On Competition: Lessons from Dachau (Part 1 of 3)

This past Thanksgiving, my family and I travelled to Germany. We spent a little over a week in Bavaria, primarily around Munich and the nearby(-ish) Alps. One day, we journeyed to the outer edges of Munich to visit Dachau, the location of an infamous Nazi-era concentration camp. The day we visited the weather seemed rather appropriately miserable—it remained cold and rainy throughout our nearly four hour visit to the site. Yes, that’s right—FOUR HOURS.

The International Monument at Dachau, as seen from the parade ground with the former maintenance building behind it.

My husband and I had no idea how we would experience the site, and wondered even more about our 9^th and 7^th grade daughters. We read up on tourist tips and reviews, and prior to the trip took a family trip to DC’s Holocaust Museum. Still, I could not have anticipated how captivating the displays and site at Dachau would be for all of us. On the recommendation of prior visitors, we took advantage of the audio tour, and the four of us set out to explore the indoor and outdoor panels and narratives (most of the education pieces were, thankfully, indoors where it was dry and much warmer).

There are many lessons and learnings that I picked up that day, some of which I am sure I will write about in the future. One seemingly small piece of information that I have been sitting with recently is this: prior to becoming a concentration camp (in 1933), the site had been a WWI era munitions factory. If you are at all familiar with the post-WWI treaty impacts on Germany, then you will immediately understand that as a condition of Germany’s role in that war, the factory had to cease operations. It does not take much time to realize what a devastating economic impact this, as financial and labor event, would have had on that town.

This fact is part of the Dachau exhibit’s context for how the townspeople largely welcomed the concentration camp. Indeed, much has been written and discussed about how much the surrounding residents knew about what would happen and once it started, was happening, at the Dachau camp. I am not sure we will ever have a final consensus on that question. But this one detail does ring true for how I think as humans we are often tempted to put our personal interests (or the interests of those dear to us or even just like us) ahead of others. To walk through life convinced that we can only succeed at the expense of others. As if life is a zero sum game where we can only get ahead if others fall (or are held) behind.

We are in a season in the United States where the lessons from the 1930s and 1940s in Germany are used in popular discourse, sometimes with hyperbole, sometimes painfully and simply on point. In the midst of this, it can be easy to brush away all such comparisons, or to become so laser focused on the similarities that we miss the opportunity and need for each of us, especially those of us who are white Americans, to recognize the way that persons in power are weaponizing our worst human tendencies—in the church we would call these sin—to focus on ourselves and prioritize our own needs and desires over others in ways that see life as a zero sum game in which we can only benefit at the expense of others. Or, that somehow the safety, freedom, heath and stability of others is somehow a threat to our own.

This way of thinking is false. It is a lie that we are told by people who simply want to manipulate us to their own ends. They do it because it works—because like those living in Dachau in the 1930s, we are too often willing to overlook the cost others pay for the things we want or need. Left to that tendency long enough it becomes even more toxic as we increasing distort science or religion or whatever tools you can manipulate to your purpose to justify what you know is unjustifiable in the treatment of other beloved children of God.

This blog entry is the first of several I will post in the coming days—my originally draft was, according to my husband’s very reasonable assessment, too long. And even at that length, missing some of the context about privilege that is vital to include. So I hope you’ll hang in with me, and keep an eye out for the next few posts as well. In the remaining posts, we’ll explore how we so easily fall into (false) competition as well as how we are seeing these tendencies show up in the toxic proclamations of nationalism, racism and the state-sanctioned (federal level) violence we are witnessing real-time in places like Minneapolis.