The experience is, I believe for almost all who visit, a very emotional one, as it certainly was for me. The self-guided tour starts on the fourth floor and winds down to the first, in a building designed to replicate the look and feel of the concentration camp crematoriums. It begins with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 (the party never received more than roughly 1/3 of the German electorate vote), with anti-Jewish action happening extremely quickly, the new Chancellor and his party consolidating power in "shock doctrine" fashion must more quickly than anyone imagined. The feeling moving through the fourth floor is somewhat claustrophobic, as the exhibits are mounted facing each other across a relatively narrow hall.
Without going into great detail, the generally feeling welling up inside of me was one of mounting, righteous anger, but as the history progresses down a floor and into the ghettoizing, internment, enslavement, and both mass and mechanized execution of innocent Jewish men, women and children, the anger gives way to horror. The museum wisely puts walls between the visitors and the most disturbing video exhibits so that only adults can look over them -- nightmarish Nazi "medical" experiments and the most graphic concentration camp liberation footage -- but you pass chillingly through a cattle car and Auschwitz barracks along the way.
The stuff that get my tear ducts going is always when, in the face of personal danger, someone who might just as easily look the other way or participate in the evil reaches out to help, and the latter portion of the museum devoted to such heroes as an oppositional Protestant church in the South of France that saved kids, the great people of Denmark who hid Jews in coastal towns and smuggled them to Sweden, the great but doomed Raoul Wallenberg, the brave Sophie and brother Hans Scholl, among a documented (and still added to) list of those who worked against the Nazi genocide, it had the same effect on me.
By the time we get to the liberation and Nuremberg Trials it's all a bit late, not quite enough relief and certainly not enough justice, considering all the declined trials and commuted sentences thanks to both German and American governmental bureaus. A section near the end on the child victims serves as a reminder that the young and old (and pregnant) were taken away and killed right off the cattle cars at most camps. Pure hell on earth.
As a Jew I get into a bit of mental role-playing whenever delving into Holocaust history, imagining if I would have grabbed my family and left at the first sign of trouble, or the second, of the tenth. The problem is that as the 1930's progressed, no matter your means, there was less and less opportunity to go anywhere. You had to pay increasing fees to the Nazi government to get out, you had less and less means as your business was restricted and then confiscated, and worst of all you had a dwindling (to zero) number of places to go. A big shame in our U.S. history is that our State Department was Anti-Semitic -- we didn't even allow our designated quota of Europeans into the country during some of these years. The "ship of fools" boat from Germany tried many ports including Havana and Miami, only to be turned back (more horror). And you would have needed to get far away, as Hitler took over the neighboring countries, none being safe.
My conclusion upon leaving this essential museum is two-fold.
For one, I believe America has taken a huge step towards avoiding a similar situation here with the election of Barack Obama as President. It is by no means a guarantee of backsliding, especially if we get hit with the kind of economic depression that powered such a development of inherent racism in Germany at the Nazi takeover, but it certainly speaks greatly of our nation's values as enshrined in our Constitution, especially after an unsettling consolidation of single party power from which we've just emerged.
The other notion is that we need more museums like this, for other holocausts, like the Turkish genocide against Armenians that Hitler uses to justify his belief that the world would ignore and forget whatever Germany did to the Jews, like the Serbian genocidal program of the 1990's, and the current genocide in Sudan.
The one that's still going on, as I write this.
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