Because there was a bright spring day in Germany when powerful men entered a camp and found that war had been disguising something even more diseased than conquest.
Because a general famous for loving battle came face to face with what battle had been serving and recoiled in human disgust.
Because he forced a town to walk through the horror it had lived beside.
Because a mayor went home from that walk and chose death over living with what he had seen.
Because another general immediately understood that future liars were already being born and set out to arm the dead with evidence.
And because, in the end, memory is one of the few justices the murdered can still receive when justice arrives too late to save them.
Ohrdruf did not change the past.
Nothing could.
But on that day, it changed the shape of the truth Americans carried forward, and it tore a hole in every respectable fiction that had protected the nearby guilty from the sight of what had been done.
Patton was right about one thing at least.
They were going to know now.
And because the camp was seen, recorded, and forced into witness, so do we.
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