Eric Muller: The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz
When the white smoke told the world that Josef Ratzinger had been elected pope, it took some of us a moment or two to get our minds around the idea that the College of Cardinals had elevated a childhood member of the Hitler Youth to one of the world's leading positions of moral leadership. Clearly, Ratzinger had been no teenaged Nazi, but his public comments about that period of his (and his country's) life left some – myself included – with the nagging sense that he was airbrushing his memories of that time and too quickly dismissing the idea of resistance.
A synagogue visit last August and recent news of a contemplated visit to Israel were welcome moves; they left me hopeful that my concerns about airbrushing and avoidance of responsibility were wrong.
On Sunday, Pope Benedict visited Auschwitz and dashed those hopes.
His remarks there were a huge disappointment, and a confirmation of my worst fears about this pope and his stance toward his, and Germany's, wartime past.
A year ago, it disturbed me that Josef Ratzinger and his family had managed only an ordinary moral response to the challenge of Nazism, rather than the exemplary response that one might have hoped for in a future pope. It turns out, though, that Josef Ratzinger's understanding of this chapter of modern German history does not even rise to the level of the ordinary. Ratzinger is out at the self-absolving fringes of his generation on the question of German responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.
Worse still, Ratzinger proved himself incapable – even standing beside the crematoria of Auschwitz – of understanding the Holocaust as a crime against the Jews. Jewish suffering is just a tool for Ratzinger, an instrument for repositioning Christianity as the true target of Nazi oppression.
Consider, first, Ratzinger's account of his reason for traveling to Auschwitz:
Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here.
"I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power."
This takes the breath away.
Of course, scholars debate the extent of the responsibility that ordinary Germans bore for the crimes of the Third Reich. Some subscribe to Daniel Goldhagen's thesis that "regarding Jews, German political culture had evolved to the point where an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became – and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be – Hitler's willing executioners." Others favor my UNC colleague Christopher Browning's views that there was nothing uniquely German about the crimes of the Reich, and that mundane principles of social psychology better explain ordinary Germans' collaboration with evil than any uniquely German tendency to violence and anti-semitism. And some prefer other accounts of the degree of responsibility shouldered by average Germans.
But no respectable scholar sees the evil of the Third Reich as the responsibility of a cabal of criminals who intimidated and terrorized an unwilling German people into achieving the cabal's goals.
Nor could one plausibly maintain such a thing, given the overwhelming numbers of ordinary Germans who pulled triggers, typed lists, ordered supplies, "aryanized" property, guarded trains, drove trucks, medicated "defectives," built buildings, extracted fillings, collected taxes, broke windows, stitched clothing, tallied numbers, scheduled shipments, and did the thousands and thousands of other tasks that that built the Nazi machine of oppression and kept it running.
Yet that is Josef Ratzinger's view. There was the "ring of criminals" who "rose to power," and there was "our people" – the German "people," that is – whom the ring of criminals "used and abused."...
Read entire article at Is That Legal? (Blog)
A synagogue visit last August and recent news of a contemplated visit to Israel were welcome moves; they left me hopeful that my concerns about airbrushing and avoidance of responsibility were wrong.
On Sunday, Pope Benedict visited Auschwitz and dashed those hopes.
His remarks there were a huge disappointment, and a confirmation of my worst fears about this pope and his stance toward his, and Germany's, wartime past.
A year ago, it disturbed me that Josef Ratzinger and his family had managed only an ordinary moral response to the challenge of Nazism, rather than the exemplary response that one might have hoped for in a future pope. It turns out, though, that Josef Ratzinger's understanding of this chapter of modern German history does not even rise to the level of the ordinary. Ratzinger is out at the self-absolving fringes of his generation on the question of German responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.
Worse still, Ratzinger proved himself incapable – even standing beside the crematoria of Auschwitz – of understanding the Holocaust as a crime against the Jews. Jewish suffering is just a tool for Ratzinger, an instrument for repositioning Christianity as the true target of Nazi oppression.
Consider, first, Ratzinger's account of his reason for traveling to Auschwitz:
Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here.
"I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power."
This takes the breath away.
Of course, scholars debate the extent of the responsibility that ordinary Germans bore for the crimes of the Third Reich. Some subscribe to Daniel Goldhagen's thesis that "regarding Jews, German political culture had evolved to the point where an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became – and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be – Hitler's willing executioners." Others favor my UNC colleague Christopher Browning's views that there was nothing uniquely German about the crimes of the Reich, and that mundane principles of social psychology better explain ordinary Germans' collaboration with evil than any uniquely German tendency to violence and anti-semitism. And some prefer other accounts of the degree of responsibility shouldered by average Germans.
But no respectable scholar sees the evil of the Third Reich as the responsibility of a cabal of criminals who intimidated and terrorized an unwilling German people into achieving the cabal's goals.
Nor could one plausibly maintain such a thing, given the overwhelming numbers of ordinary Germans who pulled triggers, typed lists, ordered supplies, "aryanized" property, guarded trains, drove trucks, medicated "defectives," built buildings, extracted fillings, collected taxes, broke windows, stitched clothing, tallied numbers, scheduled shipments, and did the thousands and thousands of other tasks that that built the Nazi machine of oppression and kept it running.
Yet that is Josef Ratzinger's view. There was the "ring of criminals" who "rose to power," and there was "our people" – the German "people," that is – whom the ring of criminals "used and abused."...