Some things are impossible to comprehend. School can be challenging but understandable, religious theories can be mysterious but ultimately fulfilling, but yet there some things I simply cannot fully process. This past weekend’s trip to Sachsenhausen, the former headquarters of the SS as well as a functional concentration camp, was one of these things.Walking into the open yard of the fenced-in camp, I was immediately struck by how much thought and, dare I say, care went into the planning of this space. As a hopeful engineer, I do value efficient and functional designs, but the fact that a space was efficiently designed to contain, break, torture, and murder human beings is nothing short of sickening. From the deliberate placement of the camp inside a wooded area to the isolation quarters for ‘misbehaving’ prisoners to a “shoe-testing track” ringing the courtyard where prisoners were forced to walk countless miles a day until they collapsed from exhaustion, the camp was obviously designed to maximize the ruthlessness of the Nazi regime. And that horrifies me. If humans can utilize efficient design to murder millions of people 70 years ago, could that mean, with the way technology has progressed, efficient design could be used to murder billions in the future?
However, one constant over time is the innate goodness and evil of humans. Design and technology may progress at ever-increasing speeds, but my hope is that the desire to do good to others will far outweigh our evil desires, lest history does in fact repeat itself.