The roots of the Holocaust

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/06/05/the_roots_of_the_holocaust/

By James Carroll | June 5, 2006

``THE PLACE where we are standing," Pope Benedict XVI said last week, ``is a place of memory." He was standing at Auschwitz, but what he said and did there raised questions less about remembering than forgetting. Is the new pope prepared to carry forward his predecessors' revolutionary moral reckoning with Christianity's co-responsibility for the Holocaust, or does he intend to initiate a new era of denial? Similarly, does he intend to roll back the doctrinal revolution that has taken place in the church's view of the Jewish religion, reasserting the ``replacement theology" that was the ground of the religious anti-Judaism that morphed into racial anti-Semitism?

The question about the Holocaust has a special edge because Benedict is German, and it first surfaced during his visit to Cologne last August. In addressing an audience of Jews in that city's synagogue, the pope roundly condemned the Nazi genocide campaign. But then he defined the lethal Nazi anti-Semitism that spawned the genocide as having been ``born of neo-paganism." He made no mention of anti-Semitism's other parent, the long tradition of Christian contempt for Jews and the Jewish religion, which both fed the hatred of the perpetrators and justified the inaction of the bystanders. Little was made of the pope's omission of reference to such Christian responsibility, as if to give him time to make his position clearer. snip

These are not minor matters. If the Holocaust is remembered as having been the work of a small ``ring of criminals," with no relation to the deep structures of Western Civilization's attitude toward ``the other," as centrally represented by Christian contempt for Jews, then sources of future crimes against ``the other" remain protected. Roots of anti-Semitism, in particular, can sprout again. Against this, the doctrines of Christian belief that made such hatred sacred must continue to be revised. The church must continue to affirm the independent integrity of the Jewish religion. Christians must continue to recall what their triumphalism led to in the past, because religious triumphalism still threatens the future. Pope Benedict XVI, heir to what his predecessors began, is the custodian of the most precious transformation in Christian history, but it is a fresh lit candle, and can be extinguished.

Interestingly, since I'm in Europe this summer, I visited Auchwitz last week, and I took a tour from one of the guides there. They spent a lot of time touring Auschwitz I, where they made quite a point of ensuring everyone knew that mostly Poles and Soviet POWs died there. There's a little shrine in the cell where a Polish priest died. By the time we got to Auschwitz II (Birkenau), we only had a few minutes left.

Not exactly the best way to present a tour of a place where the vast majority of victims were Jews.