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Face to Faith
Not only defeated nations commit atrocities in war - by
forgiving their actions we admit our own nation's guilt
By Paul Oestreicher
01/28/06 "The
Guardian" -- -- 'Please Sir, it was them that did
it." Familiar playground language, deeply ingrained. They did
the evil deed, not us. When the Guardian, a few weeks ago,
published evidence that interrogation centres where torture was
systemic existed in the British zone of postwar occupied
Germany, I was shocked. There was even a British officer,
looking every bit the nasty Nazi, master-minding it all. This is
what they do. Many readers no doubt shared my moment of
playground denial.
I grew up during the second world war in New Zealand. The
Japanese were not human: the only good Jap was a dead Jap. There
was ghastly evidence to prove it. Fighting them, the US military
learned the ruthless tactics that were later perfected in Korea,
Vietnam and now Iraq. Today Japan is New Zealand's primary
trading partner. The country's standard of living depends
largely on Japanese tourism and investment. At my old high
school, all students learn Japanese. Yet the atrocity stories
were true. Only the perspective has changed.
In the popular mind, concentration camps typify only German
cruelty. Every British school child knows it. How many know
that, a century ago, the British army set up concentration camps
(and invented the name) in South Africa where thousands of Boer
families were held in sub-human conditions? The death rate was
high; the bitterness lasted for generations. In Kenya's war of
independence British troops were (with a wink and a nod)
permitted to kill anyone, provided they were black. Historians
still debate: did Cromwell's protestant soldiery put the Irish
peasantry to the sword? Irish history ever since is a classic
case of the them-not-us-syndrome.
Hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians, mainly
women and children, were killed in Allied bombing. An
instruction to RAF crew: "Concentrate on working-class areas.
The workers live closer together than the middle classes." It
culminated in the incineration by the United States air force
(motto: "Peace is our business") of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and
the slow death from radiation of tens of thousands in the years
to follow.
The demonisation of "the other" is both the cause and motor of
war: in turn, war legitimises barbarity on a grand scale. The
Nazis built extermination camps on conquered Polish soil under
cover of war. As defeat drew near, there was a futile attempt to
wipe out the traces. What the Turks did to Armenians in the
first world war showed Hitler what could be done. Turkey is
still largely in denial. Nations cover up their histories. Now
in the global war on terror no holds are barred. The murderer
and the torturer are back on the official payroll - both theirs
and ours.
Holocaust Memorial Day has many justifications when compassion
is a rare commodity. Christians need to see themselves in the
person of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who would
never have been given his task without the 2,000 years of
Christian Jew-baiting that prepared the ground. "Burn their
synagogues," Martin Luther had cried, speaking for all churches
across the centuries. Jews who hear the voices of the prophets
of Israel, ancient and modern, today face the painful truth that
the children of survivors, still haunted by fear, can themselves
become persecutors.
At the end of my personal pilgrimage to Auschwitz (my
grandmother took her life before she arrived) my Polish student
guide took me to Höss's place of execution. To her, that put the
seal on the defeat of evil. I wondered. I remembered the cartoon
that Vicky, himself a Jewish refugee, published the day before
Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death in Jerusalem: "One eye for
six million eyes? Brothers, kill no more." Is that not a better
answer to the worship of death?
As I left the camp, I could not escape the visitors' book. After
a long pause I wrote "Father forgive", the prayer of Jesus,
facing his own executioners. My guide shook her head in
disapproval. She had my sympathy.
· Paul Oestreicher, canon emeritus of Coventry Cathedral, is
Quaker chaplain to the University of Sussex
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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