THE OTHER CRIMES of ADOLF HITLER* Arguing from Within The
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publication pending, in a book edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck THE OTHER CRIMES OF ADOLF HITLER* Arguing from within the parameters of Biblical theology, we will stipulate immediately that the Holocaust was indeed Hitler's major crime. Outside the Biblical context, killing Jews is no more significant - except to Jews, of course - than the killing of Russian apparatchiks and PoWs. From within the Biblical worldview, the text most often cited as a warning to those who wish, plan or contemplate the genocide of the Jews is Zechariah 2:8: "he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of His eye." We are not arguing from a proof-text, however, but rather in the spirit of the Scriptures so ably interpreted by Eric Voegelin in his Order and History. The dialogue with the Book of History (of which this conference is a part) consists neither in the piling up of mountains of "scientific" facts nor in the chronicle of endless cycles of rising and falling civilizations (a la Arnold Toynbee). The giving of the Torah. the Way of Life, came as the sign of a "leap in being," a radical discontinuity in human affairs1. Previously the tribes and peoples had used the gods to bless and assist their purposes: now the god WHO IS (Exodus 3:14) created a people to do His will. Our dialogue with the past, in which the memory of the Holocaust hovers over our minds like a dark cloud, is carried on during an historical drama which has a beginning, a direction, and an end. In that drama, the survival of the Jewish people is fundamental - a truth never understood by triumphalist Christendom in the 14th century nor by dissolving Christendom in the 19th century. The question still before the churches, in the seven lean years before the 21st century of the Common Era ("Anno Domini," as they say), throughout the half century since the effort to render Christendom iudenrein was launched by some officially Christian peoples - the only worthwhile question for the churches - is this: whether the significance of the survival of the Jewish people is penetrating the centers where the clergy are trained, Sunday School and catechetical literature is prepared and published, the holy days of remembrance and instruction are identified and published in church calendars, and the hymns and liturgies and prayers written and distributed. *A paper by Dr. Franklin H. Littell, Robert Foster Cherry Distinguished Visiting Professor, Baylor University (Texas) , at the Inaugural Conference of the U. S. Holocaust Research Institute: ' Washington, D.C., 8 December 1993 The Question of Uniqueness Next: we shall also stipulate the uniqueness of the Holocaust, although the nature of that uniqueness is in dispute. Nowhere is the contrast between the language of the Enlightenment and the language of the Bible more evident than in the attempt to identify the uniqueness of the Shoah. In the language of a reasonable universe - in the idiom of Kant, Descartes, the Encyclopedistes and Bertrand Russell - the effort may be made to portray the uniqueness of the Holocaust in terms of the exigencies of modern war, or the inexorable logic of dictatorships, or the disposal of "surplus populations," or the sheer mass of the project, or an explosion of violent ethnic nationalism... In other words, some general principle or abstraction is sought - a rubric under which the Holocaust may be subsumed. This is the way the children of the Enlightenment think: all of the above are attempts to explain the Holocaust in language that a modern, long out of touch with the Biblical worldview, can understand. Such attempts have one merit: they turn the reader away from the most insensitive and inhuman misuse of Biblical myth, in which the Shoah is said to be God's punishment upon a reprobate people. This wicked line of preaching and teaching, even more spiritually debasing than the politics of the Holocaust deniers, is beginning to circulate again in the cultural underworld of Christianity, Islam and even Judaism itself. However, shrinking our confrontation with the Holocaust to the confines of a Cartesian or Kantian mode of thought exacts a price that must be rejected as excessive on two counts. First, a premature closure is effected: our necessary wrestling with the spiritual and intellectual meanings of this watershed event is stopped too soon. If we are with a certain kind of historians' conference on the Holocaust, we find ourselves drifting into the same mood and atmosphere that usually characterizes a seminar on the Thirty Years' War ot a conference on the Wars of Napoleon. In premature closure we give, in effect, answers that we have already memorized to questions that were not asked. Second, with premature closure the moral burden is lifted too soon from our consciences - in our present memory of the past, our awareness of present choices, and our present commitment to the future. There remains a core to the Holocaust story that resists rational explanation, a gravitational pull that draws us back again and again to the story and its meaning(s). What glimpses we have into the dark core of a collapsing universe of discourse reveal a terrifying, mysterious, and demonic chaos for which we have no words adequate to communicate. Only the poets, the musicians and the liturgists, the artists - whose message travels along the nerves of the right hemisphere of the brain - were able at first to ' help us. Even yet, as the survivors and liberators and rescuers have begun to speak after "forty years in the wilderness,"2 after the sheer mass of the event has risen up to command the horizons of our past, present and future, we look above and beyond pedestrian science for help to rise above our impoverished prose in telling the story and searching its lessons. When we move on to what Richard Libowitz has called the "third phase," from telling the story and interpreting the message to Holocaust pedagogy3, we face another parting of the roads: we may deviate to the abstract and propositional and declarative style or we can hold to the human measure. The human measure will involve ambiguities, mysteries, paradoxes, varying interpretations and conflicting insights - what in the Hebrew and early Christian world of thought was called midrash. The declarative style, the triumphalist style of which we have a prime example in the recent church statement Veritatis Splendorr is life-destroying in both religious and secular formats. The midrashic mode of discourse calls for dialogue. Since Galileo Gallilei wrote enthusiastically about "the language of the universe" - which he thought to be Mathematics - intellectuals and academics often have attempted to transfer the style of the dialogue with the Book of Nature ("hard science") over to other sectors, especially obvious in the attempt to control the dialogue with the Book of History and to define the dialogue with the Book of Books. The human being, who is both the observer and the subject observed, may escape the trap set for him - but if he does he will carry a good many scars acquired in the process of being set free from the chains of Rationalism and "objectivity." With a theology that consists of cement blocks, so to speak, with a method of dealing with the Holocaust that has everything tidy, one can go about his business relatively undisturbed. But if he truly confronts the Holocaust, if he allows himself to be addressed by it, he will be a changed person. He will, so to speak walk the rest of his life with a limp. The uniqueness of the Holocaust is not to be expressed in the propositions, abstractions and generalizations that academics are accustomed to use in order to seem to tame all disorder and appear to render chaos harmless. The Holocaust is a specific story to be told,, its uniqueness made troublesome by a concrete truth: six million Jews were targetted and systematically murdered in the heart of Christendom, by baptized Roman Catholics, Protestants and Eastern Orthodox who were never rebuked, let alone excommunicated. Harry James Cargas, who calls himself a "post-Auschwitz Catholic," has called for a symbolic act by one section of the Christians: the posthumous excommunication of Adolf Hitler4, Roman Catholic - an action which his church could take but which unfortunately is not available to contemporary Protestants in their painful recollection of Hermann Goering and other evangelische < Hitler's Other Crimes 3 baptized. Professor Cargas' appeal not only points up the moral uniqueness of the alpine event called "the Holocaust:" it also points to the core of the problem of the Shoah for those who still profess Christ, a problem that is neither technical nor rational, but rather existential. The Uniqueness of the Holocaust depends upon its Moral Significance The uniqueness of the Holocaust is not in definition but in moral quality. Repeated for emphasis: using the frame of reference of the Enlightenment, there is no essential difference between what happened to the targetted Jewish victims of Nazism and what happened to the targetted victims of Stalinism. It may be unseemly for a German scholar to say so, but the equation is fixed by the formula used. Neither is there in general terms any difference between the fate of the six million and the fate of the other five million who perished in the KZ. A sectarian Jewish objection might unthinkingly be raised to this line of thought, since the person inside the targetted group, who has lost precious family and friends quite naturally feels his suffering and his losses most keenly. This response reflects human nature and life in its condition of equivocation and paradox, and it evokes sympathy when it comes to our ears as the outcry of those who still suffer.