and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9 ESV
My wife and I recently watched a documentary on the National Geographic Channel called Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell in which two picture albums from Auschwitz were examined. One was a book of pictures taken of Jews as they were forced from the cattle cars and segregated into the small group who would live as slave laborers, and the very large group who would be immediately taken to the gas chambers and murdered, the only known collection of such pictures in existence. The haunted looks of terror and despair of the faces of these people are the maker of nightmares.
But by far the bulk of the piece focused on a picture album only recently discovered in the effects of an American ex-military intelligence officer who had worked to determine the status of Nazi death camp guards and officials with respect to their subsequent prosecution. The album had once belonged to an SS officer named Karl Hocker, and is filled with pictures of smiling men and women, most of whom are SS officers, or SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries) as they relax after a hard day of killing Jews. The theme explored is the juxtaposition of the unspeakable horror of what these people did against the ordinariness of their leisure activities--so banal, so human as they relax in chaise lounges on the deck of a lodge near Auschwitz, mug for the camera as they jostle one another on a wooden bridge, sit on the rail of a deck and eat bowls of blueberries while an accordionist plays nearby, drink, and laugh, and pose with a beloved dog. This is the point driven home. As monstrous as the things that were done by the Nazis, they were not monsters who did them, at least not in the sense that we would like to believe--monstrous in the sense of being other than human, or a different species of human. No, they were just as human as us, just as capable of love and tenderness. Much is made about the cognitive dissonance this creates, one young woman, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Museum, expressing her pangs of guilt at the touches of sympathy she involuntarily feels for the Nazi men and women when she looks at these pictures.
For the Christian this should not be a surprise, for the lesson here is not that we should sympathize with the Nazi's because they were human, but that we should guard our own hearts and minds and know that we are capable of every monstrous act committed by the Nazis. The human tendency is to search for some political, cultural, or sociological cause that turned the German people--the same people who gave us the printing press, the Reformation, and a scientific revolution in metallurgy and chemistry--into a deviation of humanity that allowed them to perpetrate the greatest horror of the twentieth century. But that's simply not true on several accounts.
First of all the changes in German culture that precipitated the holocaust did not change their humanity, it merely repudiated their Christian heritage and the Biblical moral truth upon which it was based by adopting a Nazi variation of Teutonic Paganism and the Übermensch (superman) ethic of Frederic Nietzsche. In abandoning Christian ethics they removed the legal, cultural, and moral restraints on behavior seething within every human heart.
Second, this was nothing new. Human history is saturated with holocaust, torture, and mass murder. Titus' sacking of Jerusalem resulted not only in the complete destruction of the Temple, and untold death, but the Jewish diaspora that spread the tattered remnants of the race to the far corners of the empire. Successive waves of Mongol invasion in the 13th century completely annihilated whole cities and all their inhabitants (to the last infant) in Russia, the Balkan states and on to the gates of Vienna. 40% of the entire population of Poland was exterminated by Batu Kahn and Subutai.
And third, despite the unprecedented Nazi use of modern technology to effect their attempt at systematic genocide, if we use number of killed as a measure of horror, then they weren't the greatest in the 20th century--not even close. Six million Jews killed? Compare that to the 16 to 20 million Russians that Stalin killed over his long rein of terror, many of whom (grandpas to nursing infants) starved to death by his engineered famine of the Ukrainian Kulaks. Or the roughly 50 million Chinese Mao Zedong is responsible for killing over his tenure as "president for life" of the People's Republic of China.
The point is, this evil is nothing sub, quasi, or non human: it is purely human. This evil runs straight through the human heart. As Jesus said:
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. Matthew 15:19 ESV
The lesson for us here is that the only hope our society has is to keep our culture wedded to the Biblical moral truth that informed its founding. To the degree that we have already abandoned those principles we can see the degeneration of the values stated as most dear to us in our founding documents: liberty and equality. Freedom of speech is being superseded by a value of uniformity of thought and the prohibition of offense ("political correctness", "hate" speech laws). Equality of process and universal human dignity ("all men are created equal," in other words equal in the sight of God and of the law) is being superseded by an enforcement of equality of result, which necessitates an inequality of process, such as racial preferences and government seizure and redistribution of wealth. Our abandonment in regarding humanity a creation of God in his image has lead to abortion and assisted suicide in numbers unthinkable in the past.
And the only hope each of us has as individuals is in the grace of God and the redemption of Christ.
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. Ezekiel 36:25-27 ESV
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. II Corinthians 5:17 ESV
According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead... I Peter 1:3 ESV
