Larmata Gahs, known not officially as Bud, was a 20 -year soldier in the American army who had fought for a year when he and his unit entered the Dachau concentration camp just outside Monaco in 1945 for the first time.
His unit – the 42nd infantry division – had seen a heartbreaking fight since he started fighting in France. But, he said, freeing the concentration camp was completely different.
“When we opened the doces to Dachau, only then did we really understand what we had fought for,” said Gahs, 100 years old, to a crowd that included survivors, families and dignitaries in Dachau Sunday.
When he and his unit crossed the doors, Mr. Gah met prisoners so malnourished, sick and mistreated that they seemed as soon as you live. Along the way, the soldiers had found piles of bodies inside the wagons of the train.
On Sunday, Jean Lafaurie, 101, survived the field after being arrested in his village in France, spoke of the sadistic treatment that the prisoners had been forced to resist.
The minds of other survivors were on the present. Mario Candotto, 98 years old, from Italy, who survived the field but lost four of his brothers and both parents, said: “I hear about weapons and nationalism and the thought comes to mind: did people learn anything?”
The 80th anniversary of the end of the Nazi era – and with it Anniversaries of the liberations of the concentration camps – arrives in a fundamental moment for the Germans.
The last of the survivors, liberators and authors is dying of old age and with them all the living memories of the Holocaust. At the same time, the extreme right is becoming established. While the alternative for Germany, or Afd, whose leaders repeatedly minimized the holocaust, was once a marginal party, is currently the most popular party in Germany, according to some polls.
“We truly live in a period of upheaval; I hear it in the commemorative sites, and in particular in Dachau,” said Gabriele Hammermann, director of the Dachau concentration Memorial Site, at the New York Times to Dachau. “He acts as a seismograph.”
The anniversary also arrives after a pronounced change in the tone of the relationship between Germany and the United States. While once Washington was decisive in promoting a culture of responsibility and memory, the administration of President Trump made his preference for the AFD very clear.
In January, vice -president JD Vance shocked the German leaders when he told a crowd in Munich who should have stopped avoiding the Afd. Last week, after the AFD was officially labeled an extremist party by the German national intelligence unit, the secretary of state Marco Rubio, in a social media place, called the decision of the German intelligence unit “Tyrannia under lied”, adding that Germany's border policies were instead the “extremist” problem of the country.
Even anti -Semitic hatred crimes have increased in Germany. In a country that has long married the motto “never more”, many care that liberal democracy is threatened. In a survey conducted last year, 69 percent of interviewees said he believed that populism was a threat to democracy.
Even the people who manage the commemorative sites of the concentration camp have noticed a disturbing increase in theft and small crimes committed for reasons. In 2019, Nikolai Nerling, a far -right video blogger and a provocateur, was sentenced for encouragement for video in which he interviewed Visitors of Dachau and relating to the Nazi crimes. Last year the thieves stole exhibition objects from the field gas chamber.
A few weeks after Hitler went up to power in 1933, the Dachau field initially held political opponents. It was a model for future fields and a formal training site for paramilitary troops was created before they were sent to manage the new fields that Germany built throughout Eastern Europe when war began. More than 40,000 people died in Dachau, who, over the age of 12, has held more than 200,000 prisoners.
Built less than 10 miles outside Monaco, it was also distinguished from the fields built later during the regime, which were very outside the borders of the Reich. The injustice and atrocities committed in the Dachau field could not be easily ignored by the general population.
US soldiers of the 42nd and 45th infantry divisions that freed the field were among the first Americans to testify and document the horrors of the Nazi regime. The scenes they met by entering the field 80 years ago have changed many men for life. On Sunday there were mainly the families of the liberators who participated in the ceremony.
The survivors who came to Dachau Sunday, most of them were about 90 and 100 years old, indicating that this could be the last great anniversary involving people with first -hand memories of the fields. Among the youngest there was Leslie Rosenthal, who had traveled from Canada. Born only three months before the liberation, Rosenthal recently celebrated his 80th birthday.
“With the passage of time, the survivors and eye witnesses are quickly decreasing,” he said, observing that he and the seven children who were born in Dachau in the last few months before the liberation would soon become “last living bonds with the holocaust”.