Akos Belogh
TGC
Seventy five years ago, on the 27th January 1945, soldiers from the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army liberated the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
Former Soviet officer Ivan Martynushkin recalls seeing the prisoners for the first time:
It was hard to watch them. I remember their faces, especially their eyes which betrayed their ordeal.And what an ordeal it was: the systematic enslavement and destruction of human beings, unmatched and unparalleled in human history.
‘Never again’ was the catchcry of those who survived. As Auschwitz survivor Ellie Wiesal wrote in his haunting book ‘Night’:
The witness has forced himself to testify. For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his past to become their future.’And yet.
As the world remembered the horror of Auschwitz 75 years after its liberation, there is still much to reflect on—whether ideology, freedom or political power.
But it’s also a time to reflect on morality—in particular, the failure of a secular ‘God-less’ view of morality to make sense of this atrocity.
Here’s what I mean:
1. A Secular View of Morality Cannot Explain Auschwitz
It sees it as irrational madness: but Auschwitz was rational – and evil.
Adolf Hitler and his fellow Nazis’ are often called ‘madmen’ by our secular culture. According to this thinking, it was madness that drove the Nazi’s. It was madness that made the Holocaust. The Nazi’s were psychologically insane, so we’re told.
There doesn’t seem to be any other way for the secular mind to make sense of Auschwitz.
Except that the Holocaust was not an act of clinical ‘madness’. Yes, some of the Nazi’s may have been clinically insane. But the majority weren’t. The overwhelming majority were rational people, psychologically in their right mind. And thus, the Holocaust was not an act of sheer irrationality.
As secular philosopher John Rawlston Saul points out:
It is hard to avoid noticing that the murder of six million Jews was a perfectly rational act…
