BERLIN

Eurodam docked around 5.00 am in Warnemuende just as our alarm went off to prepare for our trip to Berlin. It was a gloomy scene from our balcony with weather looking uncertain. Warnemuende means 'mouth of the Warne River' and is a Baltic port for transfer of goods south into Germany. Currently it has a significant industrial role constructing Viking river boats that are so popular today on the European rivers.

Warnemuende Port

Again, our tour is with Alla Tours and we join the bus on time at 6.30 am and are soon on our way for the three hour drive down the highway with a comfort stop along the way. The guide relates the history of early settlement of Berlin in the twelfth Century through the various wars with France, Denmark,WWI and WWII, the reconstruction after the war, and on to modern day Berlin. She did a reasonably good job of recounting this complex history of 800 years in three hours. No punches were pulled in the description of the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazi Third Reich and of course our visit to Berlin focuses on visiting those sites most relevant to the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. Here's a sample:

This church kept in its current condition to demonstrate damage from bombs.

Memorial to the fallen.

The Reichstag

The Brandenburg Gate constructed in 1790

The Holocaust Memorial

The site of the Nazi book burning event replaced with a cellar below the glass comprising empty bookshelves.

Memorial of a mother cradling the body of her soldier son below an open window that allows rain and debris to fall on them throughout the year

Lutheran Cathedral designed to rival the nearby Catholic Cathedral and reminiscent of St Paul's in Rome

Michele takes the salute at Checkpoint Charlie

Berlin's oldest museum built in Classical style.

Remnants of the Berlin Wall above and the tragic history of the Third Reich on the Memorial Wall from 1933 to 1945

From the Memorial Wall

We are back to the ship by 6.30pm. A long and very interesting visit to the centre of one of the most evil periods in the history of our human 'civilisation'. 

Adolph Hitler

The evil that exists in our world can generally be thought of in two categories. The natural evils are those that occur seemingly at random. An undersea earthquake creates a tsunami that takes thousands of lives, a disease like Ebola spreads suddenly without warning killing hundreds, a young life is cut short with brain cancer, a car accident takes the lives of an entire family. The natural evils are tragic events that can happen to anyone at any time.

The unnatural evils are those that are similarly freakish and random but are enacted by someone on someone else - like rape, murder, domestic violence, and war. They are the things that people intentionally do to others to achieve some personal objective. Certainly Hitler's reign as Chancellor of the Third Reich fits the category of unnatural evil. His actions supported by his henchmen and by the German public could not be excused as mental illness or aberration of mind. They were purely and simply unnatural evil acts.

The theological explanation for the existence of evil in the world is known as the Greater Goods Defence. That proposes that it requires the presence of evil in order for good acts to occur. For example, courage cannot be found without fear or sympathy without pain or happiness has no value without sadness. This theory further expounds that God, in creating the world, got the mix of evil and good behaviours or events just right such that the amount of evil in the world is justified by the good it provokes. When Germany was bombed to within an inch of its survival by the allies and its citizens humiliated by the partitioning of Berlin, a decision was made not to make reparations so unbearably crippling as occurred after WWI but to take the course of rebuilding the economy of Germany and its political structures so that it could one day rejoin the family of democratic nations. This good action was only possible in the context of the evil that previously existed. It does seem a strange way for God to manage the conduct of the world, but that's the theory.

The non-theological explanation is that an all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving God would not have purposefully created a world in which evil exists in order to develop corresponding virtues in man but would instead have made the best possible world to live in. The reality is we live in an unpredictable world where random acts of natural and unnatural evil occur from time to time. It seems to me that the Greater Goods Defence gives God a very bad wrap. Given the evidence that Hitler was able to perpetrate the evil he did, it is clear that such evil exists randomly and unpredictably and the best that can be said about God is that he cannot or chooses not to take any action to prevent such natural or unnatural evils. Either conclusion logically calls for a redefinition of the nature of 'God' which currently presumes a capacity to intervene in the natural and unnatural order of events on this planet.