Jan. 10



USA:

Psychology of Holocaust examined


What: "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State," a documentary on the notorious
concentration camp.
When: 9 p.m. Jan. 19, 26 and Feb. 2
Where: PBS. Viewers should check local guides to see which PBS affiliates
will air the program.
Etc.: The screening marks the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.


All of Holocaust-era German society including military,
governmental, civilian and corporate sectors bore responsibility for the
Nazi atrocities committed against Jews, leading scholars discussing the
psychology and mentality of the time said yesterday.

The panelists spoke after a documentary on Auschwitz was shown at The
Museum of Jewish Heritage A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Battery
Park City. The six-hour series, "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State," which
will air this month on PBS, marks the 60th anniversary of the notorious
concentration camp's liberation.

Responding to museum director David Marwell's question about how human
beings could have allowed the Holocaust to happen were Raul Hilberg, an
author and professor who fled Nazi persecution in 1938; Dr. Robert Jay
Lifton, author of more than 20 books on such diverse subjects as the
Vietnam War, the Chinese cultural revolution and Nazi doctors; and Harry
Reicher, a leading international attorney and director of international
affairs and representative to the United Nations of the Agudath Israel
World Organization.

Hilberg said he made a list of organizations and companies that would have
benefited by association with the German government.

He found that many in the wider society also bore blame either through
active participation or inaction for the Holocaust, he said.

Hilberg cited the railroad companies, who he said were paid per body to
transport Jews to the camps, but whose complicity was hardly ever
acknowledged.

The German financial ministry, he noted, was another culprit, as were the
many lawyers, ordinary police officers, and auctioneers who sold Jews'
confiscated belongings.

Many of the blameworthy were normal people, some of whom were troubled by
what they did and very few of whom were zealous idealogues, Hilberg said.

Reicher, the legal scholar, pondered the issue of why Nazis went to
extreme lengths to codify their "massive legal assault" against Jews, who
at the time represented less than 1 percent of Germany's population.

"When we talk about law and the Holocaust, when we utter these two terms
in the same breath, we may in fact be articulating the ultimate oxymoron,"
Reicher said.

Some of the more ridiculous prohibitions included "you can't buy flowers
from a Jewish flower vendor; you can't buy milk from a cow owned by a
Jew," he said.

The numerous pieces of legislation were meant to dehumanize Jews, inure
the population to the atrocities and cloak any subsequent actions in the
guise of lawfulness and justice, he said.

"And the final indignity, the Reich became the heir when a Jew died, the
heir of that Jew's property," Reicher said.

The system thrived either because the passage of the laws actually
fostered the belief that Jews were less human, or possibly because German
society, which already tended toward militarism, proved to be receptive to
that kind of behavior, he said.

Lifton, who has conducted research on apocalyptic violence, said his
discussions with Nazi doctors showed that they did not believe what they
were doing was in their control, and they thought they were sparing Jews
pain by killing them.

Any human being could be vulnerable to a larger system, and could be
forced to conform to and internalize new beliefs, he said.

Pointing out that the Auschwitz death doctors, survivors and some who
supported the camp reported feeling as if they were on another planet,
Lifton said genocide could be socialized, as in the cases of the Nazi
Holocaust, as well as Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan.

About 300 attended the screening and subsequent discussion.

Numerous commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the
Polish camp which occurred Jan. 27, 1945 are planned worldwide.

Throughout the matter-of-fact delivery of first-person accounts from
survivors and a Nazi soldier, as well as dramatizations and film footage
from the era, the audience sat immersed in the film about the evolution of
the most murderous Nazi facility in which an estimated 2 million people
died. Viewers broke their silence only to react to the horrifying
depiction of destruction.

When, during one vivid scene, a former Nazi soldier recounted witnessing
the grisly assault of a Jewish infant by Nazi soldiers who wanted to stop
the child's crying, a few gasped. And some sighed when, during another
scene, they were told that 99 percent of all Jews who were sent to
Treblinka were killed within two hours of their arrival there.

(source: The Journal News)





VATICAN CITY:

Saving Jewish Children, but at What Cost?

In October 1946, just a year after the defeat of the Nazis, the Vatican
weighed in on one of the most painful episodes of the postwar era: the
refusal to allow Jewish children who had been sheltered by Catholics
during the war to return to their own families and communities.

A newly disclosed directive on the this subject provides written
confirmation of well-known church policy and practices at the time,
particularly toward Jewish children who had been baptized, often to save
them from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Its tone is cold and
impersonal, and it makes no mention of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Its disclosure has reopened a raw debate on the World War II role of the
Catholic Church and of Pope Pius XII, a candidate for sainthood who has
been excoriated by his critics as a heartless anti-Semite who maintained a
public silence on the Nazi death camps and praised by his supporters as a
savior of Jewish lives.

The one-page, typewritten directive, dated Oct. 23, 1946, was discovered
in a French church archive outside Paris and made available to The New
York Times on the condition that the source would not be disclosed. It is
a list of instructions for French authorities on how to deal with demands
from Jewish officials who want to reclaim Jewish children.

"Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions
that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing,"
the directive says.

It also contains an order not to allow Jewish children who had been
baptized Catholic to go home to their own parents. "If the children have
been turned over by their parents, and if the parents reclaim them now,
providing that the children have not received baptism, they can be given
back," it says.

Even Jewish orphans who had not been baptized Catholic were not to be
turned over automatically to Jewish authorities. "For children who no
longer have their parents, given the fact that the church has
responsibility for them, it is not acceptable for them to be abandoned by
the church or entrusted to any persons who have no rights over them, at
least until they are in a position to choose themselves," the document
says. "This, obviously, is for children who would not have been baptized."

The document, written in French and first disclosed last week by the
Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, is unsigned but says, "It
should be noted that this decision taken by the Holy Congregation of the
Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father."

The publication of the document is likely to embolden those who do not
think Pius XII is worthy of becoming a saint. Some prominent Jews and
historians have attacked the document for its insensitivity to the
Holocaust.

The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Rome-based Jesuit priest and a leading proponent
for the beatification of Pius XII, the first step toward sainthood, said
he was convinced that the document did not come from the Vatican. He
pointed out that it is not on official Vatican stationery, that it is not
signed and that it is written in French, not Italian. "There is something
fishy here," he said.

But tienne Fouilloux, a French historian who is compiling Pope John
XXIII's diaries during his years in France, said that the document had
been discovered recently in church archives outside of Paris by a serious
researcher and that it is genuine. John has been beatified, the last
formal step toward sainthood.

At the time, Pope John XXIII was Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, Pope Pius
XII'S representative to France. During the war, Monsignor Roncalli was
credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution by
using diplomatic couriers, papal representatives and nuns to issue and
deliver baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas, many
of them forged, to Jews. He also helped gain asylum for Jews in neutral
countries.

"This document is indicative of a mind-set at the Vatican that dealt with
problems in a legal framework without worrying that there were human
beings involved," Mr. Fouilloux said. "It shows that the massacre of Jews
was not seen by the Holy See as something of importance."

He said he would include the document in the next volume of the diaries.

The document underscores the sanctity with which the Vatican treated the
sacrament of baptism at the time - no matter how or why it was
administered.

The church's stance that a baptized child is irrevocably Christian was
established nearly a century before the Holocaust, when, in 1858, papal
guards took Edgardo Mortara, 6, from his family in Bologna when word
spread that he had been clandestinely baptized by a Catholic maid. It was
relaxed only in the 1960's.

More important, the directive captures the church's failure to grasp the
enormous implications of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. "It shows the
very bureaucratic and very icy attitude of the Catholic Church in these
types of things." said Alberto Melloni, an Italian historian with the John
XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, who is working with Mr.
Fouilloux to publish the diaries of Pope John XXIII. He called the tone of
the directive "horrifyingly normal."

A second document that was also discovered by the French researcher is a
letter in July 1946 to Monsignor Roncalli that noted his pledge to
intervene to return Jewish-born children to their community and asked for
his help to return 30 Jewish-born children living in a Catholic charity.

"Almost two years after the liberation of France, some Israelite children
are still in non-Jewish institutions that refuse to give them back to
Jewish charities," said the letter, which was signed by the Grand Rabbi of
France and the head of the Jewish Central Consistory. It added, "We are in
advance, grateful for your help."

It is not known whether there was a reply.

No reliable figures exist on how many French Jewish children were saved by
the church from the Nazis, or affected by its decision to prevent them
from rejoining their families and communities after the war. The French
Jewish population had limited success in recovering Jewish children who
had been adopted by non-Jews.

In the most well-documented case in France, two Jewish boys, Robert and
Gerald Finaly, were sent in 1944 by their parents to a Catholic nursery in
Grenoble. The parents perished at Auschwitz. Family members tried to get
the boys back in 1945, but in part because they had been baptized, it took
an additional eight years and a long legal battle to prevail over the
church.

"Look, I know that for the church, baptism means the child belongs to the
church, you can't undo it," said Amos Luzzatto, the president of the Union
of Italian Jewish Communities. "But given the circumstances they could
have made a human decision."

Mr. Luzzatto described himself as "speechless" that the Vatican directive
on the children does not mention the Holocaust and questioned the
worthiness of Pius XII to be made a saint.

"If they beatify him, don't ask us to applaud," he said.

Some corners of the Catholic Church are suspicious that the document, and
the ensuing debate that has played out in Italian newspapers, was produced
to create obstacles in Pius XII's march toward sainthood.

But Pope John Paul II strongly supports the campaign to make Pius XII a
saint, and in February 2003, the Vatican announced the opening of some
secret archives to help clear Pius XII's name, although the papers do not
deal with his activities as pope.

(source: New York Times, Jan. 9)