The content is chilling, not only in its raw inhumanity, but in the way it chronicles the Nazi transition from street violence (a la today's ICE) to being an industrial killing machine.
The most insightful comment I heard during the evening was from a local rabbi during the introduction. He said, in effect, that Auchwitz marked a shift in the Nazi strategy for eliminating Jews and other undesirables. Before Auchwitz, Nazi troops went city but city, creating killing fields and mass graves. What they learned was that it was much more efficient to bring the victims to a centralized killing facility than marching troops around the countryside.
The exhibit in Cincy also includes a portion of artifacts from local survivors and their families - as well as videos recounting their experience. Pretty wild to talk with someone while watching a video of his father talking about how he escaped from Auschwitz during a work detail march or to meeting someone who survived a camp as a child. Cincy was a final destination for many survivors who came to the US and they arrived by train in the same Union Terminal housing this exhibit so the combination of the exhibit AND the space is really powerful.
I didn't have enough time to really see everything so we'll be doing round 2 at some point.
I'll leave this with a quote from one of the gallery walls:
In 1933, the German legal system quickly aligned the Nazi goals. The courts permitted the purge of Social Democrats and Jewss and did not protest when the new goverment gave the police broad powers - independent of judicial review - to arrest and incarcerate real or perceived state enemies in concentration camps.
Sound familiar ??? Don't tell me it was just a coincidence that DJT's kept "My New Order" (a collection of Hitler speeches) on his bedside table (according to Ivana in 1990).
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