TheologyThoughts

The thing that frightens me the most about the Nazi Era is that it involved
people like me. It isn't the concentration camp victims that I'm talking
about; it's the Nazis themselves.

We don't like to think of ourselves that way; we like to imagine that the
insanity of the Third Reich was an aberration, an odd exception in human
history. Because the Nazis did monstrous things, we tend to think of them
all as monsters and distance them from the rest of humankind. But they were
people like me.

By and large, they loved their children; they worked hard, were brave and
patriotic. Many went to church. The society that gave birth to Nazism was
not a medieval throwback. No country was more scientifically advanced; no
people better educated. They were patrons of the arts. The German
Protestant Church was the most liberal church in Europe. That's what
frightens me: the people that did these barbaric things were not
barbarians. They were cultured and enlightened. They were people like me.

What's so frightening about that is that it can happen again, that in spite
of multiplied Holocaust Memorials, in spite of people crying, "Never Again,"
it can happen again. Indeed, it probably will happen again. That's the
lesson of history. Our species is notorious for singling out scapegoats to
purge from our ranks, whether it's the Jews of Warsaw, the Palestinians of
Hebron, or the Muslims of Sarajevo. It can always be justified by the
mesmerizing demagogue.

I am a descendant of slaveholders. As far as I can tell from my family
history, they were decent, loving people. How did such people justify so
brutal an institution as slavery? I do not know. I only know that I, too,
am capable of blindly rationalizing great evil. What amazes me about
history is not all the bad things that bad people did; it's the bad things
that "good" people did, people like me.

That's why I fear Nazism -- because it's not so far away. It's always
lurking, not just out there, but inside me, too. To believe that those who
are different from me are less than human is not a thought that is foreign
to our species. It is a thought that embraced in desperate times leads to
death camps and ovens. It is a thought that can be embraced by people like
me.

Robert Benn Vincent, Sr.
Comments at the Grace Presbyterian Church
Hosting the Annual
Holocaust Memorial Service
Under the sponsorship of Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim and
The Central Louisiana Ministerial Association
Alexandria, Louisiana