It's been 35 years since I graduated from St. John's University. With those decades having come and gone, I remember very little of what I learned, at least directly. I can, however, picture one professor. I picture him at the head of the class. He was short and elfish with white hair and a white Abe Lincoln beard. He spoke softly and had a thick accent. He taught philosophy which was probably no one's major.
The memory that remains in my head is of a day when he told us that he was from Austria. I don’t remember how the topic came up but he said that Austrians had not taken their share of responsibility for the Holocaust, they had not been seen as responsible in the way that Germans were. Whatever his experience may have been, he was clear that Austrians should be seen as complicit. He may have been referring to the Austrian politician Kurt Waldheim and revelations about his past that had recently come out. And then he said, "I have no illusions that it couldn't happen here." A chill went down my spine with the quiet, confident way he said it. He knew the history. He experienced it. It could happen here. It was as if he saw signs, similar conditions and events. Or maybe he just meant we weren't so different, but his tone and countenance were ominous.
This summer I joined a trip with the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center (of White Plains) to learn about how many people in Germany and Poland are bravely facing their history, how they honor the memory of those killed, how they explain what went wrong, and what if anything has changed. A group of high school history teachers and myself were led beyond the movies and books many of us have seen and read. This trip, for me, was a kind of pilgrimage to learn more about how our faith informs our view of human sinfulness and efforts to build a more just society. The memory of that philosophy professor's warning has remained strong for decades: the problem is not limited to one group or a purportedly more primitive time.
I recently read Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany by Robert P. Ericksen (Cambridge University Press, 2012). It details the damning letters, sermons and statements of German Christian clergy over the two decades of the Nazi rise and their consolidation of political control. Even those few members of the resistance, the Confessing Church and others, did next to nothing to help Jews. Eriksen also shows how German Catholics and the Vatican said nothing as hundreds of Polish priests were sent to camps. He then goes on to detail how, after the war, the clergy lied about their inaction,
involvement, and support. Churches helped in the process of documenting who was Aryan and then, after the war, who was cleared in the denazification process.
Ericksen demonstrates that these prominent leaders, when it mattered most, described National Socialism (Nazism) in idealistic terms even while they acknowledged and discounted the alarm heard from international leaders. When Nazism was defeated and then reassessed to be unparalleled barbarism, there was an effort to make the church "seem the most heroic and least tarnished of Nazi-era institutions." (Eriksen p.25)
Ericksen reports on how highly educated many of the most complicit soldiers were, men who would have been strongly influenced by academia.
In recent decades there have been grassroots movements to create public remembrances in Germany. An article in The Atlantic Magazine (March 2023) reviews the many new memorials and documentation centers: How Germany Remembers the Holocaust: What can memorials to tragedy in Germany tell Americans about how to remember slavery in the U.S.? Do these creations of metal, stone and accompanying text represent a real and long-lasting change? Will they assure a continued rejection of bias, discrimination and hate?
Ericksen sees a real transformation in German society after the war. Aided by the Allies, there was a rapid and wide-spread rejection of Nazism. He also reviews how Nazism rose. Two things fed the fascist agenda. Along with antisemitism, the other common theme that church leaders extolled before and during the war was nationalism. These are two issues that should give Americans of today pause. Eriksen wrote this before the rise in Christian Nationalism in America but the connections are obvious and worrisome. One way for clergy and lay leaders to help our congregants think about this influence is to contrast patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is about love of your country, your people. Sometimes it gets exploited and twisted into ethnic or racial superiority, hate and repression of people deemed different. Sometimes it gets perverted into exclusion and hate. The word, then, for patriotism gone wrong is "nationalism." Nationalism focuses on one ethnic or religious group and promotes that group to the detriment or exclusion of others.
No rational individual today thinks White Nationalism is a preferred way to think about a healthy social order for the United States. Christian Nationalism needs to be thought of in that same light, a national identity that privileges one group and, as it grows, increasingly excludes others.
Even seemingly benign patriotism can fail when it does not nurture a love for all humanity. Patriotism should not exclude interest in and admiration for other cultures and countries. Every country is more complicated than some authoritarian fantasy about a noble race or exalted culture. Patriotism at its worst is a nationalistic egotism that is extreme in its delusion that one group is better than all others. Nationalism is a toxic, collective narcissism that seeks to enlarge and inflate the importance and power of one’s own group.
Today, in America we hear people protesting any efforts to share the hard lessons from our history. Germany in the 1920's saw a rise in a culture of grievance and a willingness to scapegoat and seek retribution. In the decades since the Second World War Germany has seen a slow but steady evolution towards lament and repentance, truth seeking and repair. The church rarely led this movement.
Our trip included visits to Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, camps where people were tortured and killed. We saw the Wannsee estate that hosted the January 1942 conference where bureaucrats planned for the "final solution." To see the places where perpetrators plotted brings them into the narrative, so we do more than just be mindful of the victims. It is not enough for memorials to make us feel sad, to help us mourn. We must also tell a story about how societies fail at providing basic rights for all. How are populations desensitized and convinced to deny the humanity of others? What are our weaknesses?
There is also the story of those who stood apart in times of a general lack of moral leadership. We visited the center that details the German resistance. It featured a temporary exhibit recalling the work of women. Elisabeth Schmitz (1893-1977) was a teacher who joined the Confessing Church movement in 1934. She wrote a memorandum calling for the Confessing Church to protest the persecution of Jews. Her call to action was ignored. After the November 1938 Pogrom she tried again but the result was the same. Faced with new curriculum demands from the Nazi government, she took an early retirement. She took action on her own and participated in the hiding of Jews.
In Berlin we visited the four major memorials to victims of the Nazis. In recent decades Berlin has given places of prominence to detailed histories for the major groups that were targeted: Jews, Homosexuals, the disabled and the Roma people. We also saw the suburban train station of Grunewald where a memorial lists how many Jews were marched day by day through the residential streets by soldiers and loaded onto trains never to be seen again. The Jews were marched through a very neat cluster of homes to a central commuter hub.
We also happened upon Stolpersteine, (or “stumble stones”). These markers bear the names of victims of the Nazis in front of residences. Tens of thousands of these are found in sidewalks in virtually every country of Europe.
This opening up and revisiting of a terrifying chapter has become easier as time has passed. It is less and less about looking witnesses in the eye and naming living perpetrators and more about a willingness to tell a story about a shared history.
Germany is not the only place that needs to remember the Holocaust and most European countries have begun to make sure that we do not forget. This year the Netherlands opened a National Holocaust Museum and it is an example of further progress towards more accurate remembering, not just for victims, but also acknowledging the local complicity.
Dara Horn's book People Love Dead Jews (2021) was recommended to me by a local Rabbi and has helped me think about how the Holocaust is not the whole story of Judaism or the struggles of the Jews. She describes how, much like racism in the U.S., it has often seemed to improve while it has actually shape-shifted. She also demonstrates how we have framed Holocaust history in a way that mythologizes it, removes it, and makes it less applicable to subsequent events.
Recently, The New York Times (8/20/2024) gave an overview of efforts to stop new tragedies: “The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’”. A hopeful instrument, the UN Genocide Convention, gathered dust until the 1990s and even when invoked, it has disappointed many who hoped it would allow for intervention as atrocities unfold. Many have requested that the court empower a more proactive statute and relax its evidentiary requirements for proving genocidal intent. Canada, Germany and Britain proposed action related to events in Myanmar arguing that the court should respond to violence and the forced displacement of the Rohingya people. Legal experts are looking for updates that would “make the Convention a living instrument that can be applied.” This is similar to the concern that Dara Horn shares, how detailing the unique and unimaginable scale of the Holocaust can hinder attempts to alert us to current growing threats.
As technology has advanced, our language has had to catch up and to grapple with increasingly horrific events. Terms like “genocide” and “Holocaust” were not in our vocabulary before World War II. Today many Jewish people use the term "Shoah" for the Holocaust. "Holocaust” is derived from the Greek word for burnt offering which was never really an appropriate term. “Shoah,” is Hebrew and its Biblical root “shoah u-meshoah” (wasteness and desolation) appears in the Book of Job (30:3), a story of undeserved and unimaginable suffering.
Over time we have found ways to tell the story in history books, fiction and film. The TV broadcast premier of “Judgment at Nuremberg” was viewed by nearly 50 million Americans in March of 1965. It would educate many about the history and used the drama of a courtroom to depict relatable people being confronted with their actions. The program was preempted on that Spring evening by footage from Selma, Alabama, of police clubbing, trampling and chasing peaceful marchers: Bloody Sunday. In one evening, America's attention was taken to Nuremberg and then suddenly brought home. Whenever we tell the story of the Holocaust, it needs to be a journey that takes us to the past and brings us back to the present. We must make the journey from Nuremberg to Selma, from 20th century Europe to 21st century America. The PBS documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein “A History to be Reckoned With: The US and the Holocaust" (2022) gives a detailed look at American inspiration for Nazi atrocities. How these things are with us today can be seen in “Tree of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting”, the 2022 HBO documentary.
America has made comparatively tentative steps to start on the journey to a more honest treatment of our history. A visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in our nation's capital will confront you with the horrendous tragedy of Emmet Till among other varied and expansive parts of the story. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, takes the approach of the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe in giving space to be enveloped by a symbolic scale and toll of a violent social order.
My philosophy professor did something few people have done by taking a hard, honest look at his own history. The Bible is a natural place to learn this. Throughout the story, no matter how horrendous the situation was, prophets called the people to continue to consider the moral dimensions of their lives, the ethical direction of their communal existence.
Let us love our nation for what it aspires to while we are realistic about a troubled history that is not past. America can be for all its people. Wherever Christians live, Jesus is a model of a prophetic voice, dramatically calling out systems of oppression and corrupted power. Let us live out the calling to be a voice for justice, a neighbor to those in need and create a more perfect union, a more beloved community.