Mission at Nuremberg (32 page)

Contemporary Germans who were not alive during the Holocaust don't have the moral standing to ask for forgiveness, despite the guilt some may feel for the evil acts of their parents' or grandparents' generation. Similarly, most contemporary Jews, despite the pain many may feel for the atrocities perpetrated on their families during the Holocaust, don't have the moral standing to forgive the evil acts done to their parents' or grandparents' generations. “While forgiveness between contemporary Germans and Jews is therefore not logically possible,” Dorff says, “reconciliation is both possible and necessary.”

Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, wrote about the moral impossibility of survivors of the Holocaust to forgive what was done to those who did not survive. In 1941, Wiesenthal—then thirty-one—was captured in Poland and sent to the Janowska work camp near Lvov. One day, Wiesenthal was included in a group that was taken out of the camp to work at a nearby hospital for the day. Wiesenthal was given the job of emptying cartons filled with rubbish from the operating rooms. At one point, he was approached by a nurse.

“Are you a Jew?” she asked.

He followed the nurse, who walked quickly into the Red Cross building, up a flight of stairs, and into a room with only a white bed and night table beside it. The nurse left the room, and a figure on the bed, wrapped in white, asked in a broken voice, “Please come nearer. I can't speak loudly.”

As Wiesenthal approached the bed, he could see the man's white, bloodless hands and a head completely bandaged with openings for his mouth, nose, and ears. Wiesenthal sat down on the edge of the man's bed. “I have not much longer to live,” the man whispered. “I know the end is near.” Wiesenthal could tell the man was German.

“I am resigned to dying soon, but before that I want to talk about an experience which is torturing me,” the man said. “Otherwise I cannot die in peace.” The man explained to Wiesenthal that he'd been in the hospital for three months, and that he'd heard there were Jews working as laborers there. He'd asked a nurse to find a Jew and bring him to his bed, and the nurse had complied, acting on the last wish of a dying man.

The man said his name was Karl and that he was a member of the SS.

“I must tell you something dreadful, something inhuman,” Karl said, grabbing Wiesenthal's hand. “I must tell you of this horrible deed . . . because you are a Jew.”

Karl told Wiesenthal that he was twenty-one years old, and from Stuttgart where his father managed a factory. An only child, Karl was brought up Catholic—an altar boy whom their priest hoped would grow up to study theology. Instead, Karl had joined the Hitler Youth, and faith receded from his life. Out of fear, his parents stopped speaking much about their lives in front of him, so he found friendship in his Hitler Youth comrades. Like most of his friends, when war came Karl volunteered for the SS.

“I was not born a murderer,” Karl said.

When Karl's SS platoon joined a unit of SA stormtroopers in Dnepropetrovsk on the Russian front, they found the town deserted. Cars had been abandoned. Homes were burning. Streets were blocked by hastily erected barricades. Karl's unit received an order to report to another part of the town. When they arrived at a large square, he saw a large group of civilians huddled together and under guard.

“And then the word ran through our group like wildfire: ‘They're Jews,' ” Karl told Wiesenthal. “In my young life I had never seen many Jews. . . . all I knew about the Jews was what came out of the loudspeaker or what was given us to read. We were told they were the cause of all our misfortunes. They were trying to get on top of us, they were the cause of war, poverty, hunger, unemployment.”

The order was given and Karl, along with the rest of his unit, marched toward the huddled mass of families—150 people, maybe 200. The children stared at the approaching men with anxious eyes. Some were crying. Women held their infant children. A truck arrived with cans of gasoline, which were taken to the upper stories of one of the small houses on the square. Karl and his unit drove the Jews into the house with whips and kicks. Another truck arrived, and those Jews, too, were crammed into the small house before the door was locked.

Wiesenthal had heard the story before. Many times. He didn't need to hear the ending. He knew the ending. He got up to leave. “Please stay,” Karl pleaded. “I must tell you the rest.” Something in the tone of Karl's voice—or maybe the need to hear a confession from the mouth of a Nazi—convinced Wiesenthal to sit back down.

The order was given, and the SS unit pulled the safety pins from their grenades and tossed them into the upper windows of the house. Explosions, then screams, then flames and more screams. The men readied their rifles, prepared to shoot any of the Jews who tried to flee the fire. Karl saw a man on the second floor of the house, holding a child. His clothes were on fire. A woman stood next to him. The man covered the child's eyes with one hand and jumped. The woman followed. Burning bodies fell from other windows. The shooting began.

“My God,” Karl whispered. “My God.”

For Karl and his comrades “there could be no God,” Wiesenthal wrote. “The Führer had taken His place. And the fact that their atrocities remained unpunished merely strengthened their belief that God was a fiction, a hateful Jewish invention.” Weeks later, a shell exploded near Karl and he lost his eyesight. His face and upper body were torn to ribbons.

“Here was a dying man,” thought Wiesenthal, “a murderer who did not want to be a murderer but who had been made into a murderer by a murderous ideology. He was confessing his crime to a man who perhaps tomorrow must die at the hands of these same murderers. In his confession there was true repentance, even though he did not admit it in so many words. Nor was it necessary, for the way he spoke and the fact that he spoke to me was a proof of his repentance.”

Karl wanted to die in peace, and peace was only achievable through forgiveness. “In the long nights while I have been waiting for death, time and time again I have longed to talk about it to a Jew and beg forgiveness from him. . . . I know what I am asking is almost too much for you, but without your answer I cannot die in peace.”

Wiesenthal stood up and looked at Karl's folded hands. And then he turned around and left the room.

When he returned to the camp, Wiesenthal told his fellow prisoners about Karl. “So you saw a murderer dying,” one said. “I would like to do that ten times a day. I couldn't have enough hospital visits.”

But another, a devout man named Josek, said that as he'd begun listening to the story of Karl, he'd feared that Wiesenthal was going to forgive the SS man by the story's end.

“You would have had no right to do this in the name of the people who had not authorized you to do so,” Josek said. “What people have done to you, yourself, you can if you like, forgive and forget. That is your own affair. But it would have been a terrible sin to burden your conscience with other people's sufferings.”

Wiesenthal argued that he was part of a community “and one must answer for the other.” He was unsure that he'd done the right thing by remaining silent and leaving the man to die. But Josek told Wiesenthal he had done the right thing. Karl had not made Wiesenthal suffer, and what Karl had done to other people, Josek said, “you are in no position to forgive.”

“If you had forgiven him,” Josek said. “You would never have forgiven yourself all your life.” Two years later, an SS guard shot Josek for being “work-shy.”

Wiesenthal survived Janowska. He also survived Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, and Buchenwald. When he eventually landed in Mauthausen he was assigned to Block 6—the death block. The camp's gas chamber “was working at full pressure,” he wrote later. But it “could not keep up with the enormous number of candidates. Day and night above the crematoria there hung a great cloud of smoke, evidence that the death industry was in full swing.”

At Mauthausen, Wiesenthal befriended a young Polish man named Bolek, who had survived exhaustion, exposure, and starvation on a three-hundred-mile death march from Auschwitz only to end up in Block 6 at Mauthausen. Wiesenthal heard Bolek praying—something most of those in Block 6 had given up on—and eventually found out that the young man had been originally arrested outside the Catholic seminary in Warsaw. His time at Auschwitz had been especially difficult, because the SS guards knew Bolek was a priest in training.

Wiesenthal told Bolek about his encounter years earlier with the dying Nazi. “Should I have forgiven him?” Wiesenthal asked. “Had I in any case the right to forgive him? What does your religion say? What would you have done in my position?”

Bolek thought that Karl had turned to Wiesenthal in the hospital that day because “he regarded Jews as a single condemned community.” For Karl, Wiesenthal was a member of that community, and therefore his last chance to confess. By simply listening to Karl's confession Wiesenthal had liberated the Nazi's conscience and allowed him to die in peace, returned to his childhood faith through confession, Bolek said. If the man had shown sincere repentance for his sins, as Wiesenthal believed, then he deserved the mercy of forgiveness. “In our religion repentance is the most important element in seeking forgiveness,” Bolek said.

If Wiesenthal struggled with his moral authority to forgive a dying, repentant Nazi who had taken part in the massacre of Jews, what is the moral standing of a non-Jew, like Bolek, a Catholic seminarian, to offer mercy to a murderer of Jews? Christian theologians speak of a counterpart to forgiveness that's not quite forgiveness, but more like compassion for a wrongdoer. Forgiveness entails identifying the guilt of another, placing that person in a moral universe, assigning blame, lifting blame, and then letting the person go. Compassion and mercy are analogues to that.

When Bolek told Wiesenthal that in Christianity “repentance is the most important element in seeking forgiveness,” he was not quite right. It is in this fissure that the difference exists in Christian forgiveness theology and Jewish forgiveness theology. Christian tradition has consistently said that forgiveness precedes repentance. Forgiveness can happen on its own, without repentance. Christians believe God has already accepted and forgiven them.

There are questions in the face of that Christian tenet: So all Christians just get a blank check? They can do whatever they want in their life because they've already been forgiven ahead of time? They're not accountable for their behavior because Christ's death on the cross has relieved them of that responsibility? Each Christian has already received God's grace so they can live their lives with a lack of morality? And historically the answer from theologians is that Christians are motivated to do good because they are loved by God, not because they are threatened.

But the Christian concept of forgiveness must be strained by the idea of genocide. Could Christians really believe that their God was crucified to forgive those who conceived of the gas showers at Auschwitz or the “parachutist” jump into the quarry at Mauthausen?

In the Christian tradition, since forgiveness isn't earned, the question about whether someone is worthy of forgiveness simply doesn't apply. Just by being human one is worthy of forgiveness. Those who are wronged forgive the wrongdoer, not the evil deed the wrongdoer committed. Forgiveness is a way of separating the doer from the deed. The person doing the forgiving—the victim who has been harmed by the wrongdoing—acknowledges the wrongdoer's evil deed, but doesn't count it against him. It's the person who is forgiven, not the deed. The deed can't be changed. The past can't be undone. Wrongdoers can be disassociated from the wrong. That's what forgiveness does.

But what right does anyone other than those who died in the Holocaust have to forgive anyone for having created or participated in the Holocaust? Because the majority of the Holocaust's victims were Jewish, it would seem right to honor the Jewish sensibilities about forgiveness. Christians like Gerecke and O'Connor would argue that they had to act toward the Nazis in their flocks, and their families, in ways that honored their deepest understanding of humanity, and its relationship to God. The chaplains believed that their duties toward the Nazis and their families revolved around how to return them to the good.

Martin Luther would have supported the idea of offering spiritual consolation to those who have committed wrongs against others. He believed every human being is both sinner and justified as righteous through God's grace. He would have seen no principal difference between a criminal and an innocent. He would not have divided people into children of light and children of darkness. No one is innocent—neither a Gerecke nor a Kaltenbrunner—but everyone, Christians believe, is saved.

Even though Nazi war criminals had committed a different kind of wrong than ordinary people do, Gerecke would not have seen the monsters he pastored at Nuremberg as children of darkness. And he certainly would not have seen their wives and children that way. Without forgiving the deeds of those responsible for wiping out six million Jews, by the nature of their faith in God, Gerecke and O'Connor saw these men and their families as part of a single human community. Once they recognized the men in Nuremberg as just men, ministering to them, despite the horrors they'd executed, became a matter of attempting a transformation. The Nuremberg chaplains' one single burden was to return these children of God from darkness to the good of their own light.

 

THE DAY AFTER THE
executions, Andrus announced to the press on behalf of the Allied Control Council that the bodies had been cremated and that the ashes had been “dispersed secretly.” The decision for cremation countered German law, which stated that relatives had a right to the remains. The commandant said he couldn't elaborate on what “dispersed secretly” meant, but reporters surmised that the intention of the secret dispersal was, as the
New York Times
put it, “to destroy absolutely any possibility that the location of the Nazi leaders' remains ever could become a shrine for some future brand of Nazis.”