The Nazis and their prisoners each created art to reflect their world views -- the oppressor and the oppressed. These are among the most powerful legacies of the Nazi era. Berlin, the undeclared capital of central Europe, contains many Nazi monuments, including the eerie Olympic Stadium, where Hitler showcased Nazi racial ideology to the world in 1936. Statues glorifying these genocidal ideals still stand, with no explanations that put this artwork in the context of the genocide that came soon after their creation. The stadium should be visited by any student of World War II.

In nearly every concentration camp I visited, I also saw enormous displays of memorial art, such as statues and plaques. Sketches, paintings, stained glass, and other artwork from prisoners also hang in just about every ghetto and concentration camp museum. These grab you, viscerally. All speak to the universal horror of Nazi oppression and the highly uniform camp system that created parallel hells for the millions of persons incarcerated throughout Europe. So uniform was the camps' brutality, that all of these pieces -- and without any exceptions, anywhere -- showed identical skeletal human beings wearing striped uniforms. Some of the most common images depict the prisoners being beaten worse than farm animals by hideous-looking guards.

Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor David Olere's painting "It's All Over Now" is typical of many paintings of camp survivors that honestly depict the horror of their ordeal -- and in this case, the joy at their liberation.