Matching Tracksuits

I’ve begun The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. According to the introduction,

The title “The Good Old Days” (“Schone Zeiten” in German) comes from the cover of a private photo album kept by concentration camp commandant Kurt Franz of Treblinka. This gruesomely sentimental and unmistakably authentic title introduces a disturbing collection of photographs, diaries, letters home, and confidential reports created by the executioners and sympathetic observers of the Holocaust.

It includes the Jäger Report in full. What is this report?

The “Jäger Report” is a statistical summary of the killing carried out by the Einsatzkommando 3, a unit of Einsatzgruppe A, between 4 July and 25 November 1941 in the towns and villages of Lithuania and Latvia. It was written by the unit’s commander, SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger (1888-1959), a member of the NSDAP since 1930 who was 53 years old at the time. As historian Ronald Headland points out, the “Jäger Report” is exceptional among these horrific documents for its “cold-blooded horror” and the “mind-boggling depravity” of its meticulous, morbid cataloguing. “In no other report,” Headland observes, “do we get as detailed a picture of the steady accumulation of victims.” At the conclusion of his report, on page 7, Jäger stated that “the aim of solving the Jewish problem for Lithuania has been achieved by Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more Jews in Lithuania apart from work-Jews and their families,” approximately 35,000 in number, still living in the towns Siauliai, Kaunas, and Vilnius. Note the change that took place at the end of July and the beginning of August: Jäger’s Einsatzkommando begins shooting Jewish children, in addition to adult men and women, and the overall rate of killing increases by a factor of ten: from a total of 4,400 in July to 47,906 in August. Karl Jäger committed suicide in June 1959 while awaiting trial (Source).

It’s page after page of tabulated columns indicating the date, the location, and the number of victims as Einsatzkommando 3 moved through Lithuania, killing Jews. Two back to back entries stand out:

All the Jews of a given town, wiped out in a single day. And this was long before gassing: these murders were personal, close.

The Einsatzkommandos had to take aim individually at individual people — at men, at women, at children. They were splattered with blood and brain matter at the end of the day.

The world said, “Never again!” when this happened. In a unified voice, we declared, “We will not let this happen again.” And yet it’s happening again, now, in Ukraine. Not to this extent. Not yet.

Why are we letting it happen again? Simple: the man behind all this has a whole arsenal of nuclear weapons behind him. We risk World War 3 if we simply intervene. He’s holding the world hostage as we sit and watch his troops slaughter, rape, and terrorize the civilians of Ukraine.

It’s fairly clear that, in a conventional war without the fear of nuclear weapons, the NATO allies could completely humiliate the Russian army right now. Putin knows that; his troops probably realize it; the world sees it. That’s why he keeps rattling the saber of nuclear annihilation.

And when you realize what, according to some, is the actual motivation behind all this, it’s even more sickening:

Growing up in the eighties, I was aware that we were in the midst of the Cold War, but I never really gave it much thought. The ubiquitous duck and cover practice of the fifties and sixties was nonexistent, and it seemed to me that Sting’s song “Russians” was less a worry about nuclear war and more a song about the simple fact that, because the Russians actually did love their children (they’re human after all), nuclear war was unlikely. Mutually Assured Destruction to my mind seemed to be common sense, and all adults possessed common sense. That’s what it meant to be an adult, I assumed.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, I (and likely most everyone else) assumed that the threat of a nuclear holocaust was at last a thing of the past. The only possibility of a nuclear explosion somewhere on the planet was connected to Islamic terrorism. Communism seemed it would have more reasonable leaders to me, and the fact that at most such terrorists could gain possession of a couple of such devices seemed to offset the relative dogmatic irrationality that accompanies Islamic terrorism.

During the past three weeks, though, I’ve thought more about the possibility of a nuclear world war than I ever have. Probably because it seems more likely than ever. Putin combines the worst of both the Cold-War era Soviet Union (i.e., a ton of nukes) and the warped view of the reality of Islamic extremists (i.e., an alternate view of history complete with totally fabricated “facts” that fuels a contemporary grievance).  And he’s backed into a corner. The Russians are inflicting terrible damage, but three weeks in, they still haven’t taken the capital. Russian soldiers are abandoning vehicles daily and the advance seems to be slowed to a near-standstill. If this continues, Russian surrender is the only sensible option, but it’s the one option that so many of us cannot imagine Putin taking.

The thing is, I find myself thinking of this all the time. I’m standing in the hallway, monitoring students as they change classes, and I’m thinking about it. I’m mowing the lawn, and I’m thinking about it. I’m going for a jog, and I’m thinking about it. It’s easy simply to say, “Well, you’re an adult now, and you have children: you have a better grasp of the dangers, and you’re directly responsible for the well-being of two children.”

But this is fundamentally different: Putin is one man. He answers to no one. The premier of the Soviet Union answered at least to the Politburo. There was some sense of accountability. Putin, on the other hand, answers to no one. He’s been holed up in solitude for two years now fearful of Covid and ever worried about a potential coup (allegedly) — he has literally lived in a reality of his own making, and the notions coming from his speeches indicate that his reality and reality reality don’t have much in common.

And so I, like everyone else, go through my normal routine — teaching, running, mowing, laughing, fussing — with a nagging fear just under the surface. A fear that I tell myself is ultimately not founded in reality. “Surely,” I tell myself, “Putin won’t escalate this to the point of no return.”

Evangelicals are all hot and excited about Putin’s attack against Ukraine.

Never mind the ridiculously immoral thought that God is compelling all these people to commit these actions, thereby making him ultimately responsible (so much for the Christian favorite apologetic move to explain the existence of evil, “It’s free-will!”). What’s equally disturbing is his excitement at the thought of what all this means: the rapture must surely be right around the corner. And shortly thereafter, Jesus will return! Hallelujah! Putin, in such a scenario, must launch nukes at some point because almost all life on Earth has to be wiped out (at least in the version I was raised learning), so we must lift our hearts in prayer that Putin will go ahead and order that nuclear attack.

So let’s run a thought experiment. Let’s say Putin does launch a nuclear war. Let’s say it’s worst-case scenario: almost all life is wiped out. Surely in that group of survivors, there would have to be some evangelical Christians. How would they interpret this devastation? Jesus’s return was supposed to be tied into this apocalypse, they might reason. Would they stop believing, though? Would this be proof for them that their rapture idea (at the very least) was faulty?

I don’t think they would stop believing. They would have to explain it somehow, but to suggest that they were wrong all along? It seems unlikely. They might even suggest that a lot of people were raptured just before the explosions vaporized millions. That would mean, though, that they weren’t raptured. That would mean that, despite their convictions about the impossibility of the scenario, they were left behind a la the Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins fictional series. But giving up that belief? I think they might even cling to it all the more.

At this point, another line of thought: we’re going to be living under the actual threat of a nuclear holocaust for as long as Putin is alive. But even in his death, he would threaten the world: his successor, if chosen by Putin, would be someone who’s groomed in the same convictions just as happens in North Korea. There is a very real possibility that this successor would have almost identical political views and aims as Putin. In that case, we’re right back in the same situation as the evangelicals: nothing could convince them that their convictions are wrong. Which would mean that the nuclear threat would continue. Which would mean that the evangelicals would continue to find perverse excitement in the situation. Which means it’s all circular…