I won't discuss that particular Nazi collaborator today because I'm only vaguely aware of him, not having had the time to study such evil, though relatively petty criminals in the Nazi crime wave. I see from the Wikipedia article you reference that he belonged to a Lutheran congregation which, looking it up just now WAS LED BY AN ANTI-NAZI PASTOR. So it's clear his membership in that particular congregation isn't where he got his collaboration with the Nazis.
If I have time to look farther into him, I might write about him in the future. So many Nazi scientists and doctors, so little time to look into them. I will note that other things I see online say one of the problems is a lot of people, including apparently his own child, believes he destroyed a lot of the evidence that would be needed to determine the extent of his crimes against humanity. That, I will point out, is not generally true with those people my writing about has pissed you off so mightily, I've used their own words and recorded deeds to make my case.
If you are going to blame churches for not being in total control of the behavior of their members - and if they did you'd accuse them of totalitarian behavior - why don't you hold the medical profession that researcher belonged to even more responsible. They enabled him to practice his profession just as the legal profession and the universities he went to enable William Barr to commit his crimes, right out in full view. The Lutheran church didn't give that Nazi doctor credentials to preach or teach theology, he was licensed to practice his profession, having gotten academic credentials that allowed him to work in the field and put him in contact with the Nazi medical officials who enabled what we rightly consider criminal activity. That would be because a number of them, like him, had credentials from universities and were licensed as doctors and hired as scientific researchers. Why doesn't that totally discredit universities and the medical profession?
It's stupid to judge an entire religious orientation, Christianity, because there are people who profess that faith who are, in their actions, faithless. A legitimate criticism of Christianity, for which the ultimate authoritative voice is what Jesus said and did, what the acknowledged early authorities in the other scriptures, especially Paul, said WOULD HAVE TO BE A CRITICISM OF THOSE WHOSE ACTIONS WERE IN LINE WITH THE SCRIPTURE. You'd have to blame them for doing to others what they would want done to them, to feed the poor,clothe the naked, heal the sick and visit the prisoner, to treat the alien among them as they would someone of their own group. To treat the least among them as they would treat God. Go ahead, do that, you'd find yourself in the company of Charles Darwin and his inner circle who warned that doing literally all of those things would endanger the "superior" sort of people. You want to blame Christianity for those people who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus but whose actions couldn't possibly be more of a contradiction to the Gospel.
The Nazis fully intended to replace Christianity with Nazism after the war, their own internal documents prove that was part of their plans AFTER THEY WON WORLD WAR TWO. Their inter rum plan was to gradually introduce Mein Kampf into churches and to get the Bible out of it, to replace the cross with the Nazi swastika. The great scholar and religious figure, Susannah Heschel has said that the Nazi collaborators in the Lutheran establishment were in the process of totally altering and distorting the Scriptures to make Jesus an Aryan and to cut out everything overtly Jewish about it. As I recall the percentage she said they had to cut was well over half of it, though I don't have her book with me. She pointed out that that was a big problem for, especially, Lutherans because Luther depended so heavily on Paul and Paul explicitly said he was a Jew, a Pharisee. No doubt after such willing collaborators in Christian churches would have been swept aside after the Nazi stronghold was sufficiently strong. Hitler had many around him whose atheism cannot be said to violate anything about atheism, any who might have called themselves Christians had to violate virtually everything that Jesus taught to be Nazis. Nazism is a contradiction of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospel.
But I'll say it another way, if I were to look at the medical doctors who are active in Washington as Republicans, if I treated the medical profession in the way that the secular culture insists Christianity be treated, I'd have to conclude the medical profession was uniformly greedy, amoral, stupid and generally mentally ill. I haven't noticed any of them losing their credentials or anyone seriously proposing they be kicked out of that lucrative profession. I'd say the same thing about any of the Republican caucus in the House and will probably say the same about those in the Senate who profess Christianity. Only, in most cases, that's a personal claim, it's generally not a claim that Christianity and churches have the power to refute, it's not set up like a profession or a degree granting institution. Though John Paul II and Benedict XVI stripped a number of fine and brilliant Catholic theologians of their license to teach as official Catholic theologians - what they did to Elizabeth Johnson was particularly disgusting - nothing they did could keep them from identifying themselves as just that.
I'm going to go eat an orange in honor of Susannah Heschel. And if you don't understand why that's appropriate, find out why. I love Susannah Heschel.
Update: OK, I'll name him. Othmar von Verschuer, who I read about while researching these issues but who I'd not gotten around to looking into in the depth I like to before I write about someone. This was the only reference to him in my notes on this subject.
After spending six years researching the history of the Institute, Hans-Walter Schmuhl from the University of Bielefeld is convinced that these were not the only instances of collaboration between the institute and Auschwitz.
"There were most probably further ties, beyond these two research projects," he said. "On the strength of my studies, I also believe that samples of people with disabilities were also sent from Auschwitz to Berlin. During the war years, this field was one of the institute's man research areas."
In 1942, Josef Mengele's former professor Othmar von Verschuer was made director of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem, Berlin. He and his protégé went on to work together on the two eugenics projects.
Aussenansicht des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz, 60 Jahre Gedenktag Mengele sent blood samples from some 200 patients of various race to his partner at the Berlin institute, while Karin Magnussen received human parts from the notorious concentration camp, such as eyes taken from a dead Sinti family.
I would guess that it is quite likely that the Sinti family who were murdered as part of the Nazis "final solution of the gypsy problem," a particular interest of Adoph Eichmann, were Christians, the Roma people in Eastern Europe being largely Christians.
I will also note that it was my negative reaction to a racist "Gypsy" joke made on a play-lefty blog that led to my seven years plus trolling by the guy who made the racist joke.
No comments:
Post a Comment