Raoul Wallenberg: A Hero Has a Heart

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White Rose #2 Resisting National Socialism

White Rose - Leaflet 2

The second leaflet of the German anti-Nazi group the White Rose, produced in 1942.

It is impossible to engage in intellectual discourse with National Socialist Philosophy, for if there were such an entity, one would have to try by means of analysis and discussion either to prove its validity or to combat it. In actuality, however, we face a totally different situation. At its very inception this movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one's fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies.
After all, Hitler states in an early edition of "his" book (a book written in the worst German I have ever read, in spite of the fact that it has been elevated to the position of the Bible in this nation of poets and thinkers): "It is unbelievable, to what extent one must betray a people in order to rule it." If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control. As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumour broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body. The greater part of its former opponents went into hiding. The German intellectuals fled to their cellars, there, like plants struggling in the dark, away from light and sun, gradually to choke to death. Now the end is at hand. Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system. When thus a wave of unrest goes through the land, when "it is in the air," when many join the cause, then in a great final effort this system can be shaken off. After all, an end in terror is preferable to terror without end.

We are not in a position to draw up a final judgment about the meaning of our history. But if this catastrophe can be used to further the public welfare, it will be only by virtue of the fact that we are cleansed by suffering; that we yearn for the light in the midst of deepest night, summon our strength, and finally help in shaking off the yoke which weighs on our world.

We do not want to discuss here the question of the Jews, nor do we want in this leaflet to compose a defence or apology. No, only by way of example do we want to site the fact that since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings - no matter what position we take with respect to the Jewish question - and a crime of this dimension has been perpetrated against human beings. Someone may say that the Jews deserve their fate. This assertion would be a monstrous impertinence; but let us assume that someone said this - what position has he then taken toward the fact that the entire Polish aristocratic youth is being annihilated? (May God grant that this program has not yet fully achieved its aim as yet!) All male offspring of the houses of the nobility between the ages of fifteen and twenty were transported to concentration camps in Germany and sentenced to forced labour, and all the girls of this age group were sent to Norway, into the bordellos of the SS! Why tell you these things, since you are fully aware of them - or if not of these, then of other equally grave crimes committed by this frightful sub-humanity? Because here we touch on a problem which involves us deeply and forces us all to take thought. Why do German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly anyone thinks about that. It is accepted as fact and put out of mind. The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their depredations; and of course they do so. Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalised in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake? It seems to be so, and will certainly be so, if the German does not at last start up out of his stupor, if he does not protest wherever and whenever he can against this clique of criminal, if he shows no sympathy for these hundreds of thousands of victims. He must evidence not only sympathy; no, much more: a sense ofcomplicity in guilt. For through his apathetic behaviour he gives these evil men the opportunity to act as they do; he tolerates this "government" which has taken upon itself such an infinitely great burden of guilt; indeed, he himself is to blame for the fact that it came about at all! Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty! It is not too late, however, to do away with this most reprehensible of all miscarriages of government, so as to avoid being burdened with even greater guilt. Now, when in recent years our eyes have been opened, when we know exactly who our adversary is, it is high time to root out this brown horde. Up until the outbreak of the war the larger part of the German people was blinded; the Nazis did not show themselves in their true aspect. But now, now that we have recognised them for what they are, it must be the sole and first duty, the holiest duty of every German to destroy these beasts.

If the people are barely aware that the government exists, they are happy. When the government is felt to be oppressive they are broken.

Good fortune, alas! builds itself upon misery. Good fortune, alas! is the mask of misery. What will come of this? We cannot foresee the end. Order is upset and turns to disorder, good becomes evil. The people are confused. Is it not so, day in, day out, from the beginning?

The wise man is therefore angular, though he does not injure others; he has sharp corners, though he does not harm; he is upright but not gruff. He is clearminded, but he does not try to be brilliant.

Lao-Tzu

Whoever undertakes to rule the kingdom and to shape it according to his whim - I foresee that he will fail to reach his goal. That is all.

The kingdom is a living being. It cannot be constructed, in truth! He who tries to manipulate it will spoil it, he who tries to put it under his power will lose it.

Therefore: Some creatures go out in front, others follow, some have warm breath, others cold, some are strong, some weak, some attain abundance, others succumb.

The wise man will accordingly forswear excess, he will avoid arrogance and not overreach.

Lao-Tzu

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book burning

The White Rose Resisting National Socialism

The First Pamphlet

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be “governed” 
 without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes — crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure — reach the light of day? If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order in history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass — then, yes, they deserve their downfall. Goethe speaks of the Germans as a tragic people, like the Jews and the Greeks, but today it would appear rather that they are a spineless, will-less herd of hangers-on, who now — the marrow sucked out of their bones, robbed of their center of stability — are waiting to be hounded to their destruction. So it seems — but it is not so. Rather, by means of a gradual, treacherous, systematic abuse, the system has put every man into a spiritual prison. Only now, finding himself lying in fetters, has he become aware of his fate. Only a few recognized the threat of ruin, and the reward for their heroic warning was death. We will have more to say about the fate of these persons. If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon. Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism. Offer passive resistance — resistance — wherever you may be, forestall the spread of this atheistic war machine before it is too late, before the last cities, like Cologne, have been reduced to rubble, and before the nation’s last t young man has given his blood on some battlefield for the hubris of a subhuman. Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure.

 From Friedrich Schiller’s “The Lawgiving of Lycurgus and Solon”:

 Viewed in relation to its purposes, the law code of Lycurgus is a masterpiece of political science and knowledge of human nature. He desired a powerful, unassailable state, firmly established on its own principles. Political effectiveness and permanence were the goal towards which he strove, and he attained this goal to the full extent possible under the circumstances. But if one compares the purpose Lycurgus had in view with the purposes of mankind, then a deep abhorrence takes the place of the approbation which we felt at first glance. Anything may be sacrificed to the good of the state except that end for which the State serves as a means. The state is never an end in itself; it is important only as a condition under which the purpose of mankind can be attained, and this purpose is none other than the development of all of man’s powers, his progress and improvement. If a state prevents the development of the capacities which reside in man, if it interferes with the progress of the human spirit, then it is reprehensible and injurious, no matter how excellently devised, how perfect in its own way. Its very permanence in that case amounts more to a reproach than to a basis for fame; it becomes a prolonged evil, and the longer it endures, the more harmful it is… At the price of all moral feeling a political system was set up, and the resources of the state were mobilized to that end. In Sparta there was no conjugal love, no mother love, no filial devotion, no friendship; all men were citizens only, and all virtue was civic virtue. A law of the state made it the duty of Spartans to be inhumane to their slaves; in these unhappy victims of war humanity itself was insulted and mistreated.  In the Spartan code of law the dangerous principle was promulgated that men are to be looked upon as means and not as ends — and the foundations of natural law and of morality were destroyed by that law… What an admirable sight is afforded, by contrast, by the rough soldier Gaius Marcius in his camp before Rome, when he renounced vengeance and victory because he could not endure to see a mother’s tears!… The state [of Lycurgus] could endure only under the one condition: that the spirit of the people remained quiescent. Hence it could be maintained only if it failed to achieve the highest, the sole purpose of a state. From Goethe’s The Awakening of Epimenides, Act II, Scene 4: 

SPIRITS: Though he who has boldly risen from the abyss Through an iron will and cunning May conquer half the world, Yet to the abyss he must return. Already a terrible fear has seized him; In vain he will resist! And all who still stand with him Must perish in his fall.

 HOPE: Now I find my good men Are gathered in the night, To wait in silence, not to sleep. And the glorious word of liberty They whisper and murmur, Till in unaccustomed strangeness, On the steps of our temple Once again in delight they cry: Freedom! Freedom!

 Please make as many copies of this leaflet as you can and distribute them.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel

nonviolent protest

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Colin Kaepernick

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Colin Kaepernick

NONVIOLENT PROTEST

bully genocide danger

  

More people are computing the relationship between bullying and genocide and finding a direct line from one to the other. The invisible force of the internet has made itself corporal in Simi Valley, California just as it did in Charlottesville, Virginia.

csaba kis roka

Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about culture

A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true goldmines of a culture.

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1955)

"Insecurity of Freedom", p. 72

corbisimages

2017 peace

Race on the Oprah Show: A Twenty-Five Year Look Back (HD)

Hyam Maccoby talks about the humanity of Jesus

Throughout the centuries there have been Christians who have actually protested against Christianity. People like Pelagius who protested against Augustine. People who believed in the humanity of Jesus, not the divinity. Who didn't want to think of the death of Jesus as being a sacrifice, a theological sacrifice, but simply the martyrdom of a great man in the cause of freedom. He was fighting against Rome, not against the Jews. People who think of Jesus as a model teacher. And Jesus would be in the same position then, as Moses is in Judaism, as Mohammed is in Islam, a human teacher. There is nothing anti-religious in this.

Explaining Hitler
THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF HIS EVIL

Ron Rosenbaum
Chapter 18
The Passion Play of Hyam Maccoby
page 329

We See Roma in Wagons

The beginning of our journey causes alarm to those who do not join us. 

Forward one step, backward two steps, like clockwork.

It is difficult to feed everyone.

At times we cross state borders, then recross.

There is a sanctity to our footsteps, the rolling of cartwheels over broken glass.

It is an an appalling sound.

We cover ourselves with prayer.

We believe in God's blessing.

Troubles follow.

There is ungovernable treachery.

We try to remain inconspicuous.

The sun thwarts our clandestine movements.

A nameless man joins the landlocked voyagers we have become.

He holds children close to his breast, gives them comfort and helps them stop crying.

There is no stopping this type of evil when it strikes children.

We are kin to God but our armor is insufficient to raze down the illicit tabernacle of murder.

A mass of rolling clouds, the wetness of it changing reality from white to grey:

A shattering wail of evil intentions from beyond the sky.

We pass a camp of Roma.

They wave.

Their little children are bright like butterflies.

My wife begins weeping.

I try but cannot stop her bitter sadness.

"God is good," she whispers.

"God is just," I reply.

My words make her grief terrible.

A nameless mad thing slices into our hearts. 

I say no more.

The sobbing of my wife's horror makes me want to die.

RAPHAEL LEMKIN : GENOCIDE

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. The imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.

Genocide: a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. 

Raphael Lemkin
Axis Rule

The perpetrators of genocide would attempt to destroy the political and social institutions, the culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence of national groups. They would hope to eradicate the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and lives of individual members of the targeted group. 

A group did not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity. "It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a national culture," Lemkin wrote, "but Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour." 

Samantha Power
"A PROBLEM FROM HELL"
AMERICA and the AGE of GENOCIDE
Chapter 1
The Crime With A Name
Page 43
  

Anti -Semitism: George Steiner on Humanity's Bad Conscience

Ron Rosenbaum
I asked Steiner about his argument that the Jews were killed because they tortured the conscience of mankind.
"You seem to be saying that something about the Jews--that there is a rational hatred--"

George Steiner
"No--it is--no. Call it, if you want, an intuitive (hatred)--I believe that explanations for anti-Semitism of a sociopolitical nature are fine as far as they go, but they tell you nothing about two things. About Jew-hatred where there are no Jews (in contemporary Poland, for instance) and about the ontological decision that one must kill the human person because of its being. And hence I put forward this image, this hypothesis that our invention of God, of Jesus, our invention of Marxist utopia, has left humanity so uncertain inwardly that it is trying to banish its own bad conscience."

Ron Rosenbaum
"Are you saying, then, that the torture of conscience is worse than the torture in the camps even?"

George Steiner
"Over the long run," he says, "to feel yourself at fault probably builds up unbearable hatreds, self-hatreds, to feel yourself found out."

Explaining Hitler
THE SEARCH FOR THE ORIGINS OF HIS EVIL
Ron Rosenbaum
Chapter 17
George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish "Invention of Conscience"
page 316 

David Olère (1902 – 1985, Polish-born French), Artist

The Revolt Of Sonderkommando At Auschwitz-Birkenau 

On Sonderkommandos:

Primo Levi: The Gray Zone

                                              

Dr. Elchanan Elkes, Chairman of the Kovno Judenrat

He was murdered at Dachau. He wrote his 'last testament' to his son and daughter who lived in London. The letter was retrieved along with his diary after the liberation of Kovno.

"I am writing this in an hour when many desperate souls--widows and orphans, threadbare and hungry--are camping on my doorstep, imploring us, (the council) for help. My strength is ebbing. There is a desert inside me. My soul is scorched. I am naked and empty. There are no words in my mouth." 

from Nazi Germany and The Jews

by Saul Friedlander

Chapter 14: Total Extermination

Fall 1943-Spring 1944

George Kadish, photographer

Wolf Mishelvski was 21, in his first job as an Engineer, when the Germans invaded Lithuania. This book is a personal account of his experiences in the ghetto, supplemented by a detailed chronology of happenings in the Kovno Ghetto. This book also includes a translation of the infamous Jaegger Report, detailing day by day the systematic murders carried out by Einsatzkommando 3, from July 4 to November 25, 1944. William W. Mishell, Kaddish for Kovno; Life and Death in a Lithuanian Ghetto 1941-1945 

Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about dignity

Our life is beset with difficulties, yet it is never devoid of meaning. The feeling of futility is absent from our souls. Our existence is not in vain. There is a Divine earnestness about our life. This is our dignity. To be invested with dignity means to represent something more than oneself. The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents.

We are God's stake in human history. We are the dawn and the dusk, the challenge and the test. How strange to be a Jew and to go astray on God's perilous errands. We have been offered as a pattern of worship and as a prey for scorn, but there is more still in our destiny. We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gate of the kingdom. The time for the kingdom may be far off, but the task is plain: to retain our share in God in spite of peril and contempt. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, against the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal. Loyal to the presence of the ultimate in the common, we may be able to make it clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite. 

The Earth Is the Lord's

THE INNER WORLD OF THE JEW IN EASTERN EUROPE

George Walker Bush in a Dream

In 2000, shortly before the presidential election I had a dream . George W. Bush and I were in Berlin. We were standing on a balcony of the Reichstag.

 He was smiling and laughing in a cordial way. I was enjoying his personality despite the fact that he was not my choice for president. As we chatted, a change in the atmosphere occurred. It felt as though a presence quite unearthly had come to join us. It was not an angelic visitation. We both turned, for it was at our backs. There was no person, no creature, no vision. It was a living thing and a dead thing: not corporal but alive with deadly intent, an intention to annihilate the human race. 

That was my dream. I suddenly came awake, chilled with awareness: It was to be President George W. Bush and he was going to meet the Beast.

  

the laughing hitler

Christian W Staudinger, artist

Text from Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum

Chapter 20

Lucy Dawidowicz: Blaming Adolf Hitler

It is possible to reconstruct Hitler's personal portrait of his extermination of the Jews in the progression of his chilling images of laughter--the extermination of the Jews in the extermination of their laughter.

We begin with his January 30, 1939, speech, in which the "resounding" laughter of the Jews is now resoundingly choking in their throats. In 1941, he imagines the laughter of the Jews still sounding, if not resounding, but "the coming months" will change that. And twelve months later, he professes no longer to know if the Jews "are still laughing." But whether they are or not, he says he's confident "if their laughter has not already subsided," it soon "will subside" everywhere. And, finally, he confirms for us that not only the laughter but those who once laughed have been exterminated: "Countless ones no longer laugh today, and those who still laugh now will perhaps in a while also no longer do so." 

Dawidowicz cites these passages for the "slips" not for the laughter, for Hitler's retrospective fusion of the January 10, 1939 threat to annihilate the Jews with the September 1, 1939 declaration of war that launched his armies east and made Auschwitz possible. But it might be argued that the laughter imagery is itself a kind of slip that vindicates Dawidowicz's thesis about Hitler more powerfully than his confusion or conflation of dates of declarations and speeches. It seems to vindicate her vision of Hitler as someone who knew always what he wanted to do with the Jews, not someone who hesitated and doubted and suffered nervousness about the enormity of the idea. Rather someone who knew what he was doing and laughed about it.

The unspoken displacement in these passages is, I'd suggest, not so much from one speech date to another, but from one species of laughter to another. The laughter Hitler incessantly conjures up dying in the Jews' throats is reborn in his own. The laughter suffusing those passages is not the Jews laughing but Hitler laughing. It's not the laughter of someone suffering from trepidation about what he's doing. It's not the laughter of someone who still, at an even later date, could think, "My dear Heinie...Would it be possible?"

It's the laughter of someone who knows what he's doing and relishes it to the bone, relishes the coded way he speaks of it, relishes the fact that the relish of the joke is only shared by an esoteric few. It's the very same relish with which he and Heydrich and Himmler, the three architects of the Final Solution. relish their ostensible dismay at the scurrilous "rumor" that the Jews are being exterminated, in that passage in the Table Talk in which the chief perpetrators of the Holocaust share a private joke about both their complicity and their cover-up.

Nor is this the laughter of someone "convinced of his own rectitude," as Trevor-Roper would have it. It's the laughter of someone savoring a secretive triumph, whose pleasure is clearly enhanced by an awareness of its profoundly illicit nature, whose pleasure can only be truly be savored by the cognoscenti aware of the magnitude of the illicit acts that are concealed by esoteric references to mass murder as "subsiding laughter." This is not something whose "enormity" Hitler feared, but something he relished, with obscene gleefulness.

Once I heard a parable about a Jew going into battle who asks a rabbi what he should do if he's captured by the enemy and his only alternative to starvation is to eat pork. The rabbi counsels him that, yes, to save his life he can do what would otherwise be a transgression, an enormity: He can eat the pork. But don't the rabbi adds, relish it: "Don't suck the bone." With his laughter, the laughter he sucked from the dying Jews' throats, Hitler was expressing his obscene relish at the enormity of his transgressions. With his laughter, Hitler reveals extermination is not a matter of rectitude to him, a difficult task done for a stern ideal. With his laughter Hitler reveals he is both aware of and wallowing in the illicitness of his transgression, his conscious evil. With his laughter he is "sucking the bone."