Ein Weg dùrch die Hölle...Dachau wie es wirklich war - The Hell Road of Dachau as it really was, by Fritz Wandel, published by Reutlinger Zeitungs-Vetriebs-GmbH, Reutlingen (Germany), [1946] first edition. An incredible documentation of a prisoner who suffered hellish torments in German prisons and then in Dachau camp for a period of almost 10 years. German.
After returning from Russian captivity, former communist city council member Fritz Reutlingen gave a shocking report on his experiences in the Dachau concentration camp at the Federal Hall in Reutlingen (Germany) in November 1945. In Dachau he spent five and a half years as a political prisoner after having previously suffered 4 and a half years of imprisonment. Detailed excerpts presented here were published at the time in the media of the Reutlingen military administration, in the "Schwabischen Tagblatt" and in other newspapers. Since then the demand from the listeners to print and distribute the report in its original, shocking form, and to place them in front of every German has increased. In response to this demand, the author printed the report before us.
"Despite all my efforts, I will not be able to describe to you the mental torments and physical burden that my hundreds of thousands of comrades and I were forced to suffer with me in prisons and concentration camps. In one of the last speeches I gave from this place, I referred to the blood documents of Boxheim and tried to use them to show you the true nature and face of fascism. I explained then that in these blood documents every paragraph ended with the laconic sentence: "... sentenced to death". Very few people understood me then. No one wanted to believe that what was thrown at the German people in these blood documents could ever become reality. In fact, everything that threatened there against the German workers and opponents of fascism has now turned into a bloody reality. And the German people, who were once proud to call themselves "the people of poets and thinkers", have now been humiliated by fascism into "a people of judges and executioners" (from the introduction).
The author was first arrested in March 1933 on the serious charge of treason in the "highest degree", he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and put in solitary confinement in the Rottenburg state prison, where he stayed for three and a half years. When his release day arrived in November 1937, with his wife waiting for him outside the prison gates, he was informed that he was not being released, and was transferred to "protective custody" in Welzheim. "The reception ceremonies that the SS held for us there were so cruel that a few minutes after we entered the building we were all left with bleeding bodies", he writes. Fritz describes a week of nightmare - unimaginable tortures that he and his comrades went through in Welzheim, and this, as mentioned, after he had already served three and a half years in prison in Rottenburg. At the end of that horrific week, he was taken to the Dachau concentration camp. He describes his arrival in Dachau: "As soon as we arrived at the Dachau concentration camp, we were beaten till we bled. The SS men Wagner, Vogelberger and others, whom we later learned to know as the cruelest sadists we had ever met in our lives, greeted us newcomers with wild shouts. We were forced to kneel and stay in that position for a long time. Woe to anyone who could not endure these hardships. He was hit in the face with a dog whip or kicked in the stomach or side, regardless of the injuries caused. Woe also to anyone who dared to use his hands to block a kick to the stomach. He was attacked immediately! "What, you're reaching out to me, you're still defending yourself, you bastard, wait a minute, traitor, we want to teach you, practice obedience here!"
When the formalities were finally over and we arrived at the camp in the blue-gray striped uniforms of the protected prisoners, marked with the red triangle of the political prisoners, we were received there by our suffering comrades who were already housed... Our starving camp comrades gave us a bit of bread and then told us what was going on. We will have to expect suffering in the Dachau camp...".
From here he describes at length the daily tortures and suffering he endured in the camp that led him to choose death several times, each time his suicide plan miraculously failing. The daily "punishment exercises" that he and his fellow prisoners went through, the terrible deeds of the "Dachau hangman", the conditions in which the prisoners were held - "the prisoners always had to walk in a bent state, woe to whoever dared to sit down a little...", at some point the prisoners were allowed to write letters to their family members - the letters of course went through censorship. A prisoner who dared to write a single word that seemed awkward was sentenced to hanging on a peg, or to 25 lashes, and Fritz himself was sentenced to seven weeks of severe punishments for a single word he wrote to his wife that "did not fit". He describes an act of abuse beyond comprehension of a father and son who were burned in the crematorium on the same day after severe torture, and more.
It would take too long to describe the severe abuse and murder events presented here in the book. The book is written in a sharp manner, with Fritz clearly describing the terrible deeds, almost without wasting ink on incidental details - the horror that took place daily in the camp as it really was, as the name of the book. Fritz was released from Dachau on January 16, 1943 following changes in camp regulations that occurred due to the outbreak of typhus disease - the camp went into a state of lockdown, and veteran political prisoners were released: "On March 17, 1943, my foot again stepped on Reutlingen soil as a free man."
48 p. 20 cm. Very good condition.
