People are disgusting.

WOW! i just spend 3 hours watching that BBC war docu-drama which focused on the same thing… and the various branches of the organization that killed the Jews… In one case a German soldier fell in love with a Jewish girl, but the girls younger siblings and older sister were ordered to be gassed…  and the German was able to save the sister of this girl, but the children as a rule could never be saved because they were unfit for labor. The German told his superior that the sister was a worker and she was exempted from death just while she was going in to die.
  Another section dealt with Himmler and how mad he was that SS officers were stealing Jewish personal effects and how he wanted to punish his own men for these acts.

Yep, disgusting.

Unfortunately, man’s inhumanity toward man is not limitted to some history show or isolated to the early 40’s.  Both our history, and our news broadcasts are filled with it.

Yeah I remember watching some documentary in a humanities course about the Holocaust and it ends with something to the effect of “but does the monster really lie buried beneath these ruins [of cocentration camps], or does it lie within us all, dormant, waiting again to be unleashed?”

Of course there are no absolutes when dealing with humans in any number greater than zero.

We work in generalities, majorities, pluralities, most of the times…

And the Holocaust so massively tips the scales on THAT standard that it is defacto “black and white”, eventhough the exception in both directions exists.  Those exceptions are just so rare as to be statistically insignificant (they rank up there with the odds of 1 German INF taking all of Russia single-handed)

There is a limit to how good a person can be, but there is no limit to what evil a person can commit.

? I don’t get what you get from this. I feel more sorry (if that’s possible) for the kid because he was hurt by his own people as well as the Nazi’s. I don’t feel any better about the Nazi’s. I don’t feel any better about pedophiles either. Evil is evil. Who commits it does nothing to reduce the crime or make it better or worse. Sadly, the truth is most child abuse is done by people close to you. People you know very well. People that are trusted enough to be alone with you. Anobymous crime on kids is the exception not the rule. Now that should give you real pause. I know it bothers me. I have 3 kids, all young. Knowing I can’t trust anyone makes the world a scary place indeed.

What that pedophile did was evil, pure and simple.  I also can readily acknowledge that people in this world do terrible things to other people (Paul
Bernard etc.).  My question is:  To what degree was the mentality of this “man” and his actions affected by the inhuman(e) treatment of the concentration camp?  I am not absolving this man by any stretch, however there are SOOOO many variables that we can not see.  I think that there may be some “evil-begetting-evil” here.

@trihero:

Yeah I remember watching some documentary in a humanities course about the Holocaust and it ends with something to the effect of “but does the monster really lie buried beneath these ruins [of cocentration camps], or does it lie within us all, dormant, waiting again to be unleashed?”

good question.  Better than you think.
I gave a talk on PTSD in Holocaust survivors.  These people have done amazingly well all things considered, however there is a DEEP imprint on them that is going to be a real problem for them, their families, and their health-care providers.

Be quiet everyone!

By talking about something which never happened you will anger a Muslim or two.

I do not think I could have lived 60 years with that on my conscience.  Whether God forgave me or not.

I recall an article about a girl in Poland who did research about the WWII history of her village.  A monument was built to Jewish holocaust victims.  The names had been removed.  She found evidence that the government and some villagers had cooperated in capturing and killing the Jews.  It had been covered up.  There was bitterness among the villgers that she had dug this up.

The fabric of civilization is very thin. Studies have shown individuals will become barbaric in many cases whether alone or in a mob.