Hitler, Jesus, and Me

Danish director Lars von Trier made some wildly inappropriate comments at the Cannes Film Festival last week. His attempts at humor included deriding Jews, identifying himself as a Nazi, sympathizing with Hitler, and speculating that his next movie could be The Final Solution. It was a Mel Gibson moment.

All this was enough to get von Trier kicked out of the festival, and justifiably so. Afterward, he tried to explain himself with these words: "There's a little bit of Nazi in all of us, and there's a little bit of human being in Hitler, and I think it's dangerous to think otherwise."

As wrong as his first comments were, von Trier was exactly right with this follow-up. The scary truth is that Hitler was not some phantom from another dimension. He was flesh and blood. A man. Like me.

The infamous Nazi, Adolf Eichman, was captured and put on trial in the 1960s. One of the witnesses who identified him had come out of Auschwitz. That in itself was a miracle. In Auschwitz 8,000 Jews could be stripped, gassed and cremated every 24 hours. The chimneys never stopped smoking. But Yehiel Dinur, had survived. Dinur stood in front of the bulletproof glass and stared into the face of the accused war criminal. It was a moment for justice when the once insignificant despised Jew could point the finger of blame at the once fearsome mastermind of the master race.

Instead of accusing, Dinur fell to the floor sobbing. Why? Eichman was not at all what Dinur expected. He didn't see a devil. Instead, Dinur saw a man who was just like himself, and it frightened him. As Dinur revealed in an interview with Mike Wallace, "Eichman is in all of us."

There is some Nazi in all of us. That's why we so desperately need the gospel. To think otherwise is worse than dangerous...it's damning.