ALAI, América Latina en Movimiento
2010-02-08
Thinking About Being Human After Auschwitz
Leonardo Boff
Sixty-five years later, we remember the Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazism of Hitler and Himmler. The inhumanity shown in the extermination camps, especially in Auschwitz, Poland, was terrifying. That fact caused Jews and Christians to question their faith. They would ask themselves: How do we think about God after Auschwitz? The answers suggested so far, either from the Jewish side or by J.B.Metz and J. Moltmann on the Christian side, are insufficient. The question is more radical still: How do we think about human beings after Auschwitz?
It is true that the inhuman derives from the human. But, of how much inhumanity is humanity capable? Nazism was a project, deliberately conceived, and with no scruples, to redesign humanity. At the head would be the Arian-Germanic race; other races would fall into secondary or tertiary categories; others would be enslaved or simply exterminated. In the October 4, 1943, words of its formulator, Himmler: «This is a glorious page of our history that has not been and will never be written.» Hitler's National Socialism was clearly aware of the total inversion of values. What was a crime was transformed by him into virtue and glory. Traits of the Apocalypse and the Antichrist are revealed here.
The most disturbing book that I have read in my lifetime, and which I still can't fully digest, is titled, Commander in Auschwitz: autobiographic notes, (Kommandant in Auschwitz; autobiographische Aufzeichnungen) by Rudolf Höss, (1958). During the 10 months he was jailed and interrogated by the Polish authorities in Cracow, between 1946-1947, before being finally sentenced to death, Höss had time to describe with extreme precision the details of how he sent near two million Jews to the gas chambers. What was mounted there was a factory, daily producing thousands of corpses, that even frightened the executioners themselves. It was the «banality of death» of which Hannah Arendt talked.
But what is even more scary is his human profile. Do not imagine that Höss linked mass extermination to feelings of perversity, diabolic sadism and pure brutality. To the contrary, he was loving towards his wife and children, conscientious, a friend of nature, in fact, a normal petitbourgeois. At the end, just before dying, he wrote: «Public opinion may think that I am a blood-thirsty beast, a perverse sadist and a murderer of millions of persons. But they will never understand that this Commander had a heart and that he was not bad.» The more unconscious that Evil is, the more perverse.
This is what is disturbing: How can such inhumanity coexist with humanity? I don't know. I suspect that here is where the strength of ideology and total submission to the chief enters the picture. Höss, the person, identified himself with the commander and the commander with the person. The person was Nazi, body and soul, and radically loyal to the chief. On receiving the order of the «Führer» to exterminate the Jews, there was no room for thought: off we go to exterminate them, (der Führer befiehl, wir folgen). He confessed that the orders were never questioned because, «the Führer is always right.» The slightest doubt was considered as treason to Hitler.
But evil also has limits and Höss felt them personally. There is always something of humanity that remains. He himself tells of two children who were entertaining themselves playing. Their mother was being pushed into the gas chamber. The children were forced to go in as well. «The pleading eyes of the mother begging for mercy for those innocents —comments Höss— I will never forget them.» He made a brusque gesture and the guards threw the children into the gas chamber. He confesses that many executioners could not bear so much inhumanity, and committed suicide. He himself stayed cold and cruel.
We now face an extreme fundamentalism that is expressed by totalitarian systems and blind obedience, be they political, religious or ideological. The result produced is the death of the other.
This danger threatens us as well, because we have now given ourselves the means of self destruction; to unbalance the Earth system and annihilate much of life. Only by strengthening within the human being that which makes us more human, such as love and compassion, we can limit our inhumanity.
- Leonardo Boff, Theologian, Earthcharter Commission
http://alainet.org/active/36005&lang=es
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