[mstade]

I have not visited Hiroshima, or Japan at all for that matter, but I just recently came back from visiting the beaches of Normandy, the American cemetery, Arromanches, and other war memorials around there.

While obviously not the same thing, I recognize what you say about the scale of horror – it really is unfathomable from pictures, movies, and other representations. You simply have to visit to get a feel for just how big some of these key events of the war actually were, and it's absolutely mind boggling and horrific.

What really got me about visiting Normandy though was how real it all suddenly became. I'd like to think I'm a fairly well educated person when it comes to modern history, and particularly in terms of WW2. But since I grew up in a country that wasn't really pulled into it, everything just seemed so distant (even though it physically wasn't, I'm from Sweden) and in many ways unreal. That all changed with Normandy, and it was a very strange and mixed set of quite strong emotions involved. I can only imagine what it's like to visit Hiroshima, and hope I some day get the chance to do so.

[ptaipale]

I could recommend another, shorter trip, if you can spare a few days: get a Russian visa and drive to Haparanda - Kuhmo - Kostamuksha - Belomorsk. Nowadays, it's a one-day drive.

Look at Stalin's Canal there, and imagine that when it was built, the wasted humans were many enough to lay along the canal, buried there head to toe, to form a chain as long as the man-built parts of the canal itself.

The canal was never economically or militarily useful, it was just a project used to get rid of people.

Not quite as many people killed as in Hiroshima, but they were each one separately and individually starved, beaten or shot to death instead of being killed remotely by one big industrial bomb. The killing machinery was human and it worked slow and it worked eye to eye.

From Belomorsk you can take a boat trip to Solovetsk, which was the original development lab for how to starve people in concentration camps. Both Soviets and Nazis studied and developed their methods based on the findings there.

Notice also that you won't see memorials for those who were killed. The miserable swamps are their monument.