This year I’ll be taking 12 wonderful Asbury students as well as Asbury Student Life Resident Director, Liz Louden, to Germany and Poland. Much of the tour will follow the tried-n-true route of previous years. But I will also be looking up new memorials in Berlin (thanks in large part to my friend, Christian Marx), visiting the Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin) permanent exhibits exploring the dubious role the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics played in terms of mainstreaming and implementing eugenics and racial hygiene policy across Germany. I’ll also be spending an extra few days in Munich (sans students, but meeting up with my history-teaching college roommate, Steve Gray) where I hope to, among other things, drive into northern Austria to tour the Mauthausen Concentration Camp (one of the most brutal of camps – it was classified as a Category III camp, featuring the “stairs of death” among other notorious distinctives) as well as the nearby Hartheim Killing Center at Hartheim Castle – one of the six Aktion T4 centers where the Nazis killed mentally and physically handicapped German citizens. I hope to also find some more memorials in Munich – e.g., the White Rose and the Main Synagogue memorials.
The tour starts next week, Tuesday, May 27, and will last for about 3 weeks. I do plan to make at least one more pre-trip post, as I will arrive a day early to get things all set up for the students. Feel free to follow along as you have interest and time. I try to release a post each day – though sometimes I find that I have to combine two or more days into one post.
Below is a picture from last year’s group – the day we visited the infamous Wannsee Conference Villa in picturesque Wannsee, a resort town just outside of Berlin. Over the next few weeks, the students’ experiences will swing wildly between the hideousness of barbed wire, cold barracks, gas chambers, and terrible human brutality – and the beauty of natural scenery, delightful people, majestic churches and castles, and wonderfully performed live classical music; the next few weeks will capture the entire width and breadth of human capacities. For those inclined to pray, we would appreciate it.
