It has always fascinated me that when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, (to what we know as the Septuagent), the Hebrew word Olah was translated as Holokausten and into English as Holocaust. You see, the Hebrew word Olah comes from the verb "what is offered up" and is used to signify the "whole burnt offering."   When we remember that over 12 million people were sacrificed from 1939 to 1945 -- many offered as whole burnt offerings whether in ovens or in pits -- we can only wonder at the choice of Greek words.

Too often study of the Holocaust is reduced to the horrors of the concentration camp: the deportations, the showers of death, the ovens of destruction and all other horrors, some that can hardly be imagined or perceived. I believe that your syllabus includes Picasso's Guernica (local)Guernica (web). I well remember when I walked into the New York Gallery and, for the first time, came face to face with Picasso's Guernica. Horror can be powerful. Pain can be awesome. So when you read Elie Wiesel's Night you will read about horror. When you contemplate Picasso's Guernica you will see it. And, in films such as the very popular Schindler's List and others, you will have that aspect, but only one aspect. Although I could talk about the camps, the horrors, the destruction etc., I would rather talk about events that made the Holocaust possible because it is the repeat of those events that will create another Holocaust and that is where our concern must lie.

So, in that vein, there are basically two avenues we can take to speak about the Holocaust. We can look at it from an historical, political, economic and social perspective or from the perspective of religion. However, if we look at only one without the other, we do not have a complete picture or a real understanding.

CONSIDER: Of those 12 million murdered, 6 million were Jews. Almost 90% of Western and Eastern European Jewry was annihilated. Therefore it is difficult to study the Holocaust without concentrating on the decimation of the Jewish population, yet, while doing so, relating that to the 6 million political dissidents, clergy, gypsies, homosexuals, aging and infirm that also were subjected to Hitler's "final solution" that would have rid not only Europe, but the world, of Jews and all others that the Third Reich determined to be inferior.

The uniqueness of the Jews according to Emil Fackenheim, a contemporary philosopher and theologian, is that:

". . . it lies not in the number killed or the monstrous use of technological efficiency: It was an annihilations for the sake of annihilation; murder for the sake of murder and evil for the sake of evil."

Let us consider, for a moment

1. The effect of World War I on the psychological effects of mass murder; 
2. The effect of the Bolshevik revolution on anti-semitism; 
3. The effect of Germany's defeat in World War I and the economic crisis that followed; 
4. The psychosis of group culture that led to the acceptance of Hitler's leadership. 

In the east, the expendability of human life was told vividly in the tale of a peasant who confessed that he had killed another peasant and stolen his cow during the Revolution. The murderer was greatly worried that he might be prosecuted for theft. When asked whether he was afraid that he might also be prosecuted for murder the peasant replied, "That is nothing. People now come cheaply."

After the defeat of Germany the German economy declined.  There was high unemployment, insecurity, hunger, restlessness, inflation at a stunning high and, fear of the east -- the ever growing communist threat.

In the east, the defeated White Russians -- the aristocracy -- blamed the Jews for the Revolution and went even farther and accused them of fomenting a world-wide conspiracy and published the fabricated "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" -- originally a satire on Napoleon III by a Frenchmen. Now an anti-Semitic treatise falsely accusing the Jews of a plan to take over the world. Moreover, these same White Russians had fled to Germany and promulgated the lie there. It is interesting to note that Nazi propaganda found in these false papers the forerunner of the German idea of being the "Masters of World" while at the same time teaching that the only thing that stood in the way of Germany's mastering the world was the Jews.

Why was Hitler accepted as a leader?

Sigmund Freud, in his work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, taught that

"Men permit themselves cruelties and immoralities as members of a cohesive group which they do not allow themselves as individuals. In group behavior there is a regression to the primitive, illogical, magical thinking and immediate satisfaction of drives that characterizes the world of the infant. This world remains an archaic inheritance of the unconscious throughout life. When the going gets rough, the sleeping infantile monster awakens to its career of destruction and cruelty."

Indeed Hitler became the super-ego -- the god-like figure -- and right and wrong no longer were based on obedience to or rebellion against the will of God -- but now solely in terms of obedience to or rebellion against the will of the leader -- the Fuhrer.

Moreover, at the end of World War I there was created at new type of person -- the Stateless person. (And you might think I am giving you contemporary history -- up to the minute -- but I'm not.) New states were created -- Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia -- but in each there remained minorities -- Croats in Yugoslavia, Ukrainians in Poland, Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.

These minorities were not wanted -- and to deal with them a process of denaturalization and denationalization was used. The Soviets, for instance, denaturalized the White Russians who opposed the revolution, then the Spanish Republicans who fled to Russia, then the Americans and then the Jews.

When any of the minorities entered into a country en masse they were unwanted and many were placed in detention centers -- the forerunners of the Concentration Camps. Indeed, even before 1939, leaders in Germany appealed to the French to take in some Jews. the answer was that the French did not want to solve Germany's problem of the Jews. The answer was "No!"

All of this set the stage for Germany's Nationalism, the rise of Hitler and the total domination of the Nazis, the practice of Genocide, all made possible because of a bureaucracy that was utilized as the instrument of extermination. The Germans were masters of bureaucracy.

Max Weber, a German Sociologist, observed in 1916 (long before the Nazi party came into prominence):

"When fully developed, bureaucracy stands under the principle of 'sine ira ac studio' - without scorn or bias. Its specific nature which is welcomed by capitalism developed the more perfectly, the more bureaucracy is dehumanized; the more completely it succeeds in elimination from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation." ¹

It was possible to overcome the moral barrier that had in the past prevented the systematic riddance of surplus populations when the project was taken out of the hands of bullies and hoodlums and delegated to bureaucrats.

On the other hand, those Germans who were shooting Jews and others face to face, knowing of the final solution and that the order was the total annihilation of the Jewish people, could not use the bureaucracy as an excuse.

Richard Rubenstein in The Cunning of History writes: 
 

"The process was a highly complex series of acts which started simply with the bureaucratic definition of who was a Jew. Once defined as a Jew by the German state bureaucracy, a person was progressively deprived of all personal property and citizen rights. The final step in the process came when the Jew was eliminated altogether. ²

"The destruction process required the cooperation of every sector of German society. The bureaucrats drew up the definitions and decrees; the churches gave evidence of Aryan descent; the postal authorities carried the messages of definition, expropriation, denaturalization and deportation. Business corporations dismissed their Jewish employees employees and took over 'Aryanized' properties; the railroads carried the victims to their place of execution. The operation required and received the participation of every major social, political and religious institution of the German Reich."  ³

"The German's mass murder, their reintroduction of slavery on the European continent, their adoption of free license to treat 'subhumans' however they wished without any restraints -- all suggest that the camp was the emblematic institution of Germany during its Nazi period and the paradigm for the Thousand Year Reich. The camp world reveals the essence of the Germany that gave itself to Nazism, no less that the perpetrators reveal the slaughter and barbarism that ordinary Germans were willing to perpetrate in order to save Germany and the German people from the ultimate danger -- the Jew." ⁴

1. The people were coerced: "There are only 14 documented cases in which it was claimed that the punishment for refusing to carry out an execution order was either death or transfer to a military penal unit." 
2. That the Germans were strongly prone to obey orders, regardless of their content: "These very people were the same people who battled in the streets of Weimar in defiance of existing state authority and often in order to overthrow it." 
3. That the perpetrators were induced to contribute to mass murder by psychological pressure engendered by situational factors and by their peers: "But if a large segment of a group, not to mention the vast majority of its members, opposes or abhors an act, then the social/psychological pressure would work to prevent, not to encourage individuals to undertake the act." 
4. That the perpetrators, like petty bureaucrats, pursued their self-interest (i.e., for career advancement) in total disregard of other considerations: "Most of the men of police battalions, as well as many other perpetrators had no bureaucratic or career interests to advance by their involvement." 

Jean Paul Sartre, French Existentialist, in Anti-Semitism and Jews wrote:

"Anti-Semitism is not merely the joy of hating; it brings positive pleasures, too. By treating the Jew as an inferior and pernicious being, I affirm at the same time that I belong to the elite. This elite, in contrast to those of modern times which are based on merit or labor, closely resembles an aristocracy of birth. There is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is a given, once and for all. It is the poor man's snobbery.  . . .  The anti-Semite need not be logical. There is not embarrassment or hesitation about imputing responsibility for communism to Jewish bankers whom it would horrify, or responsibility for capitalist imperialism to the wretched Jews who live in poverty in the Paris Ghettos."  ⁵

Between 66 and 70 of this era, Judea fought against the Romans. One million Jews lost their lives. The insurrection was put down without mercy. The second temple was destroyed. The Jews became landless and powerless.

It was also at this time that the Gospels were beginning to be written. It was at this time that the followers of Jesus as the Messiah were no longer merely a sect of Judaism. It was at this time that the competition for souls between the Synagogue and the Church developed. It was at this time that the view was promulgated that the defeat of the Jews was God's punishment of them for having rejected Jesus and, more, for being responsible for the death of Jesus -- and even more, that this was a confirmation of belief that Jesus was indeed Lord since the people who rejected him had been grievously punished.

Certainly politically the church had to disassociate itself from the defeated rebels. Certainly Jesus could not be portrayed as just another Jewish insurrectionist. The Romans were exculpated and the Jews portrayed a villain.

The Nazis were anti-Christian, saying "No" to much that Christianity affirmed and "Yes" to much that was forbidden. But they did not invent a new villain. They took over the 2000-year Christian villain -- the Jews. Christianity is not responsible for the death camps -- but Christianity was a necessary precondition that the Nazis utilized to stir up hatred of the Jews.

By the end of the first century, Justin Martyr, a pagan converted to Christianity, developed the new sin, the murder of Christ, to be defined as deicide. And once Christianity became the state religion, the state and the Church worked hand-in-hand to persecute the Jews.

Have you heard or read about the Nuremberg laws promulgated by the Nazis in 1933-35?

• Jews and Christians not permitted to eat together. 
• Jews not allowed do hold public office. 
• Jewish books such as the Talmud to be burned. 
• Christians not permitted to patronize Jewish doctors. 
• Christians not permitted to attend Jewish ceremonies. 
• Jews not permitted to act as agents in the conclusion of contracts, especially marriage contracts between Christians. 

And, to make matters worse, Martin Luther, once a friends of the Jews, hoping that his rejection of the Pope and Rome would bring the Jews to him, wrote the most vitriolic statements about the Jews -- statements that had so much to do with the development of German thought about the Jews.

One example:

"Herewith you can readily see how they (the Jews) are thirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom, with full intent now for more than fourteen hundred years, and indeed they were often burned to death upon these accusations that they had poisoned water and wells, stolen children, and torn and hacked them apart in order to cool their temper secretly with Christian blood"

Once Constantine ruled, Christianity became the State religion. Church policy was set in relationship to Jews for the next 12 centuries.

First, there was an attempt to convert the Jews and to remove any Jewish influence from the believers by laws of separation and burning Jewish books.

Even this failed when the church instituted the inquisition of the "new" Christians and issued certificates of purity for those whose ancestry was wholly Christian. This led to the second policy:

Expulsion: England had expelled its Jews in 1290. France had done the same thing. One of the largest was Spain where the Jews had lived for centuries and contributed so much to he culture of Spain. In 1492, all Jews were expelled from Spain and, in 1493, from Portugal. The Nazis tried expulsion, but it did not work because no other country -- including the United States -- would accept its Jews. So the third policy:

Extermination -- annihilation.

Raul Hilberg in The Destruction of the European Jews writes:

"The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: 'You have no right to live among us as Jews.' The secular rulers who followed [and, I might add, with the acquiescence of the church] proclaimed: 'You have no right to live among us.' The Nazis at last decreed: ' You have no right to live.' " ⁶

"If I believed in God as the omnipotent author of the historical drama and Israel as His chosen people, I had to accept the conclusion that it was God's will that Hitler committed 6 million Jews to slaughter. I could not possibly believe in such a God nor could I believe in Israel as the chosen people of God after Auschwitz.

"I am compelled to say that we live in the time of the 'death of God.' This is more a statement about man and his culture than about God.

"When I say that we live in the time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God?

"The agony of European Jewry cannot be likened to the testing of Job. To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, antimony explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God's purposes. This idea is simply too obscene for me to accept." ⁷

1. That we must survive as a people and not give Hitler a posthumous victory. 
2. That we must always remember the martyrs of the Holocaust and never let their memories perish. 
3. That we are forbidden to deny or despair of God, however much we may contend with Him or struggle with our belief in Him. 
4. And finally, that we are never to despair of the world as the place which is to become the Kingdom of God lest we make it a meaningless place in which God is dead or irrelevant and everything is permitted. 

"To abandon any of these imperatives, in response to Hitler's victory at Auschwitz, would be to hand him yet other, posthumous victories."

Baeck speaks of a three-fold relationship.

1. A belief in oneself.  That is, that one's soul is created in the image of God and is therefore capable of purity and freedom. 
2. A belief in one's neighbor. His soul, too, has as its possibility that purity and freedom that derives from God. 
3. A belief in humankind. All people are children of God; hence they are welded together by a common task. 

"To know the spiritual reality of one's own life, of the life of our neighbors and life of humanity as a whole as they are grounded in the common reality of God -- this is the expression of Jewish optimism"

"In this our own time, one asks again and again: how is a Jewish life still possible after Auschwitz? I would like to frame this question more correctly: How is a life with God still possible in a time in which there is an Auschwitz? The estrangement has become too cruel, the hiddenness to deep. One can still believe in the God who allowed these things to happen, but can one still speak to Him? Can one, still as an individual and as a people, enter into a dialogical relationship with him?"

He tells us that just as an eclipse of the sun is something that happens between the sun and our eyes and not in the sun itself, so the Eclipse of God, to use his terms, represents the character of the "Historic hour through which the world is passing." We have shut ourselves off from the light of heaven. It is not something within God himself. It is our feeling of omnipotence that has stepped in between God and ourselves.It is up to us to await the appearance of the "hiding one."

Or the question asked in the concentration camp as told by Elie Wiesel in Night.

Men in camp are called out into courtyard in freezing weather. Line up and roll call. Three people had been caught stealing crusts of bread from the bakery. Two grown men, one small, thin, twelve year old boy. 

While the men watched the three were marched to the center, where three gallows were silhouetted against the sky. The three were stood on chairs, the nooses around their necks. The chairs were kicked out from under their feet.

The men were commanded to walk past the gallows. The two grown men, necks broken, were dead. The twelve year old, so emaciated, had not enough weight to break his neck. He swung, choking, eyes wide open, tortured. As the line progressed past this awful sight, one inmate whispered to the man in front of him: "Where is God now? Where is God now? " To which the whispered answer came: "There He is. There he is. On the gallows."

"I understand the historical event called the Holocaust as an event of sheer, unmitigated negativity: an event disclosing as evil that is incommensurable, incomprehensible -- indeed, as Fackenheim, Cohen, Greenberg and others have persuasively argued, a unique event.  Arthur Cohen's expression for that event -- the tremendum -- seems to me to capture the religious and theological dimensions of the event itself.  The event is tremendous in the original meaning of that word: earthshaking and frightening.  The event is also tremendous in the religious meaning of the word: awesome, incomprehensible, frightening and world shattering."

We must rethink the reality of suffering in the reality of God's own self and the self who is love.  I believe, with the often repressed strains of the Scripture of both traditions, Jewish and Christian, that our God is none other than pure, unbounded love -- the God who radically affects and is affected (that is, suffers) by the evil we, not God, persist in inflicting upon God's creation.  I believe, therefore, that the unspeakable suffering of the six million is also the voice of the suffering of God.  It is for us to hear that cry -- the cry at once of our fellow human beings and the cry of God's chosen people become the cry of God.  Like all the commands of God, this command to hear that lament and that suffering, is a command which can enable and empower all who hear it to real action in real history.  For all those who hear that voice -- the voice of our suffering betrayed God (betrayed by us) and the voice of God's suffering, betrayed people (betrayed by us) -- that voice can become the bond that unites us all in calleing out together, with them and with our God, "Never Again."

Elie Wiesel in his book  Memoirs: All Rivers Run Into the Sea writes: 

"The barbed-wire kingdom will forever remain an immense question mark on the scale of both humanity and its Creator. Faced with unprecedented suffering and agony, He should have intervened, or at least expressed Himself. Which side was He on? Isn't He the Father of us all? It is in this capacity that He shatters our shell and moves us. How can we fail to pity a father who witnesses the massacre of his children by his other children? Is there a suffering more devastating, a remorse more bitter?

"This is the dilemma confronted by the believer late in this century: by allowing this to happen, God was telling humanity something, and we don't know what it was. That He suffered? He could have -- should have -- interrupted His own suffering by calling a halt to the martyrdom of innocents. I don't know why He did not do so and I think I never shall. Perhaps that is not His concern. But I find myself equally ignorant as regards men. I shall never understand their moral decline, their fall. There was a time when everything roused anger, even revolt, in me against humanity. Later I felt mainly sadness, for the victims.

"There is a Midrash -- a rabbinic story -- that recounts:

'When God sees the suffering of His children scattered among the nations, He sheds two tears in the ocean. When they fall, the make a noise so loud it is heard round the world.'

"It is a legend I enjoy rereading. And I tell myself: Perhaps God shed more than two tears during His people's recent tragedy. But men, cowards that they are, refused to hear them.

"Is that, at last, an answer?

"No. It is a question. Yet another question." ⁸

Notes

1. Max Weber, "Bureaucracy" in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford University Press, New York, 1946) pp. 215-216 [1] 
2. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History (Harper & Row, New York, 1975) p. 4 [2] 
3. ibid p. 5 [3] 
4. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996) pp. 460 & 461 [4] 
5. Jean Paul Sartre, Anti-Semitism and Jews (Schocken Books, New York, 1948) pp. 26 & 27 [5] 
6. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Holmes & Meier, New York, 1985) p. 8 [6] 
7. Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, 1966) pp. 151, 153 [7] 
8. Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run Into the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1995) p. 105 [8]