“Why didn’t you leave Nazi Germany while there was still time?”

Dr. Werner Weinberg, a professor of Hebrew language and literature at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote an article that appeared in the Christian Century March 21, 1982 p. 478. (Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation). 

In this article Dr. Weinberg grappled with the question, “Why didn’t you leave Nazi Germany while there was still time?”

I have been familiar with this article for half a decade but today I’m seeing it in a whole new light. 

Dr. Weinberg, somewhat reluctantly, answered the question in his article. What he did not say, but I will now, is that it’s the wrong question aimed at the wrong people (the Jews that were caught "in the barbed wire of history").

The question implies guilt (which Weinberg addresses). "Just leave already," is the "logic." The Jews were, by virtue of the question, guilty of putting themselves in harms way. And THAT is categorically wrong headed. 

 “Why didn’t you leave Nazi Germany while there was still time?” is as morally and spiritually bankrupt as asking the victim of abuse, "Why didn’t you just leave?"

The abuse is the issue - NOT the action, or inaction, of the victim. 

Why revisit the article and this issue? Because we are faced with systemic abuse, from our governments and our "leaders," that is more lethal and invasive than anything that Hitler and his minions could have envisioned - even in their wildest, delusional dreams. 

It is the age of a nightmare. Weapons have gone rogue and the needle of the moral compass of humanity is desperately low on the necessary magnetism to point us in the right direction. New technology has created a surveillance apparatus that has potential beyond compare with anything that the Nazi’s possessed. 

Resources are allocated, at staggering percentages, for bombs, machines and devices of extraordinarily destructive power. US citizens are being "disappeared" from their homes in the middle of the night only to show up years later in front of a judge in an unstable mental condition. US citizens are being targeted for execution by the "commander-in-chief" himself. Ideological "enemies" are being manufactured and then removed from their homes in faraway lands, tortured in a network of US prisons around the world. 

A better question, and one to ask the German people as a whole, would be , "Why didn’t you stand up to your government in time to stop the deadly atrocities committed in your name?"

And the question for today’s Americans is the same. A further question, for ALL countries not the US, is, "Why aren’t ALL of you putting out orders to arrest US war criminals past and present?"

"Why don’t YOU stand up to your government in time to stop the deadly atrocities committed in your name?"