I have always been curious about Hitler, not because i look up to him, but because I'm ashamed of him. I'm half German, and there is a small rumor that we may have been Jewish at some point. I don't know if that is true, but I'm more of a christian now. I remember my family speaking German when I was a little girl at my grandparents home, but nobody has spoken anything but English since the 1960's. The thought that my ancestors were in the middle of the Nazi Party is very disturbing and embarrassing at the same time. If my family was Jewish they were possibly imprisoned in those camps, and if they were just Germans, they may have been there to torture, and kill the Jews. That goes against all my belief system in my life. Nobody talks about this in my family and there fore I will never know.
     I remember being a waitress in a coffee shop in my twenties (I'm now 56), and meeting a women who was imprisoned in one of those camps as a little girl. I was fascinated by her stories. She is most likely dead now, but she told me about the horror of living through that and I have never forgotten. I am also a fan of chorus music and have a good friend who sings with Scola Cantorum from Standford University. They did a performance of the music written by the Jewish  prisoners. If you want to feel their pain of living though the concentration camps all you had to do was sit in that audience. Which is so much easier than being beaten, starving and being raped if you were a women. I think as humans we have come so far, we have learned to be better people, but we have also learned that there is a dark side to our existence too. We have also learned the people like Hitler are to be stopped, and never allowed power if it can be helped. But like any society, we don't always know about a dictator until they gain power, and then it is to late.