People never cease to amaze me. With the days of 24/7 news networks pounding people with information on the hour with updates every fifteen minutes, news networks have to search for stories in areas outside big cities to cover.
While scrolling through the news Web sites one morning to pass the time, an article caught my eye: "Wisconsin Farmer Plans Hitler Memorial."
How could I not click on it? In my mind, the idea sounded completely absurd. I had to read it. At first, I thought it might be a parody, because of "The Producers" - a musical about two Broadway producers finding the worst play ever written to try to make a ton of money off of it. The play they discovered to produce was about Hitler - which is why I was skeptical of the guy building a Hitler memorial in the Midwest Dairy Land.
According to the Associated Press, a German immigrant named Tom Junker, who was a member of a German Parliament unit in WWII, wants to build a memorial because "there are inaccuracies about the war and Hitler's role in it," he said.
Inaccuracies? Have the history books we've seen from grade school until now actually been that misleading? Was there someone else with a short black mustache sending his men out to capture people and send them to concentrations camps? Or maybe that book everyone reads in middle school - "The Diary of Anne Frank" - is just a bunch of jibberish from a girl with an overactive imagination. I mean, who wouldn't want to hide in an attic with seven other people?
Seriously. I want to know what Junker is smoking in Wisconsin.
Apparently, Junker received a permit to build a new tractor shed on his property. But instead of a new shed, he built, "a concrete structure in the side of a hill and has a German flag and other items for display," the article said.
Scrolling down to read the rest of this article, the AP reports that, "Mr. Junker volunteered to join the German Waffen-SS in 1940. The Waffen-SS was the fighting branch of the Nazi party's dreaded paramilitary unit, the Schutzstaffel. Commonly known as the SS, the unit acted as a special police force and was involved in some of the worst crimes committed in territory under Nazi control during World War II."
How is it possible that someone who was associated with the worst of the Nazi regime is able to deny that anything bad happened with a straight face or, better yet, a clear conscience?
While I'm all for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and everything that goes with it, I find it hard to understand how some people are still in denial about the Holocaust and the terror that Hitler spread throughout Europe. There's enough evidence that proves it happened for these delusional people to bury them alive.
If you want to have your own little shrine of Nazi collectibles and other memorabilia inside your house, fine. I can't do much about it, but then again, I can't see it either. But having a display, outside, for everyone to see is just wrong and disrespectful not only to the families that had members serve in WWII, but for the ones that had family members die in the concentrations camps, and most importantly, the ones who survived.
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