My involvement in the struggle of my own people is a matter of record. I
have not pursued the grim history of the Holocaust to the neglect of my
own history. To the contrary, it was the experience of growing up Black in a
racially segregated America that led me, ironically, to examine the Holo-
caust, and from that history, back to a more systematic immersion both in
the history of my own people as well as that of European Jewry during the
era of the German Third Reich. They remain two entirely separate historical
experiences, but the latter contains lessons and implications that are more
profoundly disturbing than anything else I have ever encountered. And be-
cause it is part of the history of another people, forced to live on the margins
of Western society, I am acutely aware that it could have been or, God for-
bid, could yet be my own history. At one level, therefore, unbridled self-
interest has led me to learn as much as I can about the events that led to the
organized, systematic murder of almost six million Jewish men, women,
and children in Europe between the fall of 1939 and the spring of 1945.

If self-interest was my initial motivation, it has by no means been the
only reason for my pursuit of the history of the Holocaust. From the outset
of my inquiries, I came quickly to the sense of how deeply it affected the
two institutions which I cherish most in society and where I have spent
nearly all of my adult life: the church and the university. Both institutions
lay claim to unique roles in society--the church as bearer of deep spiritual
insights regarding the human condition and the university as the transmit-
ter of knowledge regarding the world and its inhabitants. Both institutions
are sources of values and ideals that purport to reflect humankind at its best
and yet, during the German Third Reich, both institutions succumbed to a
government and an ideology that depicted humanity at its worst. I have
been haunted by this unsettling realization for more than thirty years.

I came to the study of the Holocaust by a somewhat circuitous path that
weaved its way through both the church and the university. In the mid-
1950s, I was at the University of Chicago studying for my first graduate de-
gree in theology and preparing for what I hoped would be a life-long career
as a Christian minister. In those days, theological students read the great
classics of Christian theology, a field over which German scholarship held
sway for most of the past century. Wherever one turned, from whatever
perspective one delved into the riches of theological insight and reflec-
tion--Biblical studies, church history, historical or systematic theol-
ogy--one encountered the German theological giants. In my courses in the
Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in the history of dogma, in patristics and
in the history of religions, I found myself grappling with the professors of
Heidelberg, Giessen, Göttingen, Marburg, Tübingen, and Berlin, whose
works were the acknowledged authorities in these fields.

Those were also the days when Paul Tillich--the most renowned of the
German theologians on this side of the Atlantic and himself an early refu-

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