What a jolly story in today's news, the one about the 'feisty' [nowadays, a must-have word for every right-thinking woman] little old German lady in her late nineties who legged it from her care home just hours before the scheduled beginning of her trial in North Germany. She is charged with having, as an eighteen-year-old, worked in the admin department of an extermination camp.
Herr von Plod did catch up with her. I wonder whither she was heading ... to that much-storied Last Nazi Redoubt somewhere in the Alps, perhaps?
Perhaps they will confiscate her zimmer-frame to ensure that she now faces justice without further mishap. Her escapade, of course, ensures that her trial will receive more coverage than might otherwise have been the case.
Personally, I believe that the Shoah was such a horrible act of monstrous evil that even a typist who merely made up the lists should have to answer for her conduct. However aged she is.
Every single Jew who was exterminated deserves at least this modest expiation.
Just as I like to hope that, be it ever so long after my own death, the nice young ladies who with elegant efficiency confect the Operating Rotas in our fine modern British Abortion Clinics will be given the opportunity to explain themselves.
By linking this story with the modern massacres of unborn children, I rather thought I was making exactly the point suggested by pdm.
ReplyDeleteFr. H scored the goal in this exchange.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post, Father Hunwicke. I particularly liked your use of the word "Shoah" instead of the ubiquitous and unsuitable "holocaust". A holocaust was a full burnt offering, an act of great piety offered to God. The Nazi mass-murder of millions, mainly of Jews, but also of many others that they considered undesirable, was in no sense an act of pious devotion to Almighty God.
ReplyDeleteOne of the high points of Benedict XVI's magnificent legacy is the reflection he gave on his visit to Auschwitz. It repays careful reading.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this! I’m delighted with this information, where such important moments are captured. All the best!
ReplyDeleteIf this person had lived a life of expiation and reparation, one might feel this was too much. For example, the old German lady in Daktari who was in recent years revealed to have been a Nazi. She spent the rest of her life serving Africans as a physician, without pay, to make up for persecuting untermenschen when young. She sentenced herself and paid her dues herself, and did not want praise for it.
ReplyDeleteBut a secretary or clerk in a concentration camp would necessarily know a great deal about what was going on. And this woman did not turn herself in, back in the day, so presumably she wasn't repentant, either.