Jews in Britain (and in the early U.S.) also tended to be Sephardim. If one looks at the old paintings and photos, one would never think of them as Jews because they don’t look like what we expect Ashkenazim to look like. The Brit and early American Sephardim mostly just look like Brits. But there are a lot of European Ashkenazi who don’t look like what we expect them to look like either.
Liberal Princess did not claim that every German citizen was antisemitic – she said “Anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread in Europe during this period.” And right she is. Even so, all bystanders bear responsibility for what happened during the Holocaust. That they perhaps didn’t share antisemitic or anti-Jewish sentiments does not absolve them of the ethical choice to stand by while others were openly targeted, oppressed, and killed. This is a hard truth for many to accept, particularly when they consider how their own family members failed to act righteously. But it’s incorrect to ignore the realities of this time in an effort to explain the Church’s role. And to claim that anyone who does rely on the historical record is blindly accepting of modernism is at best seriously misguided. The Holocaust could not have happened without millions of bystanders who permitted it.
I hope you seriously did not just accuse my family of being indifferent and that they failed to act righteously and that I have a hard time accepting that they did because nothing could be further from the truth. Pope Benedict was forced into the Hilter Youth do you consider Pope Benedict and his family indifferent and unrighteous and who just stood by?
You seem to think im blaming his being a genocidal maniac on his being nominaly catholic, which I dont.
I wouldn’t suspect too many people on here would, but a lot, not all, but a lot of Atheists will.
I tend to agree with this. Hitler was certifiably insane. He was mentally ill. No one is responsible for that. More responsibility lies with those who followed him, those who offered no resistance to him, those who turned a blind eye to his brutality, and so on.
And your also correct that he didnt exactly have the most religious upbringing, I was simply stating that he was never a protestant.
Identifying individuals – then or now – as bystanders, perpetrators, or resisters/rescuers is based on their actions or lack thereof. If an individual did or does not act altruistically to benefit victims, he or she is a bystander. You can stow your indignation – we’re all bystanders to some degree. And for the record, I also have family in Germany and to my knowledge my German ancestors were not antisemitic and did not act to benefit victims. They were, then, bystanders. Pope Benedict cannot be identified this way because he was a child and therefore did not have the cognitive capabilities to make ethical choices as an adult would. But his parents did and they did not act righteously.
A lot of people bought into Aryanism and this false Gospel and many Christians worshiped the State and not God this is true – it has to be true because the Nazi’s don’t rise to power if it isn’t true. What bothers me though is that to me it seems like you believe that so many people were indifferent and have judged people living in the Third Reich as if the decisions were so black and white. The ethical questions without a doubt are black and white how to respond to the atrocities were not black and white and were not easy to make. If you speak out against the Holocaust the SS take your business and burn it down, praise God even in tragedy and God will provide for us for doing the right thing but we can’t sit around and do nothing, then they put you in jail, you say to yourself Jesus was jailed, beaten and died if that is what I have to so be it, then they take your kids away from your family and train them as child soldiers and your daughters go into forced prostitution for the army ok that changes things, then they go into your neighborhood take all of your Jewish friends and neighbors and tell them that they can thank you for sending them away ok that really changes things. So what was the best thing to do? 12 hours before you printed anti-Nazi papers your Jewish neighbors were under the radar within a week they were probably all dead. Your actions have now led to innocent people being hurt and killed. If you stayed quiet and helped protect your Jewish neighbors and kept your neighborhood under the radar, would they have lived, could they have lived long enough to escape to another country and would your children not have become property of Reich? Do you continue to speak out, if the SS does not kill you and you can return home? Is speaking out because you know it is wrong and you need to have a clear conscience morally acceptable when you know that innocent people will be taken to concentration camps every time you do and the human dignity of children will be violated? These are not easy questions and people had to live with the consequences of their actions. For some Germans the ethical dilemma was so weighting on their hearts they honestly believed their own death would be a liberation. My family was not wealthy and my great-grandmother was basically an invalid by 1939 and no one was educated further than the equivalent of the 4th grade, they didn’t have the luxury of leaving Germany and avoiding this nightmare and moral dilemma and had to make these decisions. So since you appear to be the moral judge of Germans under the Third Reich because you study this in school tell me which way would you have gone?
Hi Ut,
