To forgive is exclusively divine

In 1969, Jewish Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal published a controversial book called The Sunflower, based on an experience he had as a young man in 1943 in the Janowska concentration camp in Poland. Wiesenthal had been assigned to forced labor in a converted army hospital, where he was instructed to clear medical waste. It was there that he encountered a wounded soldier named Karl, who flagged Wiesenthal down. Knowing that his wounds were likely fatal and that he would almost certainly die in the coming days, Karl begged Wiesenthal for a favor.

He had been an SS officer who had committed horrific acts of evil, and there was one act in particular that was causing him anguish, a crime so heinous that he was certain he would not merit entering paradise unless he received forgiveness from a Jew. The crime had taken place the previous year, when Karl and some other SS officers surrounded a Jewish apartment building, poured kerosene around it, and set it on fire. As Jewish men, women, and children leaped out of the windows trying to escape, Karl gunned them down. Three hundred people perished.

Karl tearfully described his story to Wiesenthal and closed by begging him for absolution. He insisted that he was repentant but that he needed a Jew to forgive him before his soul departed for the next world.