The film Downfall is based largely on the diaries of Traudl Junge, Adolf Hitler’s secretary and recalls the last days of the Second World War in the Berlin bunker where Hitler and his close confidants lived out the final, desperate days of the war.
In the film, Traudl Junge herself, now an elderly lady, recalls that, as a young woman, she never felt any sense of guilt as she was unaware of the criminal behaviour of the Nazi regime. She retained this attitude even after the Nuremberg trials and the tales of horror that were told there. However, one day she saw a memorial plaque dedicated to Sophie Scholl who, together with her brother and a few others, had been executed by the |Nazis for opposing the regime. Traudl Junge realised that Sophie Scholl had been born in the same year as herself and had been executed in the same year that she had started working for Hitler. It was then that she became conscious of the fact that being unaware or not being personally involved in what had happened was no excuse for her passive attitude towards the regime.
The Nazis took power in Germany in 1933. A decade earlier Hitler had dictated his Mein Kampf where his hatred of Jews, Bolsheviks and all forms of democratic ideals were clearly expounded. During the twenties and early thirties, by fair means and foul, the National Socialists struggled to build up consensus and finally managed to get democratically elected to the Reichstag. They immediately set out putting into practice the ideology mapped out earlier by the Fuhrer in his work.
One question that needs to be asked when confronted with these tragic events is the following: Since the ideology behind National Socialism was clear enough, what were lay ordinary Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, thinking and doing about the matter? There was a minority of Germans, who, like Sophie Scholl, fully conscious of the evils of Nazism, tried unsuccessfully to combat it. However, the large majority of ordinary Germans either sympathized with or were passive regarding the tragedy unfolding before their eyes. Among them there were a significant number of both Protestants and Catholics who disagreed with what was happening, but, since it did not concern them personally, they decided to do little about it. One could ask oneself how different historical events would have been had German Christians forcefully opposed National Socialism before it took power.
Today, Christians in many countries are being confronted by governments that enact laws that shamelessly negate God’s eternal laws, the moral natural order and the dignity of man made in the image of the Creator. Moreover, these laws violently strike at the most vulnerable in society – the unborn, (50 million children killed in the US alone since Roe v Wade legalized abortion in 1973), the terminally ill, the disabled, (here Hitler’s moral victory is complete since the Nazis, even before the war started, had gassed around 70,000 disabled Germans, deeming them ‘unfit to live’). Today, for example, in many western countries the majority of Downs Syndrome babies are aborted.
Many Christians sadly reason that since they have no intention of asking for a divorce, aborting a child (even if disabled), marrying a person of the same sex or euthanising themselves, such laws really do not concern them that much. They foolishly believe that somehow such laws will not cause long-term serious and devastating consequences on the society they live in. In all this one cannot help recalling Christ’s’ admonishment to His followers, “The sons of darkness are wiser in their generation than the sons of light.”
Jacqueline Calleja
BALZAN