Nurenberg

I have learned a lot, or what I thought was a lot, about WWII and the Holocaust. I had seen documentaries and pictures, but today was a whole new experience. The bus tour around Nurenberg was very informative. Getting off the bus and seeing what the Nazi's had designed and built was very sureal and disturbing. To picture all the plans they had of roads, stadiums, fields, and a congress building blew me away. I never realized just how much power Hitler held over so many people and how much of a "vision", if you can call it that, he had of what he wanted Germany to be. Being designed to display power, it really creeped me out how much of an effect the building had on the people in attendance. Seeing pictures of children with their mothers infront of Zepplinfield, or hearing witnesses talk about how excited they were to go see a rally, completely confused me on why they would view Hitler and the Nazis in such a positive light. And it scared me to think that many of them would be considered normal people. To go into room 600 in the Nurenberg courthouse was a once in a life time experience. To picture all that occured in that one room and to realize the magnitude of those trials and verdicts made something so foreign to me seem very real. I found the Documentation Center incredibly enlightening. It was helpful to see pictures combined with the history in order to gain a much better understanding of how the Nazi party was able to start at all, and how things progressed during and after the war. The pictures in one of the last hallways of the people in the concentration camps really disturbed me. It was an overwhelming day, of information and emotion. I am very nervous for Dachau.