Last week I visited the Holocaust museum for the 1st time as part of our office's management training. It's quite an experience for all the senses. The building makes you think of a factory; made entirely of stone and metal. Under other circumstances it would look like the outside of a modern Major League baseball field; lots of red and beige brick on the outside. But once you enter, it's a whole 'nuther place. Very dark, very brooding and very quiet (at least until the school kids arrived). You can touch the stone all around you, you see the dark rooms and watch black & white video of thousands of people being being herded into (what turned out to be) gas chambers and incinerators.
You walk into a steel elevator to enter the exhibit rooms. You can smell the steel, taste the air inside. It tastes like copper (or blood). You become a witness to Man's worst behavior. You become aware of how dangerous bigotry and hatred of those unlike yourself can become.
The cruelty and lack of humanity of those who perpetuated and promoted this deviant and retched behavior is unimaginable. Educated adults made the conscience decision to murder and incinerate the disabled and mentally challenged, regardless of age, gender or nationality. Small German children were taken from their parents to be killed because of their infirmities.
When the Reich decided to exterminate the Jews at the Wannsee Conference, those responsible were respected members of society; lawyers and doctors. Men who had the education to know better. Apparently what they lacked was basic humanity and a conscience.
