Hans Calmeyer Righteous Gentile  1903-1972

“The Dutch Schindler”

 Lawyer for Life

WHY  SAVE  LIVES ? 

Calmeyer knew well that the deportations led to concentration camps, some for slave labor, some for extermination, and ultimately for both. His moral imperative was therefor a combination of fighting for justice and fighting for life and freedom. Since there is little evidence that Calmeyer was a particularly vocal thinker on the topic of individual freedom, we can conclude that his reason for drawing a line in the sand was his basic respect for human life.

If you want to vanquish your enemies, you would want to gather them in one place, concentrate them. And so it has been through the ages, by Stalin, Mao, every despot, everytime a sizable minority was being “culled.” The concentration camps for the Jews were among the most extreme, but they were not only for the Jews, other dissidents and partivularly Christians were in these camps:

The Holocaust concentrated on the Jews, but Catholics and especially their priest leaders were targeted as well. In Dachau alone, no fewer than 2,771 priests were imprisoned, of whom at least 1,000 died from hunger, disease or illtreatment. Acts of brutality, torture and murder were commonplace in these camps, not just for Jews and Christians, but other dissidents, especially Christians. The majority of the priests interned in Dachau were of Polish origin; however, apart from German nationals, there were large numbers of French, Czechs, and Austrians. Dachau was host to priests from all over Nazi occupied Europe. Seminarians from these same countries were drafted in as part of forced labour gangs in Germany.

No less than 4,000 priests were put to death during these years, either as 'political saboteurs', or, after incarceration in concentration camps, by hanging, starvation, mishandling, lack of medical aid, or as victims of medical experiments including euthanasia. It is a story of courageous and heroic resistance against the overwhelming power of a police state. [3]

ENDNOTES

1. cf Lewy, G., The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany, London 1964, pp.170-172

2. cf Homiletic and Pastoral Review, February 1983, p.48-49

3. cf J.C. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945, London 1968, pp.298-299, and note 24, p. 447

 Jews are now once again concentrated, in Israel. That should make us all pause (see potential Holocaust II)

If concentration is a rule of engagement, the key to resistance against tyranny becomes changing those rules.

A remarkable fact is that one reason that the American Revolution held against the British was their refusal to fight with the traditional rules of engagement that involved concentration of troops in vulnerable formations. The power of individual fighters is in the end seldom enough to overcome massive arrayed power, but when an entire country is transformed into armed individuals that act similarly as a “militia” then it is very hard for even the most powerful dictators to control the populace.

Hitler dis-armed his citizenry prior to taking power for this very reason. It is no coincidence that Switzerland permits and insists on all individual men to be trained and armed for contingencies. Despots can only control a populace when the populace is fundamentally intimidated.

Of course, decentralization can work against democratic societies with elected leaders as well. Jihad, Terror, and the lack of an organized concentrated enemy to fight, represent superb tactical advantages for a decentralized subversive force. Thus even an unarmed but demographically rapidly growing minority can progress through insurgency by threatening individual, seemingly disorganized violence, and thus intimidating the populace and the government at the same time. In the short term, a government is destabilized by random terror, in the long term, demographics provide an immovable force in an otherwise relatively free society.

These new rules of engagement are giving “free” societies a very hard time, even to the point of leading those societies to try to oppose decentralized strategies with their own concentration strategies. Thus you have permitted ghettos of Muslims that refuse to assimilate and live in islands under Sharia Law, acting to concentrate the Jihadists and the Muslim populations they intimidate. This should work to shield the free society from guerilla warfare for a time. But in a free society, terrorists are relatively free to operate throughout a country, from without and from within. Disarmament tactics do not fit well with free decentralized societies, so tensions mount.