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[Wardog]

When I was in the Corps and deployed to Italy, we took a trip through the Chaplain's office to Dachau.

The museum was a hit in the head but the crematorium with its sliding gurneys into the ovens was a stab to the heart. It still smells - that smell.

[Charles Phipps]

I visited the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C.

It remains one of the most moving/terrible things I ever encountered.

I still have it burned into my little brain (I was horrified) where I saw a massive pile of shoes taken from people.

It's difficult to say whether Hitler or Stalin was worse (Stalin wins on body count, UNLESS you include WW2's casualties) but the sheer mechanized destruction of life for something so pointless is justifiably one of the more insane things we've had in the entirety of human history.

I recall as a child, vividly also learning that while Jews were the most famous victims they were far from the only too.

Gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals, and Slavs - the sheer breadth of Hitler's victims amazes me.

"Never again." should be not only the mantra of Jews but everyone. We needto look at these horrors and have them burned in our psyche so we never ever let the kind of hate which motivated them take place again.

(To this day I don't know if we'll ever know who knew what in terms of who was involved in the Holocaust)

EDIT:

In a black bit of humor, do not type "eight" with a ) when you're describing the age you visited the holocaust museum or it'll come up as a . That was damn creepy.

[Matthew]

Gypsies, dissidents, homosexuals, and Slavs - the sheer breadth of Hitler's victims amazes me.

Not to mention criminals, the physically or mentally handicapped, the emotionally ill, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

[Rob Pegler]

The interesting thing is that the concentration camps and gas chambers were actually the Nazi's Plan B. They started with the Einsatzgruppen - the units responsible for rounding up the undesirables in an occupied area, herding them into mass graves and shooting them. They wiped out over a million people this way before Himmler decided they were too inefficient to get the job done, the killings were too public and the whole business of shooting people face-to-face was too much of a "psychological burden" for the men (the poor lambs). They experimented with mobile "gas vans", but later came up with the "final solution" of using camps to kill people en masse.

[Charles Phipps]

Hitler also intended to initially deport the Jews but an experiment involving a ship which almost no country in the world wanted convinced him no one would care if he killed them all.

It made me sick when I read that.

[Matthew]

One story I remember hearing says that Hitler's generals asked if the world would stand still for the "final solution." His was response was, "Who remembers the Arminians" referring to the genocide of approximately 1.5 million Arminians by the Turks 20 years earlier.

While hardly any ports accepted Jewish refugees, Shanghai did. It's one of those almost forgotten bits of history that there was a thriving Jewish section in the city in the 1930s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Ghetto