The Associated Press reported in this story that the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free) sign above the entrance to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz has been stolen. The story caught my attention because the same slogan appears above the gate at the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich, Germany.

I have toured the camp which is now a memorial to the victims who suffered there at the hands of the Nazi regime. Words like sobering, haunting and troubling do not begin to describe the camp and the exhibits of torture and malice. My visit was on a sunny, warm fall day but I vividly remember the chill, real or imagined, that descended when I toured the camp. Hard, cold concrete buildings, the crematorium’s ovens and hard-packed, bare earth stick out in my mind.

Dachau, the Nazi’s model concentration camp, served as a “school of violence” for the Nazi SS. During its 12 years of operation, more than 200,000 prisoners passed through it’s gates, and 41,500 were murdered.

It is important, in my view, that we preserve these terrible monuments of pain and suffering and use them to educate ours and future generations about the evils of hatred.