to set up my laboratory in one of the vacant buildings surrounding the inner compound, the former work place of the prisoners. Now the inmates slept and ate in the several one-story buildings which had been “factories” during the war. In the “factory” building I chose for a laboratory, a body of an inmate was under a table. He had been shot.
There were many nationalities in Dachau: French, Poles, Russians and those from the Baltic states. There were two Englishmen, six mothers with breast feeding infants in their arms were said to look healthy. The mothers were adequately nourished, they said. They disappeared with the German soldiers. Neither I or any of my men saw the women and babies. They left with German soldiers before we got there.
The Typhus Commission set up a new hospital in some of the buildings of the former “factories” of the prisoners. The American army set up mess halls and everybody was now well fed.
The prisoners grouped together according to nationality and wandered around the many buildings that used to be their work place. The toughened American infantry were instructed to prevent looting by the liberated prisoners.
When the newly freed prisoners would pick up some trinket for a souvenir or to barter, the infantrymen made him put it back, then made him take off his clothes (the prisoner’s uniform) and walk back naked through the camp to the building where he was billeted.
The young men of the American Infantry were tough soldiers. They had been taught to kill at a very young age. No one argued with these tough liberators.
The prisoners usually traveled in groups according to nationality. One afternoon I saw the French doctor from the inmates’ hospital in the inner compound, wandering with a group of about thirty Frenchmen. They were wandering without purpose. He seemed embarrassed for me to see him in such a purposeless activity.
“I have to do something to pass the time,” he lamented. He was a dermatologist in Paris before the war. He was sent to Dachau because he was Jewish. He survived because he was useful as a good doctor.
It would have been nice if the Typhus Commission could have used him, but the sudden liberation of 50,000 is complicated.
Many of the inmates wandered for miles over the countryside. But most returned to the Dachau camp. Germans were afraid of them and did not want to feed them. Many could not make it on their own on the outside.
The Soviets were different form the other nationalities in that the day after liberation, they began to drill on a playing field adjacent to the rows of one-story buildings surrounding the inner compound. Soviets spent the afternoon doing complicated military drills. Their steps were individual and more intricate than I had ever seen. The actions were military–definitely not ballet. The number of participants increased daily. No other nationality drilled voluntarily like the Soviet Russians.
In the evening at dusk, Soviets in a group wandered the streets of the outer compound singing. Their deep virile voices drifted over the night air, beautiful and frightening. They never wandered aimlessly like the other nationalities. Soviets were always organized.
Finally, we got to doing what we were sent to Dachau to do, i.e. the autopsies on the patients who had been treated for typhus fever by the Typhus Commission. Everyone had been dusted with DDT to kill the lice carrying the rickettsia of Typhus.
Before that, I had done several autopsies on those dying of “starvation,” tremendously emaciated young bodies. A consistent finding at autopsy was military tuberculosis in the lungs. The upper lobes in particular were studded with small visible areas of tuberculosis similar to that found in young babies, Native American tribesman, blacks and Eskimos. Europeans and those of European ancestry had developed a certain resistance to tuberculosis. They fight it with fibrous proliferation and cavity formation. Not so with those dying of starvation in Dachau. It just galloped through their lungs. They had lost their immune powers to resist disease because of the prolonged starvation. As far as I could determine, there was no treatment for typhus or tuberculosis that worked until the discovery of the broad spectrum antibiotics.
After my sergeant and I had done a few autopsies on those who died of starvation, we decided to enlist the services of some of the inmates. They were all very willing. They loved to work for Americans and to eat with them.
While in France, we had recruited six workers who washed glassware and did general cleanup work around the laboratory. Both men and officers were helped by these extra workers. The Frenchmen also enjoyed working with Americans. Our workers could not speak English so our whole outfit had a chance to speak French and we became good at it.
When we crossed into Germany the Army Command would not allow us to take French workers with us. We moved so fast through Germany that it was not until Dachau did we have a chance to recruit liberated workers to do cleanup work in the laboratory.
My sergeant could speak a “soft German.” The main language of communication was German. In the crew of inmates there was a middle aged Polish prosector.
In Europe, professors of pathology have prosectors who do the actual dissection in the autopsy. The professor watches, observes, and teaches. He does not get his hands dirty. It is different in America. The dissection is usually done by an intern or resident rotating through pathology who teaches medical students and with the help of the professor explains the disease process from the gross organs and slides made for the microscope.
There was a big Soviet and a little Soviet. A Bulgarian who was a quiet steady worker and a Yugoslavian.
The sergeant and I were averaging about four autopsies a day. Everything had to be washed and disinfected between each autopsy. There was much work to be done.
The sergeant and I decided it would be better to have one boss of the inmates in the cleanup operations. We both thought that the Polish prosector was the most experienced and should be in charge. But that did not please the big young Soviet who was one-half the age of the Polish prosector. As we did more autopsies, the big Soviet continued to assert his dominance over the other workers. It became a power struggle between the big Soviet and the Polish prosector. The big Soviet asserted himself in the clean up work; he was infatigable, quick and smart. I was at the autopsy table cutting open the bodies, examining the organs and getting samples for microscopic study and samples to Washington when the power struggle began. The young aggressive big Soviet continually put down the refined, experienced Polish prosector. Whatever the Pole did the big Soviet would say, “The Doktor.” Then the prosector would stop helping and look at me. I would smile and nod agreeing with him, but that was not enough. The big Soviet continually vexed the prosector. The subtle Russian-Polish-German byplay escaped both my sergeant and me. We did not understand enough of their languages, perhaps.
The sergeant and I decided it was best to make the big Soviet boss and he did just that in his “soft German” mixed with English that the GI’s were so good at. Making the big Soviet boss seemed best for everyone. The little Soviet was all smiles every morning. Before we started work and at any break in the work he would show me a picture in Life magazine of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin sitting side by side. He would not communicate in English. There was just a smile and the picture at every opportunity.
The inmate from Bulgaria was a quiet steady worker. He did not care who was boss.
“Yugoslav” had just gotten word he was scheduled to go home. He remained in a dream world.
The Polish prosector never really asserted himself. He obeyed the young big Soviet who no longer said “the Doktor” whenever he tried to help.
We developed a well organized team. One of the several members of the Typhus Commission always watched us do every autopsy. They were hard-working researchers and kept very complete notes. The members of the Typhus Commission were from Harvard and Yale medical schools. Some were my teachers. French army doctors frequently visited us. They were fascinated in the research and the way officers of the Typhus Commission kept their records –”like in the Massachusetts General Hospital” one said.
“Were the atrocities in Dachau deliberate?” asked a senior British officer. Indeed they were. They had a gas chamber and had been gassing Jews for years.
There were not many Jews left alive when we got to Dachau. I recruited a young Pole, one of several non-jewish prisoners who were not skin and bones. He could speak Polish, French, German and English with scarcely any accent. He was sent to Dachau because he stole bread in Warsaw during the German occupation. I asked him why he was not skin and bones like the bodies on the pile.
“When I got here, I was determined to come out alive. I did everything I was told to do.” I sensed he didn’t want to explain any details or be caught in anymore compromising contradictions, so I asked no more questions of him. He had had enough.
He showed me where he slept – a space fifteen inches in height with two other men in the same bunk, the third tier of four.
He went on to say there was much stealing of food. The Jews were most abused. If they became weak for any reason, they got weaker because companions would steal their food.
“The Jews never had a chance,” he said. “Everyone would steal their food. Some died in the hospital or in their bunks – about four per day.”
He would not talk about the gas chamber. It was obvious it was used just before the American infantry arrived. We arrived about a week after the infantry had liberated Dachau. The hundred in the pile all died at the same time. There was no evidence of long time dead being at the bottom of the pile. The Nazis gassed them, but did not have time for cremation before the Americans arrived.
The German people did not know what went on in the concentration camp. The guards were nice people; they had children who went to school with their children. The Nazi guards were efficient in keeping their families and friends in complete ignorance of what was going on in the concentration camp. That is why, when the captain of the infantry marched the people from the village to view the atrocities, they wept for the guards whom they knew and not for the starved prisoners. Perhaps the captain did not realize that the hundreds of years of Lutheran and Catholic doctrine that kept the Jews in subservient positions did not evoke any guilty response to the subhuman condition of the Jews, it was not a great surprise. Martin Heidegger had been an apologist for Germany in that he held everyone has a right to try to survive, and extreme poverty had cruel punishment and had overwhelmed the German people since their loss of WWI. Our constitution proclaims the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Germany was looking for life, but entered a pact with death, a Faustianesque wager gone horribly wrong.
This experience has influenced my life greatly. The inner twisting of helplessness lingers but much dulled. From the ashes these things were glazed to my being:
Breastfeeding: it is not mother nature which would destroy its offspring, but it is human nature to see how to maximize that profit by marketing an ever more insidious “garbage” that separates the infant from the mother’s breast, causes increased infections, allergies, skin irregularities, not to mention the less active growth, and feeling of abandonment from the parents.
Like the townspeople around Dachau: we don’t realize that large corporations maximize the cost to the family and give it to doctors as well as Millions of dollars (e.g. $2 Mil. to the Academy of Pediatrics Building in Illinois). Minimal instructions are available to the mother at the time of birth from the hospital. Dangers of mixing water although warned on the formula cans, do not tell of the increased lead exposure and other contamination hazards using other than Mother’s food.
Also too little about maintaining Mother’s emotional and nutritional health is universally available.
We hesitate like the townspeople as we are helpless to do anything., and the collective guilt is all protective of our do-nothing attitude.
It is natural to fear and dread: it is natural: greed and arrogance. Nature can overproduce as well as create famine. Most animals given some food and fair treatment display the same to others. Man not as often.
This has further inspired me to actively show and hope to prove that large animals are particularly good at teaching good moral behavior. They will be kind so long as you are responsible for them and kind to them.
Since 1962, at my dad’s Ranch for Special Needs Youth, the Easy-K Foundation, Inc. the only horse accident was with a novice female counselor who swatted a horse as she went around the rear end. She got a hoof in the face.
Except for the doctor, I saw no Jews in Dachau that I recognized as such. I believe they had all been gassed before we got there. After the Jews were all killed, the Nazis sent many political prisoners to Dachau to work making uniforms. With the overcrowding, the starvation, the typhus fever and tuberculosis, there was a general loss of moral and mortal strength. The strong stole from the weak; the weak go weaker, then died. Then more men were sent for the slightest excuse to work for the Third Reich. There were many nationalities. The only religion was the law of the jungle: survival of the strongest or he who could steal the most.
After about two months and 150 autopsies, Dachau became decompressed. My unit was ordered back to the parent unit. We took the Pole of many languages and five other inmates with us.
Then we moved back to Darmstadt, Germany to the bombed out university that made the V-bombs that plagued London before V.E. Day. The university was the M.I.T. of Germany.
Everyday a truckload of prisoners was delivered to us. The Pole of many languages directed the prisoners with exactness in the cleanup work of the only building left standing. The faculty lived in the many tunnels.
His subtile criticism of the prisoner of war’s ancestors and the sarcasm concerning the superiority of the German Army were lost to most of us who did not speak German. But the Pole from Dachau got the job done. Sometimes we had to make the prisoners rest. They were middle-aged and tired, not like the young, virile arrogant prisoners captured in North Africa. Within two weeks we had a laboratory and living quarters that was the envy of many. The professors continued to live in the tunnels.
“No one really knows war unless he is killed.” –Plato 427 - 347 B.C.

Of Dachau
by Ernest Robbins Kimball Jr., MD with comments by David Custis Kimball