Kill the Killer?

Dachau, Bavaria. It's 32°C and on my way to the concentration camp memorial I stop for an ice cream (a luxury that the prisoners transported in cattle trucks and beaten along the way did not have). I go past the restaurant of the visitor center and through the gate. "Arbeit macht frei" (work sets you free) says the sign on the door. I enter the main exhibition room and walk around reading, looking, thinking... I lean againt a wall. There was a prisoner I "share" the wall with though so many years stand between us. I will leave this sordid place in a couple of hours but he will stay there. Very few will make it out. It gives me a pang of despair and a sort of survivor guilt...

Dachau was one of the first concentration camps in the Nazi Germani, others that followed used it as a model. Hitler imprisoned and killed thousands of Jews, foreigners, ethnical minorities and homosexuals.

However, it was initially meant for GERMAN political prisoners.

Would you dare fight the regime if you risked such repressive measures? A Jingle went around in Munich in 1935 : "Lieber Herr Gott, mach mich stumm, Das ich nicht nach Dachau komm'" ("Dear God, make me dumb [silent], That I may not to Dachau come").

I find it not less disturbing that what followed the end of the war was imposing "collective guilt" on all Germans. All of them. For being German alone.

That abominable and criminal generalisation allowed for deportation of ethnic Germans in Europe and the infamous Brno death march.

Have we put enouph of "racism protection" in place or is the history bound to repeat?