What determines the essential value of a human life? Is not any one innocent life as valuable as another?
Several decades ago I studied the German administrative system of killing during the reign of the so-called “Third Reich” (1933-1945). I walked the ground of Dachau and studied such works as “A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence” by Fredric Wertham, M.D., (Macmillan Co., N.Y., 1966). I don’t present the following for shock, but for deliberate thought about this continuing issue.
In writing about the varied methods used to kill in the camps (and here we are not only talking about the camps specifically designed for death, but all types of camps used throughout the Reich), Wertham speaks of the “inclusion of children” in the killing. He wrote,
“One aspect of the administrative mass murders was the inclusion of children. This fact has been generally soft-pedaled and is little mentioned. This is an omission which helps to obscure the whole picture of the violence of our time. It has been estimated that about 1,500,000 children were killed, ranging in age from infancy up. Many of them were asphyxiated in gas ovens. The expression generally used for this procedure was ‘chasing the children up the chimney.’ The child phase of the mass murders had three features. First, it was carried out with the greatest brutality. Second, it was not a matter of individual excesses (although that happened often too, especially for sexual reasons), but was part of the routine and a regular constituent of policy and strategy mapped out at the desks of highly placed officials. Third, it was not carried out only by the SS; ordinary people did it as well. Painful medical experiments that often led to death were also carried out on children by physicians.
“We can best imagine the official attitude toward children in concentration camps from a scene that took place in Auschwitz. A young child walked straight through the camp. Around his neck was hung on a string a placard with his name on it in big letters. That was most unusual. Why was he wearing it? He was the son of the camp leader, Aumeier, on his way to visit his father, and if he had not worn such a sign he might have been snatched up on the spot and tossed into one of the gas ovens” (pp 138-139).
Why is this passage pertinent to the questions asked at the beginning of this post? What determined the essential value of children in Nazi Germany was the State, not the humanity of the child. In Nazi Germany, when compared with other children in, or around, the camp, the innocent nature of the human child did not determine their value. Instead, the value of the child was in his relationship to the State. In this case, the child’s father’s status determined his value. If the child had had Jewish parents, or Gypsy parents, or even Christian parents he would have had no protections and his life could have been lost not because he did not want to live, nor that his body was not important to himself; but his life would have fallen into the hands of some adult paid to throw him into a crematory oven!
Why do I ask this today? Because I pray that Americans can still care. Because this became the norm in the Third Reich’s sphere of control because the people learned to either not care at all about the true essential value of a human life, or they became capable of compartmentalizing people into the disposable and the non-disposable predicated upon the laws of a corrupted State.
As hard as this is to say–again–but the United States are as guilty as the Third Reich in each and every case where a child has been essentially tossed into the abortionist’s oven! The United States of America, since the 1973 Roe v Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court has made what Wertham spoke of in Third Reich concentration camps the norm for not 1.5 million children, but well over 60 million children, who were disposed of by medical authorities on the permission of the mothers with the protection of the State (like the Nazis protected the operators of the killing factories of the Third Reich).
In Nazi German the law was settled–until United States military forces intervened and stopped it and then forced the German citizens to see what they had sponsored in their cooperation with the Reich! Americans might also think that the slaughter of the innocent children in the womb is “settled law” in the United States; but it is not settled for those of us who understand the real value of human life–all human life! I present this article so that moral and good Americans might perhaps for the first time since 1973 recognize that the child in the photo no more deserved to be thrown into a gas oven than any child deserves to be crushed, burned, poisoned, or brutalized to death in their mother’s wombs. I present this article to expose the callousness of the justifications (including rape and incest) and the essential injustice of American law concerning innocent pre-born life who have been marked for death in America by a system that devalues them from conception.
The day has come for Americans to refuse to accept the evil of abortion to continue in our nation. Let us never accept the lie that killing pre-born children can be accepted in our nation as “settled law”; and let us determine to stand with our new president and demand that he remain true and faithful to nominate only truly pro-life judges to the federal courts and justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, let us return to our founding principle that all human life is absolutely created equal and deserves the protection of the State!
CPT Terry Michael Hestilow, USA, Ret.
Fort Worth, Texas
January 4, 2017
combatsoldier 
Excellent commentary.