From: david.lloyd-jones@rose.com (david lloyd-jones)
Subject: Hitler's Religion
Organization: Rose Media Inc, Toronto, Ontario.
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 1992 10:10:51 GMT
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Date Entered: 04-16-92 23:19
RO>Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,soc.history,soc.culture.jewish
RO>From: roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig)
RO>Subject: Re: Hitler's Religion (was re: Instant Yuppies)

Roger,

One of the most disturbing books I've read in a little while is one I
received this week: "The Berlin Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov."  I have
it in the expensive Folio Society Edition, because I thought it was
something worth passing on for a generation or so.  It's also out in a
1987 Knopf edition in the US, and a 1985 Chatto & Windus edition in the
British Commonwealth.

"Missie" Vassiltchikov was from a White Russian family who had settled
in Latvia and then, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germany.  The
diaries start in 1940, with Missie povertystricken looking for work.
She applies to the US Embassy and the German Foreign Ministry, and
verious other places around town (Berlin).  The German foreign Ministry
hires her, and then the next day she gets an offer from the Americans...

Her boss at the AA (Ausw rtiges Amt., Foreign Office) was Adam von Trott
zu Solz, garrotted in 1944 for his involvement in the June 20 attempt on
Hitler's life.  After the first wave of executions she held a memorial
Mass for the executed: one Orthodox priest, one communicant, herself, in
a private chapel.

An awful lot of the book is about drinking "wine and champagne" or else
brandy.  This whole social class, they call themselves "aristos," didn't
like Hitler, and clearly spent a good deal of the war drunk.  Some of
her immediate circle are Jewish, and, after losing their legal appeals,
get sent to Theresienstadt.

These are the "good Germans."  (I'm not sure whether this phrase is
still current.  I think it reached wide currency through Hanna Arendt,
but I remember it as always spoken with a sneer in my childhood in the
late forties, early fifties.)

They are indeed pretty good people, as good as anyone you will meet in
everyday life.  11,400 documented, 17,000 more likely, were killed by
the Nazis after trials by "People's Courts" in the aftermath of the 1944
assassination attempt.   All of them were Christian (a very few Jewish
or "mischling," the Nazi word) by convention.  Many were fairly
seriously observant.

Here's a bizarre example: after von Trott is arrested, and while he is
being tortured by the Gestapo, Missie tries to get a third of a squab in
to him in prison.  The other two thirds are for two other prisoners,
and another woman is trying to ply guards with cigarettes to get those
morsels in.  All three fail.  Thirty years later George Vassiltchikov,
a brother, is editing the diary for publication, so to fill in the
blanks he is interviewing prisoners.  Several of the prisoners in this
prison at the time are Catholic priests, and they have set up a system
of confession and absolution for other prisoners, using the guards as
messengers to carry confessions to them in writing, and wafers and
penitences back in envelopes.  I mean how does this work: "OK, Hans,
drop off the thumb-screws in Fritzi's office and then run out and get a
suppply of wafers for the guy in cell 43..."?

                            * * *

Enough!  Surely it is obvious that the Nazis were not Christians, though
some may have pretended to be, and others may have thought they were in
a rather offhand way.

Equally obvious, the Christian Church as an organisation has been at
many times and places a pathological and vile machine causing great
harm.  Poland in the previous couple of generations would seem to be one
such time and place.

Pervasively, though, Nazism was a political and cultural force of such
awesome power that it simply swept over very many ordinary decent
people.  Many of these were Christians of some depth and seriousness,
and they were helpless.  Many of these lived and died their consciences,
and we should honour them for it.

                                               -dlj.
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