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mdbglobalmom on Instagram: "All images ©️David Dalton archives or Melissa Dalton-Bradford..My father—raised in a small American West farming town—volunteered f…"
All images ©️David Dalton archives or Melissa Dalton-Bradford..My father—raised in a small American West farming town—volunteered for 2.5 years in post WWII Germany, a country and a people he quickly learned to love..He learned the language fluently and spoke it til his death in his last 80s..Some of these images are his. This is Germany in the early 1950s. 1,2,3,4,6,7,9 he took as a 20 year-old. With the camera he lugged everywhere, and throughout his life..He was no professional, but the 1,000s upon 1,000s of images he took are among the greatest treasures he left his family. .That, and his insatiable attention to how history shapes our present..The other images here are my shots..I’ve lived 35 years outside my native US —Asia, South Central Asia, Scandinavia, Europe—learning daily about the evils and echoes of the regime that set the world on fire..Over 18 of those years have been in German-speaking countries..Image 5 is close to home, outside Frankfurt..Images 10-17 are from my visits to Birkenau and Auschwitz, just two of several concentration camps I’ve studied formally and experientially..The mechanism of inhumanity is not hard to see. But it is hard to dismantle.Not because people are monsters.But because they are indifferent.Quickly numbed.Readily lulled.Easily fooled.Blithely uninformed.Gladly masked..LINK IN ENGLISH TO MORE INFO:https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-04/nazi-party-search-engine-membership-records-ancestors-englishOR:Contact the Bundesarchiv directly (bundesarchiv.de) — they have a research/inquiry service where you can request a search for a named individual in the NSDAP membership files (Zentralkartei der NSDAP-Mitglieder).International Tracing Service / Arolsen Archives — for records related to victims, forced laborers, or concentration camp connections (different from party membership records). National Archives (US, NARA) — holds microfilmed copies of many BDC records too, since the US processed them after the war; these can be searched at NARA in College Park, Maryland, or sometimes ordered remotely..#germanhistory #history #wwiihistory
