55 Monate Dachau Ein Tatsachenbericht – 55 months in Dachau a factual report, by Dachau camp prisoner Walter Feuerbach who stayed there for a long period of over 4 years, published by REX VERLAG Lausanne (Switzerland), 1945 – first edition.
An early report written by a prisoner in the Dachau camp even before the camp was released by the Allies, and published immediately after the end of the war. The author, a former inmate of the camp, describes the agenda in Dachau in detail and the various types of forced labor, the punishments practiced in the camp, and reveals many previously unknown facts about the horrors of the camp. Among other things, he reveals shocking details about the laws surrounding the punishment of flogging for prisoners in the camp – for example, if an SS soldier did not hit hard enough, he was arrested for six months and removed from the ranks of the SS on the charge of “unmanly behavior in front of the enemy”. Until the summer of 1942, the SS men carried out the floggings themselves, since then the flogging was handed over to the capo (the prisoners themselves who were under the control of the foreman), if the capo refused to flog for any reason, the punishment was that he would be whipped himself. In addition, he describes all the stages of the punishment of execution by hanging in the camp, as well as the horrific punishments meted out to prisoners who tried to escape from the camp and were caught near it, as well as the collective punishments meted out to the rest of the prisoners when a prisoner was caught trying to escape.
He also writes that the highest percentage of prisoners in the camp died of starvation. In the first months, the Nazis stated the cause of death as “general physical weakness”, but later it was completely forbidden to write these words. And the cause of death was not mentioned at all. More than once he witnessed cases of severe abuse and humiliation of the Jews by the Nazis, on one occasion he describes how the Nazis forced a Jewish youth to tear out his father’s beard, and details the severe torture that Jews went through in a way that we can’t detail here.
Also, Walter tells about the medical experiments the Nazis performed on prisoners in the camp in order to test the body’s resistance to freezing cold. In other cases, the prisoners were injected with poisonous gases to test the body’s resistance, experiments were done on the body’s reactions to terrible overcrowding conditions, and more. Each time the experiments were carried out, groups of German professors and doctors came specially to Dachau to observe these experiments.
Walter also lists dozens of names of prisoners who stayed with him in the camp, some of whom were familiar and well-known people in the communities before the war, who perished in Dachau while he was there, and more.
Rare. Only six copies appear in the world catalog of libraries “world cat”, five in libraries in Germany and one in a library in Switzerland.
29 [3] p. Very good condition.
