History Flows Through Us: Germany, The Holocaust, and the Importance of Empathy. Edited by Roger Frie. New York:  Routledge, 2018.  194 pp

“The things I saw beggar description… The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering… I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”

As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, Dwight D. Eisenhower was uniquely positioned to understand the German enemy, but even Eisenhower was unprepared for what he encountered during the liberation of the German concentration camp of Ohrdruf in April of 1945. There, he found bodies piled high on top of one another and living skeletons struggling to survive. Even as the Allies continued to fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. It was this concern that inspired him to require Germans living in the surrounding towns to walk through the camp and witness the atrocities for themselves. Three days later, he wrote General George C. Marshall a letter that expressed his concerns about the potential for

future generations to dismiss the existence of the extermination camps, relegating them merely to propaganda.

Eisenhower’s warning is now memorialized in stone on the outside walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. In college, I interned in the Museum’s history department and often walked by his prophetic warning to future generations. At such moments, I sometimes contemplated a question all students of modern German history must eventually ask: “What would I have done?” Confronted with this question, I sometimes imagined (hoped, actually) I might have had the courage to join the underground resistance. However, if I’m being honest, more likely I would have remained a silent bystander like so many other Germa