Germany's Christmas Markets!

Just a week before we arrived in Munich, we were in Florence rubbing the nose of this very same sculpture.



At 11, the church bells ring and these mobile displays do their little song and dance for onlookers.





While in Munich, recognized as the birthplace of the Nazi movement. So we went to Dachau. It's one thing to watch films about Nazis and concentration camps. It's another to stand in the gas showers, crematorium, and torture rooms. I could not shake the dread for days.

We took no photos there.

I had always thought that these camps were out in the middle of nowhere. Dachau concentration camp is practically in a neighborhood, which makes it that much more gruesome that thousands were being starved, subjected to terrible human experiments, and exterminated...and Germans were going to church and to the market right just steps beyond the barbed wire. In the footage shown at the camp, American liberators parade the townsfolk thru the camp and show them the hundreds of bodies piled in mass graves (Coal was no longer available to keep the crematorium running.)

This is where the "Bitch of Buchenwald" reigned with her Nazi officer husband and made gloves for herself from the skin of prisoners.