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8 ON LOSING TRUST IN THE WORLD John K. Roth Jean Amery, lone child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, was born in Vienna on October 31, 1912. He fled Nazism by going to Belgium in 1938. There he later joined the Resistance. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, he was sent to a series of concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Amery went on to write a series of remarkable essays about his Holocaust experiences. One of them is simply titled "Torture." It drove Amery to the following observation: "The expectation of help, the certainty of help, is indeed one of the fundamental experiences of human beings...." But the gravest loss produced by the Holocaust, he suggested, was that it radically undermined that "element of trust in the world, ... the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me-more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being."1 Jean Amery took his own life on October 17, 1978. That fact, along with a host of other particularities generated by the Holocaust, compels one to assess what losing trust in the world can mean. In the spring of 1942, while Amery resisted Nazism, SS officer Ernst Biberstein went east. He had already been involved in deporting Jews to killing centers, but his new assignment would take him from an administrative post into the field to relieve an officer in Einsatzgruppe C. One of four Nazi squadrons charged with eliminating Jews behind the lines of the German advance into Russia, Einsatzgruppe C policed the Ukraine. Among its credits was the murder of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar the previous September, a task accomplished in only two days. Biberstein missed Babi Yar, but he did nothing to diminish the record of his unit once he assumed command. It was unnecessary to deport thousands of Jews because Biberstein and his men worked efficiently. This Nazi, however, was not bloodthirsty. No evidence shows that he actively sought to lead a crew of killers or that he 163 Copyrighted Material 164 I PART TWO: ASSAULT ON MORALITY relished the operations carried out by those under his command. His is only one example within a spectrum of activity that included not only direct participation in murder but also the many sorts of complicity required to make a process of destruction happen. And yet when we think about losing trust in the world, Biberstein's case makes us wonder. It does so because, prior to his joining the SS in 1936, Biberstein had been a Protestant pastor. As Biberstein moved from killing by administrative decision to killing by ordering executioners to fire machine guns, a young German soldier reached Munich, following orders that transferred him to the university there for training as a medic. Earlier, his letters alluded to events that had shaken him to the core. "I can't begin to give you the details," he wrote, "it is simply unthinkable that such things exist. ... The war here in the East leads to things so terrible I would never have thought them possible."2 Willi Graf referred not to combat against Russian troops but to slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen. In Munich two of Graf's closest friends were Hans and Sophie Scholl, both in their early twenties. Motivated by an understanding of Christianity and a love for Germany that were at odds with Hitler's, the Scholls were determined to do more than ask helplessly, "What can we do?" With Hans in charge, their public dissent began. Although they possessed abundant courage, ingenuity, and high ideals, their power was scant. Nonetheless, along with their philosophy professor, Kurt Huber, fifty-one, and fellow students Alex Schmorell, Christoph Probst, and Willi Gra£, leaflets from their resistance movement, The White Rose, attacked Nazism. German resistance to Hitler remained scattered. It did not land many telling blows, as the Scholls' effort seems to demonstrate. Their group operated for less than a year, its output restricted to several thousand copies of seven different flyers. The war and the death camps churned on for more than two years after the White Rose was crushed. The results seem paltry, but a second glance is in order. The war was still in Hitler's favor when the students' protest began in 1942. By the time the Scholls were caught, that tide had turned at Stalingrad. The White Rose could assume...

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