You are free!

That is the name of a documentary film produced by the US Army after WWII using a mix of footage of the liberation of concentration camps in Germany and interviews with some of the soldiers who liberated them and some of the survivors.  The title comes from the assertion that one of the soldiers remembered giving to a group of shocked survivors who seemed unable to fathom that the nightmare was over... "You are free!  You are free!" he kept repeating to them.  One of the camps in the film was Dachau, the first camp set up by the Nazis in 1933, liberated by the US Army in April, 1945.  After visiting the Nazi Documentation Centre in Nuremberg, we spent a sombre afternoon at Dachau, reflecting on past horrors and our own freedom.

At its core, the National Socialist government was a terrorist organization, meant to instill fear and fascination in its citizens.

The burning of the Reichstag.

Excited Nazi party members awaiting Hitler's arrival in Nuremberg.

Some of Hitler's biggest supporters were middle class German housewives.

The cult of personality...

... Hitler was promoted as more than a man...

... instead an almost divine saviour of the German nation.

The original Lufthansa

How the rise of Hitler was seen by some across the Atlantic.

The Nazi Documentation Centre is interactive and very English language friendly.

The entrance to the documentation centre - part of the massive Nazi Congress Hall built by Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect.

Dachau - this memorial was created by a survivor of the camp.

Some of the symbols that prisoners would wear to identify the group they came from - Jewish, political opponent, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness, etc.

Waiting outside the barracks in the role call yard. 

The Catholic memorial at Dachau - thousands of Catholic priests spoke out against the evils of Nazism from the pulpit and many were imprisoned in Dachau for doing so. 

At Dachau, people were routinely worked to death or murdered for the slightest infraction of camp rules.  Bodies were burned, though by the end of the war the slaves working the crematorium could not keep up.  When the Americans arrived, their were piles of the dead waiting outside the ovens.  Anyone who questions the historicity of the Holocaust is either ignorant or willfully evil.

The gas chamber

The ovens

A survivor of the camp created this memorial to the dead.