Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll Read Free Book Online

this wasteland. Then I tried to picture the Nazi headquarters and that bunker, but couldn't.
"It's where he killed himself," Tramm said. 1
    The memory brought my head up, and my eyes went right to a low hill in the middle of the death strip. The mound that my official guide had pointed to in 1980 was still there. And now so were my children. There they were, in their yellow and red, their blue, Pat in his flashing Michael Jordans, Lizzy in her barrettes. My children were heading right for Adolf Hitler's bunker. I screamed "No!" and began to run. Lexa called after me, then began to run too.
    The Führerbunker was a tunnel complex below the Reichskanzlei. Hitler, his new wife, Eva Braun, a few trusted aides, and a guard made up of an elite SS unit had watched American movies while the city above them was battered and torched by the storming Russians. The rooms were well furnished. There was a wine cellar. Precious paintings lined the concrete walls. I knew all of this. But to me the Führerbunker was a chamber of hell. And like hell, I hadn't been sure until now that it existed.
    "No!" I screamed again, and I closed on them. They were at the mound, and like beagles going after prey, they had zeroed in on a small opening at the base of the low hill. Pat was already nosing into the hole. I saw a slab of concrete protruding from the dirt, and I thought, Pat is now going to touch what Hitler touched. "Get away from there," I ordered, swooping down on them, grabbing each one by an elbow and dragging them back.
    "What's wrong with you?" Lexa demanded. My children looked up at me, mystified. And it seemed ridiculous, what I had to say by way of explanation. I said it, hardly believing it myself. "This was Hitler's place!" And I led them away. 2
     
     
    What was I afraid of? My children falling into the hole? My children sucked into the vortex of an abyss? Why is it that the innocence of our children is what finally forces us to face the flawed condition of our lives? I had never sensed how thin the membrane is between us and death until I watched my toddlers crossing the street or skied after my teenagers down the double-black-diamond slope of a mountain in Maine. In the former death strip of Berlin, I saw that I had brought my children into the zone of evil from which I had always assumed I would protect them.
    Hitler is our Prince of Darkness. We would have liked to go on thinking that he alone was responsible for the monstrous crimes committed in Europe between 1933 and 1945. When I inadvertently took Lizzy, Pat, and Lexa to the very threshold of his lair, I think I still hoped to protect the illusion into which I had been initiated as a conqueror's son in the Rhineland, that the Nazis were of another species entire. I think that was why I screamed so, to keep my children on this side of the other Berlin Wall, the one I wanted to remain intact forever, the one that ran between the innocent and the guilty, the good and the bad. The Cold War had imposed its dualism on our minds, and we could still think that way, even though it was already clear that Mikhail Gorbachev was no Joseph Stalin. Perhaps in 1990, I needed Hitler's moral isolation from the rest of humanity more than ever, his abject evil as proof of our relative virtue.
    The virtue of my children was absolute, of course. Part of what I wanted to protect us all from, in my panic, was the threshold of knowing that my own virtue was anything but. Now I see what I was afraid of that day: the shock of my own complicity with evil. How to protect them from that? I do not mean here to wrap myself in a blurring guilt, as if the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish genocide are not uniquely to be condemned. I have taken pains throughout this book to observe the distinction between the crime of the Nazis and the attitudes of Christians that prepared for it. But to accept responsibility for those attitudes, as a Christian, is to go much farther along the road of moral reckoning than I ever