Entrepreneurs of Violence: Money and Hate Drove SS Innovations in Horror

 

Jewish slave labor in the Flossenburg quarry

The Flossenburg concentration camp was a working quarry site before it became a death camp. When the SS took over operations in the late 1930s prisoners became free slave labor to deliver quarry stones to the Nazi war effort. Later in the war, when there was little demand for stone and much need for Messerschmidt fighter planes, the underground halls in rural Bavaria became manufacturing sites for airplane parts. Innovations by the SS and Gestapo made the horrors of the Holocaust far worse than they might have been. 

In the mid 1930s, Hitler had vague plans to send Jews to Siberia once he conquered Russia or to Madagascar. The possibility of killing all the Jews in Nazi-controlled territories became possible as the SS developed more efficient methods of mass murder. At the beginning of the war Jews were killed primarily by shooting. Tens of thousands of German police and soldiers murdered Jews across Eastern Europe by shooting them over slaughter pits such as those in Kiev and Lviv in what is now Ukraine. 

Camps such as Auschwtiz and Treblinka began mass murder by gas only in the 1940s. Then rather than millions of individual murders, Jews were killed by the thousands and cremated. The death camps led to the particular horror created by Adolph Eichmann—putting three million Jews in rail cars and shipping them to their death, primarily in Poland. 

Less than a year before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of Jews were stuffed in rail cars and murdered on arrival or after being used as slave labor. As the war neared its end, slave labor lost its value and death became the sole business of the camps. The final spasms of slaughter were the worst of all. 

The crematorium at Flossenburg

At Flossenburg and Auschwitz, those who survived slave labor were marched west ahead of the Soviet Army. Tens of thousands of prisoners starved and froze to death and were buried along the roads during the cruel winter of 1945.

A diorama made by a camp survivor

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.