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$Unique_ID{bob01140}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter VII: The Chaplains - Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{god
holocaust
germans
how
mind
german
hatred
auschwitz
believe
day}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter VII: The Chaplains - Part II

Father Edward P. Doyle

     I was there.  I was present.  I saw the sights.  I will never forget.

     You have heard the story many times before.  On the night of April II,
1945, my division, of which I was the Catholic chaplain, took the town of
Nordhausen.  The following morning, with the dawn, we discovered a
concentration camp.  Immediately the call went out for all the medics
possible, for all personnel that could be spared, to be present.  It was my
want as a Catholic priest to serve my regiment during combat at the medical
center.  Having heard this, I immediately went and of course saw the sights
that very morning of our capturing and taking over this place.

     We are told there were 6,000 political prisoners, 5,000 of whom were
emaciated corpses, scattered, mutilated, starved, and dead.  But among those
we found approximately 1,000 who were alive, and they were our first order of
concern.  Everybody went to work, if at all possible, to assist and to help.
The doctors came with us, of course, and they indeed told us what to do
because you cannot feed a person that far gone - I say living - without the
proper prescription.

     I would like to pay tribute to the medical profession.  This was not my
first experience with death, for having gone through combat in France,
Belgium, Holland, and Germany, I spent all my time in a medical clinic giving
consolation, giving the sacraments, consoling, but at the same time physically
helping the doctors.  This could be cutting off the uniform where the wound
was, cutting shoelaces off the shoes, preparing for the doctors, and being
there to assist and to help.

     The doctors were with us then.  Immediately we offered our help.  They
told us what to do and what we could do to assist them.  We took care of the
survivors in every way we possibly could.  Of course, as a Catholic priest, I
gave absolution conditionally.

     But that would be my theme as I go on for a few moments.  My theme is
this:  I have not forgotten.  As a priest at the altar of God, I will not
forget.  You've heard the description so many times that personally it is very
difficult for me to recall and to express with such eloquence around ne what
to me was a softer voice, I think, but deeper in my soul than all.  It is
difficult for me to tell you as a Catholic priest.

     Only last Sunday, our Scripture was from the Apostle Matthew.  Christ was
asked, "What is the greatest commandment?" And He said, "The greatest
commandment is you will love the Lord your God with your whole mind, your
whole soul, and with all your strength.  And the second is like unto this. You
shall love your neighbor as yourself." If we abided by that second part of the
first commandment, there would be no need for any other law.

     I agree with my colleagues, my brothers here in the clergy, that we must
love one another, and we did in taking care of the living.  Then we came to
the dead.  The job was overwhelming.  Thousands and thousands.

     Then our group went into the town of Nordhausen, and we commandeered all
the elderly German men to come to the camp and bury the dead.  Particularly,
we utilized every possible thing.  I recall vividly and I reflected upon it
this past week or so we took pieces of carpet, and they became a litter, if
you will, or a sheet or a door, any way by which we could carry these bodies
and lay them out and find any living among them before we prepared for the
mass grave.  I saw men and women some deny it but I saw for myself women, and
somewhere in my mind there is always a picture of a child, a bloated child,
which has lived with me all these years.

     Again, my privilege was at the altar of God to remember the unknown, and
that indeed, as I say, is my function to remember those who are unknown
because, on that day, and days to follow, with the use of the trenches and you
know what a trench of course is six foot wide, six foot deep long trenches to
bury all those people.

     One German man said to me through an interpreter, "I am ashamed to be
German."  I heard these very words here today, whether or not we have believed
them fully.

     I just finished a year of research fellowship at Yale in psychology, and
sometimes we talk about believing 50 percent or 75 percent, but take it for
what it is worth.  They were ashamed that day, but it was their work to bring
themselves to assist in every way possible to bring those people to restful
peace.  I'm sure in my day I did my part as a priest.  I absolved them.  I
gave them all that I possibly could.

     This brings me to the reason.  I was a young priest.  I have been
ordained 42 years by the grace of God.  I came out of the university to
Providence College, and Pearl Harbor came with me.  As a young priest, I
volunteered, but I was told by my superiors, "You're too young.  Go back to
your classroom."  I asked the following year again, and I was told "Not yet."
In 1943 I was granted a commission and I was in uniform.  I might ask, why did
I go into the service?

     I believe, as all of us believe, that patriotism and religion are from
the same parent virtue of justice.  General Pershing told us that religion and
patriotism go together to love God, you love your country and they belong
indeed together.  So I left my classroom, put on the uniform of the United
States Army as a chaplain, and went through France and Belgium and Holland.

     On that morning in Nordhausen, I knew why I was there.  I found the
reason for it - man's inhumanity to man.  What has happened to that beautiful
commandment of the Decalogue, the commandment of God to love one another?  Ten
years after the war, I went back to the cemeteries of Belgium and Holland,
there being at that time no troops buried in Germany.  Every sixth cross had
the words, "Unknown but to God."  I took that upon myself, and from that time
on, all these 36 years, I have never forgotten because, again, I had the
privilege of the altar of God.  Particularly on holy days when we remember all
those who have gone before us, my mind is very keenly centered on the
obligation to remember what has gone before us.

     As a result, I adapted a beautiful poem which contains my sentiments. As
you might recall, "In Flanders Fields" was written by a Canadian colonel and
talks about the poppies growing row on row in the Flanders field.  My little
verse which I adapted from "In Flanders Fields" is rather crude poetically,
but it has my thoughts, and I call it, "In a Foreign Field."

          In a foreign field we now repose.
          Who we are nobody knows!
          God knows we suffered at the hand of man.
          Now we rest in another land.

          We are the dead:  short years of life
          We lived, felt hope and saw human strife
          Loved and in turn were loved and now
          We lie in a foreign field.

          Take up our quarrel with the foe!
          To you from failing hands we throw
          THE TORCH. 'Tis yours to hold high!
          If ye break faith with us who die
          We shall not sleep, for we lie
          In a foreign field.

Father John Pawlikowski

     Of course I comment on this from a somewhat different perspective from
the other people on this panel.  I was a child during the Holocaust.  I do
remember my grandmother speaking about some of the atrocities that her own
family was suffering in Poland, but I essentially have come to the Holocaust
as a part of the second generation or of the new generation that is now
charged with - and I take that very seriously keeping alive the memory and the
testimonies that we have heard presented so eloquently in the conference so
far.  If we are to profit ultimately from this conference, from the
experiences that the speakers on this panel and other panels have narrated, as
well as the testimonies of so many others who are not here, it is up to us,
the younger generation of theologians and educators, to try to interpret this
to people of our generation and to the people who are following us as
students.

     I myself do not think and in a decade of studying the Holocaust, I have
become more and more convinced of this - that the Holocaust is simply a kind
of irrational happening in human history.  We have many examples of irrational
behavior by dictators of various types, and in those instances many people's
lives were lost.  At one level, the loss of any life by whatever means is to
be mourned.  Every human life is precious, whether it is lost as a result of
irrationality or whether it is lost through the development of a highly
rational system of terror.

     At one level, it does not matter, but at another level it does matter
very much because I think what we learned from Nazi Germany, and what I have
learned in a decade of study and from trying to put together the testimony of
so many people, is that Auschwitz did truly represent the beginning of the new
era:  an era in which the development of bureaucracy, the development of
technology, and the growing loss of what I would call a transcendent or
traditional morality came together to make possible a whole system of mass
murder and mass extermination that was deprived of a good deal of emotion and
which was so highly systematized that, in the last analysis, it became as
routine as putting automobiles together in a Detroit assembly line.  It
represented the development of a whole language of extermination in which the
human component had been driven out.

     So I think we are faced with new possibilities in our age, possibilities
that no generation has faced before.  We have the possibilities of mass
extermination, and we also, perhaps, have a situation where much of the moral
values that put some kind of check in the past on immoral human behavior have
begun to vanish.  It seems to me the challenge before us, as many have already
said around the table, is to harness technology, to make sure that we do not
become so bureaucratic that the human component is lost.

     On this score, for example, I know of the work of Professor Henry
Friedlander who made comparisons of how the language employed during the
Vietnam period by our own government in reporting the death statistics day by
day bears some of the same kind of dehumanized tones that marked the Nazi
reports of what went on day by day in the extermination camps.  Certainly we
need bureaucracy in a mass society, but can we have bureaucracy that does not
lose the preciousness of human life and that does not lose the sense that
ultimately bureaucracy is for the people, not to dominate people?  Those of us
who are church people or religious people have to deal very seriously with the
moral crisis of our age.  We have to recognize that in very important ways,
our society has become much more one-dimensional, very, very secular.

     I am not sure that we can simply solve this dilemma by returning to the
old pious platitudes of the past.  I agree with many of the observations made.
I myself have said that to blame God for the Holocaust is in many ways a cop-
out, and I believe that very strongly.  I believe very strongly the remark
that Elie Wiesel made at a lecture some years ago in the Chicago area when a
rather young Jewish scholar, who obviously was very upset by the Holocaust and
at God's lack of compassion in the Holocaust, challenged Wiesel and asked,
"How can you tell us to continue to believe in God after Auschwitz?" Elie, in
his quite dramatic fashion, turned to this young Jewish scholar and said, "My
friend, I think the question after Auschwitz is not how we can believe in God
but how can we believe in man."

     However, I believe something else.  I believe that perhaps our
understanding of the God/human community relationship has been altered by
Auschwitz.  God has a very important place, but perhaps we have to examine
much more closely our role, and perhaps new responsibility has been thrust
into our hands.  Professor Hans Jonas, a Jewish philosopher, described very
well the post-Auschwitz state of things when he remarked some time ago that we
have come to live in the generation in which near omnipotence is paired with
near emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least what for.  It seems to me
that is the challenge before us.

     What is the purpose of society?  How can we take the new forces of
bureaucracy and technology and harvest them once again for the service of
humankind?  How can we, as religious people, as religious communities, provide
the moral tone that will in fact prevent bureaucracy and technology from
creating future nightmares like those that we have learned about from
Auschwitz and, in turn, create a new world in which brothers and sisters can
live in freedom, peace, and justice?

     Auschwitz is not over.  It was the beginning of a new era.  As a younger
theologian, I do feel the responsibility of challenging myself and my church
because Auschwitz was not simply the final stage in the history of anti-
Semitism, as many have said here.  It was due to racial theories which come
from outside Christianity which represented a kind of paganism.  That doesn't
excuse the Christian churches, however, because there is no doubt in my mind
that traditional Christian anti-Semitism provided an indispensable seedbed for
Auschwitz.  We must confront that in the churches, but we must also move on to
confront the even greater problem of providing some kind of moral ethos in
concert with our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community, in other
religious communities, and also with those who might describe themselves as
humanists so that our world can love instead of hate in the future.

Discussion

Rev. Franklin Littell:  I think we all feel a very strong commitment to the
dead and to the living as we make our testimonies, if I may use a Wesleyan
word, of what we have learned.  As we think back upon crucial experiences in
our own lives and think about our responsibilities as those who are alive, we
are blessed to be alive today and to preach and to teach.

     I would like to ask one or two questions of panelists to bring out a
point or so.  I was struck by the fact that the Reverend Wood and Rabbi Nadich
both reported the way in which our forces brought the German civilian
population into the moment of accountability, particularly in the handling of
the bodies.  Both Father Doyle and Father Wood mentioned the shame that was
expressed by Germans.

     One thing which has struck me about our conference here is that we have a
session on resistance, but we don't have anything on German resistance. There
was German resistance.

     We have examined each other as to how much we have learned and how much
we have not learned in the decades.  One of the problems in our international
community today - in the North Atlantic community particularly - is how much
have the Germans learned in both East Germany and West Germany?

     What do you think to be the genuine effect as nearly as you can tell?  Do
you think it was just a fleeting moment in which somebody felt shame or do you
think there's evidence that we have had a new day in terms of our relationship
to the German people?

     It is a very sensitive question.  I'm sure our rabbis have pastored
members of their own flocks who simply haven't been able to go back.  Do you
have reflections on that particular problem?

Rabbi Judah Nadich: I have had two different kinds of experience with Germans.
I think I can divide them into the older generation and the younger
generation.  The experiences I refer to that fall into the first category are
meetings with Germans in the village of Dachau, which was not very far from
the concentration camp.

     I am certain that there were many days when the winds must have carried
the stench from the chimneys of the crematoria to the village of Dachau.
Certainly, trucks went back and forth through the village streets daily.  Yet,
when I spoke to Germans in the village of Dachau, they said they were
completely unaware of the fact that there was a concentration camp a couple of
miles away.

     "My friend and colleague Rabbi Schacter shares with me the experience of
having gone back to Germany to lead retreats, religious retreats, for our
American troops of the Jewish faith in the postwar years.  I was there in 1974
at Berchtesgaden and it was a strange phenomenon that all the Germans spoken
to by any of our troops always said - and I'm speaking about the older
generation - that they were in the German army but that none of them ever
fought against Americans, that they fought only against Russians.  I see in
both of these experiences a defensive attitude or an attitude of trying to
deny the truth.

     On the other hand, I have met young Germans on their way to Israel to
work in Israeli kibbutzim [collective farms] for, as they said, a kind of
repentance for what their parents did.  My wife and I were in Poland in August
of 1980, and in one of the two still existing synagogues in Cracow we met a
group of about 25 or 30 young Germans on their way to Israel to atone, as they
said, for the sins of their parents.

     So I think you see two different kinds of reactions on the part of
Germans.

Rabbi Herschel Schacter:  I was in Germany less than two months ago on the
mission that Rabbi Nadich described.  I have the distinct pleasure of being
Rabbi Nadich's successor as the chairman of the Commission on Jewish
Chaplaincy of the National Jewish Welfare Board.  In that capacity, I
conducted a retreat for all chaplains of our faith who are currently serving
in the American forces in Europe.

     I inquired about precisely this question that you raised, Dr. Littell,
and I think that it would be fair and intelligent to react and say that all
generalizations are irrational.  It is just as difficult and impossible as it
would be to try to ascertain what is the attitude of the American people
toward any given issue, past or present.

     It is a fact that there are many Germans who deny.  It is a fact that the
few Jews who still live in Germany outside of the military communities
encounter various covert and occasionally overt expressions of rank
anti-Semitism.

     On the other hand, I do not know whether we should necessarily speak of
the older versus the younger German.  There may be older who have genuine
remorse and younger who would just as soon wipe this experience away from
their consciousness.  There is good and bad in every people, and it is the
degree to which we can maintain a measure of faith in the ultimate goodness of
humanity that we can retain our sanity.

Rev. Franklin Littell: Another question which was a bit blurred in some of our
discussion it comes up all the time in these public education conferences is,
were there 11 million victims of the Holocaust or were there six million
victims of the Holocaust?  Is the Holocaust a term which is to be used
interchangeably with genocide in World War II?  How do you see this particular
issue?

Father Edward Doyle: Well, just the other day I consulted Webster's Collegiate
Dictionary.  Number One, the Holocaust has reference to the massacre of the
Jews.  Secondly, it is genocide for all nations.  So, I think that answers
your question.  I would like to ask a question of the rabbis who are present.
How about the question of a person with hatred?  What do we do to eradicate
that hatred?  Hatred, you know, naturally came forth with all this here, but
hatred is sort of a cancer that works in your own disposition. How do you
dispose of that or how do you eliminate that from people?

Unidentified Voice:  That is a long, long educational process, together with
much prayer and with the invocation of divine help.  It depends in many cases
upon the cause for the hatred.  All of us who saw the concentration camps can
well understand the hatred of the victims for the persecutors, and I would be
loathe to ask them to erase their hatred.  I was not in their position.

Unidentified Voice:  I live in a community that has a considerable number of
Germans in it.  There are two reactions.  I will state them simply and
quickly. Those Germans who have come recently from Germany I mean, since World
War II just resent any mention of the Holocaust, concentration camps, etc.
They do not want to be disturbed by it.  The Germans who are of three
generations can justify it by remarks bordering on hatred in their attitude
toward Jews.

Rev. Franklin Littell:  I would like to throw a curve into the discussion by
saying that although it comes naturally to us, the terms "sadism," "cruelty,"
"bestiality," "lust," "anger," and "hatred" do not really exhaust the problem
of the Holocaust.  After all, these are all human emotions or feelings.

     I was impressed, reading again Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, by an exchange
between Leverkuhn and his purported biographer.  Leverkuhn asks, "Do you know
anything stronger than love?" and his friend said, "Is there anything stronger
than love?" Leverkuhn replies, "Yes, curiosity," which is to say there is a
demonic note there that anything which can be done will be done.

     The question in my mind is whether the Holocaust is really, except for
cases of abuse and brutal guards and so forth to be subsumed under cruelty and
anger and bigotry and hatred and so forth, or whether it represents a massive
running-wild of technological capacity.  After all, these camps were built,
supervised, rationalized, and excused by Ph.D's.  They were products of some
of the best universities in the world not Nazi universities, but universities
of the Weimar Republic and the late German Empire.

     What does that say?  I would think it would say to us that the problem
has to be dealt with also in terms of scientific technological capacity which
has a demonic thrust to do whatever can be done, which has lost ethics, which
has lost commitment to life.  To treat it as though it is cruelty like some
savage torturing of a defeated foe or something like that does not really
handle it, does it?

Father Edward Doyle:  I would say that theologically there are more vices than
virtues.  In other words, man has the capacity of doing more wrong than he
does right.  You can enumerate the natural virtues - prudence, justice,
temperance, fortitude - but man has that demonic aspect within him, so there
are more vices than there are virtues.

Unidentified Voice:  I would add that I think we learned from this that it is
not sufficient to cultivate the mind.  As you indicated, the mind can be used
to create the most diabolical evils.  In addition to cultivating the mind,
there must be the cultivation of the soul or of the spirit.  If you do not
have both of them going together at the same time, you may very well destroy
civilization.

     I think that is a lesson not only learned from the past.  It is something
that we have to be very much aware of here in the United States and indeed
throughout the entire contemporary world.  It is not enough to depend upon
science and upon technology.  They can lead us to the death camps.

Father Edward Doyle:  Man has a free will.  The intellect and the will
correspond back and forth.  The intellect proposes something, and the will
carries it out.  The longer you keep things in your mind, the more attractive
they become.

     No one commits a sin to be unhappy.  For example, if I am going to steal
an automobile, I think to myself, "Should I do what I want?" The more I think
of it, the more my will is propelled toward it, and I go for it, but my idea
was based in the mind.  Therefore, morally you have got a will so the will
must also be educated.  That is where the morality comes in.  I may know it is
wrong, but the more I dwell on it instead of just dissipating it from my mind
- the more I tend to follow it, and then I am wrong.  That is where the will
comes in.

Rabbi Herschel Schacter:  I think that this provides us with the only
intelligent rationale that we can bring to bear in groping and struggling with
the fundamental theological problem that I posed earlier.  I think that those
quasi-theologians who came forth with the concepts, "God is dead," and, "There
is no God after Auschwitz," and all of these other notions, have simply thrown
up their hands in despair and blamed God for what was clearly the failing of
man.

     As Dr. Littell and Judah Nadich pointed out, and as we all say, it is
precisely those who pursued the technological advances of modern science,
without any regard to the moral implications of their work, who are
responsible for the tragedies that befell us.  We cannot blame God.  We must
blame ourselves.

Rev. Franklin Littell: This suggests, perhaps, to pin it down, that the people
of the universities and that is most of us in this room, I'm sure - and the
people in our congregations, Jewish and Christian, have to take seriously
lessons of the Holocaust in the law schools, medical schools, teachers,
colleges, theological faculties, engineering schools, and the like.