Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Yad Vashem blasts Pope’s rehabilitation of Holocaust-denying bishop, Haaretz, Jan. 25, 2009

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial on Sunday blasted the Pope’s decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, calling the reinstatement “scandalous.” The Israeli museum’s fury marked another step in the row between the Catholic Church and world Jewish groups, who were outraged by announcements of the rehabilitation.

“The reinstatement is an internal Church matter…[however] denial of the Holocaust not only insults the survivors, memory of the victims, and the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to rescue Jews, it is a brutal attack on truth,” Yad Vashem said in a statement.

British Bishop Richard Williamson was one of four traditionalist bishops to have his excommunication lifted Saturday, just days after he was shown in a Swedish state TV interview saying that historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The four bishops were excommunicated 20 years ago after they were consecrated by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without papal consent – a move the Vatican said at the time was an act of schism.

“Even if the revocation of the excommunication is unrelated to Williamson’s comments regarding the Holocaust, what kind of message is this sending regarding the Church’s attitude toward the Holocaust?” Yad Vashem wrote. “Although we understand that Williamson’s statements do not represent the Church’s stance, we continue to hope that the Church will vigorously condemn these unacceptable and odious comments.”

Sacrificing the Jews for Christianity – Haaretz, Nov. 14, 2008
By Sergio I. Minerbi

At the onset of the present discussion, the Vatican claimed that Pius XII did not know about the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews. When this was proved false, and it was shown that the Pope was well aware of the Jews’ sufferings, the Vatican then claimed that the thousands of Jews who had been saved after being hidden in monasteries in Rome in 1943-44 could only have survived as a result of a direct order from Pius XII. But with the exception of a bishop in Assisi, no priest has ever claimed to have acted upon instructions from Pius XII. We must therefore conclude that these churchmen sheltered the Jews mainly for religious or humanitarian reasons, which were dictated by their own consciences.

Pius XII was mainly a diplomat, and he had no pastoral experience. The professional approach of a diplomat is to believe that complicated issues can be solved by a “note verbale,” a diplomatic letter. Hence, the Holy See sent a note to the Slovakian Legation deploring the regulations against people guilty only of belonging “to a particular race,” but to no avail. No other action was taken, though, such as, for example, issuing a threat of excommunication against the Slovakian president, Monsignor Jozef Tiso. No public statement condemning the deportation of the Slovakian Jews was ever issued by the Vatican, and only such a statement could have impressed the leaders of some European countries.

We do not need to wait for the opening of Vatican archives to know that never, neither during World War II nor afterward, did Pius XII call the Jews by their name. They were generally described as those “poor people” who suffer because of their national origin or race.

A few years ago, in response to the initial announcement of the candidacy of Pius XII for sainthood, I published, in a professional journal in Italy, a historical essay on the Pope and the Jews of Rome. On October 16, 1943, the Nazis rounded up about 1,200 Jews from their apartments there, and sent 1,024 of them to Auschwitz. All but 15 of them were killed.

As I demonstrate in my study, an ongoing negotiation took place at the same time, between the Nazi government, through its ambassador to the Holy See, Ernst von Weizsacker, and the Pope. The German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, agreed to recognize “the neutrality of the Vatican,” in exchange for a declaration from the Holy See regarding the “good behavior” of the German troops in Rome. On October 29-30, the Vatican’s semi-official daily Osservatore Romano published a front page article stating that, “the German troops have respected the Roman Curia as well as the Vatican City.” Was the deportation of the Jews the price for the liberty of the Vatican?

Three days after the deportation, on October 19, Pope Pius XII received the diplomatic representative of the United States, Harold H. Tittman, Jr. The only subject raised by the Pope was the defense of Rome against eventual communist attacks. Not only did the Vatican refrain from taking a public stand decrying the murder of the Jews during the war, but even after the end of hostilities, when the Nazi danger had disappeared, the Vatican saw fit to actively assist former war criminals, such as members of the Croatian units of Ustasha and their leader Ante Pavelic, in emigrating to safe haven in Argentina. After the war, the Jews asked Pius XII to return to their families Jewish children who had been hiding in Catholic institutions, even if their parents were dead. The Vatican’s response to this demand was to send an order to Nuncio Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), then in Paris, ordering him not to give back children who had been baptized during the war without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

Adi Schwartz, The silence of the shepherd – Haaretz, October 24, 2008

In the second half of October 1943, several thousand of Rome’s Jews were arrested by the German SS and incarcerated in a detention camp. The road leading from the Jewish ghetto on the banks of the Tiber to the Collegio Militare ran by the edge of St. Peter’s Square. If Pope Pius XII had looked out the window of his residence, he would have seen the German trucks taking away the Jews, who would never return.

But despite the entreaties of the Jewish community and of British and American diplomats, Pope Pius XII, who was also the bishop of Rome, refused to speak out. On October 19, when the freight train packed with Rome’s Jews passed through the city of Padua on its way north, the local bishop urged the Pope “to take urgent action.” However, Pius XII remained mum. Three days later, 1,060 of Rome’s Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. Only 15 of the transport’s deportees survived the war.

The SS was worried that the Pope – the supreme spiritual authority in the Italian capital and throughout the Catholic world – would try to prevent the deportation of the Jews. So relieved were the Germans after the operation that in its wake, the German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsaecker (the father of Richard von Weizsaecker, who would become Germany’s president in 1984), sent the following cable to Berlin: “The Pope, although under pressure from all sides, has not permitted himself to be pushed into a demonstrative censure of the deportation of the Jews of Rome. Although he must know that such an attitude will be used against him by our adversaries … he has nonetheless done everything possible even in this delicate matter in order not to strain relations with the German government and German authorities in Rome … it may be said that this matter, so unpleasant as it regards German-Vatican relations, has been liquidated.”

Biography / The making of a dove – Haaretz, October 12, 2008
By Yair Sheleg

Be’emunato: Sipuro shel harav yehuda amital (Be’emunato: The Story of Rabbi Yehuda Amital), by Elyashiv Reichner
Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 301 pages, NIS 98

Over the years, Rabbi Yehuda Amital, head of the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (where students combine compulsory military service with their Talmudic studies) in Alon Shvut, has become one of the rabbis that even secular Jews (including those on the left) love to love. There are two reasons for this. For one, he has a sunny personality. Even more critical, however, are his political views.

It was Rabbi Amital who in the late 1980s founded the Meimad movement, which, from its inception, has advocated moderation in both the religious and political spheres. Nor is he afraid to attack his colleagues, who are rabbis affiliated with the right-wing religious Zionist camp, for their views.

Journalist Elyashiv Reichner’s biography of Amital, 83, unfolds the fascinating, complex story of this man. For many years, he taught at Yeshivat Hadarom in Rehovot, which was headed by his father-in-law, until, in 1965, he decided to move to Jerusalem. Two years later, he was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was in the period immediately following the Six-Day War, and the leaders of the movement to renew Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion, in the West Bank south of Jerusalem, were inviting him to head the yeshiva that they were establishing there. (I myself studied at that yeshiva under Amital’s leadership.)

The book speaks extensively of Amital’s personality and educational approach, for good reason. These are the real reasons he is so beloved by students and friends alike, including those who disagree with his views. Amital is an open-minded, original thinker, difficult to pigeonhole, and his character is reflected in his work as an educator.

Unlike so many rabbis and yeshiva heads, Amital explicitly discourages his students from following in his footsteps. Students frequently pepper him with questions unrelated to issues of Jewish law, and he always responds, gently but firmly, that they should think out the matter for themselves. Even on issues of Jewish law, he has been known to advise the inquirer to investigate the problem independently by consulting the sources. He always emphasizes that he is not interested in producing “Amital look-alikes.”

He has the reputation of being a determined optimist. Reichner relates that, on one occasion, when the rabbi’s daughter earned a score of only 50 percent on an exam, he consoled her: “Don’t feel bad. At least you knew half the material.”

As a Holocaust survivor (Amital was born in Hungary in 1924, and lost his entire family in Auschwitz), his attitude toward that subject is sincere and does not smack of self-righteousness: For instance, he has no difficulty acknowledging that he cannot answer why the Holocaust occurred, and he is furious with those who try to do so. The late Israeli poet Abba Kovner, himself a Holocaust survivor and a leader of Jewish resistance forces in the Vilna Ghetto, once asked Amital how he could still believe in God after the Shoah. Amital replied, “And how can you still believe in humanity after the Holocaust? After all, no one pretends to be able to understand God, yet we supposedly understand other human beings.”

Revisiting Pius XII, Jerusalem Post, October 7, 2008

By LISA PALMIERI-BILLIG, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
ROME

Pope Benedict XVI will lead a mass on Thursday during the 12th Synod of Bishops, for Eugenio Pacelli – Pope Pius XII – on the 50th anniversary of his death.

Haifa Chief Rabbi She’ar Yashuv Cohen, who addressed the bishops on Monday, said that had he known of the mass for the Holocaust-era pope, he would not have become the first Jew to speak to the top representative body of the Catholic Church.

“Although Pope Pacelli may have helped many refugees in secret… he should have spoken up much more strongly than he did against the Holocaust,” Cohen told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend.

Would a moral outcry have helped stop the Holocaust or simply extended persecutions to Catholics, making further rescue efforts impossible?

Survivors and historians are strongly divided on the issue.

Radically opposed views of Pius XII’s wartime policies periodically kindle passions anew as his beatification process (the third of the four steps on the way to being declared a saint) moves forward. It is expected this issue will be mentioned again during a summit meeting of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee in Budapest next month.

Italian historian Alberto Melloni calls the conflict between Pius XII’s devotees and his critics “a stupid match between fanatical followers of ‘the defamed pope who saved the Jews’ and those of ‘Hitler’s pope’… with exaggerations, simplifications, banalities, basic errors.”

A symposium organized in Rome last month by Gary Krupp, the Jewish president of the Pave the Way Foundation, to present new, favorable evidence on Pius XII, was boycotted by the Jewish community and Catholic critics who considered the conference format biased.

The symposium presented testimonies by Catholic and Jewish scholars and witnesses, videos, including an interview with British historian Martin Gilbert, documents from the files of the OSS (the World War II forerunner of the CIA), and The Palestine Post (The Jerusalem Post’s previous name) supporting the thesis that Pius XII did more than any Allied government to save Jewish lives, although no written orders will ever be found because he worked through prudent, officially neutral diplomacy.

This line challenges the idea of a noncaring and silent pope held by many Holocaust survivors.

Pius XII’s photo exhibited at Yad Vashem among those who did nothing was deemed very offensive and the printed criticisms accompanying it were rebutted line by line at the Rome symposium.

But this issue may soon evolve.

“I am happy to have learnt recently that serious attention is being given to the matter in the wake of concerns expressed by the papal nuncio in Jerusalem to the leadership of Yad Vashem,” Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee’s chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Inter-religious Consultations – the umbrella body of Jewish organizations engaged in interreligious dialogue, told the Post from Jerusalem.

In Rome, Krupp said he intended to nominate Pius XII for recognition by Yad Vashem as a “righteous among the nations” – listing as partial evidence the Haitian visas issued under his personal orders from 1939-45 that saved 11,000 European Jews.

Pius XII was also credited with having tried to stop the October 16, 1943, deportation of more than 1,090 Roman Jews, negotiating a halt to further round-ups and opening Rome’s churches, convents, monasteries and the Vatican itself to Jewish refugees.

“No doubt after October 16, generous, organized efforts to save Jews and others were made by all Catholic institutions in Rome,” Italian Jewish historian Anna Foa said. “This could not have been done without specific orders by Pacelli.”

A DPA German news agency report recently estimated that more than 7,000 Roman Jews owed their lives to this activity.

Rome Chief Rabbi Dr. Riccardo Di Segni disagreed, telling the Post that Pacelli failed to prevent the October 16 deportations from happening.

“The train to Auschwitz was not stopped,” he said. “Seven hundred and fifty Roman Jews were gassed immediately on arrival. Another thousand were deported during the following nine months. In Bulgaria, where the Bulgarian government intervened forcefully, a similar train never left the station,” therefore saving his own grandfather, he said.

Anyone wishing to understand Christian Zionism should see Max Blumenthal’s video of the 2007 Christians United for Israel conference entitled “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour.” It is, as Nat and Natalie Cole might put it, unforgettable in every way. It is among the videos that Hagee’s lawyers have had removed from YouTube, although it is still accessible elsewhere. One can safely assume that Hagee’s security people will make sure that Blumenthal does not attend the 2008 conference.

Hagee’s Revenge? Videos Of Controversial Pastor Removed From YouTube, AlterNet, July 8, 2008

Late last week, with no prior notification, lawyers for the controversial evangelist John Hagee had a series of videos concerning the pastor removed from YouTube. The clips spanned from the contentious to the mundane; some included footage lifted from sermons Hagee had already made public, others involved documentaries made by filmmakers inside Hagee’s conventions. All told more than 120 videos were taken down in the abrupt sweep.

The timing was, perhaps, more peculiar than the move itself. Clips that had been online for well over a year were now being subjected to “third-party” copyright infringement claims. And while Hagee had not been in the mainstream press since he and Sen. John McCain ended their official relationship a month prior, Hagee’s Christians United for Israel annual summit is just days away, and at least one prominent McCain backer (Sen. Joseph Lieberman) is set to be in attendance.

Two individuals who have documented Hagee and posted clips on some of his more noteworthy sermons (including those interpreted as anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay — Hagee, Wilson noted, once claimed that the Anti-Christ will be German, gay, a “blasphemer” and “partly Jewish – as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx”) believe that nefarious motives were behind the YouTube shakedown.

“Obviously Hagee’s minions orchestrated this move to suppress bad publicity ahead of their July summit,” said Max Blumenthal, a freelance writer and videographer whose documentary on last year’s Christians United for Israel summit was viewed by hundreds of thousands. “This is a response to the McCain debacle and concern over bad publicity for Lieberman’s appearance,” he charged.

Bruce Wilson, Talk To Action | Reclaiming Citizenship, History, and Faith, May 15, 2008

Yesterday I discovered an astonishing audio recording of a sermon, by controversial McCain endorser Pastor John Hagee, in which Hagee elaborates on his view that Hitler and the Nazis were divine agents sent by God to (with gruesome inefficiency it would seem) chase Europe’s Jews towards Palestine. In his 2006 book “Jerusalem Countdown”, Hagee proposed that anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves – the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive.

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם. March 29, 2008: Make the World a Better Place » Evangelicals: ‘Killing’ Jews With Christian Kindness

A group called World Evangelical Alliance bought a full-page N.Y. Times ad (at least $120,000) this week. A bigger waste of money I’d have a hard time conceiving. Nearest I can tell, the basic message is: “Jews, we love you. But we don’t love you enough to stop proselytizing you or converting you. In fact, we really don’t care what you think of that, since it’s more important to us to keep doing this than it is to respect your wishes that we not do so.” And the real kicker was the evangelical signatories who insisted that converted Jews like Jews for Jesus and messianic Jews are still authentic Jews who despite becoming Christian have a right to call themselves Jews for the purpose of insinuating themselves into the lives of unsuspecting Jews they seek to convert.

The ad is quite a performance. Full of fake love and respect attempting to conceal presumptuousness and condescension toward Jews. The odd thing is that the ad pretends it is directed as a friendly communique to Jews. I actually took it as a declaration of war. So if it was supposed to say anything positive toward Jews it failed miserably on that score. In truth, I think it was meant more for an evangelical audience to reconfirm their certainty that they are right in their efforts to convert the Jews.

The ad begins well enough:

As evangelical Christians, we want to express our genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people. We sadly acknowledge that church history has been marred with anti-Semitic words and deeds; and that at times when the Jewish people were in great peril, the church did far less than it should have.

We pledge our commitment to be loving friends and to stand against such injustice in our generation.

But it quickly goes downhill:

• At the same time, we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and Scriptural expression of our friendship toward Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
• We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12).

FTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008

Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics – and occasionally their religious organisations – gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].

In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.

Pope Benedict XVI (AP)

ADL slams Vatican over revised prayer for conversion of Jews – Haaretz, February 7, 2008

The Vatican has come under fire from Jewish groups in recent days for changing its Good Friday service to include a prayer urging God to let Jews “recognize Jesus Christ as savior of all men.”

Earlier this week, Pope Benedict ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at traditionalist Good Friday services, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ.

But the Anti-Defamation League has called the changes “cosmetic revisions,” saying that the prayer is still “deeply troubling” because of its call to convert Jews.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer – which has retained the name Prayer for Conversion of the Jews – also excludes a former a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

Ian Fisher, Pope’s Rewrite of Latin Prayer Draws Criticism From 2 Sides – New York Times, February 6, 2008

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday issued a replacement for a contentious Good Friday prayer in Latin, removing language that many Jewish groups found offensive but still calling for the Jews’ conversion.

However, representatives of Jewish groups as well as traditionalist Catholics quickly condemned the new prayer, though for different reasons. Jewish groups said it was still offensive, and traditionalists said they preferred the version that was replaced.

“It’s disappointing,” said Rabbi David Rosen, director of inter-religious affairs for the American Jewish Committee, who for 20 years has worked on Jewish-Catholic relations with Benedict as pope and, earlier, when he was a cardinal.

The prayer was a focus of dispute last year when Benedict allowed for greater use of a traditional version of the Latin Mass, called the Tridentine rite. That decree improved ties with Catholic traditionalists, who oppose the sweeping changes to church liturgy made from 1962 through 1965 during the Second Vatican Council.

The prayer is not part of the standard service used by most of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, who celebrate Mass in their local languages.

The new prayer, published only in Latin on Tuesday in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, deletes a reference to Jews’ “blindness” and a call that God “may lift the veil from their hearts.”

Pope nixes reference to Jews’ `blindness` over Jesus in prayer – Haaretz, February 6, 2008

Pope Benedict has ordered changes to a Latin prayer for Jews at Good Friday services by traditionalist Catholics, deleting a reference to their “blindness” over Christ, the Vatican said on Tuesday.The Vatican newspaper l’Osservatore Romano published the new version of the prayer in Latin and said it should be used by the traditionalist minority starting this Good Friday, March 21.

Apart from the deletion of the word “blindness,” the new prayer also removes a phrase that asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

But the new prayer hopes that Jews will recognize Christ.

Le pape atténue les termes de la prière de “conversion des juifs”, Le Monde.fr, February 6, 2008

À la veille du Carême (période de quarante jours de prières et de pénitence avant Pâques), ouvert mercredi 6 février, dit “mercredi des Cendres”, le Vatican a tenté de clore une polémique qui a assombri, ces derniers mois, le climat des relations entre catholiques et juifs, devenu plus fraternel quarante ans après le concile réformateur Vatican II (1962-1965).

Cette polémique était née le 7 juillet 2007, avec la publication du motu proprio (décret) de Benoît XVI libéralisant sous conditions – à titre “extraordinaire” – le rite antérieur à Vatican II, appelé rite “tridentin” (concile de Trente au XVIe siècle). Destiné à satisfaire les fidèles traditionalistes, ce décret du pape avait choqué la communauté juive parce que l’ancien rite de l’Eglise comprend – outre la messe en latin – une prière pour la “conversion des juifs”, traditionnellement récitée dans les églises le Vendredi saint (jour de la crucifixion du Christ).

En 1959, cette prière avait été réformée par le pape Jean XXIII (1958-1963), qui avait supprimé l’emploi de l’adjectif “perfides” pour désigner les juifs. Mais le reste n’avait pas été retouché.

En date du 4 février, une note de la secrétairerie d’Etat du Vatican rectifie à nouveau – partiellement – cette prière. Les passages demandant à Dieu de “soustraire le peuple juif de ses ténèbres” et de “l’aveuglement” ont disparu. Mais la suite, qui invite à prier “afin que Dieu illumine le coeur des juifs et qu’ils connaissent Jésus-Christ, sauveur de tous les hommes”, est maintenue. Elle demande à Dieu de permettre “que tout Israël soit sauvé en faisant entrer la foule des gens dans (son) Eglise”. Cette nouvelle version devra être en usage à compter de l’année 2008 dans toutes les célébrations de la liturgie du Vendredi saint.

Tony Judt, The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar Europe – The New York Review of Books, Feb. 14, 2008

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

In 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe—as death became the fundamental problem after the last war.”[2] In one sense she was, of course, absolutely correct. After World War I Europeans were traumatized by the memory of death: above all, death on the battlefield, on a scale hitherto unimaginable. The poetry, fiction, cinema, and art of interwar Europe were suffused with images of violence and death, usually critical but sometimes nostalgic (as in the writings of Ernst Jünger or Pierre Drieu La Rochelle). And of course the armed violence of World War I leached into civilian life in interwar Europe in many forms: paramilitary squads, political murders, coups d’état, civil wars, and revolutions.

After World War II, however, the worship of violence largely disappeared from European life. During this war violence was directed not just against soldiers but above all against civilians (a large share of the deaths during World War II occurred not in battle but under the aegis of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide). And the utter exhaustion of all European nations—winners and losers alike—left few illusions about the glory of fighting or the honor of death. What did remain, of course, was a widespread familiarity with brutality and crime on an unprecedented scale. The question of how human beings could do this to each other—and above all the question of how and why one European people (Germans) could set out to exterminate another (Jews) —were, for an alert observer like Arendt, self-evidently going to be the obsessive questions facing the continent. That is what she meant by “the problem of evil.”

Adi Schwartz, A courageous journey, Haaretz, December 27, 2007

“The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History” by Katrin Himmler, translated from German into English by Michael Mitchell, Macmillan, 352 pages, 14.99 pounds sterling

The media in the United States recently reported the story of an elderly American Jew, a Holocaust survivor, the resident of a well-to-do California suburb. One day a new tenant, also elderly, moved into the house next door, beyond the small garden. Courteously, the Jewish man decided to call on the new neighbor and perhaps greet him with a warm apple pie. But the moment the door opened, the Jew recalled that he had already seen this person. It was then, back there, more than 60 years ago, on the train platform at Auschwitz – a German facing a Jew, an executioner facing a victim. More than 60 years had elapsed, but the Jew’s heart began to beat wildly….

Katrin discovers the fact that never, until their deaths in the 1970s, had any of that generation of the family expressed any sign of regret for the disaster they had brought upon their country and upon humanity.

From the author’s hands has emerged a fascinating document reminiscent of Christopher Browning’s book “Ordinary Men.” Instead of dealing with the institutional aspect of the slaughter of the Jews, Katrin Himmler tries to follow the dynamics and psychology of the ordinary German – the one who was in the party “like everyone else,” who perhaps had not been at Hitler’s side from the Beer Hall Putsch on, but ultimately impelled him to help make the terrible disaster possible….

This story has a fascinating final note: Katrin Himmler is in a relationship with an Israeli man, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, and the couple has a son. At the end of the book, the author writes that she is still afraid of the moment when her son discovers that one side of his family had done everything it could to kill the other side.