History Compounded
On a recent trip to Berlin, I took some time to explore the Topography of Terror museum and found myself pushing almost anxiously through the exit doors into the December damp air outside.
Standing there on the museum steps, I attempted to absorb the hard – but necessary – lessons that I had learned about the horrors of the Nazi regime from its astonishingly swift rise to power to its institutionalization of terror to its murderous crimes across Europe and, finally, to the regime’s violent end as Berlin burned in the final days of WWII.