Plot
Gunther Lutze, a former captain in the SS, returns to the ruins of Dachau concentration camp to relive the memories of his time as its commandant during World War II. He revels in the recollections of the torment he inflicted on the inmates, remembering with a cold smile the suffering he was responsible for. As he walks around the gallows and prepares to leave, he is surprised to see Alfred Becker, one of the camp's inmates. As they talk, Becker relentlessly dogs Lutze with the reality of his grossly inhumane treatment of the inmates, while Lutze stubbornly and unemotionally insists that he was only carrying out his orders and had no idea that the Third Reich planned to exterminate Jews. Becker and several other inmates later put Lutze on trial for crimes against humanity and find him guilty. Before Becker can pronounce the sentence, Lutze remembers that he killed Becker 17 years ago on the night US troops came close to Dachau, and realizes that Becker, as well as all the men who witnessed his trial, are ghosts. As punishment and atonement, Lutze is made to undergo the same horrors he had imposed on the inmates. He is not physically touched; rather, he experiences the pain in his mind, culminating near the gate, the gallows, and the detention room, where he screams in agony, having been driven insane.
Before departing, Becker's ghost informs him, "This is not hatred. This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God." Lutze is eventually found and taken to a mental institution for the criminally insane, leaving his finders to survey the remains of the camp in wonder and bafflement, wondering how Lutze was driven insane in two hours. As they prepare to leave and take Lutze to the asylum, the doctor who examined him looks around visibly upset and asks, "Dachau. Why does it still stand? Why do we keep it standing?"
The episode ends with Serling's closing monologue: "There is an answer to the doctor's question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes - all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth."
Read more about this topic: Deaths-Head Revisited
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