Germany is trying as an accessory to murder a 94-year old man who served as a guard at Auschwitz.
A 94-year-old former guard at Auschwitz is set to come face to face with camp survivors, as he goes on trial in Germany — accused of being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 people.
This is first of four such court cases, but could also be the last, due to the very old age of the defendants.
Reinhold Hanning was 18-years old when he joined the SS, and 20-years old when he was made a guard.
“It is better,” Socrates said, “to suffer an evil than to commit an evil.” But for 2000-years the Christian church has said, “Shut-up and do as you’re told; your clergy and your government leaders are appointed over you by You-Know-Who.”
It is easy to agree that Adolf Eichmann was guilty, and morally responsible for the depravities he masterminded — but, then, Eichmann was a grown man. Hanning, on the other hand, was scarcely out of childhood in a world gone mad and, probably, philosophically still ill-formed; it isn’t likely that, at that age, he had ever given any serious thought of his own, or read broadly about, questions of right and wrong or to the nature of morality and personal accountability.
“People don’t need to be born again; they need to grow up.”
Bishop John Spong
This is interesting, don’t you think? Eichmann made, essentially, a Christian defense — he did as he was told by the leaders appointed over him; we don’t know yet what Hanning will say; and most of us want to hold them both to Socrates’ dictum: It is better to suffer an evil than to commit an evil.
The gist of it seems to be that in some vague way, however uncertainly sensed or stated, we expect people to grow past Christianity, to leave behind the blind obedience demanded by clergy and to make their own judgments about right and wrong.
The matter is just as I have long insisted, then: Most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you have to watch.