"A witness to Hitler and an official observer at the Nuremberg war crimes trials warns against what happens when a nation’s moral foundations are shattered But his years studying in Berlin in the shadow of Hitler have perhaps had the greatest effect in shaping him. Today, he has many things to say as our culture continues to wallow in abortion on demand and careens headlong toward physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia and even eugenics, the belief that we can "improve" the human race through science.
The living room and study of his Colorado Springs home groan beneath the weight of books and testify to a keen intelligence and wide-ranging curiosity. Plutarch’s Lives of the Caesars, Winston Churchhill’s five-part history of World War II, an entire shelf of Tolstoy and the complete works of Martin Luther in both English and German mingle with The Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson and biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Sir Thomas More.
The Rev. Charles Carroll, who at 82 has the intellectual vigor of a man 50 years his junior, has just about seen it all in his lifetime. But his years studying in Berlin in the shadow of Hitler have perhaps had the greatest effect in shaping him. Today, he has many things to say as our culture continues to wallow in abortion on demand and careens headlong toward physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia and even eugenics, the belief that we can "improve" the human race through science.
The Warning Signs
Carroll lived in Berlin during 1937 and 1938, renting a room from a Jewish family recommended to him by the American embassy. He describes a surreal scene as the husband showed him around the apartment.
"He took me over to the medicine cabinet, showed me the medications and said, ‘You can use any of these if needed, but never touch this,’ " Carroll says. "It was cyanide. When we went back in the hall, I looked at the entrance doors. They were typical of the period, framed with glass, and behind each pane was a plate of steel. He said, '‘t will give mother Lido [the daughter] and me enough time.’
"I thought him paranoid at the time," Carroll continues, "but he was right, and I was dreaming." (Because the wife was not Jewish, the family managed to survive the Holocaust.)
By that point Nazi Germany was already well down the path to the Holocaust. It was a journey that began with small steps
First came The Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Ill Progeny on July 14, 1933. This eugenics program had two aspects: The positive side that encourages the increase of "racially healthy" Aryans, the Nazis’ supposed master race of non-Jewish Caucasians, and the negative side that justified vernichtung lebensunwerten lebens, literally "destruction of life unworthy to be lived."
Although abortion was technically illegal in Germany at the time, a case arose where a woman in the late stages of pregnancy was brought to be forcibly sterilized because she was among the "undesirables," the result of which would kill the unborn child. As a result of this "problem," the law was amended in 1934 to say that eugenic considerations carried equal weight to medical considerations when it comes to abortion.
It Can’t Happen Here…
Lest we become complacent, Carroll warns that what happened to Nazi Germany was not unique to that society.
"Although you cannot identify a situation in the United States exactly like that of Nazi Germany," Carroll says, "you can point to some parallels."
He stresses the he does not believe we are headed inexorably toward Nazism, but he does believe that the seeds for its horrible crimes are present in all societies. Sweden sterilized about 60,000 people against their will between 1935 and 1976, and Norway, Denmark and Finland at one time had similar laws allowing compulsory sterilization under certain circumstances. Germany in the 1930s just happened to provide fertile soil for those seeds to sprout.
Carroll cites, for example, the International Congress for Questions of Population in August 1935, hosted in Berlin by the German government. Participants came from around the world, including several from the United States led by Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Research Association. Laughlin was of the opinion that the entire world was in debt to Hitler for his views on eugenics.
At the conference Laughlin cited numerous U.S. laws supporting eugenics in one form or another. He claimed that as of Jan 1, 1935, more than 21,000 "eugenics sterilizations" had occurred in various states for reasons such as being "feeble-minded" (24 States), "mentally defective" (Delaware), "habitual criminals, moral degenerate persons" (Iowa), "inherited tendency to crime" (Connecticut) and "imbecility" (West Virginia). At least 13 States allowed involuntary sterilization of epileptics.
Indeed, in 1927 the Supreme Court had ruled in Buck v. Bell that involuntary sterilization was not unconstitutional.
"They were sterilizing people in Virginia who they felt were incompetent-a large number of blacks, some poor whites," Carroll says, and the Nazis often cited this legal case as they went forward with their eugenics agenda.
The German conference was also full of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thinking and references to evolution. Indeed, Carroll remembers a post-war conversation he had with a Jewish physician, Leo Alexander, during which Alexander explained the ease with which some doctors could carry out abortion, forced sterilization and even murder.
"There is a difference," Alexander said, "between those who look upon their fellow human beings as common creatures of a common creator and those who look upon them as a conglomerate of biologicals and chemicals."
Forced Sterilization and abortion led inexorably to active euthanasia. As early as 1935, Hitler considered enacting some form of euthanasia, but his fear of what the church would say, as well as protests by Adolf Cardinal Bertram, chairman of the German Catholic conference, forced Hitler to put this program on hold, at least until the eve of World War II. As Germany moved against Poland in September 1939, Hitler enacted the euthanasia program, believing the distraction of war would give him cover.
The program, under the supervision of SS doctor Lt. Gen. Karl Brandt, led first to the killing of deformed or retarded children, carried out on an individual basis, and then the mass killing of adult "undesirables," which provided the first "practice" for the slaughter of the Holocaust. One lesson learned: Killing in carbon monoxide-filled buses (only of the means the Nazis used at the time) was inefficient, which led to the development of the quicker-killing Zyclon B of the gas chambers.
It is important to note that in no case was this killing done to sick or dying people or at the request of a patient. And with the exception of the first case, this killing was done without the knowledge of the families.
"If you can get a group of physicians to sterilize and abort and, as we say, euthanize, it isn’t very difficult to get them to do anything," Carroll warns. "There’s no doubt in my mind that sterilization, abortion and euthanasia were the first steps toward the Holocaust."
A Loss of Natural Law
Even though most people are not trained in the law, Carroll believes Christians today must understand basic issues of law if they are to stand against the growing culture of death.
In particular he refers to society’s loss of natural law, "one of the bulwarks of what we once called Western civilization," he says. Natural law is the belief that, just as the physical world functions under a series of laws that we ignore at our peril, so too does the moral world.
Thje opposite of natural law is positive law: The law is what the judge, legislature—or the Fuehrer—says it is. Carroll cites, for example, Hitler’s speech of July 13, 1934, during which he stated that he was the law in Germany.
While not as audacious as Hitler’s diktat, the modern judiciary’s tendency to rule by apparent fiat is a close approximation of the state overruling natural law-- Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme court decision that legalized abortion, being the chief illustration.
Backbone of Resistance
Carroll believes that many Christians were fearless in their opposition to Hitler. And this, he stresses, required great moral and physical courage. "People minimize that today," he says.
Carroll cites a letter from Helmut von Moltke, great-grand nephew of the famous 19th-century field marshal of the same name, to his wife just before he was executed by the Nazis.
"I was not being tried because of an attempt on Hitler’s life, which I did not make, nor because I was a great land owner, nor because I was of the nobility, but because I was first and foremost a Christian," von Moltke wrote.
"I feel it can unequivocally stated that the church was the backbone of what resistance there was," Carroll says. Catholic bishop Clemens von Galen of Munster stood in his pulpit Aug 3, 1941, and denounced the euthanasia program at considerable risk to himself." After his speech, countless Catholic bishops and evangelical leaders joined forces and protested.
"Not that it stopped all the programs," Carroll admits, but it had some success. "The euthanasia program, by admission of Lt. Gen. Brandt, came to a slow end during the war, and he gave the churches credit for it."
"What Would I Do?"
What if you had been alive then? "that’s a question all of us have to ask," Carroll says.
"The thing that bothers me the most in the United States today is that the moral foundations of the republic are shattered," he says. "Our growing apathy disturbs me. One of the interesting things about the Nazi revolution is that Germany was in a moral vacuum [when Hitler came to power], and moral vacuums, like natural vacuums, seek to be filled."
A courageous church, unafraid to speak out, is the only hope to fill that void, he believes, citing the following statement from Albert Einstein:
"Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend [freedom], knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced.
"Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth."
Excellent link, thanks!
It already happened here — in 1973. If the Supreme Court can decide that a defenseless, unborn baby isn’t a human being, they can decide that an elderly person, an invalid — or YOU — are “life unworthy of life”.
If I were the Grand Duke I’d personally lead a troop of my Household Guard into Parliament and arrest every MP who voted for this on the charge of treason. F—k democracy.