In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2018, Seventy-third anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau: my sincere hope is that we will never forget their suffering or the philosophies and choices that allowed it to occur. This post is a revision of a previous article written to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht: Nov. 9-10, 1938.
A silent night became an unholy night of infamy as feet shod with hatred crossed into the streets of the ghetto. Angry footsteps swarmed ahead unabated, like army ants cutting a swath across a field. Metal struck glass once, and again, and again until the icy splintering noise became crescendos of countless of pieces of glass crashing down on streets to be trodden, kicked and broken again. Bystanders cheered. Some saw and heard but in fear, they hid their sorrow.
How does a heart pounding with terror sound in the dark of such a night? How can one describe the screams pulsing inside every nerve and muscle fiber or the mind’s frantic dilemma: protect, hide, or run? If the destruction could have been counted just in pieces of glass, that alone would be unbelievable. Twelve hours of breaking and burning fueled by the rhetoric of an audacious lie laid waste to sacred and common places alike.
The early morning sun did nothing to restrain the blazing terror. Angry footsteps were not satisfied to retreat alone from the streets of “them.” Rows of yellow starred figures were escorted away, treading down the shards of broken glass, splintered wood, and scattered bricks amid the still-smoldering desecrated ruins along their streets. Little that resembled life, or love, or livelihood remained in the neighborhoods of the “Jude” across Germany and Austria after the “pogrom” of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” was deployed nearly 80 years ago.
The Audacious Lie
The mid-day sun revealed the success of the audacious lie. Its followers and perpetrators celebrated. Political and military leaders reflected. It had worked. Hitler was right. Say it loud enough, long enough, make it big enough, make it simple; and they will believe. Say it again. Others will believe. Say it again. The world will believe. The hate of the contagious lie will justify the ruin. After all, they had deserved it. Hate is always anxious to believe that they deserved it. And, if they deserved it, then I am absolved. It was just my duty – my moral duty to rid the world of vermin and filth.
Star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright….
Yellow Star of David marked their plight.
There was no place left for them to be a people. Millions of “them” identified as different and “tagged” as undesirable were marched away; young, old, healthy, infirm, rich, poor, Jewish zealot and assimilated Jew alike. Those of different ways, different capacities and different beliefs (politically and spiritually) were added to their number. The figures had faces and names but once these were replaced by numbers, no one looked in their faces or called their names anymore.
Final Solution = 0
Numbers were easy to work with. Numbers can be added, subtracted, divided, and manipulated to reduce any equation to zero. Zero was the right answer. Eliminate the difference. Find a solution to the age-old problem; the “Final Solution” that they longed for. The German “pogrom” had worked. Hitler was right again. And so, the audacious lie became a logical duty defined by the superior intellect of its predacious leaders. Their duty was to make the world a better place, a cleansed place, free of “them” and their supposedly corrupt tentacles in commerce and trade among the nations.
One of those, who believed that he was just doing his duty, was Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Nazi Holocaust. He was apprehended in Argentina in 1960 by Israeli agents, tried and condemned to hang in Israel in 1962. Two days before his execution he hand wrote a note requesting clemency. In it, Eichmann stated: “I was not a responsible leader, and as such, do not feel myself guilty.” He requested President Ben-Zvi (President) “to exercise your right to grant pardons, and order that the death penalty not be carried out.”
If you lie to yourself long enough,
that lie will become as truth to you.
Does it matter that the place that night on November 9-10, 1938 was Germany or that Jews were the victims? World history records centuries, even millenniums of the espoused joy of hating the “Jude.” The fallacious “Protocols” still live and circulate on the internet today, and not just in Europe or the Middle East. They were referenced in stories covering the Boston bomber a few years ago. Other genocides and ethnic cleansings, perhaps less horrific in scope, but no less tragic in nature, have marred the annuals of our own time period in world history since the “Great War” that was to end all wars.
Consider some dangerous philosophies that are being taught within our own country. What about the ‘Preferential Utilitarianism’ (and ‘Hedonistic Utilitarianism’ as of 2014) and ‘Personism’ rhetoric of Peter Albert David Singer? This Princeton scholar and writer (Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton) argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—”rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”—and therefore “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” I find his views on speciesism and sanctity of life (abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia) particularly disturbing. Perhaps he has forgotten his Austrian Jewish roots and the fate of his grandparents. In one sense the problem of the Jews was just a utilitarian problem for the Third Reich whose war machine needed funding.
An Eerie Walk Through Dachau
Four decades after the atrocities of World War II occurred; I walked the grounds of Dachau in southern Germany. Dachau, Hitler’s first concentration camp, was opened in 1933 to house political prisoners shortly after he became Chancellor. Its destiny and fame did not end there, however. Some of “them” had been here too, I thought. I sat in the barracks. I saw their faces in pictures and story – the numbered ones, the tagged ones; barely human by the standards of that reign of terror.
From there, I walked into another building, a little more distant from the others. My feet were firm on concrete, my hands touched the brick, and then I saw the metal door that opened to the oven chamber. I looked at the first and then in another; almost afraid to touch the latches.
The most poignant sense in my memory at that moment was an odor, the strange smell. I tried to shake off my reaction. Perhaps it was just the dampness of the day or my overactive imagination; I suggested to myself. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, how does genocide smell in the darkness of a lie? How could the neighbors of this place not have known? I walked away still wondering, why? Why? Why?!!!
Then I remembered.
It is easy to subtract numbers.
And sometimes, it’s more convenient to believe
a contagious, audacious lie.
Written in remembrance of those who perished in the holocaust and those who endured the terror.
May they never become just a number to us, no matter how many millions big that number may be.
Let us never forget!
References:
This website contains many translations of original materials, propaganda posters, speeches, and pamphlets from this time period:
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/
“Solving the Jewish Question” and “The End of Jewish Migration” 1933
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/gercke.htm
Fundamentals of the Jewish Question (Jewish World Plague)
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/esser.htm
Other resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht
http://www.ushmm.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
Please note, the link below is to Peter Singer’s view on the questions included in his FAQ.
Theses are not the views of Between Steps or Susan Millsaps.
