Christian Nationalism and the Church at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

 

A Church built onto a guard tower at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp

When I visit concentration camps, along with learning about the horror, I pay attention to how the survivors, both victims and those who live nearby, deal with the evil happened in their midst.  

At Flossenburg, one response was to build a memorial chapel just two years after the end of the war in 1947. The stone building of the chapel is attached to a former guard tower.  The chapel honors the victims from 22 countries who were murdered in the camp.  Its design stands against every form of Christian Nationalism--the arrogant and hateful belief that God picks specific nations to be His representative here on earth.  

Christian Nationalism has been the justification for slaughter in the name of God since the Church melded with the government after the fall of the Roman Empire.  I recently read Karl Jaspers "Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus." Jaspers makes clear that Jesus pointed to the Kingdom of God and had no program for any kind of kingdom here on earth.  In the Gospels, there is nothing to support taking any kind of political power in the name of God.  A vegan butcher is less of a contradiction than conquest in the name of Jesus. 

The Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount, one of the central documents of Christianity, says God is with the victims in this world.  "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." That is not the marching orders for "Christian" army to slaughter its neighbors.

But Christian Nationalism has fully infected the Evangelical Church in America.  In 2016 nearly 80% of Evangelicals voted for the "America First" immigrant-hating candidate who expressed their beliefs.  The percentage went up in 2020.  Four years of lies and hate made the Christian Nationalist candidate more attractive. White supremacists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka just made fake Christians more excited.   

So in the midst of all the sadness of the remains of the Flossenburg concentration camp, I was glad to see a flat rejection of Christian Nationalism and all of the simmering hate behind it.  

No one can love the whole world. Abstract love is not love at all. The commandment of God to love our neighbor whether in the Hebrew Scriptures of the New Testament can only be brought into being by loving those with us and near us.  

The Holocaust, among its many horrors is a record of people who ignored, betrayed and murdered their Jewish neighbor.  From the Pyrenees to the Ural mountains, the Jew next door was beaten, robbed and dragged away in the night to be murdered. 

Every form of Christian Nationalism is wrong and hateful. Flag waving America First Evangelicals make the Jesus they claim to worship into a symbol of hate.  

My Summer Vacation: More Concentration Camps

Arbeit macht frei the ironic and terrible sign at the gate 

of Auschwitz and other Nazi Concentration Camps

Next week I am flying to Germany to join my best friend Cliff on a thousand-mile tour of Nazi Concentration Camps.  We have visited other concentration camps together in 2017, 2019 and 2020:  Buchenwald, Dachau, and the first concentration camp opened in the state of Hesse in February1933.

We also visited Nuremberg in 2020, the site of the rallies that were central to Hitler's power. 

In July we will visit Flossenburg, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Theresienstadt.   We chose these because Cliff had never been Auschwitz, I had never been to Flossenberg and neither of us have been to Theresienstadt. 

Auschwitz is the largest and worst of  the camps. A million Jews died Auschwitz, but by the time the camp was in operation, three million Jews had already been murdered. They were shot by tens of thousands of German soldiers, German police, and by police and volunteers in conquered countries.   

Flossenburg is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was martyred by the Nazis just before the war ended. One of the worst Trump toadies wrote a biography of Bonhoeffer in 2011.  Eric Metaxas could write about a martyr and then praise Trump.  

Thereseienstadt in the Czech Republic was the "show camp" for the Nazis early in the war. It was a place they took the Red Cross to show them the camps were not as bad as the rumors. It was also the camp where Jews who were confessing Christians were sent.  Churches in Germany stood aside and let their members who had any Jewish heritage be murdered.  

Bruder Timotheus and Kanaan 

Cliff was Sergeant Cliff Almes in the1970s in Cold War Germany where we were roommates.  After leaving the U.S. military he became Bruder Timotheus at the Land of Kanaan in Darmstadt. Kanaan was founded in 1947 by two women who believed Germany must repent for the Holocaust.

Before 2017, I had never been to a Holocaust museum or memorial or a concentration camp.  But when a racist President put the head breitbart.com in the White House, I knew I had to get connected to my genetic heritage.  Steve Bannon gave white supremacists and neo-Nazis a place to promote hate on breitbart.com  

In August 2017, Nazis were "fine people" according to the President and I needed to learn more about the hateful people who are his base of support.  

Germany was a civilized, if impoverished, country in 1932. By 1945, the country was bombed, invaded and defeated. The Nazis killed millions of innocent people and left their own country a smoldering ruin.  America was the leading democracy in the world in 2016, we are now slowly sinking into tyranny while Republicans cheer. 

I am going to concentration camps to see just how bad it can get if a tyrant rips away American democracy.  

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020

April 21 is Holocaust Remembrance Day.  If you do not know the history of the Holocaust in some detail, you may think of the Holocaust as the death camps, particularly Auschwitz, where a million Jews died. 

During the last four years I have visited Holocaust sites and Holocaust memorials and read the history of the Holocaust in country-by-country detail.  The numbers tell a much different story than the Auschwitz-centered narrative of the Nazi death camp.  Auschwitz went into operation as a death camp in 1942. Previously, it was a slave labor camp. Half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than three million, were already dead by 1942.

Beginning with the invasion of Poland in 1939, Jews were rounded up and killed by the SS, by German police and by local police in Poland.  When the Nazis invaded Russian in June 1941, SS units spread out in conquered territories. The Nazis told local people in eastern Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Belarus and Russia that the property of Jews could be seized by those who killed its Jewish owners.

Jews were dispossessed and murdered by their neighbors.  Some were killed on the spot, others were rounded up and shot over pits, sometimes the victims dug the pits.  Lviv, Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Vilnius and other cities in the east were the sites of mass shootings of hundreds of thousands of Jews.  The shooting was done by tens of thousands of German police, SS men, local police and sometimes German regular army units.  Thousands and thousands of men pulled the trigger on a rifle or a pistol and watched a Jew die in front of them. 

Almost no one survived the early personal slaughter. By contrast, every death camp had some survivors.  There are tales of survivors of Auschwitz. There are almost no survivors of the murders over pits at Babi Yar and other pits of slaughter.

Also, on this day, those who sheltered and saved Jews are honored.  They deserve the honor, partly because they are vanishingly rare.  There were thousands of these heroes, but they represent less than one in one thousand of the 400 million people who identified themselves as Christians in the lands conquered or controlled by the Nazis during World War II.

In his book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” Timothy Snyder says, “The Christians who showed mercy to Jews … were exceptions in the moral catastrophe that was Christianity during the Holocaust.” 

The complicity of Churches began in Germany in 1932 when German Christians supported the openly racist Adolph Hitler who was stoking fear of communism.  German Churches followed Nazi racial laws ejecting Jewish Christians from Churches who had converted, sometimes generations before.  Jewish Christians were almost totally wiped out in The Holocaust with the full complicity of German Churches. 

The Holocaust is a story of mass murder of six million Jews, but from the beginning, the story of the Holocaust of a story of government stripping citizens of rights, it is a story of theft of property, betrayal by neighbors, deportation, enslavement and murder.  The Holocaust was not done by machines. The theft and murder was done by millions of men and women who betrayed, robbed and murdered a person right in front of them. 

Visit to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Weimar, Germany

The day that I visited Buchenwald, I was sad and angry. I was more sad and more angry as the day progressed.  But the anger stayed with me. The anger was worst a few hours after I left the Buchenwald when I visited the castle at Marburg.  

Clearly, I should not have visited Marburg the same day as Buchenwald, but I did not know that when the day began.  

This motto is on the Buchenwald gate.

Jedem das seine: To each his own or To each as he deserves

  the literal German translation of the Latin suum cuique. 

Cruelty and cruel jokes are part of the Nazi belief in their superiority. 

Buchenwald is the first large concentration camp. Mass shootings were the primary means of execution, although more prisoners were worked to death than killed by shooting.  The bodies were disposed of by cremation in ovens, but there was no gas chamber at Buchenwald.  There were hideous medical experiments that killed thousands of the 54,000 killed at the camp.

All of this is numbing when visiting the camps: clean, orderly displays of artifacts can never convey the reality--the terror, the smell, the hate, that permeated every moment in Buchenwald.  

I felt so sad trying to imagine the terror of the victims, and so angry imaging the guards who tormented and killed the prisoners.  

Memorial to murdered Russian POWs

Around the grounds and in the museum were monuments to the various groups tortured and murdered. In addition to the Jews, the Roma people, homosexuals, Russian Prisoners of War, and political prisoners were victims of systematic murder.

Tabulation of deaths

Even the location of the this camp was hateful. It is on a hill above the city of Weimar. The camp could be seen, smelled and heard in the town below.  The location is to literally shove the stinking reality of Nazism in the face of the place where the last democratic government of Germany was set up before the Nazis took over.  As with the horrible joke on the gate: 

Jedem das seine: To each his own. 

Cruelty and cruel jokes are part of the Nazi belief in their own superiority.  Torment, torture, it's all part of being a Nazi. 

Equipment from American liberators of the camp

Inmate uniforms

After seeing the markers, the memorials, the displays, the clear evidence that everyone in Weimar knew what the camp was and what happened in it, I felt rising anger.  I knew that the Nazis would kill anyone who opposed them and that most of the people of Weimar were just hoping to stay alive, but one third of Germany voted for the racist wretch who would lay waste their country.

It was for them, the Hitler voters, the Hitler supporters, the people who cheered at the Nuremberg rallies, they were the focus of my anger.  Hitler's supporters in 1932 did not know their country would be razed and ruined and a smoking pile of rubble before they would vote again.

And my anger was compounded by thinking of the Americans who voted for Trump knowing exactly the sort of racist scum he is.  They saw more danger from Hillary Clinton.  What a joke that is now. Whatever Clinton's faults, she did not want to be a tyrant.

It will be the cruelest irony if the country that liberated the death camps and defeated the Nazis falls into tyranny by voting for a racist pig.  I have offered to bet more than one Trump supporter he will not leave office if defeated. No one has taken the bet.

And then my feelings were worse at Marburg Castle. The tour guide said Marburg is one of the best German castles and the home of St. Elizabeth, a saint so true to the Gospel she was canonized in record time.  I lost it at that point. The last thing I wanted to hear about was one German who actually lived according to the Gospel 800 years ago whose distant countrymen expelled Believers who were Jewish by birth from their Churches in 1935. Nearly all of them were killed.

Forty years ago when I walked the streets of Wiesbaden in 1976, I would look at people who were in their 60s or older and wonder, 'What did you do when the Jews were rounded up, turn your back or shove them in the rail cars.' I was not angry in 1976 and really enjoyed living in Germany, but this trip, I was angry.

Of course, in 1976, no American leader would ever call Nazis "fine people." Democracy is under attack everywhere, but in America the attack is personal. I defended this country. I did not enlist to support tyranny.

In 1976, I was forty years closer to the Holocaust in time, but I saw it as horrible history.  Now I see it as looming threat.

Immigration and Surviving The Holocaust in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

On the eve of World War in the late 1930s, the original "America First" campaign turned away thousands of Jews who came to America to escape the Holocaust.

But more than twenty Jewish families that escaped Germany and the Nazis found refuge in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a haven for refugees then and now.

One of those refugees died on February first.  Just a young boy when he arrived here with his parents, Arno Gerhard "Gary" Wolff of Millersville was 83. 

Born in Schneidemühl, Germany, he was the son of the late Kurt and Else Rothschild Wolff. Arno had two older brothers who stayed behind in Germany. They were both sure that things would get better. Both were lost in the Holocaust.  

The two older brothers were murdered by the Nazis. Arno and his parents, while fortunate to get out of Germany, were left to deal with the scar of the murder of their Arno's older brothers, the sons of Kurt and Else.

Arno Wolff had a long and successful life in America. He taught as a Professor in colleges and universities in both the United States and Germany. But he and his parents lived with a loss from which no one fully recovers. 

Nazis are not "fine people." Not here, not anywhere, not ever.

Talking About the Holocaust After Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally

Nazi and Confederate flags fly together in Charlottesville, Va.

How do you talk about the Holocaust?  Sadly, the events of 2017 gave me clarity I never had before. The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has given me a way to look at the Holocaust that connects with injustice in America, not only as a terrible event that happened thousands of miles away. 

A friend who is the child of Holocaust survivors told me that she has always seen slavery as central to the Holocaust. Jews in the Death Camps were not just murdered. They were worked till their health failed and then murdered. 

American slaves were dragged from their homes in Africa, stripped of everything, then sentenced to permanent and perpetual slavery, a much more cruel slavery than that in the ancient world. 

In Charlottesville, the Confederate flag and the Nazi flag marched together. The two slave and murder empires flew the flags of their losing armies together.

In my family, our conversation about the Holocaust and slavery began together when my daughters were in middle school.  We had just adopted our son Nigel as a baby.  When Nigel was between one and two years old, I read the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin to my daughters while their cute baby brother with the poofy hair slept in the next room.

Before reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, America’s history of slavery, of buying and selling and owning people, was abstract.  But as I read the book and Liza and her son had to escape across the frozen Ohio River to freedom, we could talk about just how horrible slavery really was.

At about the same time, my daughters were reading “Night” by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust memoir, at school.  The parallels helped us talk about what it meant to tear people away from their friends and family and land forever, and to be treated as less than human, less than an animal. 

Nigel is now 18 and a senior in high school. We talked about the Holocaust recently in the context of Charlottesville.  The racists who want to kill and enslave Jews rallied together with the racists who want to enslave and kill African-Americans.

Before Charlottesville, the Confederate lovers could pretend they were just preserving their heritage. But since August, they flew their flags with Nazis. The history of slavery and lynching and Jim Crow oppression is not heritage, it is hate.

The Holocaust Deportation Memorial in Paris

At the east end of Il de Notre Dame in the center of Paris is a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from France to death camps by the Nazis during World War II.  A park covers most of the east end of the island. At the very east end it narrows to a point. The memorial is below the surface of the island pointing in the direction of the deportation: east to Auschwitz and other death factories.

Visitors walk down stairs to an open space with sheer walls, then enter chambers with memorials to the dead. The chamber that points east is long and opens to the Seine through a Barred window. I took a boat ride later in the day and looked in from the outside instead of out from the inside. Either way telescopes the view and focused my mind on the point of the memorial: that two hundred thousand people were ripped from the the land the loved by a racist pig Hitler. 

We should never tolerate a racist in a position of power in our country.

My Love-Hate Relationship with Russia and Ukraine

A Map of the Former Soviet Union. 

Ukraine is the yellow country on the far west.

The kind of person we are inside shows itself both in what we do and how we react.  I had a soul-revealing moment when I heard the news in 2014 of Russia invading Eastern Ukraine and taking Crimea. The summary of the thought that raced through my mind:  “You Go Vladimir (Putin)!”

Cheering for Russia in a military dispute with Ukraine is like cheering for the New York Yankees against a high school team.  Nevertheless I had a vivid moment, not of loving Russia, but hating Ukraine.

The face that came into my mind was my grandmother.  She and my grandfather escaped Ukraine, then part of Russia, at the turn of the 20th century when more than a million Jews were slaughtered in Ukraine in a series of attacks called pogroms. My grandparents had the double good fortune of making it all the way to America.  Many other Russian Jews fled to Eastern Europe.  Those who fled to Eastern Europe and their children were killed by the Nazis 40 years later.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

My grandparents would have described themselves as Russian Jews, not Ukrainian Jews.  For the last thousand years Ukraine has been Russia a lot more than it has been an independent country.  Mark Schauss covers the sad history of Ukraine and Russia in The Russian Rulers History Podcast, available on iTunes. 

While Russia, Poland and much of Eastern Europe has a long history of hating Jews, Ukraine is the most anti-semitic country in a very nasty region. 

Next August, when I ride across what my grandparents called Russia, my trip will begin in Odessa, Ukraine. I won’t be in Ukraine long, but I expect to have the same experience arriving in Odessa that I had when I first set foot in Germany:  “Can this beautiful place really be home to those who slaughtered so many of my people?”

I am re-reading Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Fate,” a haunting book that is “War and Peace” set in World War II, particularly in Stalingrad.  Currently I am reading the letter a Jewish mother in Ukraine is writing to her son in the Russian Army.  The Germans just took over her town.  The Jews are being rounded up, robbed and will soon be killed.  Most of the neighbors are happy and cheer the Germans on, taking the possessions and houses of the Jews.  The mother writing the letter describes women who were friendly for 50 years suddenly turning on her with venom. The neighbor thinks the Jews are getting what they deserve. 

My love-hate relationship with Ukraine and Russia extends through my whole life.  My first military job was live-fire testing of the US Air Force missile inventory, everything from the Sidewinder wing rocket to the Minuteman multi-stage nuclear missile, the main weapon delivery system in the US Cold War arsenal.  Then I was a tank commander on the East-West German Border waiting for World War III to start. 

When I went to college after the Army, the literature of Russia and the literature of Florence, Italy, became lifelong passions.  Chekov, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and later Solzhenitsyn wrote the books I loved most, along with C.S. Lewis, Dante and Machiavelli.  Now I am studying the Russian language so I can read the authors I love most in their language.  Russia is currently home to many brilliant authors, but who knows when they will be forced underground. 

From my grandparents persecution, to my Cold War childhood and military life, through finding the beauty of Russian literature in college, to my current plans to travel across Russia and neighboring countries, I continue to intensify my love-hate relationship with Russia and all of its sad and brilliant history.  At this age, my love-hate relationship with Russia and Ukraine is a permanent part of my life.