As I read Rabbi Angel’s parsha column this week (see page 5, print edition), I was transported six years back to when I joined a delegation of Coloradans on the 70th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Dachau.
Our delegation, hosted by the Mizel Institute, included Jewish community professionals and members of the Colorado National Guard, whose troops, as part of the 45th Thunderbird Division led by the unforgettable Gen. Felix Sparks, were one of three divisions to liberate the notorious camp on April 29, 1945.
Among our unforgettable experiences, two similar images stood out: One, at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, of Julius Streicher, publisher of the hate-filled Der Stürmer, heiling Hitler seconds before the trapdoor opened below his feet. The other, two SS officers heiling Hitler to each other on the day of liberation, their black boots mired in the inhumanity of that camp and, symbolically, in the entire genocidal Nazi Holocaust.
I wondered how these people, faced with the incontrovertible evidence of the utter wickedness of Nazism, could continue to heil (“hail”) Hitler, the architect of the depravity? The two officers were literally standing in human waste — is there any more potent symbol of how low they had sunk — yet still “hailing” the man who brought it about? It was mind-boggling.
As unique as Nazism was, aspects of it are found in any attempted genocide. About Pharaoh, Rabbi Angel writes:
“In spite of his obviously failed policies and the terrible punishments plaguing Egypt, it seems that his advisers and the public at large still stood behind Pharaoh.”
Why, after suffering the ten plagues — including the deaths of their first born sons — did the Egyptians continue to support Pharaoh? Like Streicher saluting Hitler as he faced certain death, it is devoid of logic. The Egyptians knew that Pharaoh, with his hardened heart, caused his people, time and again, untold suffering. Yet, like Streicher followed Hitler, they followed Pharaoh to the death. Mind-boggling.
It’s a twisted version of the sunk cost fallacy, the reluctance to abandon a (losing) strategy because too much has been invested. If these perpetrators admitted the faultiness of the mythology, their entire worldview would collapse. If they admitted that the man in whom they had invested everything — including their own humanity — was evil, what would that say about who they were?
Instead of confronting their own evil, they needed to perpetuate the mythology, even as they stood in the filth it had created.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected].
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