“It’s important to acknowledge the evil that was done and pay respects to those who suffered there.”

This is what a German-American said to me prior to my departure from the US to Berlin when I expressed to him that I was torn about whether to visit the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp. My hesitation was based on a desire to avoid what is known as disaster tourism, in which some people travel to places where the principal activity is to gawk at what has been a tragedy for others as if it is now some sort of attraction to be seen and photographed. You see this when visitors to Hawaii intentionally drive through a lava-encrusted neighborhood after an eruption, for instance.

My German friend helped me see that a visit to Sachsenhausen was not the same thing. It’s about acknowledging and remembering what happened so that it is never repeated.

With this attitude, I made it my priority to visit three locations in Berlin my first weekend in Berlin: Sachsenhausen, the Topography of Terror museum which documents the horrors of Nazism on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and its associated Museum.

It was a heavy couple of days.

Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum

While this particular camp wasn’t one of the main extermination camps used in the war – it was to close to a major city for that – 32,000 people still lost their lives here. Prior to the war, it was already a prison for political prisoners who opposed what the Nazi party was doing, and it lived on after the war as a stop along the way for those destined for one of Stalin’s gulags.

Structurally, there is not a lot to see here. The buildings of the camp were burned following the liberation of the Jewish people imprisoned there due to fears of disease resulting from the putrid conditions in which they were held. The space, however, has been maintained in its original layout complete with footprints of the buildings, a re-built but crumbling enclosing wall, and a recreation of the barb-wired lined “dead zone” area on the inside of the wall. There are a few original and re-built camp prison structures and remains of buildings, but the site is largely empty.

Within the buildings that do exist, however, there is a wealth of information and relics from those previously imprisoned. I made the mistake of signing up for a guided tour which involved meeting a group in Berlin to travel to and from and to tour the site together. When I finally became sufficiently annoyed with the guide assigned to my group, who seemed to think we were there to listen to him go on incessantly telling stories about the camp rather than having the time to take in the information available at the site, I abandoned the group, had a much better experience, and returned to Berlin on my own. The tour didn’t include transportation in any case. Since the guide still plied us for a tip suggesting that was most of his pay, I honestly don’t know what I paid for when purchasing the tour ticket.

Unless you need someone to hold your hand as you travel by train and bus to the location outside Berlin, I recommend going on your own. Other tour services or even guides from the same service may be better. My guide’s need for hearing himself talk definitely got in the way of the experience. If you choose to go on your own, you’ll have to pay for travel to the site and back, but it’s otherwise free of charge.

I didn’t take a single photo of the site at Sachsenhausen. I found there was no way to capture what it was like.

Topography of Terror

This free museum in Berlin includes a boatload of reproduced images, correspondence, newspapers, and official records (thanks to the German “love” for bureaucracy) documenting the rise, reign, and fall of the Nazis in Germany. Accompanying each item are captions in German and English explaining their significance and relaying the ugly reality of that time in history.

It’s a lot to take in, but the story is also told in a compelling way. I and just about every other visitor I saw spent an extended amount of time reading every word. I found myself repeatedly, mostly silently, uttering oaths as I read the story.

Again, no photos.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Unlike the first two spots, this experience was highly visual.

Above ground is an area of 204,514 square feet (19,000 square meters) filled with 2,710 huge, rectangular, concrete blocks (“stelae”) of varying heights laid out in a grid pattern. This Field of Stelae, with each one having an average weight of 8 tons, is located on a “gently but irregularly lowered” site that you can enter in order to walk among them. The ones at the edges are only a few feet tall. As you approach the center, you find yourself among structures that tower above you.

The effect is a palpable representation of just how many people were lost. Being among these stelae, you feel the weight of the 6 million souls who were murdered.

Below ground is a free museum with design features that mirror the stelae above with content that tells the very personal stories of individuals and families from all over Europe. The free audio guide was a helpful addition to the experience.

Beyond the power of these sites themselves is the impact of the unvarnished truths of the German history on display. There is no attempt to whitewash what happened, no effort to give it a historical context that justifies the actions or inactions of the German people that allowed it to occur, no hiding from the sad reality. Given the ongoing efforts of some in the U.S. to leave our own ugly past out of the history books, this opposite approach that the German people have taken is enviable to someone like me who believes history should be remembered.

There’s a lot the Germans could teach us all about accountability, vulnerability, and the responsibility we have to recognize our misdeeds, to make amends for them by owning our mistakes, and to pledge not repeat them.