From the beginning of Western civilization, the phrase of the Roman poet Horace, “It is sweet and fitting to die for a country” has dominated our conception of warfare. Dying in battle has been viewed as virtuous, honorable and noble.

What does it mean to die for a country? It means that a human being has given over his body and soul to a nation-state. The slogan of the German SS-man, “obedience unto death,” seems extreme. But this, essentially, is the posture of the ordinary soldier. He is asked to go into battle at the behest of his nation, and if necessary to die in the performance of his duty.

Hitler was one of these typical soldiers who went into battle in the First World War---with an innocent, joyful heart. But what he saw showed him that battle is anything but sweet and beautiful. He experienced the horror of battle, witnessing the death of hundreds of his comrades. He was in intimate contact with their crushed, mangled bodies, blood and guts streaming out. He knew there nothing sweet and beautiful about warfare.

But he could not say this, neither to himself nor to the world. He occasionally questioned the German battle strategy, but refused to condemn the German nations or the leaders who managed and directed the war. In spite of the horror he witnessed and experienced—what he had gone through—he declared that it would have been a “sin to complain” because, after all, were the soldiers not “dying for Germany?”

The Holocaust represents another version of “dying for a country.” In this instance, as in the case of the First World War, millions of human beings were required to be “obedient unto death,” to die when a nation-state asked them to relinquish their lives.

However, no one would say that the death of the Jew in a concentration camp was sweet or fitting or beautiful. Is this what we can learn from the Holocaust, an event that otherwise has no redeeming value?

Was the Holocaust an enactment—a demonstration—whose purpose was to convey the message: “This is what it is really like to die for a country. The death of a human being at the behest of a nation state is abject and pathetic, rather than beautiful. There is nothing sweet and fitting about it.” Does the Holocaust contain an anti-war message?