The Cure for Hate

-What was unthinkable a generation ago, is happening.

The Holocaust is fading from memory.

As we lose the last of the generation who survived the Holocaust, those that bore witness and lived to tell their story, we lose a vital link to one of the darkest chapters of human history.

A stark reminder of what hate can lead to when left unchallenged.

According to a recent survey, 41% of American adults and 66% of millennials cannot say what Auschwitz was.

With over half unaware that Hitler came to power through democratic means.

A lesson that Western democracies, perhaps now more than ever, cannot afford to forget.

20 years ago, I was a fervent neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier.

- So what does all this say about Tony McAleer?

How much of a threat is he?

- I believe there are differences between the races.

If that makes me a racist, then I'm a racist.

- This is McAleer in 1990 inside the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, headquarters of one of North America's biggest white supremacist groups.

And it wasn't his first visit.

-It's a life I've long left behind, but I continue to struggle with my role in contributing to such a dark legacy and the shame I still carry.

The violence and murder the white supremacist movement fantasized about all those years ago, the violence I once advocated and encouraged, have now become a horrific reality as acts of racially motivated terrorism have increasingly become the norm.

Somebody asked me once, "How did you lose your humanity?"

"I didn't lose it," I replied.

"I traded it for acceptance and approval until there was nothing left."

In the Jewish tradition, "t'shuvah" means return, and describes the return to god and our fellow human beings.

That's made possible through repentance for our wrongs.

Auschwitz has always loomed as a symbol for the legacy of the ideology I once espoused and the fear that I may never fully atone for the damage I've done to the community I've harmed the most -- the Jewish community.

It was in that spirit that I traveled to Auschwitz to bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities committed there as a long overdue act of personal atonement and in hopes of preventing others from following in my path.

The inescapable truth is that white supremacist ideology, if left unchecked, always ends in murder.

And we ignore the lessons of history at our own peril.

[ Indistinct chanting ] 1941, Germany invades Russia.

It needs a workforce for the war effort.

Jews, political dissidents, and so-called undesirables being removed from newly occupied territories, predominantly Hungary and Poland, are sent to camps like Auschwitz and put to work.

Auschwitz One, the original main camp on the grounds, is quickly expanded.

With prison labor, a development zone has cleared equivalent in size to 6,000 football fields and reserved for exclusive use for the camp.

But with the adoption of the Final Solution, six short months later, Auschwitz was transformed from a concentration camp to an extermination camp.

And a second much larger camp, Birkenau, created exclusively for the specific purpose of making Europe "judenrein", free of Jews.

Agnieszka asked me at the beginning, "Why are you here?"

And I had a rough idea in my head that I'd come to bear witness, at least as a concept, even if I wasn't sure how to put it into practice.

But the more I would come to learn about the people and events that occurred here, the more I would learn about the act of bearing witness, and connect to this place on a level I could never have anticipated.

The iconic sign above the gate in Auschwitz reads, "Arbeit macht frei."

Work will set you free.

The cruelest of ironies.

Working with the Auschwitz Center for Peace and Reconciliation, we were provided with a guide handpicked with my background in mind to support our experience there.

Agnieszka was Jewish and had family members who had perished in the camps.

The profound anguish she'd lived with was burdened by the haunting, unanswerable questions around what leads people to commit such atrocities.

When I was a neo-Nazi, we used to joke, again totally disconnected, and we said, "Next time that gate will say, 'Nothing will set you free.'"

That's the cold evil that was in our hearts at that time.

That total disconnection to -- you can't feel and say that at the same time, it's impossible.

The smug jokes I traded as a neo-Nazi decades ago took on new and deeper meanings, and I was overcome with the feeling of an old friend -- Shame.

Nobody becomes a Nazi overnight.

It's something learned.

It's a progression.

Slow and insidious.

There is no "moment."

-The Jewish Anti-Defamation League says skinheads are gangs of young neo-Nazis, ranging from 13 to 28 years old who preach hatred against Blacks and Jews.

-For me, it was a gradual slide as extreme ideology became increasingly normalized and my identity became more and more intertwined with the movement.

But before the shaved head and Doc Martens, I was just a kid.

I grew up in a quiet, middle class neighborhood in Vancouver.

Although my father was a psychiatrist, he was emotionally distant.

As with so many men of his era, more comfortable in his role as provider.

Nevertheless, he was my idol and could do no wrong.

But at age 10, I caught my father with another woman.

My whole world turned upside down, and the man I so admired fell off his pedestal.

After that night, everything changed.

My grades began to plummet.

I grew increasingly defiant and resistant to authority.

The solution at the Catholic school I attended was to beat the grades into me, a tactic my father openly endorsed.

It was in that office to which I repeatedly returned, and where I was struck over and over again, where I was introduced to powerlessness and to shame.

I was 11.

A series of boarding and public schools in Canada and the UK would follow, all with similar outcomes.

I rebelled against everything and everyone.

Rudderless and more distant than ever from my father and family, I longed for a place to fit in.

Finally, attending my third high school in three years, I discovered the punk and skinhead scene.

Wild in the streets among fellow misfits and outcasts, I had finally found a place where I felt accepted, where I belonged.

But to earn their respect I would have to join in the violence, which, fueled by alcohol, also gave me permission to act out my adolescent rage.

We instigated or inspired violence everywhere we went.

In the years that followed, I was charged with assault four times.

But witnesses wouldn't show up because they were too afraid and the charges were dropped.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't on the receiving end of abuse or pain.

I was the one doling it out.

It felt like freedom and it was intoxicating.

Through this exchange, I received acceptance when I felt unlovable, attention when I felt invisible, and power when I felt totally weak.

The ultra nationalism and racist ideology, however, were secondary.

It was the casual, lazy sort of political extremism that a person adopts in order to belong and be accepted.

In what Hannah Arendt describes as the "banality of evil", that's precisely how it happens.

As the skinhead movement grew in notoriety in the 1980s, it began to attract the attention of The Old Guard and my network quickly expanded to include the notorious Aryan Nations.

The mythology eagerly consumed by those, including myself, looking for meaning, purpose, and that key piece in a young man's development, a paternal role model.

By the age of 20, I had declared that I expected to be dead or in jail as a white revolutionary by the age of 30.

A badge of courage and a point of pride.

It's one thing to read about Auschwitz in a textbook, but it's quite another thing to experience it firsthand.

These rooms hold the personal belongings of countless Jews, told they were being resettled for a new life in the East.

In that moment, while trying to take in all of those suitcases with the names, birthdates, and addresses, I was reminded of this conversation I had with a Jewish friend of mine.

I asked him, "How were you affected by my activities as a neo-Nazi and an anti-Semite?"

And he told me a story which I've since come to learn is a very common story of that generation.

That his mother always had a suitcase in the closet by the front door with passports and money in case the Nazis ever came again and they had to leave at a moment's notice.

And I had to acknowledge that the climate of fear that my activities contributed to made sure that those suitcases could never be put away.

The feeling is shame.

That shame usually shows up in the same place for me.

-Because right now you are facing individuals.

Because all items belong to individuals, and they are not anonymous anymore.

-No.

-Behind every single suitcase is a story.

Behind every single suitcase is a person.

-Has a name and has a face.

-Yes.

How old are your children now?

-25 and 27.

-Do you remember them when they were very young, very small?

-They were two and four, until they were well into their teenage years, I was a single father.

To see all of the shoes, ordinary shoes taken from ordinary people, all different shapes and sizes.

Children's shoes laying beside men's shoes, women's shoes.

I pictured my children, the children that have been my own salvation, who gave me the purpose and resolve to ultimately leave the movement, in those tiny shoes.

And I was struck that if the tables were turned and it had been my own children and me, I would have been unable to save them, unable to save them from the ideology I once espoused.

The final artifact room was the most powerful.

In it contained the hair of 30,000 women.

After removal from the gas chambers, women had their heads shorn, the hair gathered into 20 kilogram bales and transported to textile factories where it was used to make socks, blankets, military uniforms, and mattresses.

It's widely accepted that some of the products manufactured in those plants are still in use in German homes today.

Out of respect and the fact that hair is considered human remains, we didn't film in this room.

Two tons of hair is on display at Auschwitz.

I was so overwhelmed with the power of the room that I found myself frozen in place for 30 minutes.

Nauseous.

Shattered.

Speechless.

Perhaps this is how it feels and what it means to bear witness.

In 1988, I was invited to attend the Aryan Nations World Congress, the annual pilgrimage site for far right elements from around the globe.

It took place on Richard Butler's remote compound in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

-Our media is owned and controlled by Jews.

So, the Jewish view of life is what we've been brought up from.

-Often described as the spiritual godfather of the white supremacist movement, Butler was part of a lineage that shared its roots with the German-American Bund of the '30s, the Bund that established youth indoctrination camps across the U.S. and famously packed Madison Square Garden 20,000 strong in 1939.

And later with George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party that threatened to march on Skokie, the small Illinois town targeted for having the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel in the late 1970s.

- And we will save the white race.

Sieg Heil.

-But through all of my trips to Aryan Nations in Idaho, the man who made the strongest impression was Louis Beam, a powerful dynamic Vietnam War vet.

Hardcore in his beliefs and uncompromising in his actions, he would become a decisive role model for me.

- Our enemies own and control this country.

They control the communications.

They control the media.

They control the police and the government.

-Beam had created the Aryan Liberty Net, the first use of computers to organize white supremacists and disseminate propaganda, the strategy I would come to embrace as well.

Inexpensive, difficult to prosecute, and with a powerful reach, the early adoption of technology would become a cornerstone of spreading racist propaganda.

It's not hard.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

When opportunities present themselves for me to do other things, which I think will be effective, I'll be in there like a dirty shirt.

Following the FBI takedown of the order, and his own sedition trial, Beam kept his distance from any activity that might land him in jail.

Instead, he began to advocate for leaderless resistance, acts that could be undertaken by cells of one because cells of one can't be infiltrated.

With Beam underground, I followed his lead and example, putting my own burgeoning computer skills to use to create a Canadian-based Liberty Net.

You have reached the Canadian Liberty Net for Sunday, August 21, 1994.

But in the law of unforeseen consequences, what began with crude online bulletin and message boards would see its full and dangerous potential realized decades later through the increasing sophistication of the Internet and social media.

Technology once used to find and disseminate information is now used to find and create community, a shift in paradigm that has sparked horrifying acts of violent extremism.

I encourage people when they're in the military to keep a very low profile.

As we've said many times before, "Run silent, run deep."

While I could never have anticipated the devastations that my calls to action would set in motion and the ripples that would continue to emanate, in truth, I'd encourage people to do whatever they felt necessary to achieve our goal of a whites-only homeland, and is now my burden to carry.

I can claim that I never pulled the trigger, but I wasn't merely complicit, I was a willing, impassioned advocate in spreading the sort of hateful ideology that so often ends in murder.

When I was supposed to come here in 1991, I wouldn't have felt anything.

I wasn't capable of feeling anything.

We were so ideological in our need to be right that we couldn't look at the events honestly.

I had so much invested in my identity and I was, you know, a skinhead, a white supremacist, a neo-Nazi, and a denier.

That, to be wrong, challenged the identity.

-Right.

It would ruin your identity.

-But if I had traveled to Auschwitz before my identity as a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier had been cemented, it would have changed who I became.

All of the abstractions are made real here, a weight that gradually accrues and a poignancy that deepens as you make your way through the camp, an appreciation of this place's sorrowful history fully felt.

The old questions came up for me as I knew they would.

That's part of the reaction to not wanting to feel.

"Let's think about this.

Let's not feel it."

You know, I knew some of this stuff was going to at least pop into my head.

It's old conditioning because I haven't looked at the Holocaust since I was a denier.

I was wrong.

And I think that's the hard part, not wanting to accept both the reality of this place and that I was also a denier when I was younger.

And there's no way that millions of people didn't die here.

There's no way -- They didn't just die, they were murdered.

I mean, this place is filled with evidence.

And what it does to those who experience this, and especially those that are still with us, it's so -- it's not just disrespectful, it's disgusting and harmful.

Disrespectful is too nice a word.

Prior to the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz, roaming death squads had killed more than a million Jews across Germany in the occupied territories.

In what's been referred to as the Holocaust by bullets, Jews were shot and burned in crude open pits or killed in experimental gas chambers using farmhouses or mobile gas vans.

But the Final Solution required a more efficient and mechanized process of extermination.

Auschwitz would evolve to become the largest of six industrialized killing centers developed in semi-rural, isolated areas in the occupied territories hidden from public view.

Their strategic location along major railroad lines allowed for the expedient transport of hundreds of thousands of prisoners directly from the ghettos of Poland and Hungary.

Can you share with me what each of the rooms was?

-So long, narrow room with openings in the ceiling -- this is the gas chamber.

The next room, this is crematorium.

First of all, building worked as crematorium.

The burned bodies of those who were murdered in the camp, who were killed, were executed, who starved to death.

That in 1942, that long narrow room became the first gas chamber here.

-This initial smaller crematorium on the grounds of Auschwitz One was experimental.

Originally an ammunition bunker, then a morgue, it was adapted into a provisional gas chamber and the first furnaces for burning corpses installed.

It could be argued that this is where the large scale mechanized killing began, paving the way for the massive industrialized cruel efficiency of Birkenau.

And walking into this space, restored to its original configuration and the only gas chamber that remains standing at Auschwitz, is a deeply haunting and life-altering experience.

But the experimental gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz One was merely the beginning.

The Weimar Republic, the German government that spanned the period after World War One to the rise of Nazi Germany, was a vibrant and inclusive democracy, rich with social activism.

At the time, Germany had the world's most prominent gay rights movement, an active feminist movement that had just won the vote, and workers rights that included the eight-hour day and wage guarantees.

So how did a country that had long taken pride in itself as "the land of poets and thinkers", an enlightened, creative, modern democracy, allow itself to fall under the cold mood of fascism and the grip of evil?

-[ Speaking German ] [ Cheers and applause ] -The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War One, had left Germany humiliated.

There had never been a war like it, and it had come at a terrible cost.

The austere terms of the treaty, compounded by harsh French oversight and administration of war reparations, only deepened the shame.

Combine this with the collective trauma of 3.4 million men lost in World War One.

Deaths that left millions fatherless.

And is it any wonder that a father figure promising a restoration of glory to the fatherland could rise to power?

By the early '30s, Germans were literally starving.

Mired in the misery of a deep European depression, with unemployment skyrocketing as high as 40%, Germany was also reeling from an influx of immigrants as over a million and a half refugees, many of them Jews from Eastern Europe, poured into the country after the devastations and deprivations of the Great War and the Russian Revolution.

In anti-Semitism, Hitler and the populist German political right found a convenient scapegoat for a complicated set of ills.

Looking to assign blame for the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, the conspiracy theory arose famously known as the "stab-in-the-back," pinning Germany's exit from World War One on the Jewish political elite.

Simply put, Nazi ideology and the promise to restore German pride with sloganeering that vowed to "make Germany great again" was the answer to every dimension of its perceived vulnerability to the world.

-[ Speaking German ] -This is not, of course, an excuse for the horrors that followed, but does provide an understanding of just how easily vulnerabilities can be manipulated and polarization fueled.

As psychiatrist James Gilligan once remarked, "All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem."

Hitler had a deep disdain for intellectuals and the political elite.

And armed with a convenient lack of regard for both the truth and democracy, understood that people did not behave rationally.

With a rare ability to rile up a crowd, Hitler was able to provide simple solutions to bewildering problems.

Intuitively, he understood the power of psychological need.

What people wanted to hear.

What they needed to believe.

In the words of historian Timothy Snyder, post-truth is pre-fascism, and the public rarely sees the damage to democracy until it's too late.

And by 1934, it was too late.

Walking among the remains of Birkenau is an eerie and disquieting experience.

I can't quite put it into words, but you can literally feel the ghosts.

The horrors of Auschwitz and the concentration camp are difficult to fathom.

But Birkenau was something altogether different.

A highly complex killing machine incomprehensible in scale, the product of a detached, mechanized hate.

The construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau began in the winter of 1941 to ease congestion at the main camp.

But this place was no camp.

It was an intricate machine that required an enormous logistical operation and bureaucracy.

I had seen the buildings of the Jewish Quarter in Budapest and in Krakow emptied of the people who had once lived there.

Entire communities that had been made to disappear in a scenario that played out in cities across Europe in an orchestrated plan of total extermination that ended here on the grounds beneath my feet.

There's a clear line between movements that start with phrases like "Jews will not replace us" and an outcome like this place.

I had come to bear witness, and now I could no longer escape the feeling that I was an accessory after the fact to arguably the greatest crime against humanity.

This very road was the last road upon which so many Jews would walk.

-There's a moment when the train just arrived.

In the distance, you can see the main watchtower, the main guardhouse.

That's that direction.

People left the wagons.

We can see how many wagons stopped there.

So it was really a huge unloading place.

And then people were divided into two separated columns.

Their possessions were already taken by big trucks.

A few minutes later began selection process.

Between 70 to 80% of coming to Auschwitz Jews, who were deported in mass transports were designated as unfit for working.

And then they were killed right away.

Those who were fit for working -- young, strong, healthy enough -- they became prisoners of Auschwitz camps.

Each level was for five to seven prisoners, but we've got also testimonies of some prisoners who said that even more than seven prisoners were sleeping in each level.

So try to imagine seven or more prisoners in the middle, seven or more, up to ten, and a top bunk the same amount.

-You have to sleep this way.

-They slept basically far often head to toes, not head to head together.

So head, toes, head, toes.

-It's hard to imagine that many people packed into here.

-Yes.

-As we walked through the cramped and primitive barracks, it became increasingly clear to me that there are levels of deprivation and trauma here that I've only begun to comprehend.

Hell on Earth.

-The bottom part of hell, the lowest level.

-As with Hitler and a generation of fatherless Germans, the Aryan Resistance preyed upon the psychic needs of young men in need of masculine identification and strong role models.

And I was no different.

All of the garbage around pride, power, kinship, and bravery fed into a simple yet brutal blueprint of what a man should look like and be rewarded for and left no space for empathy, insight, or compassion.

-It's not the duty or the right of a small percentage of Americans who happen to call themselves Jews to dictate in every situation about every subject what's best for everyone else in this country.

-Enter Thomas Metzger, former Grand Dragon of David Duke's Klan, who ran for Congress in 1980.

Having won the Democratic nomination for a House seat, the party took the unusual step of disavowing his candidacy... - We do not believe there's room for him in the Democratic Party.

-...and endorsing his Republican opponent.

Disillusioned and feeling disenfranchized from the body politic for his extremist views, he abandoned peaceful means of participation, formed the White Aryan Resistance, and embraced the philosophy of "by any means necessary."

- We are dedicated solely to the white race.

There is no right, there is no left.

There is only the white race.

-But white nationalists already felt excluded from the political process.

So in our minds, we were forced to be radical, forced to stockpile weapons in preparation for what we saw as an inevitable violent race conflict.

We didn't see ourselves as terrorists or violent extremists, we saw ourselves as the righteous protectors of the white race.

- But violence sometimes is necessary to get a point across.

[ Applause ] -In 1988, shortly after Metzger was implicated for his involvement in the Portland murder of the young Ethiopian student, Mulugeta Seraw, I received a call from John, Tom's son, asking if I would appear on "The Montel Williams Show" with him.

- Joining us right now is Mr. Tony McAleer.

- Toronto is already a war zone.

Shopping malls in Toronto are regularly looted by black youths, rampaging.

They go from one end of the mall to the other.

On "Montel Williams," I wore the all black uniform of the skinhead, but John Metzger, in the fashion of his father, wore a suit.

Well-spoken and eloquent, they made the unreasonable sound reasonable, precisely what made them so dangerous.

When I appeared on the show again two years later, I was wearing a suit as well.

I encourage people when they're in the military to keep a very low profile, stay out of the files of the police, stay out of the files of CSIS.

And as we've said many times before, "run silent, run deep."

The strategy of mainstreaming was simple.

Grow your hair out.

Don't get tattoos.

Go to college.

Join the military.

Join the police.

Blend in.

Take an extreme position that only 1% of the population support, and put it in a nice wrapper so that 5% support it.

Now you've influenced the outer edge of what's considered normal and changed how people think in the middle as well.

- We're too deep.

We're embedded now.

Don't you understand?

We're in your colleges.

We're in your armies.

We're in your police forces.

-This is how it works.

Gradually, almost unnoticed, cloaked in language around job opportunities, nationalism, immigration policies, defending the forgotten man.

Once a particular level of extremism is normalized, the next step is possible.

Moving incrementally rightwards, rebranding the unreasonable until authoritarianism is just within reach.

If a denier comes here and is open to change, he'll be changed or she'll be changed.

The scale of this place, the size of this machine, it's beyond comprehension.

There's two stories here.

There's the story of the prisoners and then there's the story of the guards.

I can come here and experience this place and connect to the energy of the people that were here and connect to the prisoners.

But I think if I came in before, I would have connected with the guards.

In certain circumstances, almost every human being has the capacity within them to do what the guards did.

And that's why I think we have to remember this place, because I think with fully-experienced memory of this place, it's like an inoculation against that virus.

But 20 years ago...

I was disconnected enough that I could have been a guard here.

I can't say that I wouldn't have been a guard here.

It's a horrific thing to say, and it's a horrific thing to acknowledge.

But I wanted to come here to feel what it is here and feel who I am and who I'm not and recognize that I think, in humanity, there's the capacity for great love and good and there's the capacity for darkness, disconnection and evil, depending on what happens to us as human beings.

I don't think anybody gets born with the capacity to be a guard.

I couldn't be a guard now.

My pathway back from the white supremacist movement has been a long, lonely, and difficult one.

I'd become a pariah in my community and as my notoriety rose, it made things worse for everyone around me, especially my children.

And then there was the violence.

Violence my young children have been exposed to in their own home, no less, even endangered by.

But the conflict for anyone leaving an extremist group is that identity and ideology have become entwined.

And I was no different.

I like to say that I had left the movement, but the movement hadn't left me.

An unemployable single parent disowned from family, friends, and community, it took years of therapy and work to fully get my humanity and my life back.

Eventually, after years of stumbling through the wilderness like a dry drunk, years under the shadow of loneliness, shame, and angst, I found myself sitting face to face with my first therapist, Dov Baron.

When I finally got up the courage to reveal my past, he leaned over the coffee table and, with the Cheshire Cat grin, said, "You know I was born Jewish, right?"

As my cheeks burned with shame, he reassured me, "This is what you did, it's not who you are."

No sooner had those words left his lips, I broke down sobbing.

He could see the humanity within me, even knowing the harm I'd done to his people.

Receiving compassion from someone when I felt I deserved it least, changed everything for me and marked the beginning of a journey towards the fear, the wounds, and the pain that I'd been running away from my entire life.

As I began to connect with others who had left the movement, I was struck by how many similarities there were in the stories.

The personal reasons for joining an extremist group were repeated over and over.

The search for belonging, significance, brotherhood, community, and purpose.

The ideologies themselves merely secondary.

And when people discussed their reasons for leaving, two themes stood out.

One was the birth of a child.

The other was receiving compassion from someone they felt they didn't deserve it from, a pivotal moment in their journey away from hate.

-Is there some reason to hope that the people who are in it can come through it?

-Absolutely, and I would use myself as that example.

I spent 15 years in the white supremacist movement.

I was a skinhead, I was a neo-Nazi, and was involved in the White Aryan Resistance.

And I committed a lot of violence, a lot of violence that I have a lot of shame for.

I've come to call this radical compassion, "the cure for hate."

Learning to have compassion for oneself allows for compassion towards others to emerge.

And out of these acts of atonement and reconciliation, healing arises.

Compassion is the antidote for shame.

With Soviet forces having entered Poland and the Nazi defeat imminent, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the destruction of all Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria.

As part of the overall liquidation of the evidence of crime, prisoners were forced to dismantle and dynamite the structures.

What remains, however, is staggering and deeply unsettling in its own right.

Not merely the scale of the structure's massive footprint, but in the knowledge that you're standing on the same ground that countless Jews gazed upon the sky one final time before being led down into the gas chambers.

-Tony, look, you can see the remains of the gas chamber number three.

What we can see here is a result of the explosion.

In November 1944, devices from the structure were removed.

And in January of 1945, before the Soviets were here, Nazi Germans destroyed the place.

-Agnieszka then walked me through the brutal and dehumanizing process experienced by those sent to the gas chambers.

Those deemed unfit to work.

Women, children, the disabled, the aged and the sick were sent to the subterranean dressing room, bare, save for the bench lined walls and numbered hooks, and told they'd be showering.

Afterwards, the naked and lifeless bodies were emptied by a special group of prisoners known as the Sonderkommando, kept separate from the others due to their firsthand knowledge of the system of extermination.

It was their job to process the bodies, stripping them of hair and gold teeth, before being sent to the crematoria and reduced to ash.

Soil testing conducted around the camp has confirmed that this human ash remains in the surrounding fields and waters to this day.

-I would like to ask you one question.

What would you tell families of those who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz?

You are facing someone who lost family here.

What would you tell them now?

-That's a heavy question.

And I'd have to say I'm sorry.

I'm deeply ashamed.

And I'm...sorry that I did and said what I did, and that they had to endure unspeakable horror.

And that people like me can make light of it or deny it, makes a second crime against those people.

And I don't think I'm in a place to ask them for forgiveness.

I can't ask them of anything.

It's not about me.

I would also say... that I will bear witness for them.

And I will remember who they are and what happened here so that no one forgets.

That is my t'shuvah.

I could -- I was -- not I could.

I was so incredibly insensitive.

Cruel.

Inhuman.

That's what I'm feeling.

That's what I have to own about who I was.

I didn't fully feel that until coming to this place and understanding the sheer horror of what happened here.

I have a lifetime of remembering ahead of me, and a lifetime of witness ahead of me.

-So, you've got the task.

-I've got the task.

It's the least I can do, the very least.

-And this journey sent you here.

Let you into this moment and into this place for some reason.

-Oh, I can guarantee you this journey doesn't end here.

As recent trends have sadly underscored, anti-Semitism and other forms of hate are not likely to disappear on their own.

And the echoes of the Holocaust reverberate whenever people regress to scapegoating, polarization or dehumanizing and divisive us-versus-them camps.

And this exploitation of unfocused rage channeled into issues around identity, immigration, and race continues to fuel these fires today around the globe.

Lest we forget, the Holocaust isn't the last time we've seen large scale campaigns of genocide or mass atrocities in the modern era.

And the grim reminders of what humans are capable of continue to surround us today.

The true value in my story, and why I continue to share it, is that if someone like me can find my way back to humanity, someone who was once so disconnected from the humanity within themselves, then perhaps anyone can.

My hope today is that stories like my own can somehow help young people to retain this humanity and maintain their sense of compassion, because compassion for oneself as well as others is the only true cure for hate.

Our lives and our history are filled with lessons we can't afford to turn away from, lessons we can't afford to forget.

Auschwitz had long loomed as a symbol and a reminder of the hateful legacy I once espoused.

Now it has become my teacher.

There's a power in bearing witness on its grounds that can't be put into words.

But Auschwitz is also a container for profound lessons, lessons perhaps as important as ever as the echoes of history continue to reverberate around us.

The inescapable truth is that white supremacist ideology, if left unchecked, always ends in murder.

And keeping the lessons of Auschwitz and the Holocaust alive is a way to help ensure it never happens again.