How could Europe’s most cultured race allow the Holocaust to take place?

Last January marked the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. It was but one of the many concentration camps which Hitler and his henchmen set up. In these camps over six million Jews were slaughtered, and perhaps even more non-Jews were killed such as the gypsies, homosexuals, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other ‘misfits’ who Hitler deemed to be sub-human.

The assault upon the Jews began on 1 April 1933 with a boycott of Jewish businesses. A week latter the Nazis dismissed Jews from the civil service and by the end of the month the participation of Jews in German schools was restricted by a quota. In May thousands of Nazi students, together with many professors, stormed university libraries and bookshops in 30 cities to remove tens of thousands of books written by ‘Non-Aryans’ and those opposed to Nazi ideology. A century earlier Heinrich Heine – a German poet of Jewish origins, had said, “Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people”. In Nazi Germany the time between the burning of Jewish books and the burning of Jews was eight years.

Paradoxically, at the same time that Germany tried to rid its Jews via forced emigration, its territorial expansions kept bringing more Jews under its control.  More than two million Jews came under German control.

Auschwitz was perhaps the most notorious and lethal of the concentration camps. Upon arrival, in cattle trucks, Jewish prisoners faced what was called a ‘Selektion’. A German doctor presided over the selection of pregnant women, young children, the disabled, and the sick, and sent them into the gas chambers.  The German selected able-bodied prisoners for forced labour in the factories adjacent to Auschwitz, where one company, IG Farben, invested 700 million Reichsmarks in 1942 to take advantage of forced labour. The company presumed that this slave labour would be a permanent part of the German economy. Deprived of adequate food, shelter, clothing and medical care, these prisoners were literally worked to death. The Nazis would transfer those unable to work to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Historians are divided about what motivated the Germans to treat people in this way. One American historian, Christopher Browning, suggested that peer pressure, careerism, obedience to orders, and group solidarity gradually overcame moral inhibitions. On the other hand another American historian, Daniel Goldhagen, viewed the same people as “willing executioners, sharing Hitler’s vision of genocidal anti-Semitism and finding their tasks unpleasant but necessary”. Yet none of these killers faced punishment if he asked to be excused. Individuals had a choice whether to participate or not. Even so, almost all chose to become killers.

Not all German people supported the Nazis. The German ‘Confessing Church’ of which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of its members. Sadly, as a Baptist minister, I am deeply saddened that the German Baptist Union during the Hitler years, never protested against Hitler. Instead, they set a telegram to Hitler assuring him of their prayers.  Somehow these German Baptists had lost their moral compass.  I remember how in November 1962 one German told me that he knew that buses would drive through Hamburg filled with Jews, with their exhaust of poisonous gases, turned inside. He said that at that time he failed to register that this was an appalling crime. When he talked to me, he said how he deeply regretted his failure to protest.

This leads me to the second question, “What should be our response today?” On the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, I listened to Susan Pollack, a German Jewess, who had been 13 years old when she was imprisoned in the camp. Even though she lost her parents and grandparents and fifty relatives, she said she refused to hate the Germans, and had never had any desire for revenge, for hatred only breeds hatred. She went on to state that the opposite of hatred is indifference. As a Christian I admire Susan Pollack. My mind also goes to Jesus, who as the nails were being driven into his hands and his feet, kept on saying “Father forgive them” (Luke 23.34).  Sadly, there are some Christians who continue to hate those who are different from them. It must be a real challenge for Christians to forgive those who are persecuting them.  In such a context, forgiving others involves surfacing all that has been so dreadfully wrong, and then with God’s grace letting go of the anger and of the resentment. Going the way of Christ is not easy, but where feelings of anger and pain are truly liberated, there the victim is liberated to live again.

In conclusion, we need to forgive as Jesus forgave us.