Not to be believed

You'll note the date here--August 2, 1942. Historians believe this telegram is the very first communication between world leaders that the Nazi national program of extermination--"the dejudification of Europe"--was not only underway, it was, in fact, public Nazi policy.

In 1995, when I taught a course titled "Holocaust Literature," I had a panel of four WWII veterans in to speak to the class. All of them were ordinary northwest Iowans, but what they shared as vets was a nightmare vision of the concentration camps. Each of them had walked into the horror of a camp they didn't know was there. They had no prior knowledge of what lay, in some cases, just beyond a line of cottonwoods. 

By that time, early in 1945, the Allied front was fighting their way through Germany, on the way to Berlin. The fighting was local and intense, town by town. They were moving slowly through the countryside, they said, when their companies stumbled on camps full of ragged, skeletal prisoners--you've seen the pictures. They'd had no clue, they said, and neither did their commanding officers. Images captured that day had replayed for years before their eyes.

The march to Berlin they were on took place three years after this cablegram, penned by Gerhart Riegner, Secretary of the World Jewish Congress, was addressed and sent to recipients in the U. S. State Department and British Foreign Office. What Riegner reported is exactly what happened, but it seems that no one believed him. 

Why not?

Some would like to argue that anti-Semitism in the States and in Great Britain is the reason for Allied inaction, but what must also be taken into consideration is the look those men in my class that night clearly replicated, fifty years later, when they talked about what they saw in camps they had no idea existed--profound slack-jawed disbelief.

I'm no authority. I have no idea who at the U. S. State Department didn't act or why he or they didn't? Life-long students of Holocaust history still disagree about why nothing was done with the Riegner cable. It's doubtful that anyone will ever know for sure, but that doesn't stop historians from trying. 

One reason, I'm sure, has to do with misplaced faith, "the knowledge of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Some officials, I'm sure--just like those Siouxland veterans--simply couldn't believe what the cable claimed. They didn't believe Riegner because they chose to believe in humanity. They held too lofty a faith in human nature, so lofty that it was--as it still is--next to impossible to believe that a nation of educated, religious people (Catholic and Lutheran) could design such horror, much less administrate a program to carry out. That level of evil was not to be believed.

But Riegner was right. What his cable claimed was true. What a German industrialist named Eduard Schulte had related to him at great peril, I'm sure, was not fiction.

Some just didn't believe it. Some couldn't. It's distressing for me, a Christian, to believe that, but it's true. 

Difficult as it is to admit, scary as it is to discover, it seems that there are times in life when "the evidence of things not seen" is simply not to be believed.