The Final Solution

The Final Solution

Only once in my life have I witnessed a grown man breakdown and weep. It was an unbearably uncomfortable and confronting situation. However, looking back on the moment, it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

My visit to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was beyond surreal. However, I am not going to list numbers on how many Jews, gypsies, political prisoners, and soviets were killed in these camps. Nor am I going to list the atrocious conditions that the prisoners endured. I believe that doing so is ineffective for the reader and would be an injustice to the victims of these camps.

I do want to ask you, how can people do this to other people?

As a toddler, we might have hit a kid, just to try it out, and see what happens. When we see the kid scrunch up his face and begin to cry, we learn that hitting others is wrong. How is this lesson unlearned?

"Tolerance means weakness," Eicke wrote in the introduction to his rules. "In the light of this conception, punishment will be mercilessly handed out whenever the interests of the fatherland warrant it." - Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin