The "N" Word (Part 1)

A few weeks later we joined Don and his students for another tour, this time to Nuremberg. I recognized the destination as the location of the famous Nuremberg trials where Nazi leaders were tried for their atrocities in the Jewish Holocaust, but other than that, I wasn't sure what we would see. While riding the train I asked Scott, "So what else is there in Nuremberg besides the site of the trials? What are we going to see?"

 He answered, "I'm not sure what Don will take the students to see but I know the courthouse is there and Zeppelin Field, where Hitler held those huge Nazi rallies. I figured we'd just follow them." I pictured lines and lines of uniformed Nazis stretching one arm toward Hitler, where he screamed hate and from a huge stone podium.

 Don told us the courthouse was really not worth the extra travel to see so instead he led us to the "dokumentionszentrum reichsparteitagsgelände museen," or in English, The Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds Museum.

It was housed in a huge red brick and cement building. Construction had been started on the building, which would host Nazi gatherings, before the war, but construction had been stopped due to money shortage when the war started. This explained the very modern looking glass facade where we entered.

Although the building wasn't actually complete until well after the fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis did gather for meetings there when Hitler demanded and used the finished sections of the building along with the adjacent Zeppelin Field for their rallies. Now the building was a museum documenting the rise and fall of the Nazi party. The museum furnished each visitor with an audio tour. We wove around the cold cement building looking up at huge photographs of Hitler and his colleagues through the years. The photographs were lit brightly on the wall while the rooms themselves were dim and and crowded with visitors.

Elle loved the hand held audio tour device. She held it to her ear like a telephone. She purposefully strode from one photo to the next and found the red call number beneath each picture, punched it in her phone and listened intently to the information. Of course, she couldn't understand the actual story that was being told, and there were no photos of the victims of Hitler's reign thus far so to her it was just a great exercise of independence and "being grown up."

On the other hand, I knew exactly what horrors were on the horizon as I listened step by step how this sick man slithered his way up into the three highest positions in the German government. In room after room, museum visitors gawked at the countless photos of the scrawny man with beady eyes. Before I entered even the second room, I felt sick to my stomach, guilty almost. I felt as if, by listening and looking at every moment of the monster's takeover, I was somehow honoring him. I felt as if we had taken some ungodly pilgrimage to walk on the same cold stone floors where he and his lemmings marched. Before long, I couldn't do it anymore. Unfortunately, like the Holocaust museum in D.C., and like the concentration camps themselves, there was no escape. Visitors had to file through room after room until they reached the exit.

 Scott, on the other hand, could gather the information like a historian, objectively. He stopped and listened to each photo's narration while I turned off the audio tour and simply walked forward. Elle wandered through the rooms with her dad and I pushed toward the end of the sickening parade.

Without the earpiece, I could listen to the echoes of the past as they bounced between the stone walls and ceilings and floors. I swore I could hear the barking German orders Hitler gave his men here. I clenched my jaw at the booming acoustics when his soldiers called out to their leader in chorus. I shivered at the fearful sound of thousands of military boots pounding across the cement floors as they infiltrated the halls, following a madman to hell.

I didn't stop moving forward until, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed some photos that didn't feature Adolf Hitler. These were photos of the men and women who resisted, all killed immediately of course. But these were the people I wanted to honor. So I put my audio tour back up to my ear and listened to every word about regular people brave enough to face the devil. I wondered if I could have been part of the resistance, but quickly doubted my own strength. I thought of my son and daughter and sadly knew immediately that I would have kept my head down to protect my own family.

The last room of the museum was dedicated to the Nuremberg trials. Again, I listened to every word and studied every face. On the far wall, actual footage of the trials played and I sneered at the stern faces claiming ignorance. Gruesome footage interrupted their bogus testimony, showing hundreds of emancipated bodies, naked and gasping in a stone gas chamber. One man sat up and looked around himself. Every other body had fallen lifeless while he clawed at his throat in desperation. I snapped my head back to the door, where little Elle would be entering. I couldn't allow her sweet eyes to see it. I didn't want to see it either.

 Instead, I looked into a display table in the middle of the room. In it lay the newspaper headlines of the death penalties sentenced to the leading Nazis, along with a photograph of each and every one dead on stone slabs after their hangings. An ounce of satisfaction worked its way to my heart seeing them, blood seeping from their eyes and mouths, necks limp, the rope still collaring them. One man, though, caught my eye and iced my insides. He was clean faced, no blood. And he had no rope around his neck. Instead he was lying peacefully with his hands folded at his waist. His lips formed a half smile, content almost, and his left eye remained open, staring at me. It seems that while imprisoned, this man was able to get a poison tablet. He was able to kill himself on his own terms by swallowing it, and his one eye and smirk told everyone that he felt as if he had won somehow. I walked away, nauseous, fearing the evil that still lived through that man's one open threatening eye.