Dorothea von Schwanenfluegel reminds us of the reasons why it is so difficult to move on when she recites her accounts of being an eye witness during the Battle of Berlin in 1945. The war was coming to a close while she and her family were hiding in their apartment building, waiting for the Russians and allies to arrive with help and rations for survival. She remembers sighting a young boy crying and huddled in a ditch alongside a road. He was a member of the Hitler youth army. The young boy was given a task of running underneath a Russian tank and detonating a grenade. This was to be a great honor for the boy, though he continued to cry out for his lost mother and awaited his death.
Adolph Hitler was such a spirited and skilled leader, he was able to influence the masses into joining his opinion that Jews were dirty and deceitful, that they needed immediate extermination so the non-Jewish population could thrive. Even in America this standard was in some ways influential. The Jewish and non-Jewish citizens that immigrated to the United States were classified unjustly as being uneducated, due to the language barriers, and second rate citizens. Of course this was exactly what Hitler was seeking.
“The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 banned marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish people and turned Jews into second-class citizens, not entitled to vote at elections. A series of laws in 1938 placed severe restrictions on what Jews were allowed to do, where they could live, how they could travel, and what jobs they were allowed to pursue. The first concentration camps were built soon afterwards and Jews began to be sent to them” (Leapman 17).
