A leading Methodist scholar and author asserted that the Holocaust, while a cataclysm in the history of the Jewish people, also “remains a massive event in the life and death of Christians.”
“When the Christians understand the meaning of the Holocaust and what it reveals of the spiritual condition of Christendom, they will mourn it more than the Jews,” the scholar, Dr. Franklin Littell, professor of religion at Temple University and corresponding member of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said.
His comments were made to more than 2,000 people who attended the first public dialogue on the “Origins of the Holocaust; Christian-Jewish Relations in Historical and Contemporary Perspective.” sponsored by the Holocaust Survivors Memorial Foundation, at Avery Fisher Hall Sunday night.
The dialogue, moderated by NBC-TV News diplomatic correspondent Marvin Kalb, also featured Prof. Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University; Prof. Raul Hilberg of the University of Vermont; and Prof. Krister Stendahl of the Harvard University Divinity School.
NOTES A ‘CREDIBILITY CRISIS’ WITHIN THE CHURCH
Littell contended that there exists a “credibility crisis” within the church and the educational system. He pointed out that the Holocaust was “planned, supervised and rationalized” by men and women who supported the Nazi ideology and who had graduated from the university systems of Europe. He noted that the notorious Dr. Joseph Mengele, known as the “angel of death” for his experimentations on Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, possessed two doctorates and was educated in “the greatest universities of the world.”
Referring to what he termed a “credibility crisis of Christianity,” Littell said that “six million Jews … were murdered in the heart of Christendom by baptized Christians.” Noting that these Christians were never excommunicated nor rebuked by the church, he declared: “Adolph Hitler died a church tax-paying Roman Catholic to the end.”
Littell, the author of 20 books and 275 major articles and a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, said the Holocaust “must never be idle conversation. It must never be entertainment. It must be in the context of saving lives.” He added: “We must speak the truth that we know and the lessons to be drawn from it.”
CITES TWO CHRISTIAN REACTIONS TO THE HOLOCAUST
Stendahl, who is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School where he teaches the New Testament and the arts of preaching and worship, said it would be “simplistic to blame Christianity pure and simple” for the Holocaust. But he added that it would “be-naive to deny that Christianity has a strong streak of anti-Judaism.”
Stendahl observed that there were two Christian reactions to the Holocaust: “humble excuse” and a feeling of “guilt.” Elaborating on the “guilt feeling” theme, he said Christian theologians and preachers “are accustomed to” solving problems by applying this feeling or, as he put it, “technique,” so that “it always feels good to feel guilty.”
Referring to the “humble excuse,” Stendahl said this is the argument that Christianity is “perfect, full of love, goodness” and that when things turn for the worse, individual Christians are said to have gone astray on their ideals of Christianity.
According to Stendahl, some western support for the establishment of the State of Israel following World War II was a result of this “guilt feeling.” But had the Jewish State been established on the basis that it was right, he continued, Israel would have wider support internationally then it has today. Referring to the plight of Israel in the international community, Stendahl declared:” Don’t put your trust in guilt.”
Bauer pointed out that the reasons for World War II went beyond strategic and political issues, but focused more on Nazi ideology. “They (the Germans) chose war … for ideological reasons,” he declared. This ideology included the desire of the German people to rule Europe and the world, and to do this the extermination of the Jewish people was seen as a necessary element in this process, Bauer said.
Hilberg, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, and author of several books and numerous articles on ghettos, concentration camps and the psychology of Nazism, asserted that the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis was not an all-out encompassing plan at the outset. He said the policy of the Nazis first centered on the forced emigration of Jews and then advanced to the stage of the complete destruction of a people and their culture.
VIEWS OF POSSIBLE REOCCURRENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST
Questioned by Kalb as to the possibility of a reoccurrence of the Holocaust, not one of the panelists would say unequivocally that it could not happen again. Hilberg noted that he was not a betting man, while Bauer expressed a lack of faith in confidence-setting trends but said people must watch early warning signs similar to those which led to the rise of Nazism. He indicated that pluralism was a central element in maintaining just societies.
Stendahl was more the optimist, saying that the new generation can provide positive steps for the future. While the Holocaust will be remembered with precision and hopefully with enough detail, he said, “I think that it is true to say for Jewish-Christian relations and dialogue, that the primary barometer for the years ahead is the State of Israel and not the Holocaust.”
STATEMENT BY CZESLAW MILOSZ
Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, who was unable to attend the dialogue, said in a statement read by Kalb that the development in the early 20th Century of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest and the popularity enjoyed by the theory of biological nationalism which made nations analogous to biological organisms marked by genetic characteristics, began to take hold with the German people.
Milosz said that the wide popularity enjoyed by the theory of biological nationalism opened the path to the extermination of the so-called “inferior race” and for the first time, educated masses who had earlier rejected the suppression of the rights of minority members of the community accepted this position.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
