Remember Auschwitz: Do Not Turn Your Backs on Today’s Victims

Evil is the Absence of Empathy

Yehuda Bauer wrote:

“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.“

Today is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest and most lethal of the Nazi death camps. Among them Auschwitz stands alone in its nearly factory like mass murder on over one million people, the vast majority of them being Eastern European Jews, but also Jews from every corner of Nazi occupied Europe.

The scope of the Holocaust is so vast, the numbers so enormous that it is hard to comprehend. Likewise we must try to comprehend it, understand the suffering of the victims, but even more important, and far more difficult to attempt to understand the perpetrators. Timothy Snyder wrote:

“It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. …Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.”

Most of the victims were unloaded from railway freight cars, and herded to a ramp, where those believed capable of working as slave laborers were separated from the majority of the other Jews. Some others, in particular twins were spared by Dr. Josef Mengele to be used for medical experiments that were so grotesque to be considered crimes against humanity.

Sorting the Victims at the Ramp

Those not selected to work included the elderly, young children, women with children and babies, the disabled or infirm were moved down the ramp. They were told to leave their possessions as they were told that they would get them back after processing. They were taken to a building with grass and trees around it. A small orchestra of inmates played cheerful tunes to ease their nerves. Over the entrance a sign, Brausebad or showers. Once inside the victims were told to disrobe and hang their clothes on hooks on the wall with their shoes under them. Then they were directed into the gas chambers and told that they were going through delousing. As many as 2,000 at a time went into the chambers, and when the last one entered the SS guards closed the heavy steel sealed doors, and locked them to ensure that nobody, no matter how desperate could get out. Other guards on the roof then opened a small chute in which they dropped Zyklon-B, a commercial cyanide based pesticide developed in the 1920s, which the Commandant of Auschwitz had through a mistake in handing by his guards could be used on humans.

Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz

At Nuremberg, Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz testified “the camp commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Zyklon B….” Höss estimated that some 2.5 million people were exterminated at Auschwitz at rates as high as 10,000 a day. He corrected his testimony at his trial in Poland to about 1.1 million killed, noting, “I regard the number of 2.5 million as far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive capabilities.”

A dramatized version of Höss’s testimony at Nuremberg as a Defense Witness in the film Nuremberg (2000).

The Zyklon-B crystals oxidized upon being released into the air, releasing the gas. The prisoners panicked and tried to storm the door to no avail, they gasped for breath and with 20 minutes all were dead. When the SS Guard observing through the view port confirmed that all were dead, high powered ventilators vented the remaining gas into the atmosphere, at which point, Jewish prisoners called capos went to work removing the bodies of the victims, who then had their hair shorn, and any gold fillings or crowns removed from their mouths with pliers, all of which were collected by the SS for SS industries to in the case of the gold, to the Reichsbank. The bodies were then incinerated in large commercial incinerators made by a leading German commercial oven manufacturer. The smoke from the incinerator was visible for miles, and incoming victims would see it as they were unloaded from the next trains. Nearby, the staff had parties and enjoyed themselves as if their jobs were regular employment.

Auschwitz Staff enjoying a party

We would like to think that Americans would not be capable of such crimes, but in the past few years the ugly specter of violent racism and antisemitism has again come to the fore in the United States. White Supremacists and Nazis form the core of violent militia groups who are allied with President Trump, he pardoned many of them for their role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol Building which killed or mortally injured 5 police officers and wounded another 140 as they attempted to kill former Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress.

Now they will be instruments of Trump’s extrajudicial retribution, even as Trump uses Federal agencies to round up immigrants and deport them. Trump said that the round up and deportations could be bloody. As Trump rapidly runs out of countries to which he can deport them, they will be imprisoned in camps and makeshift prisons, where many will die due to like of proper shelter, food, and medical care. Others will die do to the maltreatment of guards, who mostly will be contractors or employees of for profit prisons, until more are needed and Trump’s militia Brownshirt thugs will be employed. Such people obey no laws or recognize human rights, thus the detainees will be treated with exceptional cruelty. I expect then when deportation is not possible the detainees will be forced to work, and probably rented by major farms and other businesses as forced laborers. I do not expect to see anything like the Nazi death camps, but it is likely that thousands or even tens of thousands of these people will die, not that most Americans, desensitized to violence and regard people of color, especially immigrants as less than human will care. For decades immigrants, legal and undocumented have been labeled as a “problem” that demands a solution.

The real problem is our indifference to people who are not like us. The late Christopher Hitchens understood how labeling ethnic or religious groups as in terms of questions or problems allowed people to escape the human realities of their solutions.

“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.”

If Trump can find no other solution, he just might resort to more extreme measures as at his core he is a violent and vindictive man, an unrepentant racist with strong Nazi leanings who praises and cavorts with Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. Many of his followers believe the immigrants, minorities, people of color, Jews and Muslims are vermin, and the disabled, including disabled veterans, or people with chronic illnesses or with diseases leading to death are to use the Nazi terminology, “life unworthy of life”, and thus problems that need a solution. Thus their attempts to decimate government healthcare plans and push people into insurance plans that cover little and cost far more than Medicare, Medicaid, or Veterans healthcare. Then there are their efforts to open our population to any pandemic that comes along by by negating the efforts of Federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, neuter the Federal Drug Administration, and slash funding to states for preventive care, treatment and long term care. The end result will be millions of deaths that are completely preventable and unnecessary, except to reduce taxes on the richest of the rich, and increase the profits of Trump’s oligarch friends.

The truly terrifying thing about the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust to me is that most of the men at the Wannsee Conference who planned the final solution, the men that commanded the Concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen were very ordinary men who simply believed that they were doing their jobs. Very few could be described as psychopathic killers by nature. They were lawyers, doctors, career police officials, businessmen, and bureaucrats who carried out an extermination campaign that killed by their own numbers between 5.5 and 6 million Jews, not to mention others deemed to be subhuman including the handicapped, the mentally ill, homosexuals, and other non-Jewish minorities like the Gypsies not to mention the wide variety of those considered political enemies. But it was the Jews that bore the most tragic fate and it was the Jews who were the object of Hitler’s most bloodthirsty actions.

These men might have been ordinary, but their actions were extraordinary in their criminality. Never before had a modern, educated nation attempted to eradicate an entire race and “cleanse” their society from those they considered to be less than human. They eliminated political opponents, the handicapped, Jews, those of mixed race, gays and lesbians, Gypsies, and so many more. The Nazis desired a perfectly pure racial state. Once they conquered most of Europe the commenced exterminating all the Jews and others deemed less than human or a drain on the Nazi economy.

But without the bureaucrats, the mayors, district leaders, party functionaries, police officers, soldiers, railroad officials, businessmen, and others who helped there could have been no Holocaust. When I visited the Munich Center for the Study of National Socialism in 2016, 2017, and 2018, the evidence was that very few German could have known about the crimes of the Nazi regime. Most chose to look the other way. I hate to say that after the last nine years I think that a large number of Americans, not all of whom are Trump supporters will do then same.

Some didn’t. Sophie Scholl a student at the University of Munich and a leader in the White Rose resistance movement wrote:

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ‘survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”

Laurence Rees 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.”

A Trump supporting pastor named Ben Garrett, accused Bishop Mariann Budde who preached a sermon before Trump and his cronies prior to his inauguration asking him to be merciful of committing “the sin of empathy”. He stated on the former Twitter, now known as X: “Do not commit the sin of empathy. This snake is God’s enemy and yours too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response. She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity.”

In fact there is no such thing in the Bible or the Christian tradition no matter how Garrett and others claim that empathy is a sin. In fact, a lack of empathy is evil, it makes one a sociopath capable of committing the worst of crimes. Likewise, the call to hate “God’s enemies” is nowhere in the teachings of Jesus. Today’s MAGA Trump before Jesus “Christians” have traded truth for a gigantic lie.

American Army Psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who was assigned to the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, wrote in his book:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

My friends, I hate to leave you on that note, but that is our choice today.