History: forgiving the SS

April was an important month for Adolf Hitler.  His 56th birthday was on the 20th of 1945.  Ten days later, though, on April 30th, he would take his own life in a bunker in Berlin.

We've all heard of the atrocities committed by Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party, but what if you experienced the atrocities yourself.  Could you...forgive?  A young woman named Corrie Ten Boom faced that very question.

Corrie lived in Holland where she and her family hid Jews in a hidden room in their house.  Corrie believed "You cannot love God without loving the Jewish people."  Eventually, she and her family were caught and sent off to various concentration camps where her closest friend, her sister eventually died.

By the grace of God, Corrie survived and shortly after began speaking about what God taught her through her experience, particularly focusing on healing and forgiveness.  But, then, one fateful day someone was in the audience she did not expect.

The following is from her autobiography, The Hiding Place:

"It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck.  He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time.  And suddenly it was all there-the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie's pain-blanched face.

He came up to me as the church was emptying beaming and bowing.  "How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein," he said.  "To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!"

His hand was thrust out to shake mine.  And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendall the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

"Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them.  Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?  Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.

"I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand.  I could not.  I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.  And so again I breathed a silent prayer.  Jesus, I cannot forgive him.  Give me Your forgiveness.

"As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened.  From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.

"And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His.  When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself."