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- Nov. 11, 2008: Mark Zanzig has a description of his May 2007 trip to Dachau and 69 photos on his zanzig.com website.
- Oct. 25, 2008: I just discovered that the color film footage right after Dachau's liberation (3:50 mins.) taken by US Army photographer George Stevens is available on the web. It was discovered by his son in the 1980s and made into the 50 min. 1994 film "From D-Day to Berlin" (imdb page). This clip is about 35 mins into the film.
- At 2:14 on the clip the narration notes that "122 SS guards were shot." According to recent research by Jürgen Zarusky (Dachauer Hefte 1997, the number was probably 35-40: 16 in the coalyard, 17 in Tower B, and a few others. The Jewish memorial service is at 3:17-3:27, then the May 8 end-of-war celebration.
- Oct. 22, 2008: The Baden-Württemberg Center for political educationäs journal Politik & Untrricht: Zeitschrift für die Praxis der politischen Bildung (2008), issue 3, is devoted to the topic Gedenkstätten--available as a free 60page pdf. Nice color photos of various memorials and memorial sites in B-W; bibliography on p. 21.
- Oct. 22, 2008: Otto Kohlhofer's biography was published in 2006: Deckname "Betti Gerber": Vom Widerstand in Neuhausen zur KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau (Munich: Allitera, 2006), 172 pages, € 18 at allitera.de (with pdf excerpt).
- May 7, 2008: An award-winning film team from high school near San Diego, California is making a documentary about making a documentary about Dachau and the Holocaust (yes, you got that right: they film themselves setting up and conducting filmed interviews). They interviewed me in March, and visited Dachau in April. They will be in Auschwitz in July, with a release date this fall. You can view a six-minute trailer for their film We Must Remember at their website, http://chstv.com/.
- April 14, 2008: My book Legacies of Dachau is now out in a paperback edition. (amazon.com page--price: $55 [$69 hardcover]; $42.30 at amazon)
- Feb. 6, 2008: There is a new Jewish Museum in Munich on St. Jakobsplatz.
- Jan. 8, 2008: Vol. 23 of the Dachauer Hefte was published: "Nationalitäten im KZ."
See Jan. 6, 2008 article in the Münchner Merkur/Dachauer Nachrichten.
- Oct 29, 2007: On Oct. 2, 2007, General Felix Sparks, who led one of the battalions that liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, died. See this Colorado channel 9 news story.
- Oct. 16, 2007: Just uploaded: a 32-slide lecture "Exhibiting Dachau, 1945-2005" that I presented last week. It includes the images of the 1946 murals in the US army base that I first posted on this site in August 2001.
- Sept 28, 2007: An album/scrapbook compiled by then 35-year-old former Polish Catholic inmate Michal Porulski (1910-1989) shortly after liberation was discovered. It was discovered by the daughter of fellow inmate Arnold Unger (1930-1972) who, as a 15-year-old Jewish Pole, became a translator for the US army after liberation and emigrated to the US with 60 other Holocaust orphans in 1947. See the eight photographs in the article "Album mit Zeichnungen aus KZ Dachau entdeckt," Die Welt, Sept. 28, 2007.
- May 8, 2007: The anniversary of the liberation of Dachau has prompted another step in the development of the memorial site: Starting construction of a 36x36m Visitor's Center to serve the 800,000 people who visit the Dachau memorial site each year. (May 4, 2007 Münchner Merkur article in German)
- Oct. 18, 2006: My English-language article about
Dachau has just been published in: Encyclopedia of Europe, 1914-2004:
The Age of War and Reconstruction, edited by John Merriman and
Jay Winter (New York: Thomson, 2006)(publisher's
page: $595 for 5-vol. set). I may post a much-expanded version soon.
- June 1, 2005: NPR broadcast a review
of The Ninth Day by Pat Dowell, for which I was interviewed.
- May 19, 2005: After seeing Volker Schlöndorff's
film The Ninth Day, about a Luxemburg priest imprisoned
in Dachau, in February, I got the memoir it is drawn from, translated
key passages, and made a web page
comparing the memoir and the film in March. In preparation for an
interview for a review on NPR I did some more research in May, and augmented
the page.
- April 22, 2005: On
April 29 I will be presenting at a German-French colloquium in Munich:
"Memories and History: From the Experiential World of the Concentration
Camps." My presentation is titled: "How Dachau has Changed:
Ideas and Goals of Its Presentation, 1945-2005" (in German). The
conference website is: www.dachau2005.com/;
blurb about
my presenation, French
version.
The main 60th anniversary
celebration will take place on May 1, 2005, at 10:45am,
preceded by religious services at the religious memorials. At 12:30
there will be a ceremony in Hebertshausen. Official
program of events; live
broadcast on Bavarian Radio;
- Feb. 8, 2005: I was asked about the GPS coordinates
of the memorial site. They are:
Lat-Long: 48° 16' 5" , 11° 28' 4" 48.2682 , 11.468
Found and viewable at maporama.com.
- Oct. 18, 2004: Legends
page, about why people claim the Dachau gas chamber was built after
the war, soap was made from human fat, and such like.
- Sept. 20, 2004: Sept.
18, 1945 letter from US Army Air Corps pilot Robert Monson added.
I've also created a Visits page,
which will enable me to make such reports more easily accessible.
- Nov. 10, 2003: link added to Henry Staruk's 50 page
master's thesis : "After the Liberation: The American Administration
of the Concentration Camp at Dachau" (May 2002) (link)
- Oct. 2003: Best Dachau
site in English. I receive many inquiries about the
camp. I usually refer people to the scrapbookpages.com
Dachau site, which contains a wealth of reliable information
and is richly illustrated. The site was begun in 1998 by a couple of
young American (probably from California) tourists interested in history
(see their about
us page). It has since grown to over 1000 pages about historical
sites all over the world, many of them former
concentration camps and sites
of Jewish interest, as well as some of general
interest.
- Oct. 2003: I have talked about Dachau in some of
my lecture classes, and have illustrated outlines on those course web
sites: 1890-1933-1945,
1945-2002,
demise
of mythic resistance.
- Apr./June 2003: A text by former US army corporal Henry
Senger about the capture of Commandant Martin Weiss has been added
(category background info, below).
June 2003: article
published in local NJ newspaper (archive
copy)
- Aug. 2002: At the end of July 2002 I was in the Dachau memorial
site again, and examined the first part of the new exhibition in detail.
Unfortunately, it is, in my opinion, a disaster. The walls were stripped
down and not repainted (to be more authentic??), giving the first part
of the museum a confusing, dirty character. The murals below have been
destroyed. The entire exhibition has far too much text and detail, and
very complex design features that are likely to remain unrecognized
by most visitors. What a shame!
- Aug. 2001: In 1972 the US Army returned confiscated portions
of the former concentration camp to Bavaria. This included one wing
of the present museum building, which has been empty and off-limits
since then. In 1998 three murals painted after the war were discovered
there. They decorated the mess hall used by the US soldiers. They depict:
a view of Manhattan in the 1940s, a tropical sunset, and a snowy mountain
scene.
GERMAN AUTHORITIES HAVE DESTROYED THESE MURALS,
because they are supposedly "not original." (They mean that the murals
were not part of the Nazi concentration camp.) I think the murals would
make a powerful backdrop for the planned exhibit on the postwar uses
of the former camp. About 50% of the 600,000-800,000 visitors each year
are Americans. These murals document how Americans stationed in Dachau
tried to make the former camp livable for themselves. They would help
US-American (and other) visitors to think about and define what they
(we) are doing in the camp today, without detracting from the horrors
documented elsewhere in the museum and on the grounds.
This wanton and irreversible destruction
of an important historical artifact, is typical of the Bavarian government's
stance towards documenting the history of the concentration camp.
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