Bidspirit auction | Two Thousand Days in Dachau:

Two Thousand Days in Dachau: The Experiences of a Christian among ”Master Men” and ”Herd Men” - An Early Publication on the Horrors of the Dachau Concentration Camp at the End of the War, Munich 1946 - First Edition - Zweitausend Tage Dachau: Erlebnisse eines Christenmenschen unter Herrenmenschen und Herdenmenschen - Two Thousand Days in Dachau: The Experiences of a Christian among ”Master Men” and ”Herd Men” - Reports and diaries of prisoner No. 16921, by Karl Adolf Gross (K. A. Gross). Published by Neubau-Verlag, Munich, 1946 - First edition. German. A very early German testimony, published in 1946 in occupied Germany, based on the notes/diaries of a Dachau prisoner and issued with the explicit authorization of the American Military Government. It is, in fact, one of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the Dachau concentration camp published in Germany immediately after the end of the war. Karl Adolf Gross was a Protestant publisher and journalist who was imprisoned by the Nazi regime in August 1939 because of his religious views and opposition to Nazi ideology. He was accused of being an ”enemy of the state” for having joined the ”Confessing Front” group. He was also told that he had been arrested for distributing hundreds of thousands of postcards bearing the words of the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller. He was initially taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and on September 2, 1939, was transferred to Dachau, where he spent approximately 2,000 days (about six years) as a prisoner. The book is based on notes, diaries, and reports written by Gross during his imprisonment and shortly after his liberation. From a Christian-humanist perspective, he describes life in the camp, the SS machinery of terror, the prisoners' struggle for survival, and their spiritual and moral fortitude under conditions of violence. From this point, the book develops into an extensive account of life within the camp system. The book also contains significant documentation concerning the persecution of Jews and the plight of Jewish prisoners. When describing the transfer to Dachau, he explicitly notes the large number of Jews among the group of prisoners and the fear that an especially harsh fate awaited them. He also describes how, on one occasion, he approached a group of prisoners and discovered that they were Jews speaking with a pastor about the resurrection of the dead. This is one of several passages in which he documents religious encounters between Christians and Jews within the camp. On another occasion, he describes a group of Jews (”Children of Israel”) carrying a heavy tree trunk together on their shoulders, and, amid the forced labor and starvation, calling out to one another recipes for kosher and non-kosher foods, as an almost imaginary means of coping with their hunger. Elsewhere in his book, he describes relations among the prisoners, the brutality of the SS men and their horrific forms of punishment, starvation, forced labor, murders, torture, fear, disease, death, the internal hierarchy among the prisoners, and the way in which years of imprisonment transform a person. Thus, for example, he tells of a prisoner named Böhm, who, according to Gross, controlled approximately 2,000 prisoners by means of two ”instruments of torture”: his whip and his tongue. After being deemed unfit for work at BMW, ostensibly because of laziness and incompetence, he was sent to work at the construction site of Dyckerhoff & Widmann, which was building two large halls for BMW using slave labor. Gross defines the work as: “eine Art Todeskommando, eine versteckte Hinrichtung” - a kind of death commando, a disguised execution. At the beginning of the sequence of diary entries, there already appears, as a kind of internal table of contents, a list of the harrowing events to follow: a Russian prisoner beaten to death, the strike of the potato peelers, the SS bunker, and 489 Frenchmen who suffocated to death during a transport. On March 14, 1944, he recounts the case of a pastor who had been hospitalized in the camp infirmary and kept a diary documenting the inhumane treatment in which prisoners were used as ”experimental animals.” The diary was smuggled beyond the camp fence through the man's sister, and the affair led to investigations and threats against members of the block. At the beginning of the book, at the bottom of the left-hand page, appears the statement: Published under Military Government for Bavaria Information Control Division Licence No. US-E-110 - a historical hallmark of books from the period of denazification and immediate reconstruction in Germany (1945–1946). Books published at that time required a special license from the Information Control Division of the American Military Government in Bavaria. 344 pages. Very good condition.