Judy and I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp located in Munich, Germany, on June 11, 2010. The following says it well:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ims0ZZqaHps
“During the Holocaust, Germans extinguished the lives of six million Jews and, had Germany not been defeated, would have annihilated millions more. The Holocaust was also the defining feature of German politics and political culture during the Nazi period, the most shocking event of the twentieth century, and the most difficult to understand in all of German history. The Germans’ persecution of the Jews culminating in the Holocaust is thus the central feature of Germany during the Nazi period. It is so not because we are retrospectively shocked by the most shocking event of the century, but because of what it meant to Germans at the time and why so many of them contributed to it.” Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
What more can be said about this disgrace to humanity? The torture, the brutal beatings, the inhuman medical experiments on living persons, the extermination of human beings for no more reason than they did not fit some devils idea of a “superior race”. Indeed “superior race”, the very concept is an insult to all who have any trace what so ever of decency.
I remember the first time I saw the films of what the Nazis had done in the concentration camps, I quite frankly cried and for a year, I did not want to be a part of the human race. Visiting this concentration camp, reading and seeing pictures again about what the Nazis did to the people, again brought tears to my eyes. One has to visit the site, or just read what they did to understand the horrors of this infamous period in German history.
John J. O’Dell