Recently I visited one of the many concentration camps that were used during World War II. There was a lot of history to a place like that. Each students was given an audio tour and I spent my time just standing in the middle of the camp and listening to all of the stories that were there to be heard. Throughout the trip I constantly questioned how anyone could ever justify the evil actions that were done in concentration camps, even if they thought that it could be beneficial to their country.
One sad truth that I realized in this concentration camp was that there were so many great minds that were used for such evil purposes during the Holocaust. At Sachsenhausen for example, the compound was built in the shape of an equilateral triangle in order to allow the central tower to be an effective place to shoot prisoners. This was very clever and very interesting to the civil engineers of the group. As someone who leans toward the chemical engineering side, I thought about the person who had to do the stoichiometry for the gas chambers or the person who figured out how much heat was needed to burn the bodies in the furnace. It lead me to wonder what would the world be like if we hadn’t been fighting each other, but instead using our combined brainpower to benefit the world.