Nuremberg, Germany
May 3, 2022
Nuremberg is the infamous home of the WWll Nazi war tribunals which were held in courtroom #600. That courtroom has been used for major crimes throughout the years and only recently was turned into a museum memorializing this significant event of the past.
We did not go into the courtroom yet we passed along the street in the front, the bus briefly stopped while our guide pointed out the room from outside the building. It was sobering. The trial was to last 3 months and lasted 11 resulting in the hanging deaths of 6 men who all had pleaded not guilty. They were all cremated and their ashes dumped in the river in an undisclosed location to avoid pro Nazi sympathizers turning it into a shrine of sorts.
People can be screwed up, do bad things and as the saying goes “the existence of evil needs good men to do nothing” like many “good Germans” who did nothing carrying the guilt and shame for the rest of their lives. They went along with it and one could think it was to avoid death or imprisonment but too many Germans went along with it because they believed what they heard, and what they read. Misinformation was alive and well way before current political times.
We parked and saw the Zeppelin Stadium, later called Zeppelin Field to sound more military-like, across a small lake built to resemble the Roman Coliseum with a granite facade over bricks to stay within budget and to look impressive.
We had earlier viewed the Nazi rally site where all those infamous black and white photos were taken of more than 100,000 people waving thousands of flags while Hitler’s Nazi elite appeared from a light cloud of spot lights in a staged production to impress, and it did.
To our rear a couple of hundred yards away was the former rally grounds, now a crumbling concrete “grandstand” for a lack of a better word.
Another big production for a little man with a big plan, a big fucked up plan that too many people went along with. But in the end, two of the worse architects of this grand plan, of a perfect Aryan Race, of a permanent solution for the Jews and other war atrocities committed suicide.
How would it have all played out if people called them out sooner, told them they were batshit crazy and let them live their lives out as failed human beings? If that had happened we would have not had it to learn from. History is like that. The Germans teach their kids all about the Nazis starting in middle school up through high school and have to be tested on it to graduate.
So what have we learned? I don’t know, do people still think they are being good?
Cruising the Danube 