Richard A. Koenigsberg and Rene Girard At the conclusion of my lecture, I waited for questions. There was silence. A young lady in the back of the auditorium tentatively raised her hand. But the audience was nervous. Everyone looked toward Rene Girard, sitting directly in front of me—not more than 15 feet away. Suddenly, he stood up—trembling. I don’t remember his exact words, but he gestured affirmation, “Yes, yes.” With his approval, the discussion burst forth.

The term “Holocaust” is derived from a term that means a sacrifice or “burnt offering.” The Holocaust was an occasion when Jews became sacrificial victims—at the hands of the Nazis.

Hitler fought in the First World War, witnessing the perpetual slaughter of his comrades. Nevertheless, he said, it would have been a “sin to complain” because—after all—were they not “dying for Germany?”

The most precious blood had “sacrificed itself joyfully” to preserve the “independence and freedom of the fatherland.” Thousands and thousands of young Germans, Hitler claimed, stepped forward to “sacrifice their young lives freely and joyfully on the altar of the beloved fatherland.”

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. With utter ruthlessness, Hitler sent his young men into battle. German General von Rundstedt admonished the soldiers of the Second World War to emulate the examples of their brothers in the First World War and "to die in the same way—to be as strong, unswerving and obedient, to go happily and as a matter of course to his death."

Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction, "The German soldiers go into battle with devotion, like congregations going into service." German soldiers did not rebel against their duty to fight and die for Germany. They went like sheep to the slaughter.

A highlight of my presentation occurred when I read the following passages—conveying unimaginable horror and suffering:

We were crowded together like sardines in the cattle car. There were moans, groans, and whimpers in that car; the smell of pus, urine, and it was cold. We lay on straw. The train waited for hours.

Food was our most difficult problem. Our eyes gleamed, like the eyes of famished wolves. Our stomachs were empty and the horizon was devoid of any hope.

We stood in interminable lines, to receive a cup of hot water infused with a minute portion of tea. We had too much food in order to die, but too little in order to live.

The inability to bathe led to incredibly filthy conditions, which inevitably resulted in a plague of lice. We felt like livestock rather than human beings.

There is only anxiety, fear, and terror, a life without return along with terror without an end.

The heart is overwhelmed at the unbearable thought that the smell of dead bodies is the beginning and end and ultimate sense and purpose of our being.

I asked the audience if these passages sounded familiar, and paused.

These descriptions of abject suffering seemingly depict the experience of Jews in concentration camps. Actuality, they are passages from letters written by German soldiers fighting in Russia—freezing, starving, wounded and dying in places such as Stalingrad (see Fritz, 1995).

When I revealed the source, a few people in the audience gasped.

At the time of the presentation, Jews and the Holocaust were considered sacrosanct; to compare Jewish victims with any other victim (much less with “evil” German soldiers) was sacrilegious. But I wasn’t making a moral comparison or judgement. I simply drew attention to the similarity of the bodily experience of German soldiers and Holocaust victims.

What’s more, the source of the horror experienced by each class of victims was the same: the German nation-state. Both Holocaust victims and German soldiers were where they were—because of actions undertaken by the Hitler and the German leadership.

Abject suffering is abject suffering. Death is death. What people say about the human beings who suffer or die is another thing. When a soldier suffers or dies in the name of a nation, his death often is viewed as honorable, even heroic. No one, however, would view the death of the Jew in the Holocaust as honorable and heroic.

Was Hitler, perhaps, trying to send a message? Did Hitler understand that soldiers were sacrificial victims? Was the Holocaust an extension of the logic of warfare? If national leaders could ask their best citizens to sacrifice their lives, why couldn’t Hitler ask the same of Jews?

At the conclusion of my lecture, I waited for questions. There was silence. A young lady in the back of the auditorium tentatively raised her hand. But the audience was nervous.