Feast of the Holy Innocents
Another Christian Holiday I had never previously encountered is the Feast in memory of the innocent children slaughtered by Herod the Great, celebrated Dec 28th, the fourth day of Christmas (when my true love gave me four Colly Birds–that is, black birds, for those of you keeping track.) There is not independent evidence that this event happened–Josephus, for example, does not mention it–but historians agree it is not out of character for the ambitious and bloodthirsty oriental potentate who rebuilt the Temple to unparalleled grandeur, but was also uneasy on his throne.
I did not tell my young children about this feast day–I had enough trouble explaining World War I and the poppies of Flander’s Fields to my eight-year-old, whose delicate emotional capacities are shocked by the march of General Jinjur’s Army of Revolt against the Emerald City during the reign of the Scarecrow King–but I thought in honor of the day, which I did not celebrate this year, I should post this grim but interesting memorial to one Christian who opposed the Nazis (hat tip to James Lileks).
As he noted in his post-war testimony:
“I prayed with them and cried out to my God and theirs. How glad I should have been to go into the gas chambers with them! How gladly I should have died the same death as theirs! Then an SS officer in uniform would have been found in the gas chambers. People would have believed it was an accident and the story would have been buried and forgotten. But I could not do this yet. I felt I must not succumb to the temptation to die with these people. I now knew a great deal about these murders.”
His report was one of the first and most important documents relating to the extermination of Jews in the death camps, including facts and events that Gerstein personally witnessed. After the war the basic facts of Gerstein’s report were verified by SS Obersturmbannführer Dr. W. Pfannenstiel before the Land-Court of Darmstadt in the Federal Republic of Germany, on June 6, 1950.
Kurt Gerstein, born on August 11, 1905, of an old Prussian family, graduated as a mining engineer in 1931. He had close links to the Christian anti-Nazi Resistance and remained very active in the youth groups, especially the Federation of German Bible Circles until it was disbanded in 1934. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, but outspokenly critical of Nazi blasphemies, he was expelled from the party in 1936. In 1938, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to a term in a concentration camp to reappraise his premises. Later Gerstein reapplied to become a Nazi party member but was refused.
In 1940 he applied to the SS in order to infiltrate the Third Reich and gather information about the Nazis and their dark secrets, after being told by the Bishop of Stuttgart that mentally ill patients were being killed at the institutions Hadamar and Grafeneck. In the beginning of 1941, Kurt Gerstein’s own sister-in-law, Bertha Ebeling, died mysteriously at Hadamar. Gerstein was shocked by her death and became determined to find out the truth about the numerous deaths at Hadamar and similar institutions.
No questions were asked about his past, and on March 10, 1941 he was admitted to the Waffen SS.
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There is more here.
Personally, I take this Holocaust to be the defining moment of the Twentieth Century: it is the horror writ large of every science-worshipping, materialist, soulless tendency of the modern secular world. It is a return to near-Spartan levels of inhumanity once we have rejected Athenian rationalism. It is the end result of social engineering, the triumph of the intellectuals, the triumph of the will. It is the victory of the Beast in man over the Reason in man.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
