ADDENDUM

Suffering and Dying

"Rheinhardt has died tonight. I wanted to see him again, greet him one last time, and so I went looking for him, as he lay on the road in front of the death chamber - amongst the other one hundred and fifty dead of last night.

He was barely recognizable; his face was swollen and contorted in desperation. His death is not only for us, his friends, a very hard blow and painful loss, [...] And perhaps the worst thing in the face of this death, the death of all our friends, is: we do not even have the time ... to mourn them"

(Nico Rost: Goethe in Dachau, p.234)

In the course of the war, the Dachau concentration camp increasingly became a site of mass murder: from October 1941 many thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were brought to Dachau and shot. Other prisoners, condemned for execution on Gestapo orders, were transported to Dachau and executed.

A large number of prisoners were abused by SS doctors for medical experiments; an unknown number of prisoners suffered agonizing deaths in the course of atmospheric pressure, hypothermia, malaria and many other experiments.

Beginning in January 1942, more than 3,000 prisoners were sent to the mental home at Hartheim Castle near Linz on the so-called invalid transports and murdered with poison gas.

Besides the 30,000 recorded dead, thousands of prisoners who were not registered lost their life at the Dachau concentration camp. They died of starvation, disease, exhaustion, degradation, from blows, and by torture; they were shot, hung, and killed by injections.

This prisoner committed suicide by throwing his cap into the electric fence and going after it.

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