Memory Eternal

 

Memory Eternal

Black Ribbon Day 2022

Never forget.

For whom does this bell toll?

 A village church in Germany recently discovered that one of its three bells has a dark past. It is inscribed with a swastika and an inscription that roughly translates as "Everything for the Fatherland  Adolf Hitler."

The church is described as Protestant which I am sort of assuming means Lutheran. After a rather heated debate that has drawn global interest (and commentary) they appear to have decided to leave the bell alone for now although there are plans to add some kind of plaque.

I am not unsympathetic to the conflicting views. After the war, first the Allies and then both East (Communist) and West Germany went on something of a campaign to eradicate monuments and buildings that it was feared might serve as some kind of rallying point for Nazi sympathizers. Laws were passed that forbade the public display of Nazi symbols and salutes. While a few structures with ties to the Third Reich survive, most were demolished or at least had any symbols stripped away.

But it has been almost three quarters of a century since the end of the war and many Germans are wondering if it isn't time to approach their past with out the kind of fear that, justifiably IMO, motivated their parents and grandparents to eradicate almost all physical reminders of that evil regime.

The options considered in this case were to leave the bell alone, move it to some kind of museum or simply melt it down. While I understand the emotional argument in favor of destroying the bell, I think its historical value would make some kind of preservation desirable. But as a Christian (forget Orthodox for the moment), I cannot conceive worshiping in a church with a Nazi bell ringing. It just beggars the imagination. The swastika along with the hammer and sickle are the two political symbols that I most closely associate with the demonic. To me it simply has no place in a church.

70 Years Ago: The Word Gets a Glimpse of Hell

Seventy years ago today the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp was liberated. About 7,500 inmates were found. The rest had been killed or forced into a death march back to Germany by the SS in an effort to eliminate witnesses to their crimes. Although the exact figure will likely never be known, virtually all reputable historians agree that during its years of operation somewhere around a million people were killed there by a combination of starvation, disease, shootings, hangings, torture and psuedoscientific medical experiments. But the vast majority were systematically murdered by gassing carried out on an industrial scale. The mass killings reached their height during the summer of 1944 with the gassing of around 12,000 men women and children every day as part of the planned liquidation of the Jews of Hungary.

Hungarian Jews waiting to be taken to the gas chambers.

Around 90% of those who died in the camp were Jews, with the rest being a combination of Soviet POWs, non Jewish Poles, Gypsies, political prisoners, criminals, homosexuals and others classified as undesirable or subhuman by the Third Reich. Overall it is estimated that about one in every six Jews killed by the Nazis died at Auschwitz. Today large parts of the camp remain preserved as a permanent memorial to the dead and although only one of many extermination camps, Auschwitz has become a global symbol of Nazi brutality.

Tens of thousands of shoes from those gassed.

Long Missing Diary of Arch-Nazi Alfred Rosenberg is Found

Alfred Rosenberg joined the Nazis before Adolph Hitler did. He later served as the party’s interim leader. He wrote a virulent, best-selling book about the “Aryan” struggle against Jews.

He formed a Nazi task force, named for himself, that looted European art treasures by the train load. And in July 1941, Hitler put him in charge of territories falling to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Read the rest here.

A war story from Greece

Thus when Greek Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens ordered his people to hide persecuted Jews, SS commander Jürgen Stroop threatened to shoot the archbishop. Rutler finishes the tale by recounting a striking example of episcopal sangfroid: “The archbishop replied by recalling the lynching of Patriarch Gregory of Constantinople by the Turks in 1821: ‘According to the tradition of the Greek Orthodox Church, our prelates are hanged, not shot. Please respect our tradition.’” The archbishop, happily, lived until 1949; Stroop was hanged after the war for his role in liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto.

From an article by George Weigel
HT: A blog reader

I had not heard this story before and found it uplifting.

Update: SSPX offers to celebrate funeral for Nazi war criminal (updated correction)

The latest from the AP is here.

The Diocese of Rome, presumably with the full approval of the Pope, had forbidden any of its priests from offering the Requiem Mass in public for the unrepentant Nazi. See here for the previous posting on the subject.

Update: Multiple sources are reporting that the priest who intended to offer the Requiem Mass is no longer affiliated with the SSPX. The text of the linked story has also changed drastically overnight.

Satanic

Not a word I use lightly. But sometimes it's the only appropriate adjective.