Summary Of On Hitler's Mountain

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On Hitler’s Mountain is a memoir of a child named Irmgard Hunt and her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany. She herself has had many experiences of living during that dark time, she actually met Hitler, had a grandfather who hated Hitler's rule, and had no thoughts or feelings about the Nazi rule until the end of WWII. Her memoir is a reminder of what can happen when an ordinary society chooses a cult of personality over rational thought. What has happened to the German people since then, what are they doing about it today and how do they feel about their past? Several decades later, with most Nazis now dead or in hiding, and despite how much Germany has done to prevent another Nazi rule, everyone is still ashamed of their ancestors’ pasts. …show more content…

Even today, German schools teach their students at a young age about Germany's feelings towards the events of WWII. At some point in their education, all German students are required to visit a concentration camp. Basically, German schools treat the Nazi past as a history lesson. As a responsibility, Germans keep the memory alive through school in order to prevent another Hitler-like rule. “But most- and worst- of all, as we and all the world slowly learned about the full extent of Hitler's Final Solution, we realized that all Germans, no matter what they had suffered or whether they had participated in any way in the atrocities, would bear guilt, shame and dishonor, probably forever” (Hunt 218). In 2014, a German Quora user named Rebecca Kaßner gave her experience of visiting a concentration camp when she was on a school exchange …show more content…

And when I saw these things that were taken from the prisoners (there is also one room just filled with hair), all the pieces came together in my mind, and I realized the first time on an emotional basis the whole horror… I found the toughest guy in our group, who would normally never show feelings, standing in front of a display cabinet with baby shoes crying. When the tour ended, we didn't know how to look our Polish friends in the eyes again… When our Polish friends saw us again after their tour and saw that we were all shocked and some still crying, they came up to us and told us that we shouldn't be ashamed at all and that we are not responsible for the deeds of our ancestors. It took me a few years to get to the point where I could really feel that way, but I got there

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