Hi. Need to talk to you about something serious today. Yesterday and today, I was occupied in reading Anne Frank's remarkable literary work,  'Diary of a Young Girl'. I finished the book sometime this evening and proceeded quite naturally from there to Google to refresh my knowledge of the second world war and the doings of That Lunatic, Hitler.

            Sitting safe and secure in my room at home, with 'Lion King' playing in the next room, I can hardly bear to read the Wikipedia articles on the subject. My mind shrank from the misery of the Holocaust, although I had only been presented with it in such a diluted form - from the letters and testimonies of survivors and perpetrators, from photographs of people who were not people but living caricatures of death. Human beings that once breathed and thought and suffered and are now nothing more but pixels on a screen to amaze the idle and the curious. Sated as I am with privilege, the idea of these inhuman things, gas chambers, and concentration camps. far, far away in a distant land and time make me shiver, even as somewhere a part of me is complacently aware that nothing like this has even occurred to me, or ever will.

            I left the stories of fear and moved on to less easily answered questions. Google's auto-fill proved that many had asked them before me: 'why did the Germans listen to Hitler?' 'How could the Nazis be so cruel?' There are many interesting articles on the internet pertaining to this subject and I will include a few at the end of this post.

           Worst of all were the several articles and posts I found that denied the very occurrence of such a happening. This is something that was predicted by the first people to find evidence of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Dwight Eisenhower, when he found the victims of the death camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken and gave a command for the German people from the surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and made to bury the dead.

He did this because, as he said in words to this effect:  "Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened".

            
              Coming in a close second in terms of sheer stupidity and disrespect are the few Christian websites I found that present views so blatantly idiotic on this subject that I am inclined to believe that the articles are intended to be spoofs. One especially confusing post is a comparison between Hitler and Anne Frank. The reasons the authors gives to justify his position that Hitler was a better human being include, "Because he was a white man," "Hitler was an accomplished whistler", "when he was young he was very loyal and nice and kind to the people around him". Points against Anne Frank: "She had lesbian thoughts" "Was a Jew." Humanity, I weep for you.


             In the end the most frightening thing about the Holocaust for me was not the eventual condition of the Jews, but the condition of the Nazis. Why would they do things like that? Was there something fundamentally wrong with them? Was there something broken inside these men, something that is whole and sound inside me? I don't really think so. And that's what scares me.