A Time to Judge: Nazi Germany & the Peril of Moral Weakness

Terrell Clemmons:

In April 1945, as British and American soldiers liberated Nazi concentration camps, civilized people around the world gasped in horror at the images coming out of Germany. Newsreel footage showed catatonic, living skeletons, many of them all-but-dead in various stages of disease, dehydration, and starvation. Bergen-Belsen alone, liberated on April 15, held 60,000 living men, women, and children, with another 20,000 lying dead in the open, unburied. 

By the end of April, Adolph Hitler had added his own corpse to the death toll, and the war in Europe was over. Good people everywhere were grateful and relieved, but in the aftermath, deeply troubling yet inescapable questions arose. How did this happen?—in Germany, no less, the land of Martin Luther, the Catholic monk who had given birth to the Protestant Reformation? 

Nearly a century later, it’s easy to view the whole of Nazi Germany telescopically through the lens of Schindler’s List or the U.S. Holocaust Museum: The Nazis were bad; it must not happen again; now let’s move on. But human history is not so simple. The same Adolph Hitler, who in the 1940s was recognized as a murderous despot, rose to power in the 1930s with widespread approval. The more apropos question might be, How did that happen?

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