Myth #3: The Holocaust was illegal.
Fact: The Holocaust did not violate either German national law or international law. The British invented the concentration camp during the Boer War, the Germans simply adopted it. German courts carefully stripped victims of all legal rights prior to the Final Solution. By 1941, when the death camp system began operation, the Jews had no rights. The Reich could legally treat them as it wished. Everyone recognized this. Indeed, a major Allied argument against conducting the Nuremburg trials was precisely the fact that these trials attempted to enforce non-existent law.
Myth #4: The Holocaust killed Jews almost exclusively.
Fact: While Jews were certainly foremost among the victims, and six million died in the various camps, so did five million Gentiles, including at least three million Catholics. Auschwitz killed Catholics for 26 consecutive months before the first Jews were shipped there. Some demographers point out that on a per capita basis, the Gypsies were killed at a greater rate than the Jews. Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals were also marked for destruction. The Holocaust was modelled on the equally heinous destruction of Armenian Christians by secular and Muslim Turks twenty years earlier, a genocide which had been essentially ignored in Europe and the United States.
Myth #5: No important scientific experiments were really attempted.
Fact: Many of the death camp experiments were run by respected German scientists researching major health threats of the day, such as typhus and hypothermia. Much of the data was either captured and utilized by the Allies or was quietly published in German medical journals in the post-war years, sometimes by the very doctors who had assisted in the prison camp experiments. In fact, the saline abortion procedure used in the U.S. through the early 1980’s was developed in the Nazi death camps for use on Jews, Slavs, and Poles. U.S. doctors simply lifted it from the Nazis.
So, how accurate is the legal abortion-Holocaust comparison? The Holocaust grew out of scientific work and legal precedent begun in England and the U.S. Legal abortion expresses today’s economic and psychological sciences, which assume economic and psychological harm to women will be reduced if their children are killed. The rhetoric used by the advocates of legal abortion against the child in the womb (“a disease,” “bacilli” “parasites”) repeats the Nazi rhetoric against the Jews. Both German and U.S. courts stripped their victims of all rights prior to destroying them. In both cases, medical experimentation on living and dead victims grew in parallel with the expansion of the programs. In both cases, researchers support their work with the same rationales. Other parallels could be brought forward if space permitted.
An objective study of the Holocaust and legal abortion demonstrates striking similarities. However, there are differences. For instance, the Nazis felt they had to hide the death camps to avoid general outrage; nearly all such camps were in Poland or Byelorussia, not Germany. In contrast, Americans debate but largely accept abortion clinics in our midst. In terms of pure body count, Hitler did not match Stalin, Stalin did not match Mao Tse Tung, and Mao has nothing on the U.S. Supreme Court. The differences are not all to our benefit.
God condemns all sin, but it has always been the constant teaching of The Church that God’s justice demands that pains of hell differ in degree according to demerit. This holds true not only of the pain of sense, but also of the pain of loss. A more intense hatred of God, a more vivid consciousness of utter abandonment by Divine goodness. Dante’s Inferno although a work of fiction, gives a vivid account of how sin and hell might may play out, not to mention some of the Saint’s visions.
Pax,
Tarpeian
