Studying in the Streets
Five places necessary to understanding Nazism
When studying history, it is often difficult to understand the reasons and motivations behind certain events, especially when viewing them from a dusty classroom, complimented by a dull PowerPoint and and elucidated via dry lecture. Then there’s the way we studied history on The Village, which asked us to immerse ourselves in our topic and try to understand the mindset of those who participated in and were directly affected by what we were studying. Our challenge was to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to stand where they had stood, to see what they’d seen and to think — as much as we could possibly manage — as our historical actors had thought. This chance to see history firsthand, to visit the famous sites and monuments, is why studying in Europe on The Village Program was such a huge priority for me.
My love of history is also why I elected to go with The Village Program to Munich when it came time to do my JOURNEYcourse. The chance to study Nazism and its rise in Munich itself was, for me, an unforgettable and even life-changing experience. Here are five reasons why:
1.) Viscardigasse “Dodger’s” Alley
If one were to merely stroll around Munich, it would be easy to pass by this seemingly unimportant alley behind the Felderrnhale memorial located in the Odeonsplatz, near the center of the city. Although it has since been destroyed, this memorial at Felderrnhale used to house a shrine to the Third Reich in remembrance of the Beer Hall Putsch and those who died in conjunction with Hitler’s failed grab for power in 1923. During the span of the 12 year Third Reich, anybody passing this memorial was required to give the Nazi salute or else be arrested as unsympathetic to the Hiter regime. The alley pictured above holds significance because those who wished to avoid saluting the Nazi flag and bowing to Nazi power and leadership would take this alley as a shortcut, which caused it to be called “Dodger’s” or “Shirker’s” alley.
While taking a side street nowadays seems insignificant, to the people of Munich during the Nazi years it was a silent protest against Nazism and it’s totalitarian control of people’s lives. Today this pathway of protest — paved in gold — stands as a subtle memorial to those who resisted Nazi power each and every day, even in the smallest of ways.
2.) The Munich Documentation Center
Located near where Hitler’s personal office and the Nazi Party’s offices stood ruing the party’s rise to power and after, the Documentation Center in Munich just opened in May of 2015 and houses Munich’s comprehensive museum on National Socialism. Well laid out and packed full of information, this museum recounts year by year the rise of the Third Reich and explains how so many people were drawn into this movement. It does an excellent job, too, of remembering those who opposed the terrors of the Third Reich and lost their lives in the slaughters of this regime. Personally, this museum was my favorite place that we held class in Munich. I learned so more about the rise of National Socialism than I had from the books I’d read to prepare for Munich. Even more, the museum helped me to understand more fully both how the Nazis gained their following and what led the regime’s resisters to resist and rebel.
3.) Nuremberg Nazi Party Rally Grounds
Beyond Munich proper, the story of National Socialism and its victims is compellingly revealed in nearby Nuremberg and Dachau. Hidden outside the city of Nuremberg and now utilized as a football stadium lies the dilapidated remains of what use to be the Nazi Party Rally Grounds. Although, most of the main building and bleachers were destroyed in the war, the ruins that remain show the extent and power of the Nazi party. Standing in that stadium, it was easy to imagine the thousands of people who gathered there to celebrate the Nazi party and watch Hitler and his followers display their power through parades and marches. Our class found the exact platform on which Hitler stood and delivered his speeches in front of tens of thousands of people. Seeing the rally grounds from that perspective impacted me more than I had expected. While I stood there and imagined endless rows of people praising and supporting a party that would mercilessly kill so many millions, a pit formed in my stomach. That’s what it means to really feel history, I suppose: to stand where Hitler once overlooked a sea of salutes and cheers, at the figurative heart of Nazi Germany’s most horrifically expressed hopes for world and racial domination.
4.) Nuremberg Court House
If the Nuremberg Rally Grounds were in many ways the launch of the Nazis, the city showcases the party’s collapse and fall, too. Located in the center of Nuremberg itself stands the court house that housed the trials of many Nazi officials in the world’s attempt to enforce justice on the crimes of the Nazi party. These trials are extremely important not only to the history of law, but to understanding the feelings of the world towards Nazism and the regime’s atrocious crimes. To have class held in the place where these trials were conducted was amazing to me.
So often when studying WWII, we stop with V-E Day and forget to mention the importance of the trails that brought Nazism and its surviving leaders to justice after the war. More than other acts of vengeance or retribution after 1945, these trials established the idea that there are laws which preside above all government leaders and are meant to guide moral conduct throughout the world, even during times of global conflict and war. The trials of the Nazi officials at Nuremberg demonstrated that all men are accountable to fundamental laws of human rights, despite what any leaders or set of laws to the contrary might seek to establish under the cloak of war. In our own times — when genocide has returned to various corners of our world and xenophobia has again found a pride of place in Europe and indeed the USA — Nuremberg’s infamous courtroom hammers home to anybody visiting it that the gavel justice can and should fall in judgement on any state or individual crimes against humanity.
5.) Dachau Concentration Camp
Of all the places we held class during our JourneyCourse to Bavaria, Dachau Concentration Camp stands as the most important site to understanding the horrors of the Third Reich and the Holocaust itself. One cannot truly understand the horror of such a place until one stands in the barracks and sees the rows of bunks, imagining when they’d been tightly packed with withering human beings. Or stands in the gas chamber, considering how such horrible places would have echoed with the panicked screams of its suffocating victims. Or walks onto the roll-call plaza, to think about the daily misery of what prisoners had to see and do there, as they stood for hours in every kind of weather with their own ranks sometimes falling over dead from exposure. Then there’s the last point of reckoning, standing over the ovens of Dachau that resemble almost exactly the ones at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There are brilliant ways to teach about the heinous acts committed under the rule of Hitler and the Nazi party, none of which can rival standing where the bodies became ash and smoke.
Should we teach about the Holocaust in our schools? Absolutely. But I believe that everybody should visit a Concentration Camp at some point in their lives to really understand the careful forms that evil assumed under the Nazi barbarity. Just a short bus ride out of lovely Munich — in a country that had always been seen as a great carrier of the idea of civilization — mass incarceration and murder took the name of Dachau, as neighbors all around and the millions of citizens further afield in the Third Reich mostly didn’t even bat an eye. By standing where they died and contemplating deeply what killed them, anybody who goes to Dachau today can gain at least some small understanding of the horrors of the Third Reich.
Beyond anything a history course could have taught me at home in Monroe, Louisiana, these five places in and around Munich helped me to visualize and understand what occurred during the era of the Third Reich. Each of these places highlights a different element of the history of the Hitler era, and I feel blessed as a history major to have visited them as a student. Whether or not a visitor to Munich elects to follow the terrible path of sites that brought so much learning to my class and me, I can’t help but believing that going to these places, learning about what happened at them and recounting their history to others is part of what we can all do as citizens of the world to proclaim “never again.”
