Andersonville

From 1861 to 1865, the United States was split apart and engaged in a brutal Civil War, with 11 states in the south of the country attempting to set up a new nation. These states called their new country the Confederate States of America. The secession from the Union and dispute with the federal government, they claimed,  was about states' rights, although let's be clear here and not mince words: the specific right that these states went to war over was the right of white people to own black people as property. Pretty disgusting stuff.

Thankfully, it didn't work. The Confederacy went ahead and started things on April 12, 1861 by firing shots on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Union ended it on their terms almost four years later to the day on April 9, 1865 at the village of Appomattox Court House when General Ulysses S. Grant forced the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. The end of the war ended slavery in this country, although by no means were former slaves in the south in any sense of the word free.

For the first 20 months or so of the war, the Union and Confederacy engaged in a system of prisoner exchanges which allowed released prisoners of war to return to their units on the other side of the lines. The official rules of these exchanges were formalized by the Dix Hill Cartel in July of 1862 and this system worked. For a while.

Then in September of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln called for the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union Army. Three months after that, Confederate President Jefferson Davis responded to Lincoln's call by declaring the South would not exchange black soldiers according to the provisions of the Dix Hill Cartel, instead preferring to either kill or enslave these men. In July 1863, the South made this policy a reality, refusing to swap black soldiers captured in the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. That would be the end of prisoner exchanges during the Civil War. Forever.

The old north gate. Still called the north gate even after the expansion of the compound to the north.

The end of POW swaps in 1863 meant more facilities would be required to hold an increasing number of prisoners on both sides of the battle lines. In the North, the Union predominantly turned to existing forts and prisons to hold the overflow of captured Confederate soldiers. This strategy wouldn't work in the South; the infrastructure to support such a plan just wasn't available. Instead, makeshift and wholly inadequate prison camps sprung up in the deep south as the prisoners piled up: Camp Ford in Texas in August 1863; Florence Stockade in South Carolina in September 1864; and Blackshear Prison in Georgia in November 1864.

The most notorious of the new Civil War prison camps was Camp Sumter, opened by the Confederacy in February 1864 in the town of Andersonville, Georgia. I'm not sure how I first became aware of Camp Sumter but I remember distinctly seeing the images of skeleton-like emaciated men like the one at the top of this post years ago and being horrified by the stories of the conditions in the camp. So after a long weekend of doing nothing responsible or respectable at a racetrack in Alabama, I thought I owed myself and all the men who died at Andersonville a side trip down to south Georgia to learn a little more about what happened there. And hopefully never have it happen again. Not that I have a lot of control over that.

I went south to Andersonville armed with a book, the diary of John Ransom, a Union soldier who spent the better part of a year as a prisoner of war in the Confederate prison system. He managed to last at Andersonville from the time he was relocated there in March 1864 to September of that same year. I thought a first hand account of what the camp was like would help me when I got to the site and found what would likely be just an empty open field.

The former camp location, which is now a National Historic Site, sits about a half mile walk from the railroad tracks which delivered prisoners to the site 150 years ago. This same railroad now pretty much defines the eastern edge of the town of Andersonville, population 255 according to the last census and all of 1.3 square miles in area. We visited the old camp on two consecutive days in late October. After a couple of sunny days at a racetrack in Talladega, the weather had turned with our trip south into rural Georgia. It was misty, wet and colder, seeming somewhat perfect for the place we had come. There's been a lot of misery at this place over time. It shouldn't bring us any joy either.

Sure enough, just like I expected, the camp site is now more or less an open field. It's a little more than 26 acres in total size and about twice as long in the north-south direction as it is east to west. The field slopes down from the north and the south towards a small stream in a valley which was supposed to serve as the source of water (and the sewer) for the men held here. When the camp was in operation, the place was surrounded by a ten or twelve foot high wooden fence and was completely empty except for the makeshift shelters the men constructed for themselves. You read that right: except for what the men made for themselves, no housing of any sort was provided. They had to make shelter out of what they had, which was not much, to protect themselves from the sun and rain. And although it may not seem that way to those of us who live in houses and condos, sustained exposure to water and the sun can be brutal.

Standing in the open field today, you can get an idea of what the camp must have looked like in its fully enclosed state because there's a small part of the fence reconstructed at the northeast corner and at the location of the old north gate, which sits at the west center of the camp site (it was called the north gate because the camp was at first about half its final size; the camp originally ended just to the north of the stream where this gate was built). The corner of the fence in the north of the site is especially illustrative, because the National Park Service has put in place for us 21st century tourists some examples of the makeshift shelters the prisoners called home, mostly tattered canvas or flimsy sheets barely supported by branches salvaged from trees in the area. I'm sure these mockups are actually way more substantial than the real thing.

The reconstructed northeast corner is chilling. And not just because you can get some sort of impression of how inadequate the place was to support human life. The tents, if you can call them that, are all held a distance of about ten feet from the interior of the camp fence. This perimeter, defined back in the day by a series of sticks with string or rope spanning between them and today by a series of white posts running all around the site, was called the dead line, a no mans land that meant death from a sentry's gun if any prisoner set as much as one toe over it. Ironically this was not the least pleasant death one could find at Andersonville.

So it sounds pretty bad, right? 30,000 men (not a typo) packed together in an area way too small for that number with no shelter and a zone where you might or rather will get shot instantly? It was. Life at the camp was tenuous at best. An estimated 45,000 prisoners passed through between the time it opened and the end of the war. Of those, an estimated 13,000 died there, an astonishing (and Civil War record) 28% of the total prisoners. That's more than one in four who didn't get out alive.

The stream running through the center of Camp Sumter. Not enough water for 30,000 men.

Ironically, the design of the camp was actually pretty well intentioned. But the execution of the construction was sort of a textbook example of project management gone wrong. The concept of setting  up a prison in an open field with a freshwater stream running through the middle to serve as a water supply and a conduit for waste makes a ton of sense, for the time we are talking about. I mean as much as such a concept can make sense. But things started to go wrong almost immediately.

First, the fence around the stockade which was placed right on top of the stream was installed with too little space between fencing members, reducing the flow of the stream from barely enough to pretty much nothing at all. This caused the already small stream to slow to a trickle and stagnate and thus not carry all the human waste away from the site. Second, the folks who oversaw the construction of the entire camp compound decided to place both the bakery for the camp and the guards quarters upstream of the prison. And yes, both facilities also used the stream as a waste disposal, ensuring the stream (now a trickle, remember) would be absolutely not suitable for drinking by the time it got past the stockade fence.

The result? No healthy drinking water, vermin, disease and death. Combine that with not enough food, substandard (even for the 1860s) medical care and totally inadequate funding and you have a looming full scale disaster on your hands. The misery that these prisoners felt and died with is illustrated quite well in Ransom's diary: scurvy, dropsy, loose teeth from malnutrition, lice, using sand to wash themselves in an infected stream. Just the concept of having loose teeth from lack of adequate food is enough to make my skin crawl.

But in case you needed any more reassurance that things were really really bad and just so I would have a more complete picture of the misery endured by some to most of these men, I looked up dropsy and scurvy because I really didn't understand what happens if you have one or the other. Dropsy (or edema) is an accumulation of fluid between the skin and the cavities of the body. It apparently causes swelling and significant pain, which I can imagine is absolutely true. Compared to scurvy, it sounds like a walk in the park.

Scurvy is caused by a deficiency of vitamin C. I guess I knew that. What I didn't understand was the symptoms and effects. They are brutal: dry mouth, pain in the gums, dry eyes, shortness of breath, bone pain, easy bruising, loose teeth, poor wound healing, fever and convulsions. I imagine poor wound healing is not something you can really tolerate very well in the middle of a sewage and lice filled 1860s field. Ransom wrote in his diary "Only those who are here will ever know what Andersonville is." I am fairly sure there's no way I can conceive of the misery and suffering that took place on that field in rural Georgia.

Ultimately, Camp Sumter, which was always intended as a temporary camp, didn't last long. The south moved everyone who could walk out of the place in September of 1864, just seven months or so after it opened. The decision to close the camp was spurred by the Union army getting too close to Andersonville. The Confederacy didn't want 30,000 men released to the enemy all at once but I imagine they also didn't want to let the North see the conditions under which they were holding prisoners of war. Ransom, who could only walk with the help of his fellow captives, was relocated to a hospital in Savannah where he recovered enough to live for a long long time. When he was captured, he estimated his weight at between 170 and 180 pounds. When he walked out of Andersonville, he weighed less than 100.

The center of Andersonville, Georgia, with the Wirz Monument in the middle of the street.

I also can't imagine being a guard at Camp Sumter and being able to live with myself for overseeing what went on there. Maybe I'm being naïve and thinking that the southern soldier back then had the luxury of choosing to just walk away from a situation like that. But ultimately someone was in charge of this whole mess. That someone was Captain Henry Wirz, a Swiss born officer in the Confederate army who enlisted as a private in 1861. According to Ransom, most all the prisoners in the camp would have killed Wirz given the opportunity easily.

After the war, the United States government did just that, sentencing him to death by hanging for war crimes, which included his role in charge of the camp at Andersonville but also his personal participation in the murder of prisoners there by revolver, stomping and beating in addition to him allowing the use of attack dogs in re-capturing escapees from the camp. There are some who felt Wirz received an unfair trial. That might very well be true. In every war, I imagine there are scapegoats on the losing side who are unjustly punished. War is cruel. And the victors often get to dictate terms to the losers.

But in a small sign of just how divided our great country is today, Wirz is held up as a hero in present day Andersonville. There is an obelisk shaped monument to Wirz standing in the center of town which was erected in 1908 by The United Daughters of the Confederacy. The base of the monument decries the fate of the Captain and places some measure of blame for the conditions at Fort Sumter on the north's General Grant because he refused to re-initiate prisoner swaps towards the end of the war when the south desperately needed more troops. Don't start a war if you aren't prepared to deal with the consequences is the message here.

The Wirz Monument sits near The Confederate restaurant in town which, yep you guessed it, is proudly flying the Stars and Bars outside its door. There's a sign nearby advertising the annual re-enactment of the funeral of Captain Wirz to celebrate his life. You have got to be kidding me. Wirz may have been unfairly tried. He may also have just been following orders. There's no doubt in my mind that he was also likely way underfunded by a rebellion that had pretty much no capital. But a hero this man was not. No way. No how. I can't believe the community of Andersonville allows this to continue. The priorities seem way off here. There's still a big rift out there between the north and the south in the U.S. which is pretty troubling. We have a lot of work to do.

The State of Michigan's monument to their dead at Andersonville. John Ransom was a Michigander.

This is not the first spot I've visited on this five year quest to see more of our world that held men against their will under deplorable conditions. We should have known better than to allow this to happen in the 1860s and for sure we shouldn't have tolerated this sort of stuff in Dachau, where I found myself a couple of years ago on my first trip of this journey. But we can't seem to stop doing this, either in this country (Japanese-American internment camps during World War II come to mind) or elsewhere (I'm sure the current refugee camps for displaced Syrians are pretty horrendous right now). Maybe one day we'll stop doing stuff like this.

There's a cemetery at Andersonville which holds all the men who died in captivity at Camp Sumter. It's a national cemetery so there are generations of Americans who served our country in the military after the Civil War buried there also. There is not much space between the headstones here; a lot of men are buried in very tight quarters. The cemetery at Andersonville was the last stop of this blog for 2015. I'm almost 2-1/2 years into this thing; December 22 will mark the halfway point for me. Hard to believe. My next trip has to be way more uplifting than my time in Georgia. But the two partial days I spent in an open field in Andersonville were well worth it. Never forget.

The cemetery at Andersonville. These graves are spaced awfully close together.

Arbeit Macht Frei

It's been a few weeks since my last Bavaria post and almost three months since I set out on that one week plus journey but I still have one more to post to get through and it hasn't been easy to write. This will be the last one I publish about Bavaria unless I return someday in the future to that corner of the world.

Overall our trip was a great trip. I learned a lot about the history of the region; changed my opinion of German food (for the better) and beer (for the worse); and saw gorgeous countryside in and around the Alps. But it featured two of the most uneasy days I've ever spent on vacation in Dachau and Berchtesgaden.

One of the darkest chapters in 20th century history occurred in Germany from 1933 to 1945, beginning when the National Socialist German Workers' Party (more commonly know as the Nazi Party) took power in that country until they were defeated at the end of World War II. While I don't usually seek out unpleasant holiday destinations, I thought I owed it to myself and to everyone killed in that war to visit some sites connected with the Nazi regime to remind at least myself of what we collectively should never allow to happen again. It was worth it, but it was chilling.

We arrived in Munich on a Friday afternoon and the next morning boarded a train for the town of Dachau, a typical German town about 20 kilometers northwest of the city. Only not so much. Dachau was selected by the Nazis as the site of the first concentration camp to house persons that the Nazis thought should be removed from society. And there were a lot that the Nazis thought should be removed from society.

The camp was established in March 1933 on the site of an abandoned munitions factory to hold communists, trade unionists and other opponents of the Nazi party. Eventually, other groups were brought to the camp, including Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals and, after Kristallnacht in November 1938, a significant number of Jewish men. In 1937, the camp became a work camp, first demolishing the old munitions factory and then enlarging the very place that would hold and work many until their death. The place remained a work camp until liberation by American forces in 1945. Dachau was not officially a death camp, meaning there was no mass extermination in gas chambers (although there was one built), but for sure there was plenty of death in this place.

A guard tower and poplar tree at either end of one of the barracks' foundations.

When we first got to the site, my first impression was that the place was huge. It was just way bigger than I expected. This was not a place that held a few people against their will; it was massive. We walked the site from the south end of the complex to the north, starting at the prison and then moving through the administration block (which is now a museum), past the barracks and the memorials and chapels on the property before ending up at the crematorium. That was probably the right sequence. There is no doubt the crematorium was the toughest spot to visit.

As I walked through the place, it was impossible not to be affected by so much that was there and had happened. Overall, I was struck by the abject cruelty of the entire enterprise. There was a vision of hatred put forth by Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler that truly applied to everyone not like them and it was clear from the exhibits that it would have been all but impossible for most people to avoid their persecution. The camp was truly there to work people to death. There was no constructive purpose behind some of the labor that the prisoners were forced to endure. Some work details simply moved rocks or piles of sand from one location to another before just being made to move them back to their original locations.

Reconstructed barracks.

Originally the camp had 40 barracks, each constructed to hold 200 men. At the camp's highest occupancy, there were up to 2,000 men squashed into any one barracks. Walking through the two reconstructed barracks at the south end of the site, it is unthinkable that that many men could be packed into the bunks inside. Different types of bunks are depicted in the two barracks and none of them seems any better than the other. I can't imagine how awful it was to be kept here. In many ways it is remarkable that the prisoners didn't rise up against the guards. I guess there was true belief despite all that was happening around them that the intent was not to work everyone to death.

After passing through the barracks, you are faced with the foundations of 38 other housing units, each numbered to seemingly remind you of how many there were and how many men were kept here, divided by an allée of beautiful poplar trees, who were witness to such cruelty for the first years of their lives. It's a long walk and that walk makes you think even more about the hell that the people here must have endured.

The path then directs you to the west, through the barbed wire fence atop the deep perimeter ditch and to the crematorium. As amazing as it sounds, the crematorium initially in and of itself was not that difficult to visit. This was the place where the bodies were burned, not where people died. But once you get to the gas chamber, it's absolutely incomprehensible why man would want to do this to another man. I've read and seen stories of the Nazis building gas chambers to look like showers so I expected the "shower heads" above me as I passed through the space. But the attention to detail was absolutely disgusting. There are drains in the floor which serve no purpose since no liquid would ever pass through there. It was literally one of the most horrifying spaces I have ever been in. It was never used at Dachau and that's little comfort to me. It was designed to be used. That's enough.

As if the gas chamber weren't enough, the path from the crematorium takes you past the shooting range, where the guards used prisoners as practice. For me the fact that the gas chambers were never used mattered when I got to this place. People were gunned down here for sport by men. It was truly sickening.

Looking south between the poplars to the administration building.

I can't imagine how the German people come to terms with what their ancestors have done in this place and the guilt about what happened here is obvious. After the war, the barracks were used to house refugees until 1965. Only in the 1970s did Germany start to make any effort to recount what happened here. There is so much here that is new or recently discovered, from memorial chapels and sculptures to roads and guardhouse foundations recently unearthed. It is patently obvious that this history has been avoided in some measure. Thank God it appears there is progress being made.

Dachau is perhaps the worst place I have ever been on vacation. Despite that I suggest you go if you ever find yourself in Munich. The world needs visitors to see and remember what happened here. The main gate to the camp features the words "arbeit macht frei" which loosely translated means "work shall set you free." It's horrifying to think that whoever hung that gate honestly believed those words.

Four days after our visit to Dachau, we visited the Berchtesgaden region. Our agenda for the day featured a boat ride in the gorgeous Berchtesgaden National Park in the morning and then a trip up into the Alps to visit the Kehlsteinhaus in the afternoon.

The Kehlsteinhaus, or Eagle's Nest, was built as a gift for Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday. It is a diplomatic entertainment spot designed to show the benevolence and love for nature demonstrated by the Nazi party. It was built in just 13 months, an incredible feat considering it is sitting on top of a mountain accessible by a one way road (which had to be built before construction on the building could be started) and a gold plated elevator built into the heart of the mountain. This place is clearly a demonstration of what the Nazis could build if they set their mind to it. 

When I was planning this trip to Germany, I knew I wanted to visit the Eagle's Nest. Quite honestly, I expected the place to be a typical wooden chalet like the kinds you imagine exist in the Alps. Indeed, the trip south to the Berchtesgaden takes you by a number of picturesque chalets. But the Eagle's Nest is nothing like that. It is an ashlar masonry structure with (appropriately enough I guess) very little warmth whatsoever.

It honestly feels like an executive conference center which I guess in many ways it absolutely was. Other than its size (it's huge), it doesn't seem excessive at all. There are no Nazi motifs on the building or any sort of celebration of German power. Other than the fact that it is built on top of a mountain and you have to take a gold plated elevator to get there, it doesn't seem that impressive. I guess it would have in the first half of the 20th century.

Once you are on top of the mountain, the site is really amazing. It is not quite on the top of a mountain but the peak is just a short walk from the building. The views are incredible. It's difficult to imagine the type of men who built this place in a spot so beautiful.

While walking around the Eagle's Nest, I found myself torn about the continued existence of the place. This building and this site are reminders of Nazi power and excess and I would have no qualms about wiping it off the face of the Earth. I feel this is different than Dachau. A site like that needs to remain to remind us of what we should not become again. I don't feel the same way about the Eagle's Nest. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any purpose to razing it.

I do think there was an opportunity that was missed by the German government. The Eagle's Nest today is a tourist spot and a cafeteria style restaurant. The reasons why the building exists and what it symbolized are relegated to what used to be an outside porch type corridor, squirreled away off the main path of travel by the bathroom. I'd be much more accepting of keeping the place around if it was a museum to what the Nazis had done to the people of Germany and Europe, rather than as a beer and food place on top of a hill.

The Eagle's Nest is not an easy place to get to. From Salzburg, we took three buses there and three back (eight total with our trip to the Berchtesgaden National Park) in one day. I recommend you try though. Despite the sinister reason for it being there, the view is incredible.

It seems odd that I would devote two of my nine vacation days to these sites but I thought it was extremely important. Despite the reminders that these two places represent, we keep allowing dictators to persecute their own people. I guess we can't take on all the world's problems but it's awfully difficult standing by.