On my first day of history class in the 7th grade our teacher, Coach Roberson, told our class that if we don’t study history we are destined to repeat it. Never have such words spoken in a single wide classroom trailer rung truer than they did on Sunday. They stuck with me – right in the pit of my stomach – every step of the way.

On Sunday we visited one of the most notorious concentration camps of WWII, Neuengamme, which is on the southeastern edge of Hamburg. Today the camp is a memorial that details the horrors of what took place there and echoes to future generations what must not happen again.

The phrase “concentration camp” was first used by the British to describe the way the German’s would concentrate a large number of workers into forced labor camps.

At Neuengamme the work was brick making. You’ll see from the pictures that this was a miserable environment for a cold, wet clay pit.

The camp first opened in 1938 and initially used Germans that had been arrested as labor. When the war started the SS also began importing labor from occupied territories to help support their war effort. They would basically kidnap any man capable of work and ship him off to this camp. The camp ultimately came to include men, women, and even children.

The average lifespan of a prisoner at Neuengamme was 90 days. Over 150,000 people died there. The dead bodies would be piled up in the bathroom until they could be carried out to burn.

Neuengamme was also a “feeder” camp to Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland.

Neuengamme is also particularly notorious for the gruesome and unwarranted medical experiments that were performed on twenty small children, most around ages 5 - 8. All twenty were ultimately murdered shortly before the British took control of the camp in an attempt to hide what had been done.

Based on my visit to Hamburg the two events that I believe have most shaped modern day Germany are WWII and the collapse of communism. They are certainly struggling with the horror of the former and the success of the latter…meeting both head on in a responsible way.

A refrain that we heard more than once was, “Why did this happen and why was it Germany?” The German people are still wrestling with these questions even today. It is worth noting that the largest numbers of visitors to Neuengamme each year are German school children. The German people understand and agree with those words I heard so long ago from Coach Roberson in that Zebulon middle school trailer.

If we don’t study history we are destined to repeat it.