The US Holocaust Memorial Museum

At the beginning of 1933, according to the USHMM, there were 9 million Jews in all of Europe including 568,417 in Germany, approximately 250,000 in Austria and 3,028,837 in Poland. On January 30th of that year, after he had received 38% of the popular vote in the three-way 1932 German presidential election, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by newly-reelected President Paul von Hindenburg. Two months later, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as the president of the United States.

In 1933, both America and Germany were in the throes of the Great Depression, caused by the stock market crash in 1929, but Germany was worse off because of its defeat in the first World War and the devastating terms of the Treaty of Versailles which Germany was forced to sign after the war; Hitler blamed the loss of the war and all of Germany's subsequent economic, social and political problems on the Jews.

Hitler's grandiose plans included the systematic extermination of all the Jews in Europe, and after that was accomplished, he wanted to establish a museum in Prague where visitors would be able to see artifacts related to the vanished Jewish culture. A valuable torah scroll from the Pinkus Synagogue in Prague, which Hitler was planning to display in his museum of Jewish history, is now one of the exhibits at America's national Holocaust memorial.

Hitler's first priority was to unite all the ethnic Germans in Europe under one government and one leader, himself. ("Ein Folk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer") There would be no place for Jews or Gypsies in Hitler's Germany; only the Volkdeutsch (ethnic Germans) would be citizens. The capital of this new Greater Germany was to be in Berlin, where Hitler and his state architect, Albert Speer, were designing magnificent new state buildings in the classic style of Greek and Roman architecture. Berlin was to be renamed Germania. Hitler envisioned that his nationalist empire, which he called the Thousand Year Reich, would defeat the Communists, and after the demise of the Communists, Germany would be the dominant country in a Jew-free Europe.

Twelve years later, at the end of the second World War, both Hitler and Roosevelt were dead, along with 6 million Jews, which was two-thirds of the total number in Europe in 1933. Berlin had been reduced to a pile of rubble and Washington, DC was now the undisputed capital of the free world.

In the aftermath of the war, Germany was divided and Austria became independent again; the ethnic Germans were scattered more than ever before. Soon after the defeat of Germany and its Fascist allies, the eastern half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe came under the control of our allies and Germany's arch enemies, the Communists. In order to hold back the threat of Communism to America, West Germany was made our new ally and the Cold War against our former ally, the Communist Soviet Union, became the prime source of anxiety for Americans. During this period, Americans were mainly concerned with building bomb shelters in their back yards, in preparation for the anticipated nuclear war; they had no interest in learning about the destruction of European Jewry in the last war.

Many Holocaust survivors had emigrated to the United States after the war, and by 1990, there were 5,981,000 Jews in this country, more than in any country of the world, including Israel. Although Palestine was still a British protectorate after World War II, survivors of the Holocaust emigrated there by the thousands. By 1948, the population of Jews in Palestine had reached the magic number of 600,000 and the new Jewish state of Israel was created.

For most events in history, memory fades as time passes, but for the Holocaust, it is just the opposite, as American Jews strive to bring the Holocaust to the attention of the public by building museums all across the country. At the year 2000, there were 59 Holocaust museums in America, and more were in the planning stage. Every major American city, including Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and St. Petersburg, has its own Holocaust museum. In 2000, seven states in America required students to study the Holocaust in public schools.

In 1978, the subject of the Holocaust became popular among Americans when a television mini-series, entitled Holocaust, was seen by 120 million people in this country. A few weeks later, the announcement was made that a national Holocaust memorial was being planned for our nations's capital.

In 1993, sixty years after Hitler's reign of terror began, the long awaited US Holocaust Memorial Museum was dedicated by President William Jefferson Clinton on April 22. The date commemorates the 50ieth anniversary of the month-long battle in Poland's Warsaw ghetto, between the Nazis and the Jewish resistance fighters. Ironically, on the opening day of our national museum, which memorializes the genocide of the European Jews, another genocidal religious war was taking place in Europe between the Bosnians and the Serbs.

The museum building, which incorporates symbolic design features that are intended to be evocative of the Holocaust, was done in a modern architectural style, which Hitler would have called "degenerate." The USHMM was not designed to be a dull, boring documentation of historical fact, but rather it is intended to be an intensely personal experience in which the building itself is part of the exhibit. Nothing is spared to convey the horror of the Nazi tyranny and the annihilation of the Jews in Europe.

For visitors who know little or nothing about the Holocaust, this is a gut-wrenching experience which could cause nightmares; it is not recommended for children under 11 years of age. However, a special exhibit, called Daniel's Story, which is based on a book of fiction, is designed to introduce children as young as 6 to the basic facts of the Holocaust.

Although the museum is devoted to the darkest chapter in human history, in 2000, it ranked third in popularity among the many attractions in Washington, DC, right after the White House and the Vietnam Wall.

Located at 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, the museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day except Christmas Day and Yom Kippur, a Jewish religious holiday which falls on a different day each year, usually in the month of September. Every day, 2,000 time-stamped tickets to the permanent exhibit are given out free; the line for tickets starts forming around 7:30 a.m. No ticket is necessary for the special exhibits, Daniel's Story, and other parts of the museum, including the Wexler Learning Center where visitors can use touch-screen computers to learn about the Holocaust. Tickets can be obtained by mail in advance by calling 800-400-9373.

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