Visiting the Holocaust Museum it

Visiting the Holocaust Museum

It is virtually impossible to compare visiting the Holocaust Museum to learning about the Museum in a textbook. The impact of what I saw at the Museum is something that will stay with me throughout my life. Moreover, I think that it is something that all people should be required to do as part of a basic education, because the reality is that large-scale genocides continue to occur without significant intervention. However, I still am uncertain how much of a global impact places like the Holocaust Museum will have, because I seriously doubt that people who would willingly visit the Holocaust Museum are otherwise unaware of the topic. On the contrary, I believe that people who would visit the Holocaust Museum are likely to read books or watch films about the Holocaust. Therefore, I think these visits should be mandatory, so that the people who would not otherwise learn about them are forced to come face-to-face with the reality of genocide.

The reason that I think that such visits should be mandatory is because we live in a world where Holocaust denial is a reality. Holocaust denial actually began during the Holocaust, when Nazis relabeled genocidal policies in an effort to lend them legitimacy ("Holocaust Denial"). Moreover, in the period immediately following World War II, different political factions used Holocaust denial as a means of asserting political power. Today, Holocaust Denial is a tool used by anti-Semites to promote the idea of Jewish conspiracies. While Holocaust Denial may not seem that dangerous, because denial cannot change the reality of the Holocaust, it is very insidious. My visit to the Holocaust Museum revealed to me that genocide began to occur almost immediately following World War II, and has continued to happen sporadically throughout the years ("What is Genocide?").

In fact, one of the things that I learned from my textbook, which I did not truly understand before this course, is the role that national attitudes played in the build up to the Holocaust. This is something that was emphasized at the Holocaust Museum and is, I think, critical to genocide prevention. The way that Nazism and World War II had been portrayed in my prior educational experience is that Hitler was an extremely evil, extremely charismatic man who managed to hoodwink a nation by offering up Jews as an appealing scapegoat for the troubles that Germany faced after World War I. On the contrary, there was a long history of anti-Semitism, and the reality is that the Holocaust was merely one in a series of anti-Jewish campaigns, including genocidal campaigns, to impact the area now known as Germany.

However, even more interesting than the specific anti-Semitism was the way that German culture of that time reflected a very ambivalent attitude towards helping people. For example, although I disagree with Nietzsche's sister that his writings were meant as an attack on the Jews, his writings, as well as things written by many authors of his time, did reflect a German sentiment that was very unfavorable to people that they considered weak. They reflected a Darwinian attitude about societal development, suggesting that those who were morally weak would be victimized by those who were stronger. It would be a gross misreading of Nietzsche's works to suggest that he was advocating genocide. However, if his writings genuinely reflected national ideals about evolution and survival of the fittest, then they really do help explain why more people did not intervene.

While there had been a history of repeated anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout most of Europe, there was something markedly different about the Holocaust. It was not because the Holocaust marked the first racially-targeted extermination of Jews; on the contrary Jews were targeted for death during the Middle Ages and afterwards. Instead, it was the widespread nature of the problem and the sheer enormity of the deaths. Germany's "defeat in World War I gravely accelerated anti-Semitism among the German people" ("Background"). These beliefs were actively encouraged by many German public figures long before the Nazis began their official propaganda, so that a general attitude of anti-Semitism pervaded Germany long before the build up to World War II.

In fact, it is important to understand that while all of the atrocities being committed against Jews and others in concentration camps may not have been known to the majority of Germans, they were certainly aware that Jews were being subjected to incredible discrimination, and there was very little outcry against that fact. Before Hitler was ever voted into office, though after he had received powers as a dictator, Jews were being denied their civil rights. However, Hitler received 90% of the vote showing German support for his leadership ("Holocaust Timeline"). This was not a group of people who were unaware that select groups of people were being targeted for discrimination. Moreover, the Nazis began advocating for euthanasia and forced abortions in the cases of genetic defects or abnormalities, and those policies were not met with resistance.

However, it would be a mistake to assume that all Germans supported the Holocaust or were not prepared to intervene. Visiting the Holocaust Museum, in the face of such overwhelming misery, I found it difficult to remember that some people did try to do things to stop the Holocaust. Christa M., who would have been an older teenager and young adult during the Holocaust, describes seeing starving Nazi prisoners and being horrified by the site. She was aware that there were prisoners, but she had no idea of the conditions they faced. She gave them food, and when a SS guard saw her, he threatened her that she would join the prisoners if she kept feeding them. She ran away in terror. Moreover, when she returned home without cheese, she faced repercussions from her father ("Testimony Excerpts: Christa M.). She was a person who, when she discovered what was truly happening, wanted to do something but did not feel that she was in a position to help people. That attitude is not the same as Nietzsche's position that pity is a weakness.

As the above information demonstrates, I did not walk into the Holocaust Museum ignorant of the Holocaust or its causes. On the contrary, I walked into the Holocaust Museum with a good basic foundation of information about the Holocaust. I knew that figures were disputed, but that estimates put the number of Jews who perished during the Holocaust somewhere between 4 and 6 million. I knew that the Nazis had ramped up from mild persecution of Jews, to forcing Jews out of jobs and homes and into ghettos, and finally into concentration camps. Moreover, I knew from when the concentration camps were constructed that there was almost certainly a plan to engage in genocide well before the mass killings began to occur. All of these things were facts that I took with me into the museum, with the belief that knowledge of these facts would insulate me from the impact of the museum. After all, I knew the facts.

However, the knowledge of the facts was not enough to keep the museum from having an emotional impact on me. One of the things that struck me at the Holocaust Museum was seeing the piles of shoes. I knew that the Nazis had stolen from the Jews. There are still disputes over stolen things like artwork, and a huge amount of Jewish wealth was taken and redistributed during the Holocaust. However, when I saw the photos of piles of shoes that had been stolen from Jews to be given to settlers, it just astounded me. First, the shoes are clearly not new; even if the settlers did not know where the shoes came from, they had to know that they came from people. Where did they think that all of these shoes came from? Second, the sheer number of shoes gave me pause. These people that deny the Holocaust say that evidence of it comes from biased survivors, but photographs like the one of the shoes are Nazi evidence of the crimes that they were committing. They may not prove homicide, because the shoes could simply have been stolen from Jews who were then stuck in concentration camps to perish, but they demonstrate that the Nazis were systemically plundering Jews for money. There was a financial motive to the Holocaust, which went beyond whatever financial benefits may have come from using the Jews as scapegoats.