Are we right at the limits of living memory? This week it is 80 years since Dachau, the original concentration camp of Nazi Germany, was liberated by American troops. In the same week, the present American government is celebrating a new concentration camp regime for the United States. Under both regimes, ‘criminals’ were targeted. In Washington, people are holding up signs reading: “PROTEST WHILE YOU STILL CAN”.
On 29 April 1945, American soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and the 20th Armoured Division of the US Army entered Dachau concentration camp and liberated more than 32,000 prisoners. In the days before, 67,665 prisoners were registered in the main camp outside Dachau town and in numerous subcamps, most with even more appalling conditions. Some 22,000 of the prisoners, a third of them already departed on death marches, were Jews. Another 43,350 were categorised as political prisoners. For 12 years, since the camp was opened in March 1933, Nazi propaganda had portrayed all the inmates as traitors and criminals.
America, 80 years on
On 29 April 2025, only 80 years later, American soldiers were deployed to the southern border of the United States. In the state of Louisiana, several ‘detention centres’ housed 66,866 inmates, 40,866 of them arrested for ‘criminality’. ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency whose initials strike as much terror into threatened individuals as the abbreviation Gestapo once did, lists these statistics on its website. It also lists visiting hours. As in the earlier German examples the ‘facilities’ at La Salle and elsewhere are not remote and are meant to create a mix of fear and reassurance in the population. La Salle Detention Centre is “two miles northwest of downtown Jena”, a normal part of today’s America.
The Louisiana ‘holding’ facilities are not concentration camps. Just as some Dachau prisoners were at first detained in jails and then transferred to the pitiless regime of the SS, the Trump regime is following the American pattern of locating the real concentration camps outside United States borders and beyond the reach of United States law.
Normalising concentration camps
For prisoners of the new pitiless regime, advertised with images of bowed-over, shaven-headed ‘criminals’ manacled in lines between masked men with batons, that terrorising fate is in the purpose-built prisons of El Salvador. Their Himmler is not the military martinet of the SS but the self-described “world’s coolest dictator”, President Bukele. Curiously, he was not abused before the press for wearing a tee-shirt in the Oval Office. Rather, Trump waxed lyrical about his “massive prison complex” and asked him to please build more.
Because the mass-murder programme Hitler decreed under cover of wartime was carried out at concentration camps set up on the Dachau model – mainly on conquered Polish territory – our images are of the Holocaust, Jews from all over Europe being gassed in special death camps. But now more than ever it is important to remember the beginnings: the new Nazi government suddenly in power in 1933 set up its system of detention camps to hold German citizens, law-abiding opponents it arrested as political prisoners. Never convicted of any crime, they would be labelled as terrorists, traitors and – especially for public consumption – criminals.
Living in Dachau – the beginning
When Dachau concentration camp was opened by Himmler, the first people arrested were the political opponents of the new National Socialist government. Among those I interviewed for my forthcoming book Living in Dachau was a local communist, Franz Klein.
““I was known to them,” he told me, “and sure enough I was the first to be arrested in Dachau. At 11 in the morning. I was as usual lining up for a bowl of soup and a roll at the soup kitchen for the unemployed. I saw them coming: three policemen with rifles and two big Alsatians. Sure enough: ‘Herr Klein, you are under arrest.’ They took me round the back streets up the top of the hill to the jail. No-one else there; I was the first. Moosrainer joined me after midday, then at about 2pm they brought Andorfer. Another Communist and a Socialist. We were the first three.
“No bashings or anything like that. They were still the old prison warders up there. We got our meals and could smoke, no worries. Four weeks later, at the time the Nazis dissolved all the other parties, came the big wave of arrests in Dachau, about a hundred of our people, part of the SPD and some leading lights from the Catholic political party. They were sent off to prison in Munich or Landsberg and let go after a few weeks. But not me. I was kept for five weeks up there while they opened the concentration camp. By the time I was taken down, there were a good 2,000 Communists already in there.
“It was one day before 1 May. There were three policemen and three prisoners. I was the only Communist. We were all strung together with long, thin chains, two in front and one behind and off we went on foot, down the hill, round past the paper factory. It was about ten in the morning, people going about their business.
“Some called out to me, ‘What’s going on Franz? Where are they taking you?’ I called back: ‘Down to the camp. That’s where.’ The three police delivered us through the gate and then left. We had to get undressed, had our hair cut off, showered, then admitted to the prison compound: all Communists, I knew the lot of them. All set to celebrate May Day.”
The camp was not yet built to the plan still preserved as a memorial, and which can now be compared to today’s El Salvador model.
Beyond the reach of law
In neither case would the law be allowed to apply.
Klein could not then know how the Munich public prosecutor, determined to have a legal enquiry into the first murder of a prisoner, had to learn that no such thing would be permitted. All Germans had to understand the reason concentration camps were created: to detain people without legal process.
Now Trump has made clear before all the world that his purpose is the same: courts should have no role to play in a new regime of incarceration beyond the reach of American law. While the world is distracted by the charade of his own ‘Liberation Day’ through tariffs, American civil liberties are being trashed.
What must be remembered in 2025?
This year, Dachau’s liberation, 80 years ago, will be commemorated on 4 May. There will be very few former prisoners among the visiting dignitaries. No representatives of the liberating United States Army are listed as speakers. President Trump will not mind. His contempt for American service personnel is well known. They did not have families who could pull strings to get you out of the draft.
Not for him the heroes of the Greatest Generation who liberated Europe for democracy: the day after Dachau was liberated, Hitler shot himself. A week later the war in Europe was over.
The war against American concentration camps is just beginning. Even supposed ‘moderates’, like Secretary of State Rubio, defend the snatching of student protesters from the streets. Their crime? Protesting Israel’s Gaza war. The cover? Supposedly the ‘antisemitism’ exhibited in America’s great universities. The liberal values of Columbia and Harvard are correctly seen as a threat to dictatorial power.
The vice-president visits Dachau
Determined to keep ahead of the other cheerleaders in the abuse of such power is the heir apparent. In February, Vice-President JD Vance was sent to Europe to make clear America’s new attitude to the values of the West that had liberated Europe and was now standing up for Ukraine. He took time out from downplaying NATO at the Munich Security Conference to have a photo opportunity at Dachau. Trump’s arrests and deportations were not yet underway.
“I’ve read a lot about the Holocaust in books,” Vance told the press. “But being here, and seeing it up close in person, really drives home what unspeakable evil was committed and why we should be committed to ensuring that it never happens again.”
