Re: Numbering The Stars

March 24, 2002

Dear Sister MaryAnn:

Before Christmas when I picked up the books about  Mother Gerhardinger  I had a friendly talk with one of your teachers, Ms. H. We talked about children’s books. She lent me one which she had in her classroom “Numbering The Stars.” If this book were in the Public School libraries I would try to have it removed. The book is anti-German atrocity propaganda and tries to indoctrinate our children to be the future supporters of  Israel. I am not asking you to remove the book. If you would do so it would become immediately known and you would lose half your students. When I returned the book and I expressed my misgivings, Ms. H. turned hostile, asked me if I had checked in with the office. When I said yes, I was asked rather rudely for my pass. I had not been asked for a pass before.

For the sake of the nuns who had fed, housed and educated me for five hard years, while my father penniless tried to establish a business in  the cellar of a bombed out city, Pforzheim, I carried myself with the thought of sponsoring a child through grade school. But why should I? That your school then indoctrinates this child  with hate for my people, the Germans. Maybe you should  approach the Jews of M. for financial support. If you try to tell  me that with books like “Numbering the Stars” you are really trying to teach love and tolerance, you deceive yourself. When I challenged holocaust “survivor” Walter Peltz  (l995) in the auditorium of the UW Center of M. he told me that I should have been hanged at Nuernberg. Since it was a little bit too late for that  he suggested that I and the rest of the Germans should commit suicide. The audience of mostly students clapped in approval. Is this the love and tolerance you are teaching?  And what did I challenge? I told him that one could not  burn cadavers by making a “sandwich” of discarded Christmas trees and  dead bodies, since there are not enough BTUs in Christmas trees to sustain a cremation. In case you do not get it let me point out the anti Christian drift in Walter Peltz’s talk. Jews were incinerated  with the trees of Christ.  

Now to the book itself. It is unthinkable that  German soldiers manhandled the civilian population of an occupied country. The rules were strict.  Any soldier transgressing against the rules was immediately removed from his company and if he was lucky put into a punishment battalion.

Now to something else. Present day Christianity sees itself as Nazi victim. What a lie! Christianity was not a victim.  National Socialism  guaranteed its survival. Had Communism won in Germany (and it came close to winning) and in Spain, the rest of Europe could not have been held. Christianity would have suffered the same fate, as it had suffered in Soviet Russia.  The few priests,  (I personally knew of none)  who wound up in concentration camps got there because of open resistance to the government, or espionage. Maxemilian Kolbe didn’t wind up in Aushwitz because he tended his flock, but because he was a ham radio operator. I assume he relayed messages.

The Nazi regime is portrayed as an atheistic regime. But every week in our public grade school we had two hours of religion, taught by our  priest, Sondtheimer.  In our churches there were no Nazi flags or any other secular flags, as are found here in the churches. The German soldiers went to the front with their Protestant ministers and Catholic priests who celebrated mass and gave communion in the field. The Russian soldiers had at  their back  political commissars, mostly Jewish, with pistols in their hand. You could be a member of the Nazi party and at the same time be a Catholic or Protestant. There was no conflict!

Bavaria is full of shrines and  wayside crosses. None of them were ever challenged as was done here, with the Jesus statue at Prashak’s wayside. In no way were we curtailed in the exercise of our religion. The German and Austrian bishops and cardinals  welcomed Hitler. They hoped he would save Germany from Communism and thereby save Christianity and themselves.  This is also where Pope Pius XII fits in. No people have been more maligned than the Germans. Your school seems to do its share. But  a reckoning is coming. It is now that  Christianity,  and its culture, but especially the Catholic church are  under relentless onslaught. It is now that I fear for their survival.

Sincerely yours,

Christine B. Miller