So much for the Final Solution

It feels weird writing the words ‘final’ and ‘solution’ together for a blog title. I’m inspired by an article I read this last weekend in the Guardian.

It’s pretty amazing.

The long and the short of it, for those of you who can’t tear themselves away from my blog, is that journalist Tanya Gold tracked down a descendent of Adolph Hitler who now lives in Israel as an orthodox Jew. To be more precise, this man, who insists on remaining unnamed, is the illegitimate son of the daughter of Adolph Hitler’s half-brother Alois and a divorced German woman who really, really liked the Nazis.

So, this gentleman is not an actual blood relative of Hitler’s. The article is fantastic though. There is a whole community of Germans living in Israel as converted Jews and, according to Gold at least, many of them seem vague on the real reasons for their conversion, while others maintain that contemporary Israeli society has its own issues with racial intolerance, and even fascism.

Regardless of whether or not the conversion of these people is due to a psychological need to join the ranks of the victims to eradicate their sense of guilt, a dislike of German society, or more spiritual reasons, it’s a fascinating phenomenon.

Personally, it gives me hope. There’s a reason fundamentalists have a sketchy view of history: history shows that in the long term, ideological absolutism is rendered irrelevant by innumerable tiny changes in society and decisions made by individual human beings. The legacy of the Final Solution is not irrelevant, of course; all that hatred caused suffering, but utterly failed in what it set out to do.