Comments on: A Photograph: Ezra Taft Benson, 1946

By: Velikiye Kniaz

Velikiye Kniaz — Sat, 01 May 2010 07:58:06 +0000

Along with any discussion of the Holocaust should come a discussion about the “Righteous Gentiles” such as the Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom, the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, or the Danish people, who managed to spirit away the vast majority of Danish Jews to neutral Sweden. We should not forget our own Helmuth Hubener, who spoke out against Hitler and was beheaded at age 18. There were many others, less known, who also did their part as well to protect the innocent. Some paid with their and/or their family’s lives for their courageous stand.
Two other points, General Eisenhower, himself of German descent, remarked that he was never so ashamed of his heritage as he was on the day he toured the death camps. As to Hitler, I believe that there is documented evidence that Hitler was ‘inspired’ by the mass slaughter that took place during the Russian Revolution and thereafter. Around the year 2000 the Library of Congress had an exhibit of Ulyanov’s (a.k.a. “Lenin”) orders to the various leaders of the “Cheka” rebuking them for not killing enough priests, university professors, kulaks (supposedly ‘rich’ peasants), and bourgeoise. I believe that the documents, (on loan from the Russian State Library), also included some of Dzhugashvili’s (a.k.a. “Stalin”) monthly orders to the NKVD, lists of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to be executed for mostly trivial and arcane reasons. The Russians, to this day, are still uncovering mass graves all across the country of these victims. For those who might want to read an account of how these mass murders can be brought about, Google “Ukrainian famine”. It was an artificial famine that was created to destroy all resistance to the collectivization of agriculture. Men, women and children in whole villages and towns were starved to death while the local Chekist hooligans looked on in indifference. This event occurred from the mid-1920′s through the first half of the 1930′s, if my memory serves me correctly. Incidentally, it was used as an excuse to loot all of the treasures from all of the Russian Orthodox churches, (and other churches, too), across the former empire to pay for ‘famine relief’. The only real relief, however, came from the west, and that was only allowed in at a trickle. I still don’t understand why these atrocities, (the count of the victims ranges from 16 to 22 million people), have never captured the attention of the world. I suppose that the dead can’t speak, and the survivors were too terrified to speak lest they themselves end up in the gulag or a mass grave.

By: Eric Boysen

Eric Boysen — Sat, 01 May 2010 07:53:42 +0000

The problem is that the evil has become too banal. It doesn’t shock me that it occurs.

My first exposure to the holocaust was staying up way too late and sneeking the TV on late at night finding footage from the Nuremburg trials sometime around 1970.

Pol Pot and Rwanda didn’t suprise me at least in the matter of mass murder of one group by another. It is much easier to find a single murder more shocking because it is easier to map the experience on to ones own life.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:43:17 +0000

I didn’t know what to expect by posting a picture without any real commentary — it has been fascinating to watch this thoughtful conversation develop in so many relevant directions.

Rather than ranging any farther afield in ranking atrocities or placing blame or explaining/guessing how things came to be, I’d appreciate hearing more of the personal response to learning about evil in recent history.

Thanks.

By: Chris Henrichsen

Chris Henrichsen — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:15:29 +0000

Slinger,

Please stop.

By: Bookslinger

Bookslinger — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:25:11 +0000

More random thoughts on Hitler and Jews:

Hitler was a political genius for his time, and one reason to persecute the Jews was that he needed to focus public anger against a scapegoat. The depression of the 1930′s was world-wide, and Germany went into it still suffering after-effects of World War I.

He used hatred against Jews as a means of uniting the populace, and he put forth himself and his party and his ideas as the “answers” to the “Jewish problem.” In other words, he used the Jews as the foil in a the “Hegelian Dialectic”, they were the ‘problem’ for which he and his party were the ‘solution’. And, he could have not implemented his ‘solution’ without there first being a ‘problem’ that demanded to be solved.

And, for Aryans to be the uber-menschen, there had to be an identifiable under-menschen. And he needed the idea of Aryan superiority to fuel the populace to go along with his design of kingdom-building and subjugating the rest of Europe.

And I believe his motives were Satanically inspired, though I am ignorant of whether Hitler was cognizant of it.

By: Chris Henrichsen

Chris Henrichsen — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:54:39 +0000

In #32, that should be BBC and not BCC. I spend way too much time on the bloggernacle.

By: Steve C.

Steve C. — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:51:07 +0000

Mass murder is mass murder regardless of who carries it out. We should always be aware of such atrocities. I teach about the Holocaust. I also discuss Stalin. We should, however, avoid getting into a sort of macabre ranking system regarding mass murder.

There are some troubling aspects about the Holocaust beyond just the notion that a “cultured” people could do such a thing. First, Hitler’s intense hatred toward Jews. He killed Jews not because they were some sort of political opponent, but simply because they were born Jewish. That goes for all other cases of ethnic genocide. Second, the mechanized, industrialized method of the killings. The last thing I find so troubling about the Holocaust is what would any of us do if we were in the same situation? Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men, makes me wonder what I choices I would have made given the intense propaganda and peer-pressure. I hope I would not have cracked. Even Church members were confused by the rhetoric. I sure hope that we can remember that all people are children of God.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:16:09 +0000

One more thing about Germany, which I found out yesterday in a conversation with Douglas Tobler: the German Missions had tremendous success in the years right after World War I–particularly in the east–East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Prussia, Saxony, Brandenburg. In fact, there were more members of the church in Germany during that period than in any other country outside the U.S.–including Canada.

The fall of a people that produced such missionary success, a people who, as Ardis points out, had made extraordinary contributions in the arts (music, anybody?–where would music be if not for the Germans?) and the sciences (even in the 1960s I would hear, from my chemist father, that a person who was serious about keeping up with the latest scholarship in the field had to know German–when he was in grad school in the 1950s, German was required) into such depths of depravity was and continues to be a shock.

By: Chris Henrichsen

Chris Henrichsen — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:38:28 +0000

Night is written from the perspective of a 15-16 year-old, which is how old Wiesel was during his experiences.

Anne Frank is great, particularly as a lead up to Night. However, here diary is not really about the Holocaust. This is not to say that it is not important.

I have recorded the new BCC movie of the Diary of Anne Frank. I hope to show it to my kids (8 and 10) soon.

My mother is Dutch (we visited the Attic in a trip to Holland after my 7th grade year). My Dad had strong interests in European history. So, none of this was new to me when I came to it in school.

Ardis, your comment #31 is well said.

I now feel a need to blog on this topic. Thanks for the inspiration.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:21:20 +0000

Bookslinger, you’re right about absolute numbers, and those other 20th century atrocities should not be forgotten.

There is, I think, a special horror for those of us in the West, including the US, about Hitler’s regime that raises it for us above all the others. The perpetrators of that are more “like us” than anyone else — and I’m not referring chiefly to race. So very many of us had parents or grandparents who came from the Germanic countries. Germany was, perhaps even more than England or France, the cradle of modern intellectualism — the artists and scholars and philosophers and mathematicians and thinkers who made Western civilization what it was at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century were largely German. Unlike Russia and China, Germany had, along with the rest of the West, gone through the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the value and rights of the individual. Germany was supposed to know better and do better. If they could sink to Hitler’s level so quickly and easily, didn’t we have the seeds of murderous fascism in us, too? Those are likenesses that Western civilization just didn’t share with the Russians or the Chinese.

Just my thoughts on why Hitlerism looms so much larger than the other genocides in the minds of most of us in the West.