Tag Archives: Hitler

Survival In Auschwitz

08 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in Biography, History

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Holocaust Survivor Tattoos

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”

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From Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.

I tried but failed to find a full text of the book to post here. So pick up a copy for yourself. Just don’t start it late at night, because you won’t get to sleep.

While I believe Levi’s unflinching moral outrage and existential cynicism are legitimate, even admirable, I think they should be counterbalanced by Elie Weisel’s somber reflection that, “after Auschwitz, I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind.” These takes on the Holocaust are divergent ways of grappling with Rabbi Akiva’s paradoxical epigram that “all is foreseen by God, yet free will is given.”

Kristallnacht, the attacks which intensified the rabid persecutions leading to the Final Solution, broke out 75 years ago tomorrow. Something on which we should all spare at least a moment’s reflection in the next few days. The German novelist W. G. Sebald remarked, in a hyperbolic but effective line, that, “no serious person ever thinks about anything else but the Holocaust.”

The above shot is one of my favorite photos, now hanging in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, “Diaspora” by Frederic Brenner.

In Our Image

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in History, Psychology

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Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin“Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. ‘The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,’ wrote Marx; ‘the will to create mankind anew’ is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology’

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.”

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From Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, one of the  most illuminating, easy-to-read books about science and philosophy out there.

The Defense of Freedom and Peace

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Freedom, History, Politics, Speeches, War

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Winston Churchill

“Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed. After many miseries and prolonged confusion, there arose into the broad light of day the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself. Independent Courts of Justice were created to affirm and enforce this hard-won custom. Thus was assured throughout the English-speaking world, and in France by the stern lessons of the Revolution, what Kipling called, ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law.’ Now in this resides all that makes existence precious to man, and all that confers honor and health upon the State.

People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armory of potent and indestructible knowledge?”

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From Winston Churchill’s speech “The Defense of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)”, delivered on October 16th, 1938. You’ll find it in the essential collection of Winston’s best speeches Churchill: The Power of Words.

Winston Churchill