NUREMBERG, Germany — My friend told me something about the education he received growing up in this country that I feel compelled to share.
While many American politicians seek to avoid teaching our children about all aspects of our country’s history, German children are given the opportunity to tour first-hand one of history’s greatest scourges.
My good pal Martin explained to me that all students are required to take field trips to tour one of the death camps built by the Nazi regime that launched World War II in 1939 and sought to exterminate a race of people.
The Holocaust is on full display in Germany these days, Martin said.
“We have to see it ourselves,” he told me this morning. This is my second trip to Nuremberg; I came here eight years ago with my bride, Kathy Anne and on that 2016 visit, I toured the Documentation Center, the museum built to commemorate the war trials that took place in Nuremberg after WWII.
Martin told me on that first visit that “we aren’t proud of that period in our history, but we do not hide it, either.” He said then that Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror was a “blight” on Germany’s otherwise glorious history.
Today I learned about how German children are taken to one of the sites used by the Nazis to imprison innocent families … and where they were executed!
And to think, thus, that American politicians do not want our children to learn about our own nation’s “blight,” such as, say, our enslavement of human beings.
Absolutely disgusting! We mustn’t hide, either, from the sins committed by our own nation’s leaders.
