Sobering Sites of Nazi Europe
Fondue, nutcrackers, Monet, Big Ben... gas chambers. A trip to once-upon-a-time Europe can be a fairy tale. It can also help tell the story of Europe's 20th-century fascist nightmare. While few travelers go to Europe to dwell on the horrors of Nazism, most value visiting the memorials of fascism's reign of terror and honoring the wish of its survivors — "Forgive but never forget." These sites are committed to making the point that intolerance and fascism are still alive and strong. Their message: Fascism can emerge from its loony fringe if we get complacent and think the horrors of Hitler could never happen again.
Concentration Camps
Of the countless concentration camps, Dachau , just outside of Munich, is most visited. Auschwitz-Birkenau (near Kraków), Mauthausen (between Vienna and Salzburg), and Terezín (near Prague) are more powerful and less touristed.
While some visitors complain
that Dachau is too "prettied-up," it gives a powerful
look at how these camps worked (closed Monday, www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de).
Built in 1933, this first Nazi concentration camp offers a compelling
voice from our recent, grisly past, warning and pleading "Never Again" —
the memorial's theme. On arrival, pick up the mini-guide and check when
the next documentary film in English will be shown. The museum, the movie,
the chilling camp-inspired art, the reconstructed barracks, the gas chambers,
the cremation ovens, and the memorial shrines will chisel into you the
hidden meaning of fascism. 
While many camps were slave-labor camps, Auschwitz, the dreaded destination of Polish Jews such as those on Schindler's list, was built to exterminate. View the horrifying film shot by the Russians who liberated the camp in early 1945. In the museum, the simple yet emotionally powerful display of prisoners' shoes, hairbrushes, and suitcases puts lumps in even the most stoic throats. Allow plenty of time to wander and ponder (www.auschwitz.org.pl).
A second Auschwitz camp, Birkenau, is about a mile away. This bleak ghost camp, an endless panorama of demolished barracks and looming watchtowers overlooking an ash-gray lake, is left as if no one after the war had the nerve to even enter the place. Today, pilgrims do. Auschwitz-Birkenau is just 90 minutes by train from the Kraków, Poland's best-preserved medieval city.
Mauthausen town sits cute and prim on the romantic Danube at the start of the very scenic trip downstream to Vienna. But nearby, atop a now-still quarry, linger the memories of a horrible slave-labor camp. Mauthausen is a solemn place of meditation and continuous mourning. Fresh flowers adorn yellowed photos of lost loved ones. The home country of each victim has erected a gripping monument. You'll find yourself in an artistic gallery of grief, resting on a foundation of "Never Forget." Retrace the steep and treacherous steps of the camp's inmates — the "stairway of death" (Todesstiege ) — to and from the quarry where they worked themselves to death. Mauthausen offers an English booklet, a free audioguide, an English movie, and a painful but necessary museum (www.mauthausen-memorial.at).
Just outside of Prague is Terezín concentration camp (Theresienstadt in German, www.pamatnik-terezin.cz). This particularly insidious place was dolled up as a model camp for Red Cross inspection purposes. Inmates had their own newspaper, and the children put on cute plays. But after the camp passed its inspection, life returned to slave labor and death. Ponder the touching collection of Jewish children's art, also on display in the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague's Jewish Quarter.
While these are Europe's most powerful and easily accessible concentration camps, you can also visit Sachsenhausen near Berlin (www.gedenkstaette-sachsenhausen.de), Buchenwald near Weimar (www.buchenwald.de), and many others.
Germany and Austria
Since destruction and death are fascist fortes, only relatively insignificant bits and pieces of Hitler's Germany survive. But as time passes, today's Germans are increasingly aware of the need to remember the horrors that began in their country.
Hitler got his start — and had his strongest support — in the beer halls of Munich. The Munich City Museum (Münchner Stadtmuseum, www.stadtmuseum-online.de) traces the origin and development of Nazism. To uncover Nazi sites in Munich, take the "Hitler and the Third Reich" walking tour by Radius Tours (www.radiusmunich.com). Ironically, we have the Nazis to thank for the accuracy of Munich's postwar reconstruction. When Allied bombings were imminent, Nazi photographers documented Munich's great architecture — allowing it to be rebuilt exactly as it was after the war.
Berlin, now that its Wall is history,
is giving its Nazi chapter a little more attention. Most original Nazi sites
are hidden. To help uncover them, take the "Infamous Third Reich
Sites" walking tour by Berlin Walks (www.berlinwalks.com).
But don't bother looking for Hitler's bunker — it's
long gone. 
Berlin has several Nazi-related museums and memorials. The Topography of Terror exhibit illustrates SS tactics (in the ruins of the former SS/Gestapo headquarters, near what was Checkpoint Charlie, www.topographie.de). The adjacent four small "mountains" are made from the rubble of the bombed-out city. The chilling Book Burning Monument commemorates the 20,000 books that were burned on Berlin's Bebelplatz at the order of the Nazis. Glance into the glass floor in the middle of the square (on Unter den Linden) to see a huge underground room with empty shelves. The gripping Käthe Kollwitz Museum is filled with art inspired by the horrors of Berlin's Nazi experience (www.kaethe-kollwitz.de). Berlin's New Synagogue was burned on Kristallnacht in 1938, but has since been restored. The excellent Jewish Museum Berlin, which focuses on Jewish culture, was designed by the American architect Daniel Libeskind. The zigzag shape of the zinc-walled building is pierced by voids, symbolic of the irreplaceable cultural loss caused by the Holocaust (www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de). In nearby Wannsee (near Potsdam), you can tour the house where Hitler's cronies came up with the "Final Solution" of the Holocaust (www.ghwk.de).
There was strong resistance to Hitler even in Berlin. In front of the glass-domed Reichstag is a row of slate slabs embedded in the ground, memorializing the 96 politicians who were persecuted and murdered because their politics didn't agree with Chancellor Hitler's. Near the Kulturforum museums is a former military headquarters (Benderblock) where conspirators plotted an ill-fated attempt to assassinate Hitler — and where they were also shot for the crime. It's now the site of the German Resistance Memorial (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand). Just outside of the city is the Plötzensee Prison, where Nazi enemies were imprisoned and executed (www.gedenkstaette-ploetzensee.de).
In Nürnberg, the ghosts of Hitler's showy propaganda rallies still rustle in the Rally Grounds (now Luitpoldhain park), down the Great Road, and through the Congress Hall. The north wing of the hall houses the Nazi Documentation Center, with a "Fascination and Terror" exhibit that examines the causes and consequences of the Nazi phenomenon (www.museen.nuernberg.de).
The town of Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border, is any German's choice for a great mountain hideaway — including Hitler's. Hitler's famous Eagle's Nest, designed as a retreat for diplomatic meetings, towers high above Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden. The road and building were constructed in an impressive 13 months — just in time to be given to Hitler for his 50th birthday. The site is open to visitors (mid-May-Oct), but little remains of the alpine retreat Hitler visited only 10 times. For more substance visit the nearby Nazi Documentation Center, including a visit to the bunkers that burrow into the mountainside (www.obersalzberg.de).
Just north of Trier in the town of Irrel is the Westwall Museum, with tourable bunkers that made up part of the Nazis' supposedly impenetrable western fortification (closed in winter, www.westwall-museum.de).
On Vienna's Judenplatz, you'll find the Austrian Holocaust Memorial — a library turned inside-out to remind visitors that each victim had a story. Nearby is the Judenplatz Museum, displaying the ruins of a forgotten 14th-century synagogue unearthed during the memorial's construction. Included in the same ticket is also admission to a synagogue and the Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna (www.jmw.at).
The Netherlands, Belgium, and Scandinavia
In Amsterdam, Anne Frank's House gives the cold, mind-boggling statistics of fascism the all-important intimacy of a young girl who lived through it and died from it. Even bah-humbug types, who are dragged in because it's raining and their spouses read the diary, find themselves caught up in Anne's story (www.annefrank.org).
The small town of Haarlem, 20 minutes by train from Amsterdam, has its own Anne Frank-type story. Touring a cozy apartment above a clock shop just off the busy market square, you'll see Corrie Ten Boom's "Hiding Place." The sight was popularized by an inspirational book and movie about this woman and her family's experience hiding Jews from Nazis. Tipped off by an informant, Nazis raided their house but didn't find the Jews, who were hiding behind a wall in Corrie's bedroom. Because the Nazis found a suspiciously large number of ration coupons, they sent the Ten Boom family to a concentration camp. Only Corrie survived (www.corrietenboom.com).
Amsterdam's Dutch Theater, which was used as an assembly hall for local Jews destined for Nazi concentration camps, is a powerful memorial. On the wall, 6,700 family names represent the 104,000 Jews deported and killed by the Nazis. The nearby Jewish Historical Museum — four historic synagogues joined together by steel and glass to make one modern complex — tells the story and struggles of Judaism through the ages (www.jhm.nl).
While Hitler controlled Europe, each country had a courageous, if small, resistance movement. All over Europe you'll find streets and squares named after the martyrs of the resistance. Any history buff or champion of the underdog will be inspired by the patriotism documented in Europe's Nazi-resistance museums — the most extensive is Amsterdam's Dutch Resistance Museum. You'll see propaganda movie clips, study a forged ID card under a magnifying glass, and read of ingenious, daring efforts to hide local Jews from the Germans (www.verzetsmuseum.org). Oslo's Norwegian Resistance Museum (Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum, www.nhm.mil.no) and Copenhagen's Museum of Danish Resistance (Frihedsmuseet, www.frihedsmuseet.dk) are also fascinating, as is the Museum of Deportation and the Resistance in Mechelen, Belgium (www.cicb.be).
Poland 
Poland was hit harder by World War II than any other country — more than six million Poles died, half of them Jews. But the Poles — Jewish or not — did not go quietly. Monuments around the capital city remember their valiant, though eventually unsuccessful, uprisings. In 1940, nearly a half million Jews were moved into a ghetto in Warsaw. By 1943, only a tenth of the ghetto's Jews survived — the rest had died from disease or been shipped to concentration camps. The survivors staged the Ghetto Uprising against their Nazi oppressors, but almost all of them were eventually killed in the fighting, captured and executed, or sent to concentration camps. A year later, as the Soviet army approached, a Polish resistance army staged the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, which resulted in the deaths of a quarter of a million Warsaw civilians. Today, you can still visit the neighborhoods and landmarks where these brave uprisings began.
Oskar Schindler, hero of the film Schindler's List, lived and worked in the Polish city of Kraków, just two blocks from Wawel Castle. Fans of the film can visit Schindler's factory, currently the Telpod electronics factory (near the Kraków-Sablocie train station). The Jarden Bookshop, located in Kraków's Jewish Quarter, offers walking tours that include "Schindler's List" sights and sells some English-language books about the Jewish experience there (www.jarden.pl).
The Czech Republic
After completing his "Final Solution," Hitler had hoped to build a grand museum of the "decadent" Jewish culture in Prague. Today, the five synagogues of Prague's Jewish Quarter (Josefov), containing artifacts the Nazis assembled from that city's once-thriving Jewish community, stand together as a persistently unforgettable memorial. In addition to the synagogues, a joint ticket also covers the Old Jewish Cemetery and the Ceremonial Hall. All of these sights are scattered over a three-block area between Prague's Old Town and the Vltava River.
France
Paris commemorates the 200,000 French victims of Hitler's camps with the Memorial de la Deportation. Walking through this evocative park, on the tip of the Ile de la Cité just behind Notre-Dame, is like entering a work of art. Walk down the claustrophobic stairs into a world of concrete, iron bars, water, and sky. Inside the structure, an eternal flame, triangular niches containing soil from various concentration camps, and powerful quotes will etch the message into your mind. Then gaze at the 200,000 crystals — one for each person who perished.
Possibly the most moving sight of all is the martyred village of Oradour-sur-Glane, in central France (www.oradour.org). This town, 15 miles northwest of Limoges, was machine-gunned and burned in 1944 by Nazi SS troops. Seeking revenge for the killing of one of their officers, they left 642 townspeople dead in a blackened crust of a town under a silent blanket of ashes. The poignant ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane — scorched sewing machines, pots, pans, bikes, and cars — have been preserved as an eternal reminder of the reality of war. When you visit, you'll see the simple sign that greets every pilgrim who enters: Souviens-toi...remember.
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