From the time we are children, stories of war, conquests, and campaigns ignite a strange curiosity. Names like Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, or even Hitler seem to hold a mysterious grip over young minds fascinated by tales of strategy, power, and ambition. I was no different.
The idea that a young Macedonian boy could set out to conquer half the known world, or that bands of rugged seafarers called Vikings could instill terror across coasts, seemed both heroic and awe-inspiring. Even the twisted genius of Hitler, though deeply disturbing, left me wondering how a man of such modest physical presence could plunge the entire world into the deadliest conflict in human history.
As I traveled through Copenhagen and then Berlin, a strange dichotomy emerged. In Denmark, tales of the Vikings echoed with a certain raw valor – barbaric, yes, but with a code, a mission, a primitive sense of honor. Their violence, while ruthless, was driven by conquest, survival, exploration. There was a human element to it – tribes fighting for pride, power, or place. Even in their bloodlust, there was a story, a cause. While this story is not to be proud of or to be inspired, still considering the era, I can give them some benefit of doubt.
But Berlin told me a different story. One that shook the very foundation of my romanticized fascination with wars. Listening to the stories in headphone while travelling on a hop on hop off Big Bus, or standing amidst the memorials to murdered Jews, walking through the grey blocks of the Holocaust Memorial with names etched into stone – children, mothers, old men – I felt a chill that no battlefield account ever gave me. This was not war. This was something far more sinister. And honestly I lost interest to explore some more during last one hour of the journey.
World War II has always been a favourite subject of mine and ours. By ours I mean my father, brothers. Growing up watching the films on WWII and stories various small, large battles always used to inspire us. Films like The Longest Day, Guns of Navarone, Band of brothers, Saving Private Ryan and many more have been so fascinating that we used to watch with awe – even today. But today it changed. It was not just a war. It was a collapse of humanity. Adolf Hitler’s regime didn’t just battle armies – it targeted civilians. Systematically. Coldly. With industrial efficiency. While we all know this, experiencing those moments while travelling through that dark times is something different.
The Holocaust wasn’t about land, or defense, or strategy. It was about annihilation. Over six million Jews were murdered – not in battle, but in gas chambers, in forests, in ghettos, through starvation and forced labor. Alongside them, countless others – disabled individuals, political dissenters. Homosexuals were also deemed “unworthy of life” by a perverted ideology.
This wasn’t war. This was genocide engineered with bureaucracy, precision, and terrifying intent.
In wars of the past, no matter how brutal, there existed at times a strange idea of honor – knights refusing to attack retreating enemies, truces to collect the wounded, the chivalric code. Even in the trenches of World War I, there were moments like the Christmas Truce – soldiers from opposing sides sharing a fleeting moment of peace.
But in Hitler’s Europe, honor was a word stripped of all meaning. The Nazi regime turned state machinery into a weapon of mass murder. Doctors became executioners. Engineers designed gas chambers. Railways carried families to death camps with chilling punctuality. Propaganda stripped Jews of their humanity before bullets and Zyklon B took their lives.
This was not a war fought on the battlefield. It was a one-sided slaughter justified by ideology. A war not of armies, but of a government against its own people. And it changed the course of history.
The scars of the Holocaust remain fresh across Germany and Europe. Berlin wears its guilt with openness – memorials, museums, reminders everywhere. But it is also a city rebuilt, risen from the ashes of shame and destruction. The very architecture of the city seems to whisper: “Never again.”
Not a single building in Berlin was truly safe during World War II. The Allied bombings flattened vast stretches of the city – cathedrals, homes, museums, theatres, even centuries-old churches and institutions that had stood tall for over 700 years. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to rubble in a matter of nights. The architectural heritage, some of which dated back to the medieval era, was shattered under the weight of a war that cared little for history or beauty. What stands today in Berlin is often a meticulous reconstruction – an attempt to piece together the fragments of a once-glorious city. Walking through these spaces, one constantly confronts a haunting truth: even the oldest stones here are not as old as they seem, for everything had to rise again from destruction, bearing both the memory of the past and the trauma of the war.
Germany, once seduced by nationalism and hate, today stands as one of the most conscious democracies in the world – painfully aware of its past, cautious of the future. The European Union itself is a product of that pain – an attempt to bind the continent in shared purpose so that the horrors of the 1940s are never repeated.
There is something in us that admires strength, victory, conquest. But my journey from the Viking legacy of Copenhagen to the Holocaust history of Berlin has shown me the need to look deeper.
Not all wars are the same. A battle fought for land, however cruel, still has rules. Even the ancient warriors often had a code, however primitive. But what Hitler unleashed was a war without rules, without mercy, without any military logic – just the cold-blooded execution of hatred.
In the contrast between a sword fight and a gas chamber lies the true distance between war and barbarism.
As someone who once looked at war stories with fascination, I now realize how important it is to remember what lies beneath. The stories of kings and campaigns must never make us forget the stories of those who had no sword, no army, no choice.
We can admire strategy and valor, but we must never romanticize cruelty.
Because when war forgets humanity, it becomes something far worse – it becomes history’s darkest chapter. And Berlin or Germany or may be large part of Europe, with its ghosts and grief, will always remind us of that.
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(The views are mine with no intention of hurting the sentiment of anyone)