Fr Billy Swan

Last Monday, 27th January, was Holocaust Memorial Day, that commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp on the same date in 1945. At the camp where over 1.1 million people died during World War II, world leaders gathered for a memorial service in which many of the small number of survivors gave their testimonies of the horrors that took place there more than eighty years ago. This years’ anniversary was more poignant given the next major anniversary ten years from now, these survivors will no longer be there. All the more reason to listen again to their stories that recall one of the darkest times in human history.
This annual anniversary serves a reminder of the unspeakable things that happened during the holocaust and the people who suffered and died because of them. It is also serves as a mirror in which we can see the evil that we human beings are capable of and the depths of human cruelty to which we can descend. It is easy to look at what the Nazis did and with moral revulsion point out how terrible it was. But it must not end there. It is easy to condemn a previous generation, a political regime from another time and another nation for crimes committed in the past. A more mature and necessary approach is to both condemn the wrongs of the past but to probe the reasons they happened in the first place. If we are serious about the holocaust never happening again, we must take an honest look at ourselves and our own human nature and how it can be corrupted by evil. If this happened with the Nazis, then there is no guarantee it won't happen again in another generation. Human nature is the same now as it was then. There are lessons to be learned individually, morally, socially and politically from what happened in Auschwitz. These lessons and their implementation is imperative if the world is never again to repeat the horrors recalled this week by the few survivors of the death camps.
Underpinning Nazi atrocities was an ideology that justified them. In order to carry out crimes against humanity, you must convince yourself with reasons why. In that frame of mind, self-determination is absolute and can justify anything. Nazi ideology is a classic example from history of the human tendency to usurp the place of God as the ultimate arbitrator of what is good and what is right, what is right and what is wrong. German National Socialism was essentially an atheistic regime whose philosophical underpinning focused on the strength of the will. This philosophy was greatly influenced by the German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who famously coined the phrase “will to power” – associating the human will with the power to achieve, control and create history according to how we want it to be. For Nietzsche, fashioning one’s own identity and destiny must be taken up by oneself and no other. Freedom to do this is absolute. No God, morality, ethics or laws can stand in our way.
For the Nazi national mindset, nothing was off limits once it was done in the name of German interest. And all those who resisted their ideology or begged to differ were crushed or eliminated. Where there was a difference of ideology, and conflict arose, the strongest prevailed and survived. Might was always right. And once you were powerful enough, you were not accountable to anyone. Human rights were not acknowledged but conferred by those who had that power. There was no such thing as innate human rights, human dignity or compassion. In Auschwitz, only those who were useful to the Nazis were allowed to live. The sick, the weak, the disabled and millions more were sent to the gas chambers.
In order for all this to happen, God and any external moral obligations needed to be eliminated. For example, consider Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg's proposed thirty point plan for the national Reich church offered in 1942. There it says:
“The German people must not serve the National church. The National church is absolutely and exclusively at the service of but one doctrine - race and nation.” (Point 2)
“On the day of its foundation, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches cathedrals and chapels within the Reich and its colonies. It must be replaced by the only unconquerable symbol of this swastika” (Point 30).
These two points alone confirm what G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) said years beforehand: “Once you abolish God, the government becomes God”. Here is the ideology that allowed the horrific crimes and human rights abuses to happen in Auschwitz and beyond.
Does this philosophy that underpinned German National Socialism in the 20th century still exist today? Undoubtedly the answer is ‘yes’. Does it have the potential to cause harm today as it did over 80 years ago? Absolutely, because any nation that dispenses with accountability and decides for itself what is right and what is wrong, who lives and who dies, who has rights and who doesn’t, is a nation that not only poses danger to its own citizens but others as well.
Any crude parallels between this ideology and modern practices such as abortion, euthanasia, and eugenics are met with howls of protest and fiery emotions. It is not my intention to draw a direct line between these practices and the crimes of the Nazis. However, a direct line certainly does exist between these practices that have become state sponsored in recent years and the ideology that justifies them – an ideology that we saw with National Socialism in Germany, less than a century ago. For where the State fails to protect human rights and begins to confer rights as the majority sees fit rather than acknowledge them, then the danger exists to repeat the horrors of the past in present and future generations.
In contrast to Germany, the founding fathers of America and Ireland had the common sense and religious awareness grounded in reality, to realize that a natural and moral order precedes us - an order that no Declaration or Constitution can overturn. Goodness, justice and truth precede us in the natural order and oblige us to conform to certain norms. The very structure and working of the human conscience tell us that human freedom is not totally absolute but is conditioned by its choice of the good based on what is true. Unlike Nazi ideology, the power of national self-determination is not absolute and must not usurp the place of God as the ultimate source of good and truth. That is why the 18th century American Declaration of Independence stated that:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
Similarly, the Irish Constitution states from the outset, in contrast to German National Socialism, that self-determination must proceed within certain pre-determined limits and obligations to prudence, justice, charity and ultimately to God:
“In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of people and States must be referred, We, the people of Éire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ…And seeking to promote the common good, with due observance of Prudence, Justice and Charity, so that the dignity and freedom of the individual may be assured, true social order attained, the unity of our country restored, and concord established with other nations…Do hereby adopt, enact, and give to ourselves this Constitution”.
It is important to recall the memory of these two declarations. Their wisdom was minted from the experience of history and the knowledge that to invest human beings with the powers that only God properly exercises is dangerous. We forget it at our peril and are doomed to repeat the same mistakes of history.
I conclude this article with a testimony of someone who was also a survivor of the war – a German who was forced to join Hitler Youth against his will; who had the courage to escape from it as soon as he could and who became one of its fiercest critics. He was also someone gifted with searing intelligence and insight to identify the fault lines of the National Socialism he was so familiar with. In 2011, Joseph Ratzinger, who grew up as a young man during the war and speaking as Pope Benedict XVI, spoke the following to the German parliament:
“The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness” (Speech at the Bundestag, 22nd September 2011).
Ideas have consequences. They lead somewhere and express themselves in concrete actions, good or bad. The Nazis removed the idea of a Creator God as a preamble to committing the most appalling crimes against humanity. And once God was eliminated, human rights lost their foundation and all was permitted. As we mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, let us not confine ourselves to emotional revulsion at what happened at there over eighty years ago but become less naïve about what happens when human beings remove God and play God instead.
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