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Pope: Nazis Wanted to Exterminate Jews to Destroy "Taproot of Christian Faith"

By Peter J. Smith

AUSCHWITZ, Poland, May 29, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Pope Benedict XVI concluded his visit to Poland to a place that was "particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany": the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp complex.

The visit concludes the Pope's visit to Poland, where over 1 million Catholics received him in Krakow enthusiastically. The Pope came with humility into Poland, speaking only Italian, and some prayers and greetings in Polish. But only spoke German in the place where "humanity walked through a valley of darkness."

"I could not fail to come here. I had to come," Benedict said, repeating the words of Pope John Paul II on his 1979 visit to Auschwitz. Benedict in his address at the camp confronted the remains of the culture of death into which Hitler had swept his Germany.

Although John Paul and Benedict experienced the horror of the Nazi ideology, each experienced it from different perspectives, and at Auschwitz these perspectives are united. John Paul experienced the most violent effects of the atheist ideology forged by Hitler, as a clandestine young seminarian in Krakow, where the omnipresent stench of burning flesh from Auschwitz-Birkenau constantly reminded Poles of the death sentence that the Nazis had ordered for the whole people. However, Benedict, who was conscripted forcibly into the German army, and then deserted as a teenager saw from the inside the forces that carried away his countrymen from faith in God to a faith in man that embraced death and wrecked terrible havoc on the world.

"Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people," said Benedict. "I come here today as a son of the German people … a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and [intimidation], with the result that our people [were] used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power."

The German Pope walked into the death camp, taking the road well traveled by the over a million victims sent to their deaths more than because they were believed to be "lebensunwertes Leben - life unworthy of being lived." The pope passed the iron gates, which read "Arbeit Macht Frei": "work will set you free", viewing the ruined machines of death installed to murder with efficiency 20,000 persons per day, especially the old and children. Like John Paul, he prayed in silence before the execution wall, where Jews, Poles, and the other victims of Auschwitz were shot in the thousands, and descended into the starvation chamber of St. Maximilian Kolbe.

As Benedict passed along the memorial inscriptions of the camp, written in 21 languages to commemorate all the victims of Nazi ideology at Auschwitz he explained that the Nazi architects of death treated "men and women as material objects, and failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God." He spoke of how Nazism as an "ideology which valued only the empirically useful" moved to destroy cultures to reduce people to slavery, and slaughtered migratory peoples such as the Roma, or Gypsies. Benedict also explained the Nazi's determination to exterminate the Jews as part of a means to destroy Christianity. "By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."

As the Pope pondered where God was in all this, he suspected that God permitted these evils to show what the world without God looks like. Yet, the Pope warned not to judge God since "we would not be defending man but contributing to his downfall."

The Pope embraced a gathering of 32 survivors of Auschwitz, including one Jew, who had to burn the bodies of his people in the crematoria. Benedict kissed him twice on each cheek.

 "They [the victims] show us the terrifying effect of hatred. Their desire is to help our reason to see evil as evil and to reject it; their desire is to enkindle in us the courage to do good and to resist evil."

The Pope concluded his address with Psalm 23: "Even though I walk through the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me … I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long." As the Pope made his way along the inscriptions a cool rain began to fall, but as he neared the end, the rain cleared and a most vivid rainbow arched in triumph over the old ruins of death constructed by the thousand year Reich.

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