Article May 8, 1995 Issue

Divine Love's cleansing mercy

Mark Swinney

May 7, 1945, was the day Axis forces agreed to stop aggression in Europe, and September 2 will mark fifty years since World War II ended altogether with the formal surrender of Japan. Worldwide, almost everyone has been affected in one way or another by that conflict. My father was in the United States Navy while my mother and her family lived in—and some fought for—Germany during the war. She, her parents, and her sisters experienced firsthand the fighting and separation. One sister wasn't able to escape from what became East Germany. My mother saw her only once more, forty-four years later.

Just as the war was starting, her father, who was a lawyer, helped three Jewish families escape to somewhere overseas. Several times, storm troopers harassed him in his office, and finally, the Nazis sent him to a labor camp, but he survived and joined his family a year later.

Have you ever wondered what has happened to Adolf Hitler? History records that he committed suicide, but is there any more to the story? Has he since suffered for the awful sins he committed? Has that suffering brought any understanding of the evil he did? And what do people today understand of it? At a prayer service recently, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Auschwitz survivor said, "Do not forgive the murderers and their accomplices. ... God, merciful God, do not have mercy on those who had no mercy on Jewish children."^{The Boston Globe, January 27, 1995.}

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