Cold Hearts: A Necessary Component of Evil Regimes and Future Holocausts

Today has been a busy day teaching and wrapping up my students unit on the Holocaust, lasted almost a quarter. In it students from 8th to 12th grade received what amounted to an undergraduate history class of the same duration on that topic. Today we discussed a number important quotes by holocaust historians and survivors that I had them write down last week. The discussions were good, and helped them put the Holocaust into present day context, including the role of ethics in their future work or professional lives after high school and college.

This evening I wrote three tests to given the classes tomorrow and Thursday.

British Historian Laurence Rees ended his book Auschwitz, a New History, ended with these words:

“We must judge behavior by the context of the times, and judged by the context of mid-twentieth century, sophisticated European culture, Auschwitz and the Nazis’ “Final Solution” represent the lowest act in all history. Through their crime, the Nazis brought into the world an awareness of what educated, technologically advanced human beings can do – as long as they possess a cold heart. Once allowed into the world, knowledge of what they did must not be unlearned. It lies there – ugly, inert, waiting to be discovered by each new generation. A warning for us, and for those who will come after.”

I think that Rees’s words bear a particular weight today in the actions of Trump’s Cabinet members, their Departments, as well as Elon Musk and his team of amoral coders who are destroying every Federal agency that they devastate and the consequences that they will cause. None of them have any empathy which I wrote about last week, few have the actual experience needed for their jobs and all demonstrate absolutely the cold hearts, often with technical skills applied without any regard for the law or ethics.

They are led by a man with no moral, religious, or ethical boundaries and no respect for the law or Constitution. That man is President Trump who as he proclaimed after his election that he would rule as a dictator, something he has done since his inauguration. Trump rules by what the Nazis called, the Führerprinzip. The Führers word is over the law, it is the law. This was evident today when Attorney General Pam Bondi said that a Federal Judge had “no right to interfere in foreign policy” when he issued a binding legal order which blocked Trump’s deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador, which the administration ignored. In this the Customs and Border Czar Tom Homan, and the Attorney General both invoked that un-American principle, which is used by all authoritarian regimes and dictators.

Rees also wrote:

“human behavior is fragile and unpredictable and often at the mercy of the situation. Every individual still, of course, has a choice as to how to behave, it’s just that for many people the situation is the key determinate in that choice.”

We discussed this as well, and some of the students formulated good responses to how even seemingly normal, law abiding citizens, even religious people could become accessories to crimes by simply doing their jobs, and following orders, if they put their gain over any ethical, religious or moral principles they might have had. This is probably even more of a problem now than in the Nazi era when people place their personal economic gains, profits or power over any moral, ethical, or religious principle.

Finally, since we have been talking about what the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem, and other euphemisms used by the Nazis, even watching the 2001 film Conspiracy starring Kenneth Branagh and Stanley Tucci, which is an excellent dramatization of the Wannsee Conference, I introduced this fairly long quote by the late Christopher Hitchens.

“Die Judenfrage,’ it used to be called, even by Jews. ‘The Jewish Question.’ I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish ‘problem.’ Again, the word ‘solution’ can be as neutral as the words ‘question’ or ‘problem,’ but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.”

To begin the discussion I referred back to the film and the euphemisms used in it which are part of the edited minutes of the meeting taken by Adolf Eichmann and known as the Wannsee Protocol, which I gave them as one of the materials for the course. From that I asked them a question about mathematics, particularly Algebra and higher mathematics. I asked what their instructors asked them solve, which they all answered “problems” which was the correct answer. Then I asked what an algebra, trigonometry calculus problem required them to find. Once again they answered correctly, a “solution”. With that they understood the importance of Hitchens’ words and how once people identified people of other races, religions, ethnic backgrounds, or nations as a “problem” demanding a “solution” how important it is to follow one’s ethical, moral, or religious beliefs about the value of other human beings in order to keep from becoming perpetrators, accomplices, or being a bystander to evil.

With that I ended with this quote from the historian Yehuda Bauer:

“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders”.

I will end with that tonight as it is late and I must be out and about to set up physical therapy for my back and join the YMCA in order to set up a plan to get back in shape.

Until next time, be safe and watch your six.