AT THE BORDER AGAIN
Speech on the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp
Hebertshausen shooting range 4 May 2024
"This place shows us that evil is not just anywhere. It is not abstract, but concrete and close at hand everywhere. Evil can - to paraphrase Hannah Arendt - be banal and take place just a few metres away from us."
The plow follows a straight line. Like knives, the blades cut through the black mossy earth and throw it into loose clods. White stones lie in it. Crows swoop down on the freshly thrown up earth and peck at it. The boy has been driving the tractor for hours, row by row, up and down, lost in thought. Over at the edge of the field there is nothing but undergrowth, brambles and wild birch trees. The border to this wilderness is marked by a dead straight row of tall concrete pillars. Some of them are broken off, rusted iron protruding from the demolition sites. They stand mysteriously and menacingly in the wilderness. Remnants of barbed wire hang from them. A paper sack is caught on them and whines in the wind. The adults have told the boy that the land behind the posts once belonged to his grandfather.
The boy on the tractor, you guessed it ladies and gentlemen, is me. I was born in 1959 and grew up on the Walpertshofen estate, two kilometres from here. I am a historian and until recently I was a full-time local historian for the administrative district of Upper Bavaria.
On 20 January 1937, my grandfather received a letter from the Munich office of the Reichsführer SS, Karlstraße 10, in which he was asked to go directly to the mayor's office in Hebertshausen and to sign over three acres of Mooswiese to the SS Death's Head units. For the purpose of setting up a shooting range, according to the letter. A symbolic transfer amount was specified. I have brought the letter with me. The transfer became official just five days later. Three years later, in 1940, my grandfather, the landowner of Walpertshofen, died of heart failure at the age of 48. We all know how the story continued. The construction of a sealed-off paramilitary firing range, which became in 1941 an extermination site.
Standing today on this boundary between fertile farmland and a blood-soaked killing site has great symbolic power.
- This place shows us that evil is not just anywhere. It is not abstract, but concrete and close at hand everywhere. Evil can - to paraphrase Hannah Arendt - be banal and take place just a few metres away from us.
- This place shows us that evil does not happen at some point. It can manifest itself from one day to the next if we do not recognise the signs. Evil can have a specific date. On 25 January 1937, it was recorded that a blooming meadow became a hell of death.
- After all, disaster can make itself unrecognisable. To the neighbours of 1937, it seemed as if a military training area like any other was being created before their eyes. They soon got used to the volleys of machine guns and the thunder of cannons. Shoulders shrugged. What then happened in 1941 and 1942 was something they did not want to or could not recognise.
- And ultimately: disaster can manifest itself, take root, if you recognise it too late. In 1933 it was too late for the average German citizen, in 1937 too and in 1941 even more so. The demon could and should have been recognised decades earlier.
It is not given to everyone to become a resistance fighter and martyr in an unjust state. But even in an unjust state, there were different ways of confronting evil.
There were also people living in this environment who were addicted to the Nazi regime of violence to the end.
And there were people like Hans Köchl, a simple war invalid from the First World War, who helped the prisoners in many ways. The new community centre in Prittlbach was recently named after him.
As was the case throughout Germany, forced labourers were also deployed in the surrounding villages. Undoubtedly an injustice contrary to international law.
But even within this system of injustice, it was still possible to choose. There were farmers who treated their forced labourers in such a way that they became their protectors in April 1945 and later - long since returned home - maintained friendships that lasted for decades. And there were farmers who maltreated their forced labourers so that they themselves became victims of revenge and violence in 1945.
The firing range we are standing on here is not a military training ground like any other, as our ancestors were led to believe. It was the site of thousands of murders. The last glances of the delinquents fell on fertile hills and meadows, including the railway line, which could have been the path to freedom. But their last glances also fell on the barbed wire fences that separated them from freedom. This double symbol will probably always characterise this place.
In 1977, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich described the Germans as having generated an "inability to mourn". Many decades have passed since then and the aforementioned image has become more differentiated. However, it will be an ongoing task to wrest memorial services such as these from a certain "remembrance routine", as critics accuse us of doing.
And it will be an ongoing task to confront today's demons of violence in good time. The demons must always be recognised today. Even in 2024, that is the only lesson that can be learnt from this frontier place.
We today also stand at a frontier. Again.
Norbert Göttler
Publicist, historian and Upper Bavarian district curator until 2023.
