Johanna visit to Washington DC

Johanna is an exchange student from Muenster, Germany. She documented her visit to Washington D.C.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC

A remarkable experience.

10am the Holocaust Memorial Museum (HMM) opens it doors and a good hundreds people get in. The tour starts of with a little booklet we get at the entrance. It includes the identity of a German citizen during the holocaust that was Jewish and affected by the genocide in Germany. The first  object in the Museum was big poster of hundreds of corpses over each other. Some longer dead than others. On the third floor of the museum they tell the story of how Hitler gained power and how he slowly convinced the German nation that Jewish citizens and the communists are responsible for the Hyperinflation in germany and that they are distinctive for the German race.

They show the war aspect of the war and how fast Germany took countries over and gained more and more power. On the second floor they show little films and interviews with people who survived the concentration camps. At this point I started to feel very bad and guilty with what my country has done. It makes me think about how many potential artists and scientist etc Nazi/Germany killed.  In the middle of the room is a big white metal board. It lists all the German people who saved Jewish citizens from the genocide. It is a very long list and it is really impressive that many people resisted to get influenced by the propaganda. The second floor ends with a room that is completely stone and glass framed and when you sit down you can listen to reports from camp survivors and it is very touching and something everyone should see/hear in their lifetime.

The last floor has a room full of shoes that belong to all the camp inhabitants and you can smell the panic and fear in that room. The following room shows one of the crematoriums that were used in the camps to burn the corpses. In the rooms after you can watch little films the Americans/Britons and the UDSSR Armee took when they took over Nazi-Germany. Those pictures are disturbing and depressing. You see how hundreds of corpses are just thrown into a big hole and you can see how heartless and reckless many nazis were. The tour ends with a movie about many children who survived the camps and then moved to the US.

Overall it was an experience I'll never forget and that had a big impact on me. One thing I learned in my Psychology class at Seaholm and that helps me understand the whole Propaganda thing is that people are easier willing to do something that is abnormal and not human or in any way ethical right when someone is giving them commands. When you look at the Milgram Experiment, done in in 1961 by Stanley Milgram, you can see that even the nicest person is willing to do something unethical when they get commands. Obeying is easier than standing up against someone and maybe losing something because of it. This experiment is the system Hitler used just in small. He made the people feel like they had no other choice than obeying and that even when its wrong they can blame him because they were just obeying. But at the end we are all responsible for our actions. Doesn't matter if we are just following directions or if it was our own idea.