Temptation of Jesus in the Desert
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Satan impregnated Germany with his seed to breed an incomprehensible evil within the world. Hitler and his Nazis not only sought to annihilate millions of human lives, but diabolically they sought to demolish men’s spirits. The holocaust consisted of more than an extermination of biological life. Nazis ferociously ripped through the hearts and souls of men, hoping to extinguish the spiritual flame prior to the final death blow. For this reason, the Catholic Church was a formidable foe. She not only harbored peoples to save them from execution, for which She had a limited capacity, but also She radiated consoling words and prayers whose boundless reach sustained countless souls suffering throughout all of Europe. The Germans were well aware of how quickly scattered embers could ignite into an engulfing, spiritual inferno.
Christianity was a clear threat to Nazism, in spite of some German Christians who joined the Third Reich. Truly, these Christians were replacing their faith in Christ for a new faith in German Nationalism. There was a blatant attempt to discredit the Church by trumping up charges of criminality and immorality against priests all over Europe. Propaganda and faulty ideas were the Nazis most powerful weapons, despite their advanced weapons technology. This is one reason psychological torture was part and parcel of their concentration camps. Even within the camps, they wanted to pit the lay population against those dwelling in the priestblock. The clergy didn’t have the same work details that the rest of the prisoners had to endure. Also, priests had “wine detail,” in which they were forced to chug wine in a limited amount of time so as to intoxicate them, promoting an illusion of special treatment to the rest of the prisoners. Fr. Bernard writes in Priestblock the explanation he was given by a fellow prisoner concerning the clergy’s “special” treatment: “The idea is to make the other prisoners hate them and keep them morally isolated as well.” Therefore, men of faith were considered dangerous, and simply imprisoning them wasn’t enough to diminish their influence. They recognized that ideas and spirituality could survive and spread beyond an individual man’s mortal lifespan. The aggression imposed by Nazi Germany was indeed as much a spiritual battle as it was a corporeal battle.
Dachau came to house 2,670 priests, who were separated from the rest of the prison population “as a way of keeping them together and thereby preventing them from ‘infecting’ other prison populations with Christianity.” The S.S. knew how contagious hope can be and how it could undermine their attempts to diminish the spirit of men. Clearly, the clergy in Dachau were faced with the awful truth of Matthew 10:28, “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” Nazis were not only agents of evil in ending the mortal life, but they also sought to corrupt man’s soul, forcing him to tangle with the absurdity of cruelty. Within the first two weeks of being at Dachau, Fr. Jean Bernard writes after witnessing an older man beaten to a pulp for not singing the songs correctly, “All at once a terrible rage gripped me. I wanted to leap at the man’s throat, but I lacked the courage. Or was it my reason that won out? I threw my head back and stared at the monster in uncomprehending confusion. It was an encounter with an utterly alien demonic world. Suddenly i understood what sadism was.” Evil can be pernicious, infecting what begins as righteous anger and warping it into pure hatred, and even priests had to guard against it. Moreover, what gives intelligibility to existence is the order of creation, both physical and moral. Once that order is displace by arbitrariness, life takes on an absurdity, which can weed out all hope. The mind seeks patterns, attempting to make sense of surroundings, and when this ability is lost, madness ensues. For this reason, after a year in the camp Jean Bernard admits amidst cruelty from the guards at Dachau, “Gradually we break ourselves of the habit of thinking.”
Dachau Bunks
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Erich Fromm writes in The Art of Loving of sadism, “The ultimate degree of this attempt to know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability to make a human being suffer, to torture him, to force him to betray his secret in his suffering . . . [an officer in the Russian civil war once said,] ‘with shooting you only get rid of a chap . . . with shooting you’ll never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows itself. But I don’t spare myself, and I have more than once trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what life’s like down our way.” From the testimony of this Russian offcier, we perceive that Sadism is very much a spiritual phenomenon, and only corporeal in the sense that the sadist attempts to break down the barriers to the soul. Sadism is what arose from the warped form of masculinity and militarism the Nazis promoted. Fr. Bernard recounts what he terms “snow sadism,” in which clergy had to scrape and remove snow in weather below zero degrees, sometimes using table tops hoisted on their backs, from morning until night without rest and without proper clothing. Throughout Priestblock, we witness senseless brutality that slowly degrades morals of even clergy. Fr. Bernard describes a scene in which a man slips down the stairs emptying the scalding pot of soup all over himself, incurring bad burns. He writes that while he looks away disturbed by the man’s pain, a fellow priest responded in anger, “It’s one of the pails for us!” It is this precise moral deterioration and spiritual disorientation that the Nazis are seeking to achieve. After all, they must keep the prisoners from camaraderie, and keep them in survival mode—every man for himself. However, they weren’t entirely successful in their endeavor. Robert Royal writes in the introduction that throughout Priestblock there are episodes that “give us vivid and unforgettable indications of both the depths of depravity and heights of sanctity to which the human race is capable.”
Nazis didn’t want to be in the business of making martyrs, rather they wished to exterminate people only after attempts at crushing the spirit. The strength that Christians and Jews alike summoned from their faith was the best weapon they possessed in opposing their torturers. Jews understood suffering to be of value because they trusted in God’s enduring providential care. When Christ came, He introduced concrete meaning into suffering that previously had not been wholly ascertained within the context of salvation. For this reason, Fr. Jean Bernard writes, “The bishop’s blessing gives meaning to our suffering, lifts it above the purely human and joins our small, personal suffering to the sea of injury and persecution that the church of Christ endures and must endure. His blessing lets us share in the graces and comforts and sources of strength that fed the first martyrs. O miracle of the communion of saints, which becomes our experience here.” This is why the witness of Christianity throughout the holocaust is an important memory to keep alive. Suffering, especially when it culminates in martyrdom, is a supreme witness for people today who also encounter inescapable suffering. We witness the power of the Spirit when it is uplifted and sustained by Christ amidst even the most unimaginable atrocities. We see this iron Spirit in Fr. Bernard’s final words in the Foreward: “We must forgive while remaining conscious of the full horror of what occurred, not only because nothing constructive can be built on a foundation of hatred . . . but above all for the sake of Him who commands and urges us to forgive, and before home we, victims and executioners alike, are all poor debtors in need of mercy.” Ultimately, the Spirit of God triumphed over the vain pursuits of evil through Nazism to destroy His people. We must remember that in spite how bad the world may get or our personal lives may get, there is a very real spiritual battle that is ongoing until the end of time. It's there in history if you look for it, and it is present in our daily lives. So armor up!
St. Michael the Archangel, Defend Us in the Battle
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Sources:
Ronald Rychlak. Hitler, the War, and the Pope. (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 2010).
Jean Bernard. Priestblock. (Bethesda, MD: Zaccheus Press, 2007)
Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. (New York: Harper and Row. 1956)
Christopher Dillon. “‘Tolerance means weakness’: the Dachau Concentration Camp S. S., Militarism and Masculinity.” Historical Research. May2013, Vol. 86 Issue 232, p373-389.
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