Interesting piece today in the New York Times (reg. req.) on Germans having themselves cremated in the Netherlands. Wait; I should be more precise lest I alarm you — the article is about Germans arranging to have themselves cremated later. If you want to have your corpse burnt, the Dutch will do it with a lot less red tape. Much cheaper too; what’s not to love? And, thanks to the EU, Germans with bodies, but not money, to burn may freely access the Dutch cremation market.
Now that’s what Europe is all about.
Bizarrely, this is a case where there is greater freedom of movement between Germany and Holland than between London and Yorkshire. Each UK local authority a corpse is transported through can levy a tax on it, so moving a body can be an expensive business. Ashes, though, attract no tax liability, and cremation is after all a bulk-reducing process, so it’s economic to cremate near the point of death and move the ashes.
“Each UK local authority a corpse is transported through can levy a tax on it, so moving a body can be an expensive business.”
This sounds like a film I once saw from Cuba.
“What nobody likes to talk about here is what Germans really do with the ashes of their loved ones after they are cremated across the border. Mr. Schumacher suspects that a good number take them home, in defiance of German law, and scatter them in their gardens or place the urn on a shelf.”
The race to the bottom!
We need a Cremations Directive ASAP.
I read a magazine article a couple of years ago that explained how Dutch funeral businesses quietly co-operate to keep out newcomers who threaten to lower prices etc. Kind of funny to see the Germans go to the NL because the Dutch turn out to be cheaper.
f th rll wntd t sv mn, th cld hv strtd p Dch gn. Mch clsr nd thr shld stll b plnt f xprts rnd.
N nd f pssblts, Dch cld ffr vlm dscnts. Chpr b th dzn! Mk t fml tng! Th cld ffr pr nd sls fr th wlk n bsnss (th hv xprnc thr ls). Bsnss wld b szzlng!
[The disemvowelled troll should note that Dachau was a concentration camp, not a death camp. Though many were murdered there, murder was not its express purpose. You remarks would have been better served by, say, Auschwitz. Even with a greater degree of historical precision, however, you would remain a troll; hence, off with your vowels. — Mrs. T]
Mrs. T
Those of us that visited Dachau shortly after it went out of business, know that the ovens were most definitely used for the disposal of inmates. Your point, that some death camps were worse than others, doesn’t change the function of the cremation ovens at Dachau.
I visited Dachau in 1954 and it was then being used to demonstrate to the world what had gone on there. I have no personal experience with Auschwitz.
Ray, thank you for your non-trolling reply.
I too have visited and been horrified by Dachau. And yes, as you noted (and as I noted too), the Germans murdered many people there. But it’s not merely a matter of some camps being worse then others. Auschwitz and the other death camps were established, as Dachau was not, with only one goal in mind: mass murder (the relatively able-bodied to be murdered after extracting from them what labour one could; the rest straightaway).
But you see all these camps as differing only in degree. And that is why your earlier comments were trolling. To suggest, even sarcastically, that the Germans would consider reopening Dachau is a gross calumny against today’s Germans. (It’s also grossly distasteful, not to mention disrespectful of the memory of those the Germans murdered there.) I am anything but uncritical towards elements in modern German politics, society and thought that smacks of continuity with 1933-1945 (as you will see if you read some of my other posts here). There are many accusations one can fairly level at contemporary Germany. That its people would be at all inclined to start the KZs up again (or that they would be anything other than aghast at the very notion) is not one of them.