Inside the Heart of Darkness
As the world prepares to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz this week, four out of the five central questions of the Holocaust have pretty straightforward and settled answers.
Who did what? The Nazis -- together with a large number of ordinary Germans aided by collaborating Poles, French and others -- persecuted, hounded and robbed the Jews of Europe and murdered 6 million of them, about a million of them gassed and burned at Auschwitz. One after another, the exculpatory myths -- that ordinary Germans and the Swiss and the Catholic Church and the German Protestant churches and the people of occupied countries were coerced by external forces (Nazis, terror, etc.) to take part in the persecution -- have been exposed as hollow.
Why did they do it? Although other factors also contributed to their participation, the people persecuting, torturing and killing Jews were believing and willing executioners, in the grip of a profound anti-Semitism that held Jews to be the secular incarnation of the Antichrist and therefore necessary to extirpate. An immense amount of evidence unearthed in the last decade -- most unavailable in English -- has made this clear. Just two weeks ago, a German guard at Auschwitz confessed to the BBC the truth: that he thought back to his time in the camp with "joy." There was "always behind you the fact that the Jews are enemies
How do we judge? The only right way to judge is according to the generally accepted legal and moral criteria of guilt and innocence. No excuses are or should be made for a man murdering a child today. No excuses should be made for the thousands of men who agreed to murder more than a million Jewish children. We should reject the empirical and moral fairy tales of apology, including "they did not know what they were doing" or "who are you to judge?"
What is the duty of repair? After the fact, how do those in moral and legal debt repair the harm as best they can? In several ways: not only monetarily but according to simple principles that apply to all historical and contemporary crimes. Politically, those countries and institutions that contributed to the assault must support the postwar Jewish communities and their security. This encompasses all of Europe and Israel. Morally, they must tell the full truth about the past. They must fight the continuing effects of the harm, including the immense legacy of anti-Semitism, by actively educating people about its evils and prejudice of all kinds. They must transform those parts of themselves that led to the crimes so that they will never be the source of such evil again.
