Never Again: Fighting Hate in a Changing Germany With Tours of Nazi Camps

[Behind the Aegis]

It was not the execution wall or the electric fence or even the description of the smell of human flesh burning day and night that made the teenagers stop cold.

It was the bunk beds.

---snip---

Teaching history is a pillar of national identity in postwar Germany. That is why Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin state legislator with Palestinian heritage, recently came up with an idea that is radical even by the standards of a country that has dissected the horrors of its past like no other: make visits to Nazi concentration camps mandatory — for everyone.

“This is about who we are as a country,” she said in a recent conversation in Berlin. “We need to make our history relevant for everyone: Germans who no longer feel a connection to the past and immigrants who feel excluded from the present.”

Ms. Chebli’s proposal comes at a time when Germany is grappling with the creeping rise of two kinds of anti-Semitism and as the Jewish community, now numbering about 200,000, is once again nervous.

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[gopiscrap]

1. when I was little and in school in Germany

they took us on a field trip to a Nazi death camp

[Behind the Aegis]

2. When I was in Berlin, I met someone who said most students, by 7th grade went.

He said it was quite common for students to go to the camps, but he said there is a malaise setting in, not just with students, but with teachers about the field trips.

[gopiscrap]

3. that's too bad because it left a deep impression on me

[COLGATE4]

4. My wife and I visited Sachsenhausen last year. I cannot accurately

convey the multiple, shocking impressions it made on us, starting with us walking the same route from the train station to the camp that the prisoners were forced to make. The execution areas and gas chamber were enough to give me nightmares. And, with all this Sachsenhausen was not one of the beyond-horrible extermination camps the Nazis excelled at in Poland.

[lucca18]

5. On a trip to Berlin, I went to the Topography of Terror, a museum located on the former site of the

Gestapo and SS headquarters.

A very profound experience.

There were several groups of students standing in front of photos of people that were tortured and had died; and each student would give a report and talk about this evil that is part of Germany's history.