Malcolm Hay (1881-1962) Thy Brothers Blood
Chapter 1
In the spring of 1945, three trucks loaded with eight to nine tons of human ashes, from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, were dumped into a canal in order to conceal the high rate of Jewish executions. When a German general was asked at Nuremburg how such things could happen, he replied: I am of the opinion that when for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that Jews are not even human, such an outcome is inevitable. This explanation, which gets to the root of the matter, is, however, incomplete. The doctrine which made such deeds inevitable had been preached, not merely for years or for decades, but for many centuries; more than once during the Middle Ages it threatened to destroy the Jewish people&
The German crime of genocide the murder of a race has its logical roots in the mediaeval theory that the Jews were outcasts, condemned by G-d to a life of perpetual servitude, and it is not, therefore, a phenomenon completely disconnected from previous history. Moreover, responsibility for the nearly achieved success of the German plan to destroy a whole group of human beings ought not to be restricted to Hitler and his gangsters, or to the German people. The plan nearly succeeded because it was allowed to develop without interference.
It was an excellent saying of Solons, wrote Richard Bentley, who when he was asked what would rid the world of injuries, replied: If the bystanders would have the same resentment with those that suffer wrong. The responsibility of bystanders who remained inactive while the German plan proceeded was recognized by one European statesman, by the least guilty of them all, Jan Masaryk, who had helped to rescue many thousands from the German chambers of death&
Responsibility for these deeds which have dishonored humanity does not rest solely with Hitler and the men who sat in the dock at Nuremberg. Another tribunal will judge the bystanders, some of them in England, who watched the murderous beginnings, and then looked away and in their hearts secretly approved. The Jewish blood shed by the Nazis, writers J.-P. Sartre, is upon the heads of all of us.
As Maxim Gorky said more than thirty years ago, one of the greatest crimes of which men are guilty is indifference to the fate of their fellow men. This responsibility of the indifferent was recognized by Jacques Maritain a few years before the final act of the tragedy. There seems to be a spirit, he said in 1938, which, without endorsing excesses committed against Jews& and without professing anti-Semitism, regards the Jewish drama with the indifference of the rational man who goes coldly along his way. It was this spirit of indifference, this cold aloofness of the bystanders, which made it possible for Hitler to turn Europe into a Jewish cemetery.
Christian responsibility has, however, been recognized by one English bystander who for many years has never failed to have the same resentment with those that suffer wrong : In our own day, and within our own civilization, writes Dr. James Parkes, more than six million deliberate murders are the consequence of the teachings about Jews for which the Christian Church is ultimately responsible, and of an attitude to Judaism which is not only maintained by all the Christian Churches, but has its ultimate resting place in the teaching of the New Testament itself.
Repressing the instinct to make excuses, read the following words written by a survivor of Auschwitz:
German responsibility for these crimes, however overwhelming it may be, is only a secondary responsibility, which has grafted itself, like a hideous parasite, upon a secular tradition, which is a Christian tradition. How can one forget that Christianity, chiefly from the eleventh century, has employed against Jews a policy of degradation and of pogroms, which has been extended among certain Christian people into contemporary history, which can be observed still alive to-day in most Catholic Poland, and of which the Hitlerian system has been only a copy, atrociously perfected.
Even in countries where pogroms are unknown, it was the coldness, the indifference of the average man which made the Jewish drama in Europe possible. I am convinced, wrote Pierre von Paasen, that Hitler neither could not would have done to the Jewish people what he has done& if we had not actively prepared the way for him by our own unfriendly attitude to the Jews, by our selfishness and by the anti-Semitic teaching in our churches and schools.
The way was prepared by a hatred which has a long history. The inoculation of the poison began long ago in the nurseries of Christendom.
Millions of children heard about Jews for the first time when they were told the story of how the founder of Christianity was killed by wicked men; killed by the Jews; crucified by the Jews. And the next thing they learned was that G-d had punished these wicked men and had cursed the whole of their nation for all time, so that they had become outcasts and were unfit to associate with Christians. When these children grew up, some of them quarreled among themselves about the meaning of the founder of Christianity and about the story of his life, death, and resurrection; and others were Christians only in name; but most of them retained enough Christianity to continue hating the perfidious people, the killers, the deicide race.