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The Holocaust: Really, It Was About Jesus

Jill

By now, everyone has probably heard the sad news that Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal died earlier this week. I have a lot I’d like to say about him, but can’t find words that are appropriately laudatory — he was an amazing figure, and his death is a huge loss for the entire world.

But hey, why pay him the respect he deserves and honor the memory of all the Jews and other minority groups killed in the Holocaust when we can make this about Jesus, “King of the Jews”? Surely that’s not offensive. Ain’t nothin wrong with taking the genocide of millions of innocent people and making it about me and my god.

I can understand that Jews find no comfort in the thought that the Nazis held them responsible for the coming of Christ, that the victims of Auschwitz were, therefore, unwitting martyrs for His sake. For centuries, they had been pursued as Christ-killers. Suddenly, they were attacked as Christ-bearers. Here is an antithesis, an irony a Jew cannot but find hard to take. It may even be offensive to him to think of his kinsmen tortured by the Nazis as forced witnesses to Jesus.

Ya think?

UPDATE: Dawn’s still going. Now it’s “The Jews’ and the Christians’ Holocaust Suffering: A Covenant in Blood.”

I’m not here to argue that Nazis were Christians, or that no Christians were harmed in the Holocaust. But taking the purposeful slaughter of Jews, gypsies, Africans, gays and other minority groups — a slaughter that killed more than 5 million Jews alone– and saying, no, really, it was about Christianity and Jesus the whole time! is unbelievably offensive and disgustingly self-centered. Yes, the Holocaust is inarguably a tragedy for everyone, Christians like myself included. But it is also a uniquely Jewish tradegy (and not because they were “martyrs for Christ”). My European relatives were affected, and in learning about what happened I was affected, but no one was trying to wipe my people off the face of the earth. That’s a pretty big difference, and one that I’m certainly not disrespectful enough to try and co-opt as my own. I’ll leave that to Dawn (who yes, I know is of Jewish heritage) and her self-involved minions.

17 thoughts on The Holocaust: Really, It Was About Jesus

  2. I don’t think I can work up the energy to be offended. I’m more mystified about how anyone can be quite that confused about Nazi ideology.

    Eh, I take it back, since every other wingnut is convinced that the Nazis were socialists.

  6. Since the article was written in 1965, it seems a stretch to accuse the author of insensitivity to Simon Weisenthal’s death.

    As for the ideological/theological question, the article’s rather modest claims are compatible with what I know of Nazi ideology (which is a fair amount, as I studied it in preparation for a German history major). The Nazis were indeed pagan in their inner circles, and did indeed hate the Jews for being the people that had “inflicted” Christ on the world, “undermining” the pure Nordic power with womanly compassion, etc. ad nauseum. There were a lot of other things going on as well; I would not characterize this as being the primary thrust of Nazism or as the primary motivation of the Holocaust.

    But it is something that they believed at high levels.

  7. I simply don’t get how people believe that Nazism was anti-Christian, or even anti-Catholic. Hitler was not especially Christian (not in action or in faith), but Nazism was not in any sense anti-Christian.

    Of course, the idea of Nazism being anti-Catholic/-Christian goes all the way back to before the actual outbreak of WWII. Lorentz wrote in I Was Hitler’s Prisoner (first published in 1937 or 1938) that he felt that Hitler’s long-term target wasn’t the Jews, but rather the Catholics. However, I doubt that Lorentz would have said something similar to that by the end of WWII.
    The reason Hitler and the Nazis might have seemed to target Catholics was that much of the right-winged resistance to the Nazis taking power came from the aristocrats, who often were Catholics.

  8. It’s an article of faith for many wingnuts that nazism == atheism (or socialism), therefore atheism (or socialism) == nazism. Pointing out that this is (a) a logical fallacy, and (b) completely ahistorical never gets you anywhere, because they’re wingnuts. Belief preceeds fact. It’s just another example of the Hitler Zombie at work.

  9. Jill, once again, thanks for reading Dawn Eden so we don’t have to. The full article, which I’m looking at now, is worse than typical antisemitism in its masquerading as praise for Jews. I hope to respond to it more fully next week.

  11. What is a fact is that Nazism was, as a matter of intellectual history, atheistic and anti-Christian. It was a bastardization of Nietzche’s “will to power” philosophy, which was decidedly anti-Christian. It is also a fact that the Nazis attacked the Catholic Church on ideological grounds, perceiving, correctly, that the Church’s teachings are antithetical to Nazism. It does no disservice to the memory of the millions of Jews who died in the holocaust to remember that millions of Christians also died at the hands of the Nazis in the same manner. Indeed, the Wiesenthal Center website itself acknowledges 5 million such deaths. The fact is that no one knows how many Christians were killed. No one has ever bothered to try to count them, and they are largely forgotten.

  12. Since the article was written in 1965, it seems a stretch to accuse the author of insensitivity to Simon Weisenthal’s death.

    Dawn Eden brought it up as a way to honor Weisenthal’s death. That’s how it relates to the insensitivity aspect (also, it’s insensitive in the first place).

    It does no disservice to the memory of the millions of Jews who died in the holocaust to remember that millions of Christians also died at the hands of the Nazis in the same manner.

    I don’t think that’s what I said at all… See here:

    I’m not here to argue that Nazis were Christians, or that no Christians were harmed in the Holocaust. But taking the purposeful slaughter of Jews, gypsies, Africans, gays and other minority groups — a slaughter that killed more than 5 million Jews alone– and saying, no, really, it was about Christianity and Jesus the whole time! is unbelievably offensive and disgustingly self-centered.

    My point is that it’s offensive to take the Holocaust and attempt to make it about Christianity, and to say things like “the Jews were martyrs for Christ.”

  16. I, for one, was disturbed by Pope Rat’s recent declaration that the Holocaust had nothing to do with Christianity but with Paganism. First, it was self-serving. Second, it rewrote history: Hitler received plenty of financial support from the Vatican. Furthermore, there are pictures of various high ranking German churchmen offering their benedictions for the success of the Nazi cause.

    At the very least, these churchmen did not ask where all the Jews were disappearing to. They did not inspect the camps. They supported and affirmed anti-semitism.

    If the Catholic Church had not given money to Hitler in the late 1920s just because he was a hard liner against the socialists and the communists, much of what happened in the 1930s and 1940s would not have been possible.

    In a sense, Rat is right: Christianity did not cause the Holocaust. What helped it was a purblind ecclesiasticism where the Vatican failed to see what was right about the Left and support that. Marx did not hate the Church for Jesus: he hated it for its hypocrisy and support of the exploitative class.

    The pope, cardinals, and bishops of that time were just too enamoured of the gold crosses their benefactors bestowed on them to care about matters of charity and toleration.

  17. No one foresaw the holocaust in the 1920s. No one. Indeed, in the 1920s the Nazis were a fringe party without power. No one foresaw in the early 1930s either that Hitler would try to exterminate the Jews.

    What are your sources for the claim that the Church gave money to the Nazis? It seems like an odd thing for the Church to do given that Nazi ideology was devoted to the destruction of the Church.

    What pictures are you referring to? There is a very famous photo on the cover of the book “Hitler’s Pope.” The photo is famous because it is, essesntially, a fraud. It shows the Pope being greated by German officials, and is intended to suggest that the Nazis were welcoming the Pope. In fact, the photo is of Weimar officials — German opponents of the Nazis.

    Your assumption that the “Left” was “right” is disturbing. The “Left” that the Church was battling were not benign social democrats (who were often supported to one degree or another by the Church) but rather hard core Communists who ultimately were responsible for more murders than the Nazis. The Communists opposed by the Church killed in excess of 20 million in the Soviet Union. The Chinese Communists chipped in with 20 million or so of their own. These numbers are so staggering that it is very difficult to wrap one’s mind around them. It is shocking to me that anyone would criticize the Church for opposing the regimes and ideology that are responsible for these deaths.

    The Catholic Church is credited by Jewish historians with saving 800,000 Jewish lives in the Holocaust. That is far and away more than any other group, country or instituion did during the course of WWII. The Vatican hid thousands of Jews in the Vatican itself. There were many Catholic martyrs. There were also milllions — millions — of Catholic victims, including, for example, 3,000,000 Catholic Poles and a large percentage of the Polish clergy.

    In view of all this, I cannot help but conclude that the effort to blame the Catholic Church is part of an agenda that really has nothing to do with what happened in the Holocaust but instead is part of the explicit anti-Catholicism that is so widespread in our society.

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