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

Surviving War and Terror: Sister Hildegard

Sister Hildegard in her apartment

On my second day in Dresden, I met Sister Hildegard.  She is 84 and has lived in Dresden all of her long life.  During that life her world has changed dramatically again and again.

She was born in 1937, one of four children of German parents. Her father was a member of the Nazi party. Her mother had left the Church so there was no religion in her early life.  The war began in 1939 when Hildegard was two and soon her father left to serve in the army.  At the beginning of 1943 her father was reported "missing presumed dead" in the Battle of Stalingrad.  

Also in 1943, Allied bombing of Germany began in earnest.  Hildegard and her siblings went to the country for school.  In February 1945 the beautiful city of Dresden was smashed and burned in consecutive nights of Royal Air Force fire bombing raids.  

The war ended in May of 1945, with more trouble ahead.  Dresden was in the Soviet occupation zone so the communist East German government was in charge.  When Hildegard turned 14 years old in 1953 she had to find a job. She could not continue her education. The problem was not that her father was a Nazi, it was that her parents were educated. Preference for education under the communists went to the children of workers. 

Hildegard found work at a Catholic hospital in Dresden. At first she cleaned bricks to help in rebuilding the hospital which was nearly completely destroyed in the fire bombing of 1945.  She eventually trained as a nurse and decided to become a sister in the order of nuns that work in the hospital.  Her mother returned to faith in 1947 and would become part of the Land of Kanaan sisterhood in Darmstadt.  

Until 1961, Hildegard and her family could cross back and forth between East and West Germany with little difficulty.  But the Berlin Crisis in 1961 led to a fully closed border.  Hildegard was in Dresden. Her mother was in Darmstadt and it would be many years before they were reunited.  

With the communists in full control, Hildegard took charge of the OB GYN section of the hospital from 1967 to 1997.  She worked under increasingly harsh control by the communists then suddenly in 1990 they were gone.  One of the things that made life bearable under the communists was everyone in her community and in other faith communities were clear that the danger was the communists. The communists had spies everywhere.  As devout Catholics the nuns were always under suspicion.

But believers were all united in opposition to the communists.  When communism fell, the freedom that followed led to competition and the end of opposition to a single enemy and the unity that went with it.

Sisters who had lived through the Nazi era said life then was very different. During that time, some of the sisters were devoted Nazis and some were ardently against the Nazis.  The challenge was to keep the community together when the worst strife was within.  Hildegard said after the war, the sisters who were devoted Nazis either repented or left the order.  The purge was rapid. 

My friend Cliff and I visited Sister Hildegard in her room in the hospital residential area for nuns and women in long-term care.  She speaks no English. I speak no German. Cliff and Hildegard talked and every ten minutes of so, Cliff would give me a summary of what he learned. I asked questions in these intervals. 

Cliff (Bruder Timotheus) and Sister Hildegard

Part of her story was in a speech she gave in 2015 explaining the many radical changes she lived through.  She and Cliff reviewed the speech which was written in neat handwriting while I watched and wished I had learned German.  She does not have a computer or a phone--except the phone with a wire on her desk. 

Sister Hildegard has retired from nursing but still a leader in her community. We ate lunch in the hospital cafeteria and sat at her table.  As the guest, I got to sit in her chair and eat some very good goulash and mashed potatoes.  On the walk to and from the cafeteria she greeted everyone we met with a smile.  She is in every way a gracious host.

Visit to Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Russian Prisoners of War

For the past ten centuries, the worst fate a person in Europe could suffer was to be born a Jew or a Russian.  For those thousand years Jews were targets of persecution wherever they were. Ordinary Russians, for nearly a thousand years, were effectively slaves. Within two decades of their emancipation in 1863, Tsarist repression began again. Russians were killed. And a million Jews were killed in pogroms at the end of the 19th Century by the same Tsarist government.

Then Russian peasants revolted in 1917.  What could be worse than being slaughtered by Germans in World War I and the rule of the Tsar?  Communism.
Millions of Russians were killed by Stalin during his 30 years of rule.

In World War II, Russian soldiers fought bravely and eventually beat the Nazi Army.  But the Russian soldiers captured by the Nazis were treated as untermensch sub human.  At the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the museum records the fate of Russian POWs. Many were executed and disposed of in mass graves or a crematorium.

In one of the saddest moments of a very sad visit, I saw the container below.  Nazi executioners dumped the bodies of Russian soldiers in a box lined with zinc for disposal.  The sad moment came from reading a book called Zinky Boys by Svetlana Alexievich. Fifty years after World War II, the Soviet Union shipped those killed in the War in Afghanistan home in sealed zinc coffins.

Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her writing on the Chernobyl disaster, compiled an oral history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the suffering of soldiers and families.

When I saw slaughtered POWs were dumped into zinc bins, I thought of zinc the coffins the Soviets used, and zinc trash cans--zinc keeps trash cans from rusting.

Everyone brings their own experiences into a museum.  My knowledge of Russian history added a new dimension of horror to my experience of visiting the camp.

Of course, none of the horrors perpetrated by the Soviets in any way diminish the atrocities of the Nazis.  The Nazis slaughtered Russian POWs based on race, just as they slaughtered Jews and others for the same reason.

The German Evangelical Church Backed the Nazis in 1932 Then Turned on Their Jewish Members

In Charlottesville in 2017 Nazi flags and Rebel flags

flew together. Jim Crow laws in the American South 

inspired the German race laws that led to the Holocaust.

In 2016, the Evangelical Church in America voted overwhelmingly for a President who is openly racist and has bragged about breaking all the Commandments.  Depending on how you count Evangelicals they are one quarter of the U.S. population. The same people who, less than 50 years ago, did not smoke, drink, dance or watch movies and called on their followers to separate themselves from the world, now grasp for money and power as ruthlessly as the worst Medieval Popes and Cardinals. 

By backing Trump, the Evangelical Church in America abandoned faith for political power. The Evangelical Church in Germany did the same thing in the 1930s.

In 1932 Germany’s state church—the German Evangelical Church—was by far the largest Church in Germany with 40 million members. Another 22 million Germans were Catholic. Jews numbered fewer than a million and about ten percent of them were converts who were members of German Churches. 

Throughout the 1920s, the Evangelical Church was increasingly influenced by German nationalist ideologies. German Evangelicals voted for the openly racist Hitler because they feared communism more than Hitler's rabid racism. Nazis stoked fears of communism and said Hitler would Make Germany Great Again.

With Hitler’s rise to power 1933, most Protestant clergy willingly accepted Hitler’s racist views. The Nazi regime issued the Edict of April 1933 called the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.” Many Protestant clergy consequently agreed with the Nazi policy and chose to eject all pastors who had Jewish parents, grandparents or great-grandparents. The Church voluntarily “Aryanized” itself, immediately firing all pastors of Jewish descent in 1933; by 1935, all congregants of Jewish descent were expelled.

Nazis used Luther’s anti-Semitic writings “with scarcely a word of protest or contradiction" from the leaders of the Protestant Church.

Theologically and politically, the fates of Christians and Jews should have been bound together. But most Germans, including those within the church, put an even greater distance between themselves and the Jews. The Church turned its back on its own Jewish believers, which made it easy for Nazi leaders to segregate them, and then kill them.

Theresienstadt, a small city in the German-occupied part of the Czech Republic, was a Jewish ghetto and concentration camp during World War II.

One witness said:

From the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945, more than 140,000 Jews were sent to this ghetto, which for many, about 88,000, became a transit camp to the death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Approximately 33,000 died in this ghetto. When it was all over and the ghetto had been liberated on May 8, 1945, there were about 19,000 survivors.

Among those who died in Theresienstadt, or were deported from Theresienstadt to the death camp Auschwitz or survived the horrors in Theresienstadt, were individuals who were Christians of Jewish descent. It is tempting today to call them “Messianic Jews”, but this would not correspond with their self-perception. Like most other Jews in Germany they saw themselves as Germans; unlike most other German Jews they were Jews who had embraced the Christian faith, some by conviction, others for pragmatic reasons. But in Theresienstadt they shared the fate of “Mosaic” Jews. In the eyes of the Nazis, their Christian faith did not obliterate their Jewishness.

Theresienstadt is a window into what happened to Christians of Jewish descent during the Holocaust. It is estimated that as many as ten percent of the half million Jews in Nazi Germany were Christians. They suffered and died along with their fellow Jews. For Nazis, blood not belief defines a person, or a non-person.

The path Germany followed from civilized nation to Nazi domination went from prosperity, to defeat in war, to racism and slaughter.

In 1913, Germany was by many measures the most powerful and civilized nation on earth, the world leader in education and manufacturing. It was the country where Jews were most integrated into the life of the nation, many of whom considered themselves German citizens who were Jewish.

By 1923, Germany was defeated in war and crushed by the terms of peace.  Anti-Semitism was on the rise and Germany turned inward.  In 1933, Hitler was in power and German Jews would suffer increasing attacks.  By 1943 nearly all German Jews were dead or enslaved and soon would die.  Thirty years and an immoral leader completely changed the fate of Jews in Germany and every nation the German Army conquered.  

The Evangelical Church in Germany backed Hitler early and strongly, blessing his war machines and abandoning Jews in their own congregations and their Jewish neighbors to be tormented, deported and murdered.  The Church sold out for power.

Beginning in 2015, the Evangelical Church in America has backed the vilest human being ever to be elected President and backs him more enthusiastically than any other group of his followers.  I know many Evangelicals who say that naming conservative judges to the court and defunding Planned Parenthood prove he is a Pro-Life champion.  I could understand their position before Charlottesville, but after Trump called Nazis “fine people” there is no way to label him Pro-Life. Nazis, White Supremacists and all who support them are Pro-Death, Pro-Genocide but not Pro-Life, unless they mean Pro White Life.

Jerry Falwell Sr. was the first prominent sellout for political power. He created the Moral Majority to create voting bloc for all those who wanted the restoration of White Power. The Moral Majority was clearly the White Majority in America. Brown people, Liberals, Gay people and others who were not white conservatives were not true Americans.

When the Moral Majority dissolved in 1989, it spawned a dozen other organizations with Christian labels grasping for secular power. By 2016, Evangelical leaders flushed doctrine, covenants and commandments down a cosmic toilet and showered blessing on an entitled racist who despises everyone mentioned in the Beatitudes.

But this is not new territory for Evangelicals. Before the Civil War, Evangelical Churches in the America South blessed the especially vile form of slavery practiced in slave states. When the South was defeated, the same Churches supported Jim Crow laws creating American apartheid. Churches were just as segregated as voting booths, schools and drinking fountains.

Since World War II, American Evangelical leaders have blamed the reclusive biologist Charles Darwin for inspiring Nazi leaders with the theory of evolution. They assume Darwin is responsible for Social Darwinism, which is akin to believing Albert Einstein developed the philosophy of moral relativism.

Do I think Trump will turn on the 5 million American Jews? Maybe. But it’s more likely that a national crisis will let a worse racist than him grab power. Trump, unlike Hitler, is a coward and a bully who dodged the draft and attacks men who actually have courage.  He is more sleazy than Nazi.

But I am quite sure the Evangelical Church will corrode further and faster as it receives power and privilege from its new god in the Oval Office. Its millionaire preachers will abandon all traditional faith for its orange-ish golden calf.

Big Day for Russia--Bad Date for Me

The biggest holiday on the calendar in Russia and many other former Soviet States is May 9.  These countries celebrate the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on the day the Nazis surrendered to the Russians, May 9, 1945.

The soldiers in the photo above are fighting at the Battle of Kursk in 1943.  This was and is the largest armored battle ever fought and the Soviet Army won, turning the the tide against Germany.

While this day is great for the Soviet Union, Russia and the free world, it is a bad date for me.  Eight years ago today, I had the most and worst injuries I have had on one day in my life.  If you don't know the story it is here and here.

Because there are only 365 days in a year, many days will have multiple meanings.  So the coincidence that my worst wreck and the greatest Russian victory are on the same day is just a coincidence.

So in the spirit of this day, I will practice my recently learned Russian language skills and race my bicycle at Smoketown Airport this morning.  What else would someone do on a sunny Spring Saturday morning?