On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops liberated 32,000 emaciated political prisoners and Jews near the town of Dachau, Germany, 12 miles north of Munich. Dachau was one of hundreds of forced labor/extermination camps run by the autocratic regime of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party during World War II. The soldiers also found more than 30 railroad boxcars full of bodies there.

Two weeks earlier, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had toured a similar facility at Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of the notorious Buchenwald prison, where he and his troops witnessed similar scenes. He ordered his men to document everything with still photography and movie cameras, fearing that otherwise no one would believe such horrors had taken place.

"We are told the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for," Eisenhower said to the press corps. "Now, at least, he knows what he is fighting against."

At Dachau, many local townspeople claimed they had no knowledge of the mass atrocities happening near their homes. Regardless, the American troops forced them to walk through the camp wearing their finest clothes, then made them bury the dead. As other death camps were liberated, this became a formalized policy implemented by Allied commanders to combat local denial, enforce collective responsibility, and provide dignified burials for the victims.

The townspeople buried more than 9,000 bodies at Dachau. They also laid to rest the last vestiges of Hitler's autocracy, which had gone so terribly wrong.

We are generations removed from that dreadful connection, and such atrocities are slipping from our collective memory. It becomes easier to forget about the type of repressive government that produced ruthless mass killings on a colossal scale during the 20th century.

All that misery, whether it was in Germany or Russia or China, was all a tragic by-product of........

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