Never said any such thing. I simply said that such people can be found in Germany and elsewhere, including the U.S.
Yes, I too have been to Dachau. When I went, that line was being proffered as well as another line that the crematoria had never been used either, thus going hand-in-glove with the theory that KZ Dachau was never a fully operational Vernichtungslager (extermination camp), but simply a model camp of mostly POWs and political prisoners. However, this contradicts the findings of Allied tribunals and the findings of U.S. Army made at the end of the war.
Since I read German, I noticed that there is a disparity between what the placards at Dachau say and what U.S. investigators said in official reports at the end of the war. The good folks at Dachau have done an effective job at spinning the facts to soften its image and present itself in the best light. Read the links I’ve provided concerning the disparity between German and U.S. Army characterizations about what kind of place Dachau was.
My personal opinion is that the caretakers of Dachau and the town of Dachau itself, have over the decades, actively tried to tone down the nature of the exhibits at KZ Dachau, including removing, altering and/or withholding inconvenient details little by little over the years since the end of the war. The current exhibit, from what I’ve heard, is significantly sanitized an dumbed down from the U.S. Army exhibit that was set up for the benefit of U.S. military personnel there after the war (the U.S. Army had an active military base at Dachau until 1973).
The town of Dachau, especially, is especially defensive about its role during the war years and of being connected in any way with the KZ. Interstingly, the town of Dachau’s German-language official tourist brochure, which advertises the virtues of its spas, shopping and scenery, goes as far as to deny that any of its townspeople of having any knowledge or anything to do with the KZ during the war.
The brochure also disingenuously states that Dachau was nothing more than a camp for political prisoners and POWs, and that the Allies exaggerated much of what happened there after the war. Of course, we all know that this is a lie.
If you can’t see why, then you are naive. The Germans are experts at spinning things and duping the public. They are experts at hiding evidence, twisting facts, and in propagandizing. As someone who has also visited the USHM and Yad Washem in Israel, I found the whole exhibit at KZ Dachau to be severely lacking and an affrontery to those who believe in full disclosure of what happened during the Holocaust.
The exhibit at Dachau, IMO, conveniently ommitted many inconvenient details regarding the true nature of the camp. More specifically, I found the exhibits at Dachau cleverly sanitized, and curiously devoid of anything too graphic, too distasteful, too shocking – save a few pictures regarding a medical experiments on prisoners (all justified by their potential for saving lives – albeit at the expense of the prisoners’ lives), and only a handful of pictures featuring dead bodies or anything unpleasant like that.
Instead of emphasizing the death aspect of a death camp, the Dachau exhibit, which has been dumbed down little by little by its curators over the years, has been showing less and less to unsuspecting visitors over the years, with increased distortion, speculation and questioning of information that was previously accepted as fact by Allied tribunals and war crimes investigators after the war.
In lieu of providing graphic images and multimedia presentations that allow visitors to come to their own conclusions, the museum placed an inordinate emphasis on their German-language placards, which essentially retold events with a suspicious pollyanna spin to everything that left a bad taste in my mouth as I read German. I felt the Dachau museum curators were trying to lead us to their own conclusion that Dachau was less of an active death camp, and more of a “model camp” – and whilst a few people did die there, it was mostly b/c of natural causes and disease.
Also, the exhibits seemed at Dachau to emphasize the efficiency of Germany’s camps and subcamp system with its rail connections and extensive hub of transportation networks throughout Germany, at the expense of gory details of what happened at the camp. I found these points interesting, but ultimately detractors, and therefore, suspiciously reeking of propaganda and denial, which Germans are into bigtime.
Ultimately, I found the exhibit at Dachau did an injustice to what really happened there and failed to convey accurately in an open manner that Dachau was the site of wholesale genocidal slaughter of the Jews and other nationaliites that Germans considered “untermensch.”
. As to who worked in the prisoner camps, and how they communicated with their families and friends, I’ll have to leave that to someone else.