Dehumanization

 July 6, 2022

While visiting a friend, I was perusing her late husband’s books and came across a thick volume about the Holocaust. I’ve read about it often, but have never seen it in such detail. Page after page filled with narratives, eyewitness testimony, survivors’ stories, and photographs. The photographs…

When General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces visited Ohrdruf concentration camp in April 1945, he saw bodies  piled like wood and living skeletons struggling to survive. Even as the Allied Forces continued their fight, Eisenhower foresaw a day when the horrors of the Holocaust might be denied. He invited the media to document the scene. He compelled Germans living in the surrounding towns and any soldier not fighting at the front to witness the atrocities for themselves. The Holocaust cannot be denied, yet there are those today doing exactly what he feared.

What struck me as I read wasn’t the graphic images or the tragic stories, but how it all happened. Anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe, and deepened as the National Socialist Party grew in power in Germany in the ‘30’s. It began and was fueled by the dehumanization of those perceived as different and therefore inferior. The Nazis looked at the Jew as subhuman, and when this happened, it was all but inevitable that they would treat them the way they did.

I fear we may not be far away from a renewed Holocaust. Political rhetoric has passed from seeking compromise in disagreement to vilification and demonization of “the other side.” Calls for violence are coming from our Senators and Congresspersons, and there are plenty of misguided and unstable souls all too willing to act upon such words of encouragement. I agree with Mother Teresa who opined that when a society has no problem with a mother killing her unborn baby, it should not be surprised when life in general is devalued. 

Our nation is a culture of death awash in violence. We have long ceased believing we are created in the image of God; we have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind. As Nazi Germany, drunk on hatred, racism, and violence dragged the entire world into war a generation ago, so we today are teetering on the edge of another calamity. I am not pessimistic; I believe in God, and in his purposes and goodness. He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how shall he not give us all things in Christ? It is the Enemy of our souls who robs, kills, and destroys, but he will not have the final say. The day will come when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and Savior. What a welcome day that will be!