c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The past few weeks have brought only bad news for those individuals who wish the Holocaust would recede quietly into history. And it has been absolutely catastrophic for those bigots _ the Holocaust deniers _ who claim the murder of 6 million Jews never took place. Here’s why:

ITEM: The world learns for the first time that the parents of Madeleine Korbel Albright, the 59-year-old, Czech-born U.S. Secretary of State, were born Jews and three of her grandparents were killed in Nazi death camps during the Holocaust because they, too, were Jews.

We also learn the secretary’s parents converted to Catholicism in the 1930s in an attempt to protect themselves and their children from the virulent anti-Semitism of neighboring Nazi Germany and the Jew-hatred permeating so much of Europe in those years.

Of course, in hindsight, we now know religious conversions meant nothing to the Nazis, who were utterly consumed with their murderous”racial”war against the Jews. Blood, not baptismal water, was the defining liquid of the period.

Happily for Secretary Albright, the Korbel family fled Czechoslovakia before they could be rounded up by the German occupation forces, and her later life in Britain and America is well known.

But like a deeply buried World War II land mine that has only now exploded, Madeleine Albright must deal with her own personal explosion of fact, faith and family.

ITEM: The false image of Swiss neutrality during World War II has been permanently shattered by damaging revelations that some Swiss banks acted as well-rewarded money launderers for the German war machine. In addition, official inquiries are now underway to discover what has happened to the deposits made to Swiss banks by trusting European Jews who were eventually murdered during the Holocaust.

But sadly, some of today’s Swiss government officials and bankers have failed to learn a critical lesson from history: Trying to cover up wrongdoing is sometimes worse than the crime itself. Despite such efforts, the truth about Switzerland’s role during those years will emerge for the world to judge.

As boxing champion Joe Louis said of his opponents:”They can run in the ring, but they can’t hide.”So, too, the Swiss, who now find themselves trapped in another kind of ring where they are unable to hide.

ITEM: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial book,”Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,”is a best seller in Germany and is currently in its ninth printing. In his book, the 37-year-old Harvard historian makes the disturbing charge that many more Germans participated directly and willingly in the mass murder of the Jews than previously had been assumed.

Goldhagen vigorously attacks the comfortable belief held by many Americans, as well as Germans, that is was a single”madman”and his relatively small group of Nazi true believers that carried out the 6 million killings. Not so, asserts Goldhagen. It was, in fact, the ordinary German, not soley the heel-clicking Nazi robots in their shiny jackboots who killed and killed and killed again.

Goldhagen sets out to prove that average Germans murdered Jews, not for ideology or party, but simply because they felt it was the”right”thing to do in order to purify the German nation.

Why else, he argues, would the killers proudly pose for the camera and regularly send such pictures home to family and friends? Why else would wives, even expectant mothers, visit the scenes of their husbands’ bloody work? And why in the war’s last days, even after SS Chief Heinrich Himmler had issued orders to cease killing Jews, did the ordinary German police battalions continue murdering?

Naturally, historians on both sides of the Atlantic who differ with Goldhagen have vigorously attacked his grim message as well as the youthful messenger, but to no avail. Goldhagen’s successful book tour of Germany reflected the profound need of many Germans, especially those born after 1945, to face up to a gnawing reality so clearly articulated by a leading German journalist:”… the distinction between `criminal Nazis’ and `normal Germans’ is false. … The readiness to kill millions came from the middle of German society. … (To utter) this simple truth … is a kind of liberation.” The radical evil of the Holocaust will haunt the world for decades to come. It is a giant collective stain that cannot be washed away even by the survivors’ poignant weeping and certainly not by those who contemptuously spit at the facts of history.

MJP END RUDIN