Whitehorse Daily Star

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RELIVING HISTORY – Dr. Martin Rumscheidt speaks Wednesday evening at the United Church. White Collar Crimes Against Humanity Camp Auschwitz Monowitzwas the presentation, addressing the close co-operation between the Nazi regime and his father’s company, IG Farben.

Lessons of Holocaust still relevant: church minister

Martin Rumscheidt left central Germany at 14 years old, and he’s been looking back ever since.

By Christopher Reynolds on January 29, 2015

Martin Rumscheidt left central Germany at 14 years old, and he’s been looking back ever since.

Born in a small town on the edge of a wood near Leipzig, he grew up alongside the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, which had a major oil plant there and became notorious for its role in the Holocaust and close ties to the Nazi regime.

Rumscheidt’s father was a mid-level executive for the company, though he worked largely out of Paris.

He had no direct role in building the concentration camps that IG Farben constructed for the SS, the elaborate paramilitary organization that oversaw them. Nor did he help produce or sell the cyanide-based Zyklon B gas used to horrifically devastating effect in the extermination of prisoners.

Nonetheless, Rumscheidt readily acknowledges: “He worked for the outfit that, among other things, exterminated human beings.”

One of the Auschwitz labour camps was even used to staff an IG Farben factory.

His father was never indicted, or even suspected or subpoenaed, in the famous Nuremberg Trials that brought Nazi war crimes to light after the Second World War. But family friends were.

“One of them I knew personally. In fact, he was the director of the camp in Auschwitz.”

Rumscheidt and his siblings followed their father to Switzerland in 1949, and three years later to Montreal, where the future theologian would forge friendships with many members of the city’s vibrant Jewish community.

“Until that year, I had never met a person whom I knew to be Jewish,” he told the Star Tuesday, the day before the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“I had to unlearn everything I was taught in school about Jews,” though he noted “there was never any expression of anti-Semitism” uttered in his own home growing up.

Rumscheidt would go on to study theology at McGill University, eventually becoming an ordained United Church minister and teaching at universities and seminaries across the country for more than 30 years.

His research lifted the veil over his eyes on the shrouded history of his homeland, by that point behind the Iron Curtain and firmly under Soviet control.

“I became appalled by to what degree the German Protestant and Catholic churches collaborated with Hitler and did not resist. What kind of people are these Christians who support a regime that declares that Jews need to be gotten rid of?”

Rumscheidt realized how deftly Hitler employed “the poison of anti-Judaism in the churches.”

Dehumanizing depictions of Jews as “Christ-snatchers” who would abduct Christian children “to use their blood for their matzahs” abounded under the Third Reich.

Rumscheidt, who now lives in Portsmouth, N.H., with his wife — also a retired instructor — continues to work in Canada in close co-operation with Jewish colleagues.

“I need to hear what they have to say as victims and the descendants of victims, rather than just reading the books.”

He is interested in “what happens when government and industry are really good buddies.”

Though hardly comparable, he noted the symbiotic relationships between the military and industrial manufacturers during the Nazi regime, in 1950s America and even today.

“I think we are in a situation where the military-industrial complex is doing very well, thank you very much, not only in the United States but also here in Canada,” he said, his Saxon roots showing through his mild accent.

Rumscheidt is also alert to the flickering flame of anti-semitism and other forms of hate around North America.

Nearly 1,000 active “hate groups” persist in the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre out of Montgomery, Ala. More than 20 per cent harbour anti-Semitism.

“What do we need to do to give protection should it break out into Jewish people who are our neighbours.”

He also highlighted resurgent anti-Semitism in Poland, France and especially political hotspots like Ukraine, where the current government in Kiev contains members who are “openly anti-semitic and pro-Nazi.”

Rumscheidt, now a professor emeritus at Halifax’s Atlantic School of Theology, continues to lecture and research on areas ranging from Holocaust studies to Christian theology.

“I’m highly committed to the education process. The thing I want to contribute in our schools is that generations will grow up to recognize the danger signals before it is too late,” he said.

Rumscheidt gave a presentation on the Shoa yesterday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, at a gathering at the United Church’s Lewis Hall on Main Street.

He is currently visiting the Yukon for the ninth or 10th time, he said.

His daughter and brother both work for the territorial government and live in Whitehorse.

“I love it up here,” he said.

Comments (1)

Up 7 Down 5

Josey Wales on Jan 30, 2015 at 8:26 am

Read the news these days? IMHO...we have learned nothing....absolutely nothing.
In short when visiting current events, I feel that many who lay dead from that global conflict....made the ultimate sacrifice for nothing.

You can disagree, that is cool...it is however MY opinion not yours.

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