correspondent of the day

The Camps Held Germans, Too
Editor, Times-Dispatch: Regarding the article about the more than 20,000 camps and prisons in Europe during Hitler's Third Reich: Besides the millions of Jews, Gypsies, Russian and other Allied soldiers, and others confined in these camps, many German opponents of the regime also were imprisoned.

One famous example is the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was held in the Flossenburg concentration camp and executed like his brother, Klaus, shortly before the end of the war. Other Germans, like the brother and sister Scholl, were held in prisons before execution.

Even if the existence and location of concentration and other camps and prisons were known to many and perhaps most Germans, they did not necessarily know in any detail what was going on inside -- and in any case could not speak out against them without risking their own arrest and imprisonment, or even execution. An example is my uncle, an officer in WWI who was imprisoned and executed for critical remarks about the regime that were overheard by a Nazi sympathizer and reported to the authorities.

Regine J. Gunlicks.
Richmond.