Theologian Questions Whether Holocaust Lessons Have Been Learned

A noted Christian theologian today questioned whether churches and universities had learned the lessons of the Holocaust–the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis.

Dr. Franklin H. Littell, chairman of the Department of Religion at Temple University and director of the National Institute on Holocaust Studies, speaking at a meeting of the American Jewish Committee’s Interreligious Affairs Commission, asked if Christian churches had “corrected the centuries-long teaching of contempt for the Jews which prepared the soil for the Holocaust.”

Further, he asked, have our universities changed their teaching and community style so as to produce graduates who are both technically trained and wise? The Commission meeting, held here at the Waldorf-Astoria, was one of a series of preliminary functions preceding the four-day 72nd annual meeting of the AJCommittee, which begins tomorrow and continues through Sunday.

In his address, Littell said that Christians faced a credibility crisis in searching for the origins of the Holocaust. They must seek the answer, he declared, to the question: “How could it happen that six million Jews were murdered by baptized Christians in the heart of Christendom, with the leaders of the so-called Christian nations either perpetrators or spectators?”

Both Christians and Jews, he continued, must ask themselves whether modem education, especially the universities, are still graduating “persons long on technology and short on wisdom- -technically competent barbarians.”

CIVILIZED PEOPLE BUILT DEATH CAMPS

Littell, who has held numerous academic posts and was formerly president of Iowa Wesleyan College, pointed out that the Nazi “death camps were not built and operated by ignorant, superstitious savages somewhere off in the bush; they were planned, built and operated by well-trained products of one of the best university systems in the world. Himmler was proud of the number of Ph. D’s in the officer corps of the SS (the Nazi Elite Guard). The death camps were, so to speak, planned by professors and operated at the strategic level by Ph. Ds.”

Turning to the theological issues involved in Jewish survival and the creation of Israel, Littell pointed out that many Christian theologians and agencies “still break their teeth” on “the truth of Jewish survival. Jewish survival goes contrary to the superseding myth which Christian teachers have been perpetuating since the time of the gentile Church Fathers. The founding of Israel and the reunification of Jerusalem are hard for some Christians to come to terms with, precisely because they are proof positive that Jewry will survive.”

HOLOCAUST LESSONS IN SCHOOLS

In another address at the session, Dr. Perry Davis, senior special assistant to the president of the New York City Board of Education, reported that the recent publication of a 500-page curricular guide on the Holocaust by the Board and efforts to introduce lessons on the Holocaust in high school history courses were motivated by the feeling of community leaders and educators of all faiths that the Holocaust had been severely neglected by most high school history textbooks; the growth of “the Holocaust is a hoax” doctrine, “garbed in pseudo-academic verbiage”: and the need to add morality and a stress on basic human values to the curriculum and to the “back to basics movement in education.”

Pointing out that the New York City public school system was 70 percent non-white in its student makeup, Davis declared that “the Holocaust must be portrayed for what it really was–an attempt to annihilate the Jews as a people, but at the same time, the ultimate act of racism directed at all of humanity.”

Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum, national interreligious affairs director of the AJCommittee who served as consultant to NBC’s recent production of “Holocaust,” told the meeting that “based on reports from communities throughout the United States, it is evident that the program, which reached 120,000,000 Americans, the vast majority of whom were Christian, constituted an unprecedented breakthrough of the barrier of ignorance, amnesia, or willful repression or escapism from facing the central moral challenge that the Nazi genocide of six million Jews represents to Western Christian civilization.”

The AJCommittee’s Mass Media Award was presented to Herbert S. Schlosser, president of NBC, for the network’s “historic contribution” in carrying the four-part Holocaust series “which increased understanding of the meaning of the Holocaust for all people” and to Titus Productions, which produced the series, for “their commitment to human dignity and their artistic achievement.” Maynard I. Wishner of Chicago, chairman of the AJCommittee’s Board of Governors, presented the award.