A Secret Diary Chronicled the Satanic World That Was Dachau – The New York Times

The 465 trials that collectively came to be known as the Dachau Trials began in November 1945. By the time the court permanently adjourned two years later, it had tried some 1,200 defendants for war crimes and convicted nearly three-quarters of them. With Edgar s diary as evidence, a number of former Dachau guards were punished for their part in a pattern of horrific crimes.

Edgar immigrated to the United States in 1953. Over the course of about seven years, he worked as a bellhop in a hotel, night watchman in a department store, dishwasher, a professional Santa Claus and a doorman at a cinema. In 1960, he returned to Europe and retired to the island of Sardinia.

By the time he died at age 85 in 1991, Edgar was back in Germany and nearly penniless. He never achieved the sort of recognition that came to other chroniclers of the Holocaust.

But he could do one thing he hadn t been able to when he first returned to Dachau from Neuengamme: He could look in the mirror and recognize the face staring back at him. He could know, in the deepest part of his being, that he had not only done all he could to survive the terror and utter hopelessness of life inside a concentration camp; he had not averted his eyes to the suffering of his comrades. He had focused his attention on their agony, recorded it, and in the process he had resisted the Nazis by bearing witness to their atrocious crimes. With the sleepless nights he spent recording the stories of those who had vanished without a trace inside the walls of Dachau, Edgar helped to give a second life to all those who suffered and died there, to push them up from the bottomless and bulging earth, back into the light of day.

via www.nytimes.com

Christ.