A Trip to the Holocaust Museum

A Trip to the Holocaust Museum

Humanities III

Strayer University

A Trip to the Holocaust Museum

On August 31st 2012, I attended the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, located at 100 15th Street (Raoul Wallenberg Place) Southwest in Washington D.C. It is part of the National Mall. I was struck by the size of the museum itself, and the many labyrinth-like passages, rooms, and corridors it contained that were all related to some different aspect of the Holocaust. Moreover, the interior of the museum is not like a regular museum. It is stark, gray and poorly lit; it was so dark I could hardly read some of the picture captions and text. It purposely has a “factory” feel to emphasize how dehumanizing and mechanized the extermination process was in the concentration camps.

I had known that the museum existed and I had heard stories about many of the horrors of this particular time period. I was a little surprised, though, at how much history had been preserved and that so many people were present on a routine day at the museum.

One of the pieces that I spent the most time looking at was the cover of The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zen, which was displayed in its original German language in an exhibit in the lower level of the Gonda Education Center. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia (2010) stated:

“The war that the Nazis waged against the Jews was not just a war of physical annihilation. It was an international war of propaganda to convince the rest of the world of the evils of Judaism. One of the primary weapons that the Third Reich used for this international effort was a forgery known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It is claimed that the Protocols are the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders at the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, in which Jews plotted to take over the world. The Protocols are a complete forgery most of which was copied from an obscure satire on Napoleon III by Maurice Joly called "Dialogue...