Lockered Gahs, known unofficially as Bud, was a 20-year-old soldier in the U.S. Army who had been fighting for a year when he and his unit first entered the Dachau concentration camp just outside Munich in 1945.
His unit — the 42nd Infantry Division — had seen harrowing combat since it began fighting in France. But, he said, liberating the concentration camp was altogether different.
“When we opened the gates to Dachau, it was only then have we truly understood what we had been fighting for,” Mr. Gahs, 100 years old, told a crowd that included survivors, families and dignitaries in Dachau on Sunday.
When he and his unit went through the gates, Mr. Gahs encountered prisoners so malnourished, sick and maltreated that they seemed scarcely alive. On the way there, soldiers had found piles of bodies inside train wagons.
On Sunday, Jean Lafaurie, 101, who survived the camp after he was arrested in his village in France, spoke of the sadistic treatment the prisoners had been forced to endure.
Other survivors’ minds were on the present. Mario Candotto, 98, of Italy, who survived the camp but lost four of his brothers and both parents, said: “I hear talk about weapons and nationalism, and the thought occurs to me: Have people learned nothing?”
The 80th anniversary of the end of the Nazi era — and with it anniversaries of the liberations of concentration camps — comes at a pivotal time for Germans.
The last of the survivors, liberators and perpetrators are dying of old age, and with them any living memories of the Holocaust. At the same time, the far right is becoming established. While the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, whose leaders have repeatedly downplayed the Holocaust, was once a fringe party, it is currently the most popular party in Germany, according to some polls.
“We are truly living in a period of upheaval; I feel this at the memorial sites, and at Dachau in particular,” Gabriele Hammermann, the director of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, told The New York Times. “It acts as a seismograph.”
The anniversary also comes after a pronounced change in the tone of the relationship between Germany and the United States. While Washington was once instrumental in promoting a culture of accountability and remembrance, President Trump’s administration has made its preference for the AfD very clear.
In January, Vice President JD Vance shocked German leaders when he told a crowd in Munich that they should stop shunning the AfD. Last week, after the AfD was officially labeled an extremist party by Germany’s domestic intelligence unit, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a social media post, called the decision by Germany’s intelligence unit “tyranny in disguise,” adding that Germany’s border policies were instead the country’s “extremist” problem.
Antisemitic hate crimes have also increased in Germany. In a country that has long espoused the motto “never again,” many worry that liberal democracy is under threat. In a poll carried out last year, 69 percent of respondents said they thought populism was a threat to democracy.
Even the people who run the concentration camp memorial sites have noted a disquieting uptick in thefts and petty crimes committed on their grounds. In 2019, Nikolai Nerling, a far-right video blogger and provocateur, was convicted of incitement for videos in which he interviewed Dachau visitors and relativized the crimes of the Nazis. Last year thieves stole exhibit items from the camp’s gas chamber.
Established just weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Dachau camp initially held political opponents. It was a model for future camps and was made a formal training site for paramilitary S.S. troops before they were sent to run the new camps that Germany built across Eastern Europe when the war started. More than 40,000 people died in Dachau, which, over the 12 years it was active, held more than 200,000 prisoners.
Built less than 10 miles outside Munich, it also distinguished itself from camps constructed later during the regime, which were located far outside the Reich’s borders. The injustice and atrocities committed within the Dachau camp could not be easily ignored by the general population.
U.S. soldiers of the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions who liberated the camp were among the first Americans to witness and document the horrors of the Nazi regime. The scenes they encountered entering the camp 80 years ago changed many men for life. On Sunday it was mostly the families of the liberators who attended the ceremony.
Of the survivors who came to Dachau on Sunday, most were in their 90s and 100s, indicating that this could be the last major anniversary involving people with firsthand memories of the camps. Among the youngest was Leslie Rosenthal, who had traveled from Canada. Born just three months before the liberation, Mr. Rosenthal recently celebrated his 80th birthday.
“With the passage of time, survivors and eyewitnesses are quickly dwindling,” he said, noting that he and the seven babies who were born in Dachau in the final months before liberation would soon become the “last living links to the Holocaust.”
