Operation Honor: In Memorial...Dachau Concentration Camp

One of the main reasons for our excursion into Germany on Operation Honor was to see the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial, as Colonel McCollam was one of the liberators of this living hell. It was extremely important for us to come here and see what Papa had seen to ensure that we would witness and understand what happened here - to never let it happen again. As the generation of soldiers who saw this place slowly fade away, the horrors of this part of history need witnesses - witnesses who will carry on their shoulders the reality of what happened here and the memories of the lives of thousands who never came out.

As the colonel of a combat engineer division and the only group who had access to power equipment, Papa was given the horrendous task of cleaning up the Dachau Concentration Camp. As he and his soldiers worked to clean up and dispose of the thousands of bodies which were rotting in and around the camp, Papa found that his men could not physically stand up to the task. Soldiers were vomiting and suffering severe nausea from the grotesque sights and smells they were were being forced to endure. Papa went to the nearby town of Dachau,whose residents had so long ignored the plight of the hundreds of thousands of human beings who passed through the camp, and singled out any who were capable of running power equipment. He then brought them back to the camp and forced them to begin the work of digging the mass graves and bulldozing the bodies in. The rest of the civilians were brought in to tour the camp and see the evil that had happened there. Today, the video inside the Dachau memorial shows the residents of Dachau slowly filing by the gassing showers, crematoriums, and holding rooms full of corpses as American soldiers look on.

The original gate of Dachau still stands. Hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi regime walked through these very doors and saw the words "Work Makes Free" - a lie that would lead thousands to work themselves to death in the camp.

Our time in Dachau was marked by utter disbelief at what man without God is capable of becoming. As we wandered through acres of memorials and saw the marks of one atrocity after another, our minds could not accept how one human being could do this to another. How could a nation fall so far as to accept the mass murder of human beings? How could the people who lived just outside of this camp choose to ignore the chalky gray smoke of thousands of bodies being cremated? How could they pretend not to see the faces of haunted human beings who were being led to their death?

Today the history of Dachau can be read in the cold, calculating, endless rows of barbed wire.

Two of the barracks stand today as they did in 1945.

The audio tour we purchased for our time in Dachau provided for us a complete history of the concentration camp and what happened here. Seeing the camp was a horrible but poignant experience we will never forget. The history of this place must never be forgotten.

Dachau Concentration Camp was the first Nazi camp established in Germany. It was built on the grounds of an old munitions factory and became functional on March 22, 1933. Dachau was built to hold political prisoners, intellectuals, and members of religious groups who protested against what was happening in Germany. Intellectuals or students who realized the probable outcome of Hitler's regime and his tactics were the first to be interned in Dachau. Virtually every German community had intellectuals arrested and taken to Dachau. A chant became common in Germany during the war:

"Lieber Gott, mach mich dumm, damit ich nicht nach Dachau kumm" which translates to "Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come".

Anyone who protested the atrocities of the regime or raised a voice in defense of the innocent could readily be sent to this camp. Dachau held more Christian prisoners than any other camp - over three thousand. It also had an entire barracks designated to Catholic priests. Although the German priests received relatively good treatment, the guards especially despised the Polish priests. Of everyone in the camp, they were most often subjected to medical experiments, beatings, and punishment.

Dachau was a model camp by Nazi standards, and all other concentration camps build in World War II were replicas of this one. The sadistic and unbelievably barbaric SS guards who wielded such power over the prisoners here at Dachau were also considered exemplary. A highly sought-after school for the training of SS officers was established in the camp. For a few brief months during WWII, the concentration camp was shut down to allow for more officers to pass through training.

The perimeter of the camp is surrounded by a water canal and a ten foot section of barbed wire. The area in the picture above, plus a small section on the inside side of the canal, was the kill zone. German soldiers sitting in the watch towers were armed with machine guns and had orders to kill on sight anyone who passed into the zone. Any soldier responsible for "preventing an escape" by killing a prisoner in the zone was given a thirty day furlough. Human lives in exchange for a furlough. 

The soldiers were known to take personal belongings from the prisoners, throw them into the kill zone, and then shoot the prisoners as they attempted to retrieve their possessions. At other times, starving and sickened prisoners would willingly run into the zone, choosing a quick death over the prolonged agony of starvation, torture, medical experiments, and hard labor. 

Several of the watch towers are still intact today.

In 1937, forced slave laborers expanded Dachau to a capacity of 6,000 victims. It was still not enough to hold all the prisoners that were being sent to the camp. Due to the intellectuals and religious figures held in Dachau, the public sentiment towards the camp's prisoners was very positive. In an attempt to undermine that, the Nazis began bringing convicted criminals into the camp. The criminals were put in positions of command over the intellectual and religious interns, responsible particularly for 'preventing escapes' while on the forced marches or when the prisoners were being sent to work as slave labor . The criminals were well known for letting the weak or sick prisoners fall behind, accusing them of attempted escape, and executing them on the spot.  

In 1942, one of the barracks was turned into a experimental medical unit. Although we all had studied the history of the Nazi medical atrocities, it was a very different thing to walk by the ruins of the building where the experiments happened, and to walk the trail that the prisoners once walked as they came in for the trials. The Nazis performed hellish human experiments on the victims of Dachau - altitude tests, vaccination trials, hypothermia tests, tuberculosis and malaria tests, and halting excessive bleeding, among others. Hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners died or were permanently crippled by these utterly inhuman experiments.

The monument to the unknown prisoners

The gateway leading in the crematorium and the gassing showers

The most difficult part of the camp was the crematorium  inside - and the gassing showers. There were pictures on the walls of the American soldiers discovering the showers and the ovens for the first time...it was gruesome to know that Papa would have been subjected to seeing the horrible sights here. Today you can walk through the chambers and stand in the very rooms where the bodies were piled seventy years ago. It was a nauseating experience to walk through an area that had once been part of such a massive genocide. We have all read the history books and seen the grainy black and white images of these horrors, but seeing them in person is a very different thing. People died here. Families died here. Fathers, mothers, sons, sisters, daughters, brothers, wives, grandparents - even children.

This room was used to hold the corpses of the gassed prisoners before they were cremated.
When Papa was here in 1945, this room was full of bodies. 

The door leading into the gassing chamber

"Shower"

 After having seen the gassing showers and crematoriums, we understood by Papa would never talk about his experiences at Dachau. He was asked to return to the camp in 1965 when Dachau was turned into a memorial, but he refused. His children relayed to us that he told them he would never step into Dachau again. It is hard to imagine the horrific carnage that the Allied soldiers had to see in this place.

Dachau was also the execution place of thousands of Russian prisoners of war. Since the lives of the captured soldiers were considered worthless by camp staff, their executions were largely unrecorded; there is no accurate estimate of how many perished. The common thought is that many thousands were shot here. A few mass killings were recorded; in 1941, 4,000 Russian POWs were brought to Dachau and shot, row by row.

One of the perimeter walls of the crematorium complex was used as the execution wall, complete with a deep ditch beside for the blood to run off into. When the camp was turned into a memorial in 1965, the wall had to be rebuilt, as the entire thing had been demolished by the thousands of machine gun bullets that hit the wall during executions. There is now a memorial to the many unknown soldiers who were shot at the wall. In the crematorium complex there are also two gallows and several areas where prisoners were shot. So many of the deaths are unrecorded...so many people never registered. We will never know how many people met their deaths in Dachau's execution and crematorium complex. 

This quiet, beautiful memorial stands directly in front of the execution range wall. It is dedicated to the ashes of 'many unknown thousands'. The concept of that many people whose names, faces, history, and families were snuffed out and will
 never be known was nearly impossible to comprehend. 

A memorial chapel at Dachau

As the Germans became more desperate, Dachau was flooded with more and more prisoners. The camp, designed for 6,000 prisoners, swelled to almost 70,000. Dachau was no longer a place for political prisoners, but also for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, and anyone the Nazis considered inferior.  The conditions were brutal, with hundreds dying every day; typhus was rampant due to the overcrowding and poor sanitation, and people were worked to death in ammunition factories. As the Allies grew closer, more and more prisoners were shipped into Dachau. To keep the death numbers of their 'exemplary camp' low, the majority of the prisoners sent to Dachau marked for death in the gas chambers were passed along to the nearby death camps for their actual execution. 

Just outside the doors of the camp, we saw the remains of the railroad tracks that once carried trains packed with prisoners in and out of Dachau. In the graphic video of Dachau's history that we watched at the memorial, we saw videos of the same train station, taken on the day of Dachau's liberation. A few days before Allied troops fought their way to Dachau, trains full of thousands of grotesquely emaciated people - including families and children - arrived at the concentration camp. They had endured days of travel with no food or water. Thousands had died in the overcrowded box cars and many more collapsed at the unloading point.  The first Allied soldiers who arrived at Dachau saw and recorded for history a train station full of thousands of shrunken, decaying corpses, many still lying in the trains they had collapsed in. One liberating soldier recorded the heart-wrenching story of a little girl who approached them asking for help to find her mommy. A transfer from the death camp Auschwitz, she could not remember her name; she only knew herself by the tattooed number on her arm. All she could tell them was that she once had a mother named "Mommy"; she knew nothing else about her family, her name, or where she came from. 

Dachau was liberated by American soldiers on May 8th, 1945. The 300 SS guards who had remained in the camp were lined up and shot by the liberating forces, who were utterly shocked by the conditions of the camp. Some guards had tried to escape by dressing in prisoners clothing, but the prisoners identified them to the Americans, and in many cases, killed them themselves. There was a massive celebration of freedom from the Nazis, and inmates presented to their liberators an American flag that they had secretly sewn from their clothing. Approximately 32,000 souls were liberated that day.

Mothers and children released from Dachau. These children, unlike hundreds of thousands of infants who were killed by the genocide of the Nazis, had a chance to live, grow, and have a life.

Dachau prisoners wave, cheer, and salute their American liberators from behind the rows of barbed wire.

We will never know how many people died in Dachau. Hundreds of thousands of people passed through Dachau, but only 30,000 have their deaths recorded in the camp registers. It is a undeniable fact that the 30,000 recorded deaths is a preposterously low estimate; however, there is limited evidence and very little chance that anyone will ever be able to know just how many people died here.

A monument designed by the survivors, dedicated to the many lives lost, stands in Dachau today, a silent and graphic reminder to all of us to remember the horror and genocide that happened here.

May we never forget.

Operation Honor: Neuschwanstein Part II - Our Adventure

Hello All!

Welcome to Neuschwanstein Castle, part 2! Our journey began in the town of Fussen, a bustling little tourist village nestled at the foot of the castle's mountain. From the crowded streets you can see both Neuschwanstein Castle away up on the hillside as well as its sister castle, Schloss Hohenschwangau. (We want to know who named that. Really light and feminine sounding, isn't it?) Also, just across from Neuschwanstein castle is the Marienbrucke, or Mary's Bridge, which our great-grandparents visited and which we were eager to photograph. Our only dilemma lay in a firm rule that NO cameras, photography, or videography is allowed in Neuschwanstein Castle - and there is nowhere safe to leave your cameras in the castle! We had worked out what we thought was a brilliant plan to ride the bus up to the castle, take our tour, ride the bus back down, grab our cameras from the car, catch the next bus back up, photograph the bridge, and ride the bus a final time down (are you confused yet? Still, we thought it would work...). And indeed, the plan seemed to be working quite well. After figuring out where we were supposed to buy our tickets for the bus ride up, we were able to get settled for the short, bouncy ride up the winding road the castle. The bus lets its passengers off near the Marienbrucke, and we set out on our ten-minute walk to the castle.

Who wouldn't love a walk through this kind of scenery? 

Our journey thus far has seemed to include a lot of cold and rain (definitely 180 degrees opposite of our sunny and hot California home), but the scheduled weather for Fussen was actually quite nice. It was sunny and beautiful, and everything was green—a foreign color in contrast to our brown landscapes at home. We really enjoyed our tour, which was described in more detail in the previous post! It was incredible to see so much beauty and elegance. As you walk down the hallways, it's easy to slip away for a few brief moments into an imaginary world where you can be a princess (or prince - whatever your case may be!) walking through your magnificent castle.

The waterfalls below the Marienbrucke 

Once our 5:45 pm hour-long tour was over (we stayed longer talking with our charming guide), we hurried back up to fulfill part 2 of our plan. In case you've forgotten, that was to ride the bus back down the mountain to fetch our photographic gear. Except that our brilliant minds were also a bit jet-lagged and travel-weary when we made that plan, and we didn't think to check what time the last bus left. And that happened to be 6:45. And by now, it was 7:15. It really doesn't make sense that you'd have castle tours until 8:00 pm but stop the bus rides at 7:15...but, oh well, ours was not to reason why. Ours was, however, to somehow get ourselves back down the mountain - via a nearby pebbly, unpaved walking path. With resilient and hardy American-Scottish resolve, we set forth down the steep and rocky mountain trail.

Perhaps if we were normal people, the story would stop here. Except that we're not particularly normal, as anyone who has met us will attest to. We were eagerly looking forward to photographing the Marienbrucke above the castle as part of one of our side-adventures - a goal to replicate pictures that our great-grandfather took during his stay in Germany in 1944-1945. Complete with scarf and 40's lipstick for us girls, we fully intended to take pictures from the same places Nana and Papa had stood on the Marienbrucke. In order to more closely resemble our great-grandmother (who was always dressed to the nines and wearing bright red lipstick) in the 1945 images, Savannah faithfully carried a cute dress and heels all the way from the US and on three flights, and put it on for our day in Fussen. She was definitely regretting that as she traversed down this steep mountain trail in a knee-length summer dress and 2" heels.

Again, we think, if this was any somewhat normal story about normal people, it would stop here. Except that we're really not normal people, and our stories are never normal... and because of that, our adventure continued with the addition of a thunderstorm. Since it was so sunny and warm at the beginning of the day, we had put on our warm weather clothes. Now those lovely, sunset Alpine skies began to turn gray and began to trickle rain drops down on what was once our carefully-styled hair. (Yes, the hairstyles you are about to see here in these pictures are NOT the hairstyles we began the day with. Ahem. To say the least.)

"Wouldn't it be funny," Dad said, "if it started raining really hard?"

As soon as he said this, we clapped our hands over his mouth and looked about with some apprehension, hoping that the cloudy sky had not heard him. Unfortunately it had, and being somewhat generous, it cordially granted his request a couple minutes later and released tremendous sheets of rain down on us. We were a very comical sight - three American tourists climbing down a steep mountain trail, with one of our company wearing a short summer dress and  heels, and all of us thoroughly wet (complete with dripping hair and running mascara)!

At last we reached the bottom of the hill. We were tired and had sore feet, but we really wanted to get those matching pictures up on the bridge. Unfortunately for us, cars weren't allowed on the bus road! Mildly daunted but very determined, we traded in heels for walking shoes (which looked great matched with that summer dress) grabbed our cameras, and found another path to get back up the mountain. Fortunately evenings in Germany seem to last for hours, and it had stopped raining, so by God's grace we were able to climb up the mountain (huffing and puffing), reach the Marienbrucke, and see Neuschwanstein Castle from the very same bridge that our Papa and Nana had stood on. The word "surreal" has appropriately defined so many parts of our adventure so far, and this was no exception.

Freezing cold but enjoying a beautiful moment!

Yes, it's true- we have the best daddy ever.
Sorry for all of you who didn't get him!

We had a magical time up on the bridge, looking at the view and wondering how Nana and Papa must have felt when they were here in 1945, just after the end of World War II. The hike (despite the high heels and summer dress) was completely worthwhile as we took our photos in the same spots that Nana and Papa had photographed 69 years ago.

These two men have a great deal in common- both kind, adventurous, intelligent, loving husbands, dedicated daddies, veterans of two wars...the Grant girls are incredibly grateful that we have such great men to look up to in our lives! 

"Nana" Gertrude Rose... a West Point beauty who is remembered as a loving wife and mother, a lady who exemplified 'class' during even the hardest of times, and a gracious and gentle friend. Nana fearlessly followed the love of her life all over the world, even moving herself and her children to war-devastated Germany in 1945 in order to stay near her husband. We would be honored if we could one day be a tenth of the woman she was. We love you, Nana!

 God has displayed His great faithfulness to our family throughout many generations, and this moment of our trip was another reminder of His goodness. We praise God for the legacy of honor and service that our great-grandparents left behind, and a chance to see and appreciate it firsthand.  

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose." Romans 8:28 

Operation Honor: Neuschwanstein Castle, Part 1—The History

On May 29th we had a chance to see the amazing Bavarian castle, Neuschwanstein! This spectacular castle has both amazing history and breath-taking views. This visit was special to us in several ways. First, being a place that our grandparents visited during their trip to Germany, a picture of this castle has hung in their home for years.  As a little girl I would stand and stare at it, thinking how beautiful the "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang" castle was. (Please tell me someone else is old enough to have grown up watching that wonderful old movie!) What a treat it was to see in person the castle that I had spent years looking and wishing to see! There is so much to see and learn at Neuschwanstein...because of that, we have decided to break it up into two blog posts. This first post will go over the history of the castle, what it looks like today, and why we wanted to see it. Our next post will go into the personal adventure we had while there (ahem... interesting), and our pictures. 

This picture is almost identical to the one I grew up looking at. Beautiful! 

Secondly, the castle Neuschwanstein has a strong connection to our great-grandfather. Papa was one of the very first people to discover this castle as the Nazis fled it in 1945. Our Uncle Gary was able to relate to us the story the Papa told him about discovering Neuschwanstein. 

Papa's division was always one step ahead of the troops, as they were responsible for clearing roads, building bridges, and dismantling bombs or booby traps (which were sometimes dead German soldiers, as Papa wrote in one of his war albums). When they entered the Germany village of Fussen, Papa looked up and saw Neuschwanstein castle, hidden among the alpine trees high on the hillside. He immediately drove up the hill to investigate and entered the castle. The Nazis had just left, and the only people at the castle were the two elderly curators, who had remained there for the duration of the war. They spoke to him and showed him around the castle. 

Neuschwanstein Castle, as photographed by Colonel McCollam in 1945

As has been made more widely known through the recently released film "Monuments Men", Neuschwanstein Castle was the location for one of the biggest caches of stolen Nazi art. Its obscure and hidden location, plus its proximity to the Austrian border, made it an ideal location for hiding the art which they planned to soon move into the "Fuhrer Museum". When Papa arrived in spring of 1945, the castle was full to bursting with art which had been stolen from Jews, private collections, and museums across Europe.  After seeing the castle (which itself had an incredible collection of historically and intrinsically valuable goods) and the jewelry, art, and carvings that the Nazis had left behind, Papa ordered a group of military police to protect the great quantities of art and history inside. As we wandered the beautiful, richly decorated halls of Neuschwanstein Castle, we were so proud to know that Papa's exploration and decisive action helped preserve and protect the castle for generations of people to see and enjoy. Also, we are so glad that his efforts helped protect the stolen art! The real-life Monuments Men would spend 6 weeks in the castle, tagging and removing the stolen art, and then years attempting to find out where it went and who it belonged to. Below are some pictures of the real Monuments Men cataloging and removing treasure from Neuschwanstein Castle.

Our tour guide, a very kind young German woman, was able to tell us about how much art was hidden in the castle—over 8,000 pieces—and told us that in 1945 there was not a room in the enormous castle that was not filled with art. She was very interested to find out whether or not Papa would have known anything more about what happened to art or valuables in the years following the war. She said that not all of the art or treasure held in the castle has been accounted for, and (thanks to the Monuments Men film) there has been a renewed interest in searching for the missing treasure. There has apparently been quite a bit of scuba diving and searching the lakes around the castle lately! Plenty of hopeful people are trying to locate the missing Nazi treasures that were once hidden in Neuschwanstein. 

Today, Neuschwanstein Castle is one of the most visited castles in Germany, and one of the more popular tourist destinations in Europe. We learned some interesting things about the castle on our tour, one of which being that the castle was built by the very eccentric but brilliant King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Thanks to his imagination and creation of this fairy-tale castle, he is known as the "Fairy Tale King". King Ludwig was an avid admirer and strong supporter of Richard Wagner, the world-renowned composer, and Ludwig built Neuschwanstein in Wagner's honor (Anyone who admires me is more than welcome to build me a castle. I'll accept it!) Most of the murals in the castle are inspired by characters from Wagner's musical operas; Wagner himself spent a great deal of time at the castle. 


The castle's throne room is filled with painting and murals depicting scenes of the apostles and Jesus Christ. Above the area where the throne is seated is a large painting of Jesus Christ being crowned king of heaven. Ludwig, a deeply reverent Catholic, wanted it to be perfectly clear that Jesus was king of everything. 

The throne room...

Other areas of the castle, (particularly the third floor) predominately display Ludwig's admiration of Wagner's operas. The Singer's Hall (built for theater performances) occupies the entire fourth floor of Neuschwanstein, and it's walls are covered with characters from Wagner's operas. Our personal favorite was the beautiful carving of a unicorn that hung high on the walls. The name of the castle also reflects the slight obsession the young king had with his favorite composer; Neuschwanstein translates to "New Swan Castle". This is a reference to the "Swan Knight", a musical character of Wagner's for whom Ludwig held a special sense of camaraderie and similarity.  

Singers Hall

The king's bedroom is a particularly amazing place. Wood carvers worked constantly in that one room for over four years, painstakingly creating the breath-taking woodwork within. Talk about a job! Aside from the intricate carvings that cover the walls, ceilings, and furniture, the workers fashioned an ornate and beautiful cathedral above the king's bed (check it out in the picture below). The cathedral was so intricate that you couldn't help but stand and stare. How someone could manage to create it from a block of wood is unbelievable, and we were all truly impressed.  The king's water system was also a truly impressive feat for the 1800s. 200 feet above the castle was an alpine spring, which was channeled through pipes into the king's room. A swan carved from silver stands on a table in the room, and the water flowed directly through the pipes and into the swan, pouring constantly out of the swan's mouth and wing tips. The king had fresh water whenever he felt like it, coming out of a silver swan just for him (you can see the swan in the lower left hand side of the picture). We're pretty sure we need a swan water fountain like that in our bathroom!  

Ludwig's bedroom...

Another private room for the king...

Well, that is it for Neuschwanstein, Part 1! We hope you enjoyed learning about the history behind this amazing place, and we look forward to sharing Part 2 with you all as soon as we get a chance...

*Because personal photography is strictly forbidden inside Neuchwanstein Castle, we were not able to take any pictures ourselves. Thankfully, we are allowed to use the pictures of the castle's interior from the official website, which is what you see above.