Cultural event experience at the Holocaust Museum Washington DC

Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is a place that is both dark and light, from the perspective of a visitor and the emotions that one feels on being in a place like this. The darkness results from the facts and photographs that are on display. It is very difficult to believe that these events took place just over seventy years ago in Europe, and that Adolf Hitler's Nazi party conducted mass killings without interference until the Soviets, the Americans and British and allies finally fought their way through France and into Germany to put a stop to the genocide. The light comes from knowing that the truth is a very final thing and it brings closure to such a horrifying event. Seeing the photos, viewing the videos, and watching the other visitors to the museum respond and react to the exhibits, I did see a lighter picture of the Holocaust Museum. I saw parents with their adolescent children (it is not recommended that children under the age of 11 be brought to this museum), and I could see that giving children an opportunity to learn about genocide is part of the education they need as they grow up. Seeing, reading, and learning about the Holocaust is important for them in terms of their need to understand history and to recognize that humans are capable of cruelty and those who conduct cruel actions against others must be stopped.

My Visit to the Holocaust and the "Deadly Medicine" Exhibit

I attended the Holocaust Museum in mid-May 2012 with a friend, and was immediately consumed with sense of history that I had never felt before. Part of the initial feeling was sadness for the millions of people who were slaughtered, their families, and another part of my first sensations was anger at those who, for ideological reasons perhaps, are in denial about the Holocaust. Once into the museum, I was struck by the exhibit called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race."

The Deadly Medicine exhibit shows that German scientists, who "legitimized" the inferiority of the Jewish population, helped Hitler in his madness and anti-Semitism. I didn't know that anthropologists in the 1920s began an "extensive survey of the German population" which included taking physical measurements of people for some hideous purpose. The exhibit pointed out that in the 1920s eugenics began to form as a policy in Germany and so it wasn't just Hitler's insane obsession to create a "master race" of "Aryan" Caucasians that started the vicious bias against Jews, gay people, gypsies and the disabled. Eugenics was international in scope.

Advocates of eugenics in Germany believed that too many inferior people were being born, and so doctors, public health officials, and scholars in biomedical fields (both conservatives and liberals) served on various committees and made a policy and an "ideology" from this twisted social notion. The Nazi party used that ideology to forge a political position, and in 1935 the "Marital Health Law" was passed that prohibited marriages between "the hereditarily healthy" and persons that were seen as "unfit" (this was the official beginning of the persecution of the Jews. The museum offers artifacts in a flash presentation that shows how the Nazis presented charts and illustrations of what makes a "hereditarily healthy" German. The charts show that those with epilepsy, or schizophrenia or blindness were sterilized so they could not produce offspring.

The photo of Edith F. (a victim of the children's euthanasia program) was heartbreaking. And in this flash presentation were documents showing that more than 5,000 little boys and girls were put to death due to their alleged impurity. The killing of 70,000 men and women in 1940-1941 for being "unproductive" was ghastly; they were herded into gas chambers and murdered like animals. This part of the exhibit brought tears to people who were there ahead of me. An elderly woman pulled tissues from her purse and cried while standing there. A stranger came by and put her arms around the woman, embracing her for perhaps a minute or more. Another woman was crying near the photo of the boxcars that were used to transport hundreds of thousands of people to the death camps. I started crying too. It was a relief. This part of the museum is heartbreaking. The photo of children behind barbed wire fencing in their striped uniforms was sickening and depressing because they were brought there because they were twins and twins "…were useful in genetic research conducted by Dr. Josep Mengele, considered the most barbaric of all the Nazis.

The "Fighting the Fires of Hate" exhibit

The photo of university students standing in front of a bonfire of burning books, all with their right arms extended at an angle in a salute to the madman Hitler is unbelievable. The books were being burned because the Third Reich had to go through a "cleansing" of the "un-German spirit." I knew things like this happened, but it is absolutely astonishing -- and it brings anger to my spirit -- to know that brilliant books by people like Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller, and Sigmund Freud, were tossed into a fire as though what the books contained was somehow a threat to the Nazis. Thinking about it for a minute, those books were a threat to a fascist government that only wanted it's slick propaganda to be promoted.