Auschwitz through the lens of the SS

I watched a show on the National Geographic channel last night entitled, "the diaries from hell."

In January 2007, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received a donation of a photograph album. The photographs depict SS-Obersturmfuhrer Karl Hocker, the adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Stumbannfuhrer Richard Baer. Hocker was stationed at Auschwitz from May 1944 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945.

The photographs (and the show) showed that even in the final months of the war, after Soviet troops had liberated concentration camps and labor camps to the east, SS officers stationed at Auschwitz enjoyed social functions and formal ceremonies. The album shows Auschwitz at a pivotal time - the period during which the gas chambers were operating at maximum efficiency - as the Hungarian Jews arrived and during the last months before the evacuation of the camp.

The photos show them enjoying a picnic. Relaxing on a sun deck. Singing at a "sing-a-long." Eating blueberries. Flirting (the women officers with the German men SS and vice-versa).

They are seen as people relaxing, smiling, having fun after a "hard day's work."

What has always disconcerted me about Auschwitz (having visited there in 1990) is that the men and women in charge of the camps were "every day" people just like you and me. Doctors. Lawyers. Bank tellers. Karl Hocker himself was a bank teller before and after the war.

That's what makes the crime so horrific. We tend to envision these people as the dregs of the German society who suddenly had power on there hands. They were not. They were normal, "every day" people who suddenly had the power of life and death and committed horrible crimes.

That's what makes the crime so chilling.

Jeremiah 17:9 states, "the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"

Left to ourselves, we are a self-destructive people. Full of hate, pride and an unresolvable thirst for self-absorption.

That's why we need Christ. That's why we need a belief in something beyond ourselves. If anything (for the non-religious person) it serves as a buffer between the ability of man to destroy mankind and living an every day ordinary life.

Adolf Hitler tried to destroy the Christian church and anything remotely religious. In the end, it ended up destroying him - and his empire.