On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp had largely been emptied on Himmler’s orders. At Auschwitz, the Nazis murdered more than one million people, mostly Jews. Its commandant Rudolf Höss, at his trial, perversely boasted that Auschwitz was “the greatest institution for human annihilation of all times.”
If you have learned a few facts about the Holocaust and come away with the notion that evil people did horrendous things, you have learned little.
To transform “never again” from mere words to meaningful action, it is essential to understand the consequences of combining bad ideas with unchecked powers and the forfeiting of personal responsibility.
Before his trial, one of his interrogators asked commandant Höss “whether he had ever enriched himself with victims’ possessions.” Höss became “visibly angry” and said, “What kind of a man do you think I am?”
In his autobiography, Höss admitted his crimes yet was careful to portray himself as a loving family man, “good natured,” and a humane killer. Höss, the greatest mass murderer in history, wanted the record to show his bourgeois decency. His daughter Brigette agreed with his assessment, calling him “the nicest, kindest father in the world.”
One of Höss’s biographers, Thomas Hardy, wrote, “It appeared that the commandant was an emotional and sane individual who… chose to overcome his better instincts.” Harding was terrified by his conclusion because “anyone could be capable of doing the same.”
The theory that terrible things happen because of evil people implies that to stop future tragic events in human history, ‘evil’ people must be recognized for what they are and prevented from attaining power. But if the line between good and evil, as Solzhenitsyn believed, runs through every human heart, thwarting evil by merely looking out for evil people is dangerously naïve.
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel wrote the introduction to Vivien Spitz’s Doctors from Hell. In it, Wiesel reported that the “officers of the Einsatzgruppen — the death commandos in Eastern Europe — had received degrees from Germany’s best universities. Some held doctorates in literature, others in philosophy, theology, or history.”
Wiesel characterized concentration camp doctors as “assassins in white coats” who helped choose who would be murdered and who would be subjected to experiments in their labs. The doctors, he explained, “knew how to discern Good and Evil; it was the sense of reality that was missing. In their eyes, the victims did not belong to humankind; they were abstractions.” These officers and doctors were killing machines — whose victims were children, women, and men — at Auschwitz, Babi Yar, and many other places.
This question haunted Wiesel: why didn’t their education “shield” them from “the temptation and seduction of cruelty that people may carry within?”
Wiesel partially answered his question when he observed for the Nazis, Jews didn’t belong to humankind. I have explored the mindset of seeing others as less than human in several previous essays, such as “Bringing ‘Freedom’ to Life.”
Despots can persuade people without meaning in their lives and without respect for the rule of law that killing others solves their problems.
Höss considered Hitler’s and Himmler’s orders to be sacred. He wrote, “Every order had to be considered sacred and even the hardest and most difficult had to be carried out without any hesitation.”
The attitude of Höss and other officers and doctors was widely shared. There was the rule of men — but not the rule of law — in Germany. Hans Frank, the governor-general of occupied Poland and the chief legal theorist for Hitler and the Nazi party, wrote, “Our supreme leader is also the supreme judge and that his will is now the foundation of our legal system.”
There were no individual rights in the Nazi worldview. Frank wrote, “The individual has value under the law only insofar as he is valuable to the community.”
In short, “the whole [Nazi] legal system” was “based entirely on the National Socialist worldview.” And Hitler pronounced that worldview.
The Nazi worldview was the antithesis of classical liberal principles. Classical liberal principles, anchored in Natural Law, put the individual’s rights ahead of collective identities and, when widely shared, are the front-line defense against tyranny.
In one of his most important books, The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis mounted a vigorous defense of Natural Law. Lewis used the term The Tao to describe the timeless moral principles contained in nearly all religions and the perennial philosophy (Lewis included John Locke).
Dictated value systems, such as the Nazis followed, stand apart from Natural Law. The dominance of such dictated values in society destroys essential human qualities. Natural Law, Lewis wrote, “is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is a sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.”
The Nazis and their followers believed they had discovered a new moral law — a moral law that allowed for murder, involuntary euthanasia, eugenics, and human experimentation. Hitler’s minions chose to surrender to their primitive impulses. Lewis wrote, “Those who stand outside all judgments of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.”
The naïve may “hope then among the impulses which arise in minds thus emptied of all ‘rational’ or ‘spiritual’ motives, some will be benevolent.”
Lewis throws a bucket of ice water on such hopes: “I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently.”
There is no perfectible new man, as the Nazis believed. The Nazis tried to do the impossible: invent a new Natural Law free from the constraints of all that humanity valued.
Perhaps soon, humanity will face significant economic hardships. Storing the seed corn of liberty requires cultivating a deeper understanding of and commitment to classical liberal principles. These principles are a buttress against the temptation to make poor decisions when faced with external pressures.
Holocaust survivor and psychologist Dr. Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz when she was 16 and later transferred to Gunskirchen. She witnessed Josef Mengele send her mother to death. When American forces liberated Gunskirchen in 1945, she could not walk and survived on grass pulled from the mud. An American soldier found her among the corpses, noticing her hand moving.
Eger has written two outstanding books, The Choice and The Gift. At age 97, she still does her daily inner work; by looking within, she seeks to see the humanity inherent in every person.
In The Gift, she describes a time when her resolve was tested: “A fourteen-year-old boy came to his court-appointed therapy session wearing a brown shirt and brown boots, leaned his elbow on the table, and started ranting about how to make America white again, about how to kill all the Jews, n****rs, Mexicans, and chinks.”
Eger continues, “Fury swept through me. I wanted so badly to shake him, to say, ‘How dare you talk like that? Do you know who I am? My mother died in a gas chamber!’”
Eger recalled, “Just when I thought I might reach out my hands and throttle him, I heard a voice within say, ‘Find the bigot in you.’”
Eger’s ego spoke first: “Impossible, I thought. I’m not a bigot. I’m a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant. I lost my parents to hate. I used the ‘colored’ bathroom at the factory in Baltimore in solidarity with my African American coworkers. I marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’m not a bigot!”
In the next moment, an insight filled her mind. She realized, “But to stop bigotry means you start with yourself. You let go of judgment and choose compassion.”
Eger learned, among other things, “Even a Nazi can be a messenger of God. This boy was my teacher, guiding me to the choice I always have to replace judgment with compassion — to recognize our shared humanity and practice love.”
Eger’s words carry the moral authority of one who has lived through hell on earth and decided to root out from her mind the conditions that create hell.
In Eger’s words,
It’s tempting to hate the haters. But I feel sorry for people who are taught to hate. We’re not all descendants of Nazis. But we each have a Nazi within. Freedom means choosing, every moment, whether we reach for our inner Nazi or our inner Gandhi. For the love we were born with or the hate we learned.
Studying the works of liberty’s greatest champions might make us think that instilling the great classical liberal principles is straightforward. Eger’s testimony adds another critical dimension. When, with self-inquiry and deliberate practice, we choose to recognize the humanity in everyone, the phrase “never again” becomes more than words.