Faith and Reason within the Holocaust

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Faith and Reason within the Holocaust

One of the greatest horrors of the 20th Century was the extermination of over 6 million Jews and 5 million others during the Holocaust. In the face of this atrocity many have wondered how such a tragedy transcended in a supposed "civilized" European society. What role did religious institutions play in the prevention or lack of prevention of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis? How did the German government create, within a reasoning public, acceptance and even support for the extermination of a people who previously were considered equals? The inhumanity of the Holocaust was procured with effective use of propaganda on the German people who were willing to support anyone who could return Germany to the thriving time prior to World War I. The Holocaust was able to sustain vitality during the war because of the Westís ignorance and indifference of the horrendous reality that was the Holocaust. The murder of millions at extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau was the end result of a series of events that did not develop through extraordinary circumstances, but rather from an educated German and Western societiesí abandonment of their responsibility to the minority.

Ordinarily, one would expect that any acts of injustice to a person would be found morally wrong by religious institutions. However, in Europe, Jews historically had a difficulty functioning within a Christian society. The vision that people could live together peacefully despite religious differences was a New World concept that had not found its way into Europe during the 1930ís. A great deal of Germanyís population was Protestant; furthermore, they were Lutherans. As followers of Lutherís principleís...

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... this widespread lack of compassion for the other Jews, the Nazis were able to fulfill one of their goals before their final fallóthe extermination of over 75% of the German Jewish population. In the hours before his suicide, Hitler consoled himself with this while the rest of the world questioned how such an atrocity had manifested.

Endnotes:

1. Rita Steinhardt Botwinick, A History of the Holocaust: From Ideology to

Annihilation (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1996), 19.

2. Adolf Hitler. The Jewish Peril. Rpt. in Rogers, 396.

3. Rita Steinhardt Botwinick, 84.

4. Rita Steinhardt Botwinick, 76.

5. http://serendipity.nofadz.com/cda/niemoll.html>

6. Joseph Goebbels. The Jews Are to Blame. Rpt. in Rogers, 405.

7. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 179.

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