World War II Auschwitz

Auschwitz is a monument to the barbaric inhumanity of the Nazi regime — the site where more than one million people were systematically tortured and killed in support of Adolf Hitler's determination to eradicate entire populations he viewed as racially impure. Dr. Josef Mengele conducted horrific experiments on living victims, treating his subjects as less than human. Jews, homosexuals, Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the mentally and physically disabled were all deemed unworthy of life under Nazi ideology. The "Final Solution," a cornerstone of that ideology, enacted a devastating sentence on people whose only crime was their ethnic origin or their religious and political beliefs.

But the voices of Auschwitz continue to be heard. Anne Frank's diary speaks for all the innocent who were sent there. Elie Wiesel spent his life bearing witness to the horrors he and others endured. The recorded histories of survivors keep those memories alive for generations whose only exposure to the Holocaust might otherwise be a school reading of The Diary of Anne Frank or a viewing of Schindler's List.

Auschwitz holds a grim fascination for those who learn of it: how could such evil thrive? How could an entire nation submit to the ravings of a man bent on revenge against an entire religion? The names still echo through a gallery of infamy: Hitler, Goebbels, Mengele, Goering, Himmler, and the countless others who carried out their will.

Germany today firmly rejects any resurgence of Nazism and has enacted laws meant to prevent the Holocaust from recurring. But hatred is contagious, and Auschwitz stands as both museum and warning. As Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, Hitler operated within the law when he committed his crimes — laws he himself had written. Evil can triumph when people allow it to. No group is ever truly safe from it, and the survivors and victims alike ask only that their story continue to be told, lest we forget.