But it was an open secret. Millions of Germans had direct knowledge of what was taking place. We have a lot of evidence that soldiers coming back from the front told their family and friends about what was going on. People knew.
It’s true that some Germans did find the killing unspeakably gruesome – that is, when they were shooting victims face to face at point blank range – but one of the things I did was study those units where the men were given the option not to take part in the killing. I found that very few men availed themselves of the opportunity – even when they saw that those who refused to kill were just given other duties.
So you have to ask yourself the question: Why would someone shoot children at point-blank range if he didn’t believe that what he was doing was right? And they didn’t just shoot them. They brutalized them, subjecting them to all manner of cruelty. A common phrase that the perpetrators themselves used was, “Beating Jews was our daily bread.” Why would they do it if they thought the Jews innocent and undeserving of their fate?
Now, even if you think you’re killing a devil in human form, just the sight of blood, brain, and bones flying around and spattering on you can be unsettling. After all, many people who eat meat do not want to slaughter the animals themselves or will not go into a slaughterhouse because it’s gruesome. And so the leadership did try to find a more cosmetic way of killing the Jews and that’s why they eventually set up the gas chambers in the extermination camps. But it was definitely not because of widespread opposition.
In 2002 you wrote another controversial work, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair. What exactly was the Church’s role in the Holocaust other than a passive one?
In order for the Nazis to enforce the race laws, they needed access to church records to determine the lineage of people. The Catholic Church fully cooperated.
In Germany, France, and Italy, the Church supported the race laws. In Slovakia when the regime was about to undertake the deportation of Slovakian Jews – many of whom ended up in Auschwitz – there was a pastoral letter read by the priests in parish after parish, justifying in Nazi-like terms the deportation of the Jews. In Croatia some priests participated in mass murders, and so on and so forth.
So there’s a lot that the Church needs to answer for. It’s not just whether the pope didn’t speak out on behalf of Jews, which is what the discussion has typically been about. It’s all the things Church members did, including national churches, to facilitate the persecution of Jews.
Now, I should add quickly that individual bishops, priests, and nuns probably saved more Jews than [members of] any other institution during the Nazi period because they as individuals acted upon their moral sensibility. But the overall record of the Catholic Church is quite bad.
In a country like Bulgaria, Christian leaders stood up for the Jews. How do you account for Christian leaders standing up for Jews in one country and not in another?
There was a systematic difference between the Catholic Church and most other Christian churches. From its perspective, the Catholic Church was mired in a foundational struggle with Jews. It claimed that it was the rightful heir of the Jewish tradition, that the Jewish bible was its bible, and that the Jews had become wayward. So they were more deeply anti-Semitic than many other churches, which were much more moderate.
