FINAL SOLUTION?

Heinrich Himmler with Adolph Hitler

Heinrich Himmler on cover of TIME

When I was a child my mother told me about her and her first husband working on a chicken farm in Texas during the 1930s Depression. My mother's sister had married into a family that owned a chain of restaurants in central Texas that specialized in fried chicken. The recipe was a secret well kept and most popular. The family had a complete process chain on the farm, they raised their own chickens, processed and delivered them ready to cook at the restaurants they owned in Waco, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. They also took the opportunity to sell the laid eggs to local stores and chains and even sold the plucked feathers to bedding and pillow manufacturers. It was the epitome of a modern de-assembly line. It meant that the family could control the execution of source, production and the sale of their product from beginning to end. It was a great solution.
It was during the 1930's that Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany. A nation still reeling from its WWI War Appropriations sanctions, the excesses of the Wiemar Republic of the 20's and then a global Depression with an aged Chancellor Hindenburg attempting to keep things together set the stage for a talented public persuader to enter from stage right and create a new Reich.
When Hitler first came to power not all the world was fearful. It was sometimes said of him " at least he's gotten the trains to run on time." Of course those trains didn't just run on time to Berlin or Dresden, but eventually and horribly they ran on time to Dachau, Auschwitz and about 17 other concentration death camps as well.
The man on the left in the image above with Hitler was Heinrich Himmler, the man most directly responsible for the Holocaust and the ethnocide brought upon Europe during the 1930s and 40s. On the cover of TIME he is in the foreground while the piles of corpses are rendered behind him. A legacy of eternal significance. He was the head of the SS. With a skull and crossbones above the brims of their military caps, the SS created an extent of death that rivaled continent wide epidemics from European middle history. At first the "Jewish problem" was to round up the "vermin " into ghettos, isolating and ostracizing them. But then the Nazis felt this was not sufficient, so they simply started shooting them. A simple bullet to the head of a man, a woman, a child, an infant. A brother, a sister, an uncle, an aunt. But this left bodies to be buried or disposed of. An in-efficient mess. So German chemists developed a lethal gas that could extinguish large numbers of persons in closed spaces (often disguised as communal showers) at concentration camps built across the Reich territories. Before the people were gassed and their remains burned in ovens, the SS also took all of the belongings of value from the people. They sold the jewelry, gold from teeth, wedding rings, anything that would bring a price.  It was the epitome of a modern de-humanizing line. It meant that the SS could control the source, destruction and execution of the person from beginning to end. It was the "Final Solution."
It was such a tragic irony when I first read that Heinrich Himmler had been a chicken farmer before he joined the Nazi hierarchy of the Third Reich.
In our reading from the book, The Life of Meaning, we start the second chapter regarding Suffering and Evil. Genocide and Ethnocide have always been with us but perhaps not to the extent, comprehensiveness and efficiency of the two world wars of the 20th century. The Holocaust (sacrifice) that inexplicable horror beyond comprehension for even those that witnessed its results is where we start. Like diving directly into the deep end of the gene pool. Menachem Daum, child of Jewish survivors of the death camps, expresses his struggle with how his parents have each dealt differently with their Holocaust experience. He is in the limbo land between the expressed characteristics of God as being both ultimately good and powerful or perhaps not?
Where does that put us in regard to the impact of the Holocaust? In our view of God? By the way, just what is our view of God and how does it relate to our view of others? How did the Jews and the Nazis view God?

Walter Morton for Terra Incognita