The Lies Ill-Concealed

There was a woman, as I read, named Eleanore Baur who made it her mission each year at Christmas to visit the inmates at Dachau with cookies and cigarettes. She became known as Sister Pia. An especially devoted and early member of the National Socialist movement, Baur is the only woman involved in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and was rewarded for her early loyalty to the Third Reich with a villa in Dachau and considerable influence in the camp, of which she was the appointed "welfare sister."

Here the story becomes more specific. Her visits were always marked by long, patriotic speeches in which she reprimanded prisoners for hurting the Fuehrer's heart by not being social, productive members of society. Furthermore, she exerted considerable influence in the camps. She could select "pets" and "favorites" who she would request work at her villa on projects that ranged from cleaning, cooking, renovations, to reported sexual abuse. While she never directly harmed anyone, her influence could be used to tremendous personal advantage or disadvantage. She survived the war, served a brief sentence, and then lived out her days in her villa, reinstated with her rank and pension.

I stumbled across this brief but disturbing biography while scouring Dachau's archives. A far cry from the rich, decorous splendor of Munich and it's garland-decked alleys and towering Christmas trees, the area around the Dachau concentration camp is flat, sterile, and cold. A mist hovered slightly in the air and the sun-less sky matched the greyness of the area.

I would also visit the Munich Stadtmuseum while in town and examine the exhibit specifically dedicated to the rise of the Nazis in Munich, examining propaganda, artifacts, and more information about the early momentum of National Socialism. Yet for the moment, the history of the location was almost tangible, an invisible exhibit that was none-the-less present and occupied a space more in the head than in the physical realm.

My goal was simple and complex at the same time. Dachau was designed for political and social prisoners such as communists, homosexuals, clergy, Soviet POWs,  politicians and resistance fighters. The turbulent history of Germany and Europe after 1945 left complicated legacies for these groups. Communists and homosexuals especially did not enjoy sudden popularity in West Germany (or East Germany for that matter) after the war. In fact, homosexuality's criminalization continued in Germany well into the 1970s, excluding homosexual prisoners from being involved with memorials dedicated to inmates' experiences at Dachau. My curiosity focused on how the persecution and brutality of these "political" groups was taught in Europe during a time where said groups still did not enjoy sympathy or popular opinion.

My initial examinations of books from the Dachau archives gave a chilling but comprehensive overview of Holocaust education shortly after the end of the war. Students described teachers staring at their shoes, sweating and panicked when talking about the NS period. There was tangible discomfort for both educators and the students who secretly wanted to know what their teachers had done during the war. However, political groups were somewhat excluded in from this dialogue. Homosexuals were not included in the 1968 camp memorial as homosexuality was still criminalized during that time. Some students protested the exclusion of former prisoners from now-communist nations from participation in the commemoration, an action which some western media outlets interpreted as Neo-Nazism.

In fact, many Soviets (who had been under strict instruction not to surrender) returned back to the USSR after the war to face accusations of collaboration and face even more prison time. Yet such information is uncommon in American Holocaust education. While the Jewish population of Europe suffered catastrophic losses, many other groups are ignored when discussing Nazi brutality.

I left the archives with answered questions, unanswered questions, and plethora of new, more complicated questions that buzzed around my head like frozen rain. I walked into the mist of late-afternoon, thinking of Sister Pia, and lines of prisoners, each with a narrative that may perhaps be lost in the recesses of time.