Hitler wreaked havoc throughout Europe with his Blitzkrieg victories followed by freedom-suffocating rule on those conquered lands
Hitler and his Nazi henchmen reserved for Jews a special hell, the "Holocaust," imprisoning, torturing, starving and even gassing those born under the Star of David.
If you were of the proper "Aryan race" and were willing to ignore Nazi atrocities, however, then you could prosper under Hitler's evil scheme.
When traveling through the beautiful countryside and villages of Austria and Germany, encountering highly cultured and well-educated residents of these regions, it's easy to forget that their grandparents with similar traits turned a blind eye to Nazi aggression and devastation of those less fortunate souls.
In 1944, Russia's scorched-earth retreat cost advancing Nazi forces dearly on the Eastern Front, while simultaneously American soldiers led by officers like General George S. Patton joined the British to finally effectively push back at Nazi Germany from the Western Front. Hitler's empire was crushed within a year, thank God.
Nazi war criminals were hunted down, put on trial and sometimes punished, but lots of ordinary soldiers as well as civilians who had turned a blind eye simply went back to work rebuilding their lives in cities and villages ravaged in battle.
First they just survived day by day, and then, aided by American money in the form of the Marshall Plan, they re-built and eventually prospered.
They were, after all, still intelligent, hard-working people, easily among the most systematically organized on the continent, with that incredible human innate ability to learn, adapt and, when necessary, forget.
In 1996, the Linz City Council determined it would make Linz the first Austrian city to confront its Nazi past openly.
It was a logical place to start. After all, Adolph Hitler spent his formative years between 9 and 18 years old in Linz, a city he considered his home town.
When he came to power, Hitler made a point to help Linz become an industrial powerhouse, including manufacture of the backbone of heavy industry, steel.
He envisioned re-building Linz into a "German Budapest," the newest and finest metropolis on the Danube. When he had achieved final victory, he planned to retire in style in what he considered his home town.
Linz had benefited greatly from National Socialism's largesse, in architecture and artistic projects --- Hitler considered himself an artist --- as well as industrial production, all of which meant employment and economic growth for the area.
This, of course, was financed with wealth confiscated from Jews and conquered people. At the same time, the unspeakable horrors of Mauthausen-Guse concentration camps unfolded just 12 miles east of Linz.
Linz's "culture of remembrance" includes renaming streets and constructing monuments to honor victims of National Socialism as well as sponsoring scientific studies, presentations and lectures.
Our late afternoon tour through Linz went at a hurried pace, because it came after an all-day tour and cruise passengers, of course, don't want to be late for dinner.
On a brighter note, we saw Count Thun's mutli-arched palace where Mozart composed his 36th Symphony, known as the Linz Symphony in 1783 during a three day stopover on a trip from Salzburg to Vienna.
We also passed another building where our guide said Mozart played a public concert in October of 1762 when he was just 6 years old. If so, that must have been during a stopover on a much earlier trip to Vienna from his childhood home in Salzburg.
Mozart's more significant performance that month would have been the concert in Vienna on October 13, 1762, for Empress Maria Theresa. Following that show, "Wolferl jumped on the empress' lap, put his arms around her neck and kissed her vigorously."
By then, the child prodigy had already been composing for over a year.
While the sites of Linz wouldn't prove to be as beautiful or fascinating as other ports, the fact that AmaWaterways made certain we had the opportunity to see it for ourselves should not be undervalued.
When trying to calculate how to justify AmaWaterways over a competitor, you would be wise to consider how many small extras they do include.
Something I haven't mentioned previously is that before the trip when we received documents, inside the cloth pouch we found not only beautiful embroidered luggage tags but a small guide book for Danube River cruises.
Throughout the trip, AmaWaterways found small ways to exceed our expectations, not the least of which were shore excursions well beyond the usual two to four hours per port.
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