Deutschland über alles

Well... I've been traveling again. This time to Germany (Hamburg), now in Bucharest and will be in London on Saturday. My wife and I are going to take the Chunnel Train to Paris for a few days and then return to London (where I leave for Dublin for a day) - then back to the San Francisco Bay (home sweet home).

On to my post - Germany is an odd place. I'm a historian of Germany WWII History, probably have read more on the subject then I care to admit, so when I go to Germany (and I've been many times), it gives me the "creeps" I can't for the life of my understand the vast mechanical nature of Germans. My view on history and Germany is tangled, I tend to view Germany like I would view Pol Pot in Cambodia, it's a collective organization that has some very dark qualities. When an entire culture organizes to kill, and kill on the grand scale; I've always been fascinated by why this happens. I guess the question one asks themself is ... "why?"

I've never really been able to answer that question for myself and I've constantly researched and read my way into an answer to the question. I tend to feel, like Elie Wiesel felt, which is "all of Germany is guilty". Why do I feel this way, because it's the easiest answer.

I recently was in Washington DC, and I went to the Holocaust museum for the first time. This was not about some religious trek, I'm not Jewish, but one of a research assignment. I had read a NY Times article about a SS soldier, Karl Höcker, adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz. He had kept a photo album of his time at Auschwitz and those photos showed his "time at play" at the death camps. All the persons in the photo album were happy and joyous, and this was at a time when the camp was killing the vast majority of the Hungarian Jew population in mid-1944 - over 400,000 people were put to death in 3 months or 200 people an hour. You really have to be good at killing to get that efficiency. So, with that in mind, looking at those pictures frightened and disgusted me - I again, could not reconcile why and how someone could justify in their mind that what they were doing was right.

Evil is banal (Common in a boring way). See it for yourself