People Like Me
The thing that frightens me the most
about the Nazi Era is that it involved people like me.
It isn’t the concentration camp victims that I’m talking about;
it’s the Nazis themselves.
We don’t like to think of ourselves that way; we like to imagine that
the insanity of the Third Reich was an aberration, an odd exception in
human history. Because the Nazis did monstrous things, we tend to think
of them all as monsters and distance them from the rest of humankind.
But they were people like me.
By and large, they loved their children; they worked hard, were brave
and patriotic. Many went to church. The society that gave birth to
Nazism was not a medieval throwback. No country was more scientifically
advanced; no people better educated. They were patrons of the arts. The
German Protestant Church was the most enlightened church in Europe.
That’s what frightens me: the people that did these barbaric things were
not barbarians. They were cultured and enlightened. They were people
like me.
What’s so frightening about that is that it can happen again, that in
spite of multiplied Holocaust Memorials, in spite of people crying,
“Never Again,” it can happen again. Indeed, it probably will happen
again. That’s the lesson of history. Our species is notorious for
singling out scapegoats to purge from our ranks, whether it’s the Jews
of Warsaw or the Muslims of Sarajevo. It can always be justified by the
mesmerizing demagogue.
I am a descendant of slaveholders. As far as I can tell from my family
history, they were decent, loving people. How did such people justify so
brutal an institution as slavery? I do not know. I only know that I,
too, am capable of blindly rationalizing great evil. What amazes me
about history is not all the bad things that bad people did; it’s the
bad things that “good” people did, people like me.
That’s why I fear Nazism—because it’s not so far away. It’s always
lurking, not just out there, but inside me, too. To believe that those
who are different from me are less than human is not a thought that is
foreign to our species. It is a thought that embraced in desperate times
leads to death camps and ovens. It is a
thought that can be embraced by people like me.
Robert
Benn Vincent, Sr.
Remembering Kristallnacht at the Holocaust Memorial Park
Sunday, November 9, 2014, the 75th Anniversary of the Night of the
Broken Class
And at the
Grace Presbyterian Church
Hosting the Annual
Holocaust Memorial Service
Under the sponsorship of
Congregation Gemiluth Chassodim and
The Central Louisiana Ministerial Association
Alexandria, Louisiana
Thursday, April 7, 1994