The German Influence

The German Resistance Museum is dedicated to the individuals who stood against the Nazis, most of whom were murdered for their efforts. Along the way, the Museum also made clear that opponents of the regime were a small minority. Nazi ideology was engraved into lives of German children as well as adults. They started teaching them while they were young and as they grew up, they were pro-Nazi. Many displays were of children. One contained child in class all saluting to Third Reich and Hitler himself. Another had Jewish children being transported around the ghettos. The third one had children celebrating German troops invading Austria. Children’s minds are innocent in a sense that they do not necessarily know right from wrong, and Hitler took advantage of that. These pictures represented corruption. They taught children very simply that the Jews were bad, and the Nazis were good.

 

Throughout Germany I also noticed many sites that accepted the Nazi past for what it was. In the German spy museum, they talked about intelligence throughout history, and they had an entire section about its effects throughout WW2. They wrote about the failure of German intelligence and how they failed to recognize their own faults. At the Berlin Zoo zebra exhibit there was a small plaque talking about how that particular exhibit was one of the few to experience very minor damage during the war. These sites didn’t revolve around the war, but they recognized it instead of hiding it. This shows that they are acting in memorializing the war and Germany’s past rather than denying it.