Concentration Camp visit

Our last day in Germany, June 3, Walter and Gudrun drove us to Tegel Airport (Berlin) to fly back to Bangkok. On the way, we stopped to visit the former Sachenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin. This was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazis in 1936 and was supposed to be a model. About 200,000 prisoners (mostly Jews, political prisoners, and prisoners of war) experienced this camp between 1936 and 1945 and about half of them died. Shortly before the war ended, the guards forced the surviving prisoners (several thousand) to endure a death march to the Baltic Sea. The plan was to put them on ships and kill them. The Red Army intercepted this death march near Schwerin, but many thousands died along the way before they could be liberated.

It felt strange to be in a place where such horrific atrocities on a mass scale had taken place; to be in this place of suffering and cruelty. Both my parents were German Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1934, and my uncle Eric (my father's older brother) was a prisoner at Auchwitz and Buchenwald for three years. I was very moved to be here. One wonders about the psychology of the perpetrators and how people can treat other human beings with such brutality. Anyone who would argue that education should only emphasize reading, writing and math, and not ethics, social justice and critical thinking, ought to come to a place like this and reflect about how this could have happened and how it can be prevented from ever happening again.

Visiting the concentration camp made me reflect again on the causes of fascism and war and on the immense sums of money and resources being spent on war and so-called defense. The world is spending about two trillion a year on military, and the United States spends about half of that. That means that Californians alone sends about $130 billion a year for military spending to the federal government. What if this spending could be converted to social spending? With half the world living in misery, social spending would create conditions that could help prevent wars and oppression. Instead of selling weapons to poor countries, the more affluent countries could demand more spending on health and education and less on military hardware.