Seventy years since the end of Second World War, the things which occurred under National Socialism are still regularly in the news. Occurrences like the theft by neo-Nazis of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from the entrance to Auschwitz and the recent arrest of a former camp guard for war crimes remind us that these events have lost none of their significance. They have prompted me to read a great deal about the Holocaust over the last few years, in order to try to understand the terrible sequence of events that progressed from the Nuremburg Laws through Kristallnacht and the large-scale internment of Jews into places like the Warsaw Ghetto, and culminated in massacres like Babi Yar and the extermination camps like Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibor. It makes desperately harrowing, virtually unbearable reading. One of the most terrifying aspects is the speed and ease with which Germany descended into this moral abyss, and the how ordinary, previously 'decent' citizens were drawn quite willingly into unimaginable atrocities.
Whilst we could try to examine the seemingly incomprehensible events of the Holocaust according to number of biblical perspectives, the notion that came to my mind repeatedly was that it was almost as if God had briefly opened the mouth of Hell and let us look inside - or, to put that another way, the God who mankind had sought to banish from any role in his world was letting us glimpse what things would really be like if he did remove his hand from the world.
Christians believe that, though this world and the human heart are fallen as a result of man's sin, God in his mercy has not allowed evil free rein. As a result of 'common grace' most societies know a basic level of law, order and decency. The humanists would have us believe this is because man is basically decent left to himself, but I would suggest that the Nazi era shows just how rapidly ordinary people will decend into unspeakable wickedness once restraint is taken away.
The most obvious evils of Nazism, like those listed above, are well known. Nearly 6 million Jews - up to 90% of the Jewish population of many countries - were exterminated in less than 6 years. However, the 'Final Solution' also acted as a cover for every other kind of evil imaginable and it is possible to show how during the Third Reich every basic moral principle was eroded:-
Ordinary people descending to behaving like savage beasts
In the space of just a few years without the restraint of good governance, people who had outwardly been civilised, upstanding citizens had begun to behave in the most savage, primal manner as exemplified by the madness of Kristalnacht (Nov 9th/10th 1938). Fired up with raw hatred and jealousy, ordinary people riotted in the streets and ransacked the homes of their former friends and neighbours. Housewives took their children out to watch the 'fun' as Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were looted and set alight. From then on, people lived in a deteriorating climate of mutual suspicion, fear and hypocrisy, telling on each other for every thing from misdemeanours such as failing to say 'Heil Hitler' with sufficient conviction, to attempts to hide Jewish people.
The dehumanisation of people and loss of fundamental respect for the human person
The Bible teaches that all people are made in the image of God, but the Nazis reclassified Jews, Gypsies and others as 'life unworthy of life' and herded them to their deaths on an industrial scale without even the compassion one would show to animals, without a qualm. They deliberately devised the most inhumane and cynical processes of extermination, such as the centrality of the Sonderkommando to the extermination process. The Sonderkommando were a small number of Jewish prisoners kept back from immediate slaughter on arrival at Auschwitz and other death camps and employed to operate the gas chambers, remove and cremate the corpses of their fellow Jews whilst all the time knowing that the same fate would soon befall them. The Apostle Paul's reference to men 'inventing ways of doing evil' (Rom 1:30) fits the Nazis very aptly.
The same dehumanising philosophy permitted the most grotesque experimentation on prisoners. Josef Mengele 'The Angel of Death' personally killed 14 sets of twins in one night so that he could dissect their bodies. He sewed together gypsy twins back to back to see if he could create conjoined twins. Such was the loss of respect for the human body that the Nazis cut off and sold the hair of gassed victims and even experimented with making soap from human fat.
Erosion of the fundamental sanctity of life and abrogation of God's perogative to end life
The Nazis carried out mass compulsory euthanasia of anyone with incurable diseases, mental illness or learning disabilities. Within months they emptied the hospitals and assylums of Poland. Documents refer to the 'disinfection' of people with a life expectancy of less than 10 years. Although this was termed 'mercy killing' (and in the early days some families requested it for children with interminable suffering) no efforts were made to make this painless and most died terrifying deaths in the gas vans or by phenol injection.
Removal of boundaries in the arena of sexual behaviour
Another thing which sets us apart from animals is that we are not merely driven by instincts but have the ability to control our sexual behaviour. Even primitive societies have some concept of this, with some limitations on acceptable kinds of relationship. In the death camps, however, prisoners were subjected to every kind of sexual degradation. The Nazis set up brothels where homosexual prisoners were forced to engage in weekly heterosexual prostitution. The Nazis liberalised attitudes to illegitimacy and its only real concern was the expansion of the population as quickly as possible.
The triumph of expediency over morals
Nazi philosophy lacked any fundamental moral principles; their only principle was expediency. Whatever tended towards the achievement of their ends of Aryan domination and expansion was acceptable. Thus the Nazis justified killing the chronically ill because this saved food for the rest of the population. These people could not work or contribute materially; therefore they were liquidated. Whenever expediency is allowed to justify breaking moral principles, whether in politics or by individuals, it always leads to trouble.
The glorification of aggression and the denigration of compassion, humility or gentleness
Nazi ideology despised weakness and glorified aggression, war and the subjugation of 'inferior' peoples. We see this worked out in the transformation of Nazi doctors from caring professionals to agents of genocide - indeed it has been noted that the betrayal of the Hippocratic oath had a broad basis throughout the German medical profession and without doctors' active help the Holocaust could not have happened. Guards in the camps who treated inmates with any level of decency or compassion were disciplined and the role attracted people of the most sadistic and psychopathic character, of whom the women guards appear to have been particularly warped and brutal like Ruth Neudeck and Irma Grese 'The Beautiful Beast'. Ministers and priests were singled out for systematic humiliation and torture. Most people accept on some level the rightness of the 'Golden Rule' even if they do not carry it out, but the Nazis stood this on its head. No wonder they despised Christianity and harked back to the red-blooded paganism of the past.
Open opposition to God
The Nazis initially attempted to appear to be supportive of Christianity and the main denominations. They soon abandoned this, however, with some key figures espousing neo-paganism outright whilst others sought to rewrite the Bible according to Nazi principles, including modifying the character of our beloved Lord into a more warlike Aryan figure. Salvation by faith in Jesus was expressly attacked. Christians were required to swear oaths to Hitler and the Nazi party claimed to have sovereignty in all matters including over the beliefs and affairs of believers, with obvious difficulties for true Christians.
In the light of all this, while I firmly believe that in the Holocaust the Nazis, in the words of Corrie ten Boom's father, 'touched the apple of God's eye', they also led the rest of society down a path that consisted of the repudiation of every aspect of God's plan for mankind. Thus, when we read about its effects , we find ourselves looking over the edge and into the abyss that is life without the presence or activity of God.
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