International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2013

Today, January 27, 2013, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

BerlinBrigade.com takes time to reflect on and remember the victims of the Holocaust, the genocide that resulted in the annihilation of approximately "6 million Jews, 2 million Gypsies (Roma and Sinti), 15,000 homosexual people and millions of others by the Nazi regime and its collaborators."

We, the Veterans of the US Army's Berlin Brigade, served in the city where all this began.

We are honored to have helped the city of Berlin, the country of Germany, the European Continent, and the World move forward and beyond those atrocities. However, we must always continue to take time and look back at the past to ensure that such horrors never happen again. To confirm that the events of today are no where close to what happened in the 1930s and 1940s are exactly why we need to remember and never forget.


The photo was taken by David Guerra, on November 8, 2009, at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

Vaclav Havel (1936 - 2011)

Just weeks after the Berlin Wall falls the Czechoslovakian Communist leadership steps down and Vaclav Havel becomes President without a shot ever being fired. That was, for the most part, the scene across Eastern Europe throughout the very, very late 1980s and very, very early 1990s.

Want to take a moment and say: Rest In Peace Vaclav Havel! Thank you for your commitment, dedication, and doing what had to be done. We thank you for being one of the countless many that helped take the world out of the darkness that was Communism and into a new change, a new age, a new light.

For good or bad today, we live in a world no longer darkened by a sinister shadow that hangs over Europe. It is because of men like those that served in Berlin throughout the Cold War as did those that saw that our commitment and dedication to that beacon of freedom was to emulated throughout Eastern Europe did events such as the Velvet Revolution bring about change.

Change is above all how we become better people.

We Change Thus We Change The World!

Thank You and Rest in Peace, Vaclav Havel


KEYWORDS: • Cold War • Berlin • Berlin Brigade • West Berlin • Berlin Wall • NATO • Warsaw Pact • Vaclav Havel • Communism • Czechoslovakia • Eastern Europe • Velvet Revolution