Eyewitness

"In Dachau I made a powerful discovery. No power exists in the world that is capable of destroying humans as spiritual beings."
~ Karl Roder, "Nightwatch," in his imprisonment in Dachau Concentration Camp, 1933-45

Deliver my soul
from the sword;
Mine only one from the
power of the dog.
(Tanakh, Psalm 22:20)
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Heinrich Himmler diary entry on October 4, 1943, in occupied Poland – entitled “Group Leader meeting” – outlining the Jewish extermination programme to underlings who carried out the Holocaust. "I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. "It is one of those things that is easily said. ‘The Jewish people is being exterminated,’ every Party member will tell you, ‘perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter.’

"And then along they all come, all the 80million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. "They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. "Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. "And ... to have seen this through and - with the exception of human weakness - to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.

"Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. "Altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character."
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"Max Mannheimer remained deeply traumatised by his experiences for nearly 40 years, a situation not helped by the fact that in Germany – "the land of the perpetrators", as he calls it, where he reluctantly chose to settle near Munich with his new German wife – "no one wanted to know anything about former concentration camp prisoners; there were no discussions about the Nazi era".

For years he suffered from panic attacks, depression and "survivor's guilt". Then in the 1980s he started telling his story to German schoolchildren and leading tours of Dachau.

"At the start I had to take pills to calm my nerves," he said, "because all my fears, the indignities I'd suffered, the pain, came to the fore again. I could not enter the crematorium." Now, despite his age, he holds several tours and talks a week.

"I have no intention of lecturing people on the sins of their fathers and grandfathers," he says. "I don't see myself as a judge; I am simply an eyewitness and want to enlighten them. No one is better placed to do that than someone who has personally experienced the camps."

~ "Max Mannheimer (1920 – 2016) was an author, painter and survivor of the Holocaust. Except for one brother, he lost his entire family in the Holocaust, including his new wife. For decades, he did not speak about his experiences, despite nightmares and depression. In 1986, while traveling in the United States, he happened to see a swastika and the sight of it triggered a nervous breakdown. After that, he began to speak about his experiences at the hand of the Nazis, giving talks to young people and adults, at school and universities. Mannheimer won many honors and awards for his work." ~ Wikipedia