Jacob Howland
UnHerd, Oct. 16, 2023
“Theologians have long understood Evil as an absence or privation: complete separation from God. But while mere absence is inert, Evil is as potent and contagious as certain deadly viruses”
After the Holocaust, academics and others tried to make sense of the murder of six million Jews. Historians pointed to the rise of nationalism following the First World War; the dismal state of the German economy when Hitler rose to power; the dehumanising abstraction of Enlightenment rationality. Some rabbis argued that the Holocaust was a punishment from God, but they could not agree on why it was merited. Was it because the Jews of Europe sought to found a state of their own? Or because they didn’t? Others more prudently followed Wittgenstein’s observation: “That of which we cannot speak, we must consign to silence.”
Many historical and societal factors set the stage for the Holocaust. But none of these, individually or collectively, can explain the kind of violence to which the Nazis subjected their Jewish victims.
Jewish children and babies were, for a time, thrown alive into fire pits at Auschwitz. It has been calculated that, in this manner, the SS saved approximately two-fifths of a cent per child on Zyklon-B, the insecticide they used in the gas chambers. Were the children burned alive to save money? It would be obscene to suppose that economy explains such a horrific method of murder. … [To read the full article, click here]