Hollywood Veteran Shirley MacLaine Claims Nazi Death Camp Victims Were Probably Atoning For Past Life Sins

Hollywood Veteran Shirley MacLaine has sparked widespread outrage by claiming that Holocaust victims could have been ‘balancing their karma’ for sins they committed in a previous life.

The older sister of Warren Beatty has long been known for her New Age beliefs and interest in spirituality, reincarnation, and UFOs. The Oscar winner once insisted she lived on Atlantis in an earlier life, where she says she was the brother to a 35,000-year-old spirit called Ramtha.

However, Miss MacLaine’s recent comments concerning the six million Jews and millions of others systematically butchered by the Nazis in Hitler’s dreaded death camps have triggered mass fury as opposed to indulgent ridicule.

In her recently published book, What If….. – subtitled, A Lifetime Of Questions, Speculations, Reasonable Guesses And A Few Things I Know For Sure – Miss MacLaine suggests that it’s a strong possibility that Holocaust victims were only subject to such immense pain, suffering, and horror, because they were “balancing their karma from ages before.”

“What if most Holocaust victims were balancing their karma from ages before, when they were Roman soldiers putting Christians to death, the Crusaders who murdered millions in the name of Christianity, soldiers with Hannibal, or those who stormed across the Near East with Alexander? The energy of killing is endless and will be experienced by the killer and the killee.”

Jewish campaigners and other activists have slammed Miss MacLaine’s comments as highly offensive and very wrong. A spokesman for the Community Security Trust, which campaigns against anti-Semitism, told the Daily Mail that it’s not just Jewish people who will find such controversial comments distasteful.

“The first impressions are that these comments will offend and bemuse many Jews – and many other people too.”

Aggravating an already aggravated situation, Miss MacLaine expanded upon her karmic theories and suggested that her “good friend” Stephen Hawking might have chosen to give himself motor neuron disease.

“Did he ‘create’ the disease that has crippled him in order to learn to be dependent on caregivers and the kindness of strangers so that he could free his entire mind to the pursuit of knowledge?

“What if he inadvertently chose to set an example of himself to show the rest of us that cosmic travel and universal understanding are available, regardless of one’s physical condition or circumstance?

“If Jesus chose to die in a state of martyrdom, then Stephen Hawking could just as readily have chosen to live in a dual state of being: visibly physical weakness and unseen knowledge and power. What if all reality is an illusion?”

Her views were branded “utterly ridiculous” by disability charity Scope, while a spokesman for Disability Rights UK added, “She obviously has some very confused ideas that a lot of disabled people will be baffled by.”

“It’s completely wrong to say people choose their disabilities, especially Professor Stephen Hawking, who has a genetic condition.”

[Lead photo via Getty Images.]