Great question!! Actually, my wife usually always smiles in her pictures. When we were down in the shower room, I wanted to take a picture of it with her in it (kind of a “we were here” thing). When shhe naturally struck the normal I’m so cute in pictures smile, it just didn’t look right to me. I told her “Baby, tens of thousands of people were stripped of their clothes, their freedom and their souls in this very room. I don’t think you should smile in the picture.”
Other than that, I didn’t feel uncomfortable taking pictures as long as the person in the forground looked solemn. That place is too beautiful and moving to not be captured and shared digitally with the world.
FriarTed, those pictures are forever lost in the fog of relocation. If I ever come across them again, I will immediately post a follow-up to that thread. I’ve actually actively looked for those pictures and I can’t find the CD anywhere! Damnit, I wish someone would have taught me about imageshak or photobucket back then!!!
Regarding a statement in the OP, I’m curious how Americans, or anyone from outside the Nazis’ jurisdiction in Europe, would wiind up in a concentration camp. Of course we were at war with Germany from late 1941 on, but I thought captured enemy soldiers would be sent to POW camps a la Stalag 17.
If they found out a captured American soldier was a Jew, would he be sent to a concentration camp? Or did they sometimes discover a prisoner had dual German U.S. citizenship, and therefore treat them like one of the hated internal groups within the country? Of course, at the time, there were American Jewish soldiers fighting in Europe who only a few years before had fled with their families as refugees. I was amazed to learn that the U.S. would not have sent all Jewish draftees/enlistees to the Pacific, to fight the war against Japan and be ouit of the Nazis’ way, but such was not the case. My brother’s FIL escaped Austria in 1938 with his family, as a youth, and not many years later was back in Austria fighting with the American Ski Patrol.
Yes. There are large plaques inside the museum which lists the exact numbers of each group and each country. Homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses were among the categories.