Science Forums 2

[enorbet2]

Lemit I have a direct connection to the Holocaust and I'm hoping I can give you some words that in pondering may help you release yourself from the poison of undeserved guilt while encouraging your underlying drive to try to insure such never happens again, even while it is going on right now, somewhere,

My connection is an odd one. While in elementary and junior high school Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley were heroes to me since I was fascinated with flight, especially Space Flight. In High School this continued and expanded when I began to see WWII through flight technology eyes and held great respect for the ME-262 and other firsts in progressive, even breakthrough aircraft design. As is often the case for the young, possibly even especially young males, looking for a suitable path and view of the world I even wondered if such a black and white approach to the world wasn't correct given such monumental achievements. That sense was short-lived for a couple reasons.

I first read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" as a sophomore in High School and in the early pages became appalled at how the Treaty of Versaille sought to punish the German people to a degree that seemed like slow murder. For a time I despised the Weimar Republic. I said so to my Father who had fought in WWII and who was horrified by my views.

Then two things happened in quick succession. I got to the second half of the book and began to question what I had concluded in the first half and immediately got "Mein Kampf" from the library. The more I read the more complicated and conflicting it seemed. How was it possible for both greatness and monstrosity to exist in one man? Remember I was young and fairly innocent. It was then that my Father told me that he'd marched into two camps and had seen with his own eyes the bodies stacked like cordwood, the mass graves, those walking skeletons with haunted eyes and the nearby townspeople in abject denial.

It was also then that I learned that while my Grandfather was Irish Catholic, my Grandmother, possibly the single most important person in my life, came from a Jewish family and I was shown the documentation of some 30 distant relatives who had been murdered in camps in 3 countries. Obviously my viewpoint did an "about face!". However it only took a little more History and life experience to realize that all men have both "angels and demons" inside so I never came to blame the German people any more than those Jews that failed to see the writing on the wall and leave. I even learned that the two greatest "justifications" for the Holocaust for Hitler, Himmler and the rest came from the reaction, or lack of it to the Armenian Genocide and, of all things, Darwin! They bent the Theory of Evolution to their own means as Social Determinism so we can't blame Darwin. We can however blame the world community that ignored the Armenian Genocide since that crime was at least as bad as that of the original perpetrators.

So yes we can't forget or let such things slide but there is no benefit after the fact to the blame game. The greatest tool or weapon is education and political involvement, Write a book. Make a film. Write a government official or 10 and express your concern that such things get glossed over, or paid no more than lip service. Write to the Vatican protesting the reinstating of the group of Nazi sympathizers who had previously been excommunicated if you think that is proper. Teach your children and your grand children of what you have experienced as my Father and Grandparents did for me. Just please learn to expurgate the guilt. It is as surely poisonous as Zyklon-B and serves you no good purpose, IMHO.
Promote Peace, friend, in yourself first