A Legacy of Hatred: Why Christians Must Not Forget the Holocaust

I just picked this up yesterday in a used book sale and could not put it down until I had finished more than half of it in one sitting. I've read a number of works on the Holocaust in the past couple of years and I found this one, while not the most interesting, certainly the most directly applicable to my life. It surely persuaded me of the truth of the subtitle: Why Christians Must Not Forget the Holocaust. David Rausch (Ph.D. Kent State) was (is?) a professor of church history and Judaic studies at Ashland Seminary, an evangelical school in Ohio. He has organized a truly massive amount of information into nice bite-sized chapters, with plenty of subheadings. This is a book that is very clear about where it is heading each step of the way. What it lacks in artistic pretense it more than makes up for in honesty, facts, and earnestness. It gives as solid and balanced of a basic history of Hitler and Nazism as I have yet seen. He shows fascism in all its contradictions and moral complexities. Some of this makes us very uncomfortable. There is such tragedy in learning of just how the Poles (victims of Russian Stalinist and German Nazi attrocities themselves) would continue the vicious slaughter of Jews AFTER the Nazis fell, continuing the evil work of the concentration camps through a thousand small acts of murder against their defenseless survivors. The irony is that when Hitler was done eliminating the Jews, he fully intended to do the same to most of the Poles and other Slavs. What was the roles of Christians in this whole ordeal? And was there a difference between the behaviors of 'real" Christians (church going, Bible-believing evangelicals and Catholics) vs. that of the nominal or cultural Christians? As a commited Christian, its uncomfortable to see the answer is Yes AND No. Yes, it is true -- Hitler and all the top Nazi leadership were contemputous of the traditional church and its teaching. They were occultists or agnostic to the man. Like Nietzsche before them, they saw in the Gospel the anti-thesis of the 'will to power," viewing Biblcial ethics as weak and foolish. And, yes, its also true that the active churchman most sympathetic to the Nazis were mostly theological liberals and radicals (think Heidegger, Althaus, etc.). And yes, there were many courageous Christians of the evangelcial or conservative Catholic variety who gave their lives to fight Naziism and defend Jews. BUT, Rausch shows, there were also many evangelicals and Catholics who thrilled to Hitler, and turned a blind eye to his regime's evil. Others, while not advocating genoicde, were enthusiastic anti-Semities and racists. And also, Rausch shows in great detail, there were some righteous Gentile rescuers who were liberals, agnostics, atheists. Its not such a neat, tidy picture, as the contemprary church would like it to be. From there Rausch shows, quite convincingly, how Germany was the last place in Europe where Jews would expect pogroms. If