Children of the Holocaust

An internationally respected historian said, “Hostility and aggression in the political social world are created through murderous rage, persecutions and foulness, and the conscious and unconscious inner fantasies of the perpetrators. A moment's reflection will convince us that we are only able to postulate a characteristic or trait in another because it has been, to some degree, known to us in fantasy. Peoples and nations find in their minorities and in their neighbors an available and vulnerable target on whom to project their bad internal objects — their hatred and urge to kill, as well as their depreciated sense of inferiority, of being despised as slovenly parasites, cheats and unscrupulous characters. In the passion of nationalism, the enemy within becomes the enemy without” (Loewenberg).

The Nazi attempt at Jewish genocide was not just German. It was supported and encouraged everywhere the Germans went by other governments and the general population. Those “righteous Christians” (who saved Jews) were a small minority in the lands of Christian vicious anti-Semitism that fell right in with the destruction of the Jews. For nearly 2,000 years, Christians have been taught to hate the Jews and to treat them as the most hateful thing on earth: Christ Killers, Satan's Disciples, vermin, etc. The Holocaust could not have occurred without this basic Christian anti-Semitism. Such irrational hatred of others is an expression of self-hatred.

However, it is important to know that it didn't begin with the Nazis, that for generations upon generations the Jew in Germany and Austria and in much of Europe had been the object of denigration, depreciation to the point of being treated as less than human. Particularly during any time of stress, they became the object of abuse.

A Christian theologian, former Chairman of the Department of Theology at the University of British Columbia, said, “Is it possible that Christian humanism, the passion for truth, justice and human b