The worst thing that can happen to those that we love is to forget them, no matter how long they have been dead. In our family, one generation seems to "resurrect" past generations, especially at such holidays as Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We tell "let it all hang out," humorous and sometimes tragic, stories about those family members we knew, and we retell stories told to us by those who've passed on about those we didn't know. It's common for us to have three or four generations of pictures of our loved ones prominently displayed during the holidays. We don't do that to evoke sadness and gloom, but rather to teach our children that life is precious, and that moments with those we love are fleeting and are to be "lived," with combinations of loving, dissent, accord and discord, and reaffirmations of those sweet and sour human qualities that define a normal family.

It's with that background that I, as a young man, first encountered the first of several sites (about fifteen years after the deliberate designed deluge of death that occurred there) of the most horrendous crimes against humanity that one can imagine. It was Dachau, a WW II killing camp run by the Germans, near Munich. It was my personal introduction to the Holocaust, though I had read everything I could find on the subject, including a 1,000 page plus book given to me by my brother, Lonnie.

I don't use the word "Nazi" or Hitler's Gestapo, or the "SS, "to describe the German perpetrators of the Holocaust because the use of those "blame deflecting-excusing words" lets the German people (of the period 1933-45) off the hook for German atrocities, in a German war, started in Europe by German politicians elected ("elected" as in a democracy, don't forget that) by the German people, and prosecuted by German officers and their German soldiers.

At Dachau, I vowed never to forget those who suffered and died in the Holocaust, and to that end I have written, and spoken, about the German mass murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children from that time onward. Today's column is a puny reminder of what happened. Let's start with the fiction about Hitler being a "madman," as if that term described him.

There are several myths about Hitler's abnormality, but the truth about how actually "normal" he was is even more terrifying, and more important to remember about mass movement-politicians, and cultists of all types. Here are a few myths [some of these are from "Adolf Hitler," by John Toland, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1976, and hundreds of other authorities on Hitler and from more than forty years of personal notes]: Hitler was never a paperhanger or a house painter. But he was a member of a church choir as a child, and he liked to play cowboys and Indians . . . He wrote several plays and the words for an opera. "St. Joan" was one of his favorite dramatic works, and he knew many of Wagner's operas by heart . . . He, like Napoleon, had a photographic memory . . . Hitler was the first head of state to promote modern urban planning and antipollution devices in cities, he would have been at home among present day berserk "environmentalists." He was also a vegetarian, with all the accompanying neuroses? At least four women attempted suicide over Hitler, and at least three succeeded, one of whom was his "niece," (but no blood relation) Geli Raubal. Incest was not one of Hitler's "things," though one could wish that incest had so occupied his mind that he would not have become a politician, determined to destroy the Jewish people. By the way, Nazi laws defining "Jewishness" were carefully designed not to include Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler as "Jews." One of Hitler's grandparents might have been a Jew.

Hitler went to his death angered that (1) the German people were not "worthy" of him, and (2) that he, with their help, was not able to murder every Jew in Europe. However, the level of his "success," the evidence for the death of more than 6,000,000 Jews, by Hitler and his chief hangman, Heinrich Himmler, is overwhelming and indisputable and unforgivable.

Here are but a couple of examples of the Nazi mind. The following is SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler speaking to a group of his SS Generals in Posen on October 4, 1943, at the height of the killing of Jews in "extermination" camps: "I [Himmler] also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly . . . I mean . . . the extermination of the Jewish race . . . Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time--apart from exceptions caused by human weakness--to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written . . . "(NCA, IV, p563) (N.D. 1919 PS 2171) [NCA means Nazi and Conspiracy Aggression Documents, and N. D. means Nuremberg (trial) documents, kk]

Let's look at Himmler's speech. First, the "grave matter" Himmler speaks of is the psychological effect (not the fact of their bestial behavior) that too few German murderers were having trouble dealing with, especially since the German people didn't know, and would (he thought) never know, and thus appreciate, the "sacrifices" they were making in ridding the nation of the Jews! But, the most chillingly hypocritical and self-deluding phrase in Himmler's speech is, " . . . remaining decent fellows . . . " It was a sign of the times that the Germans thought they could remain "decent fellows" bashing babies' heads against prison walls, while their mothers watched, as they themselves were having their heads' shaved prior to be being herded into the gas chambers?

It's also instructive to quote some excerpts from the Nuremberg trial record of one of the most notorious camp commanders in one the worst extermination camps, Auschwitz, where toward the end of the war he was directing the gassing of up to 6,000 victims a day. His name was Rudolf Hoess. Here is some of his testimony: " ...another improvement we made over Treblinka (another death camp) . . . our gas chambers accommodated 2,000 people at one time . . . whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accommodated 200 each."

The German people of Dachau, and the people living near the camps in say, Poland, claimed to know nothing of the killings. Yet Camp Commander Rudolf Hoess said at his trial in Nuremberg . . . "We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on . . . " Hoess was hanged in 1947, after being found guilty by the allies at the Nuremberg trials. Hoess apparently knew he had no defense, and he testified freely, and some say, as if he enjoyed reliving his experiences, both during the postwar Nuremberg trials and in documents he dictated and signed for the prosecution.

It was about 61 years ago this past Sunday, when the world learned of the first discovered extermination camp. And already there are those who would start the annihilation of Jews and all non-Muslim anew, beginning with Hitler worshiper, Saddam Hussein, Hamas, PLO, and now, the new president of Iran, who, as the head of a sovereign nation, officially calls for the destruction of Israel.

We remember those murdered in the Holocaust by the Germans in WW II, and remember them best when we support the Israelis in their (our) fight against the new Nazis, the Islamic Nazi savages of the Middle East, and Indochina. And, finally, we remember Levi B. Kinchen, killed August 31, 2003, in Afghanistan, and Jeremiah Colt Kinchen, killed April 7, 2005 in Iraq, both fighting the new Nazis, both young men with biblical first names and Germanic last names, and both distant relatives, for whom our grief is earnest and deep. Both American heroes.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.