INTRODUCTION TO THE HOLOCAUST by Raphael ben Levi
“The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn’t. (Eg, Germany was considered to be the most cultured nation in Europe and the world) What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” Yehuda Bauer
These profound words are prophetic since biblically this is exactly what will occur in the end times during the 7-year Tribulation yet on an even greater and unimaginable scale than the Holocaust.
But before we consider social, economic, demographic or even spiritual perspectives we need to balance things by reviewing Jewish history. The Holocaust or SHOAH, (“catastrophe” in Hebrew) did not just happen arbitrarily but grew out of a combination of events with the active cooperation of almost every European nation and Christian organisation and denomination most especially including the Roman Catholic Church.
Prior to the Holocaust there have been many mini-holocausts down through Jewish history that shaped and moulded the Jewish people especially in connection with the destruction of the 1st and 2nd Temples. Yet, all of them were eclipsed by Hitler’s implementation of the Holocaust less than 100 years ago where two-thirds of European Jewry (6m) were slaughtered (could this refer to the prophecy in Zech. 13: 7-13?) Even seen against the slaughter of 1m Jews during the destruction of the 2nd Temple (representing around 45% of the entire population of 2.5m, casualties of the Holocaust signal something beyond shocking.
Germany’s economy suffered badly after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 not least because of its dependence on American loans from 1924 onwards. As the loans were recalled, the economy in Germany sunk into a deep depression. Investment in business was reduced.
As a result, wages fell by 39% between 1929 to 1932. People in full time employment fell from 20m in 1929, to just over 11m in 1933 (a 50% drop). In the same period, over 10,000 businesses closed every year. As a result, the amount of poverty increased sharply as countless people plummeted from riches to rags.
The economic climate combined with political instability left people disillusioned and looking for change, providing a vacuum and necessary conditions for the Nazi party to fill which they did skilfully and ruthlessly destroying all opposition through a variety of means that led to their election into power in 1933. Let’s examine a timeline of development because through it we will see a similar process that is playing out in front of our eyes incrementally in these current times.
1933 – Adolf Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Nazis ‘temporarily’ suspended civil liberties and set up the first concentration camp at Dachau. The first inmates were 200 Communists. Books with ideas considered dangerous to Nazi beliefs were destroyed.
1934 – Hitler combined the positions of chancellor and president to become ‘Fuhrer’ or leader of Germany. Jewish newspapers could no longer be sold in the streets.
1935 – Jews were deprived of their citizenship and other basic rights. The Nazis intensified the persecution of political people who do not agree with their views.
1936 – Nazis boycotted Jewish-owned business. Jews were no longer allowed to vote.
1938 – German troops annexed Austria in March. The world kept silent. The Évian Conference was convened 6–15 July 1938 in France to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. This was the initiative of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt who hoped to obtain commitments from some of the invited nations to accept more refugees. He also desired to deflect attention and criticism from American policy that severely limited the quota of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States.
The conference was attended by representatives from 32 countries, and 24 voluntary organisations also attended as observers, including Golda Meir who was not permitted to speak or participate in the proceedings. Some 200 international journalists gathered at Évian to observe and report on the meeting. The conference was ultimately doomed, as aside from the Dominican Republic, delegations from the 32 participating nations failed to come to any agreement about accepting the Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich. The conference inadvertently proved a useful propaganda tool for the Nazis. Adolf Hitler responded to the news of the conference commenting that in light of the response of the nations, it would be hypocritical now for them to criticise Germany for the manner they treated their Jewish population. And in a sense he was right. As for Eastern Europe, anti-Semitism was alive and well and the Eastern bloc actively supported and cooperated with Hitler in his planned extermination of the Jews. This emboldened Hitler who on Nov. 9th tested the waters of world public opinion in an event known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”. At this carefully orchestrated and coordinated event, the Nazis terrorised Jews throughout Germany and Austria – 30,000 Jews were arrested. Jews were compelled to carry id cards and Jewish passports that were marked with a “J.” They were no longer permitted to attend plays, concerts, etc.; all Jewish children were moved to Jewish schools. Jewish businesses were shut down and compelled to hand over securities and jewels. Jews were forced to hand over drivers’s licenses and car registrations and they were basically quarantined and placed in lockdown.
1939 – Germany took over Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. World War II began as Britain and France declared war on Germany. Hitler ordered that Jews followed strict curfews, turn in radios to the police and wear yellow stars of David. According to studies of the Holocaust, deaths of Jews at the hands of Nazis until this time were under 100,000.
1940 – Nazis began deporting German Jews to Poland where they were forced into ghettos. Nazis began the first mass murder of Jews in Poland. In 1940, the Nazi concentration camps began processing Jews in large numbers. 500,000 Jews died.
1941 – Jews throughout Western Europe were forced into ghettos. They were not permitted to leave their houses without permission from the police and could no longer use public telephones. The genocide of the Jews was enormous. 1.1 million Jews died. Jews from Central Europe were rounded up and transported by trains to concentration camps where they were divided into slave workers and those who would be gassed on the spot. In Eastern Europe, Jews were herded to rural areas, shot, then left in the open fields just as Jeremiah prophesied (cf., ch. 7).
1942 – Nazi officials devised and implemented the ‘Final Solution’ – their plan to annihilate all European Jews who were now forbidden to: subscribe to newspapers; keep dogs, cats, birds, etc; keep electrical equipment including typewriters; own bicycles; buy meat, eggs, or milk; use public transportation; attend school. In this year, the Holocaust was at its peak: 2.7 million Jews died.
1943 – The Holocaust was slowing down: 500,000 Jews killed, partly because the Germans simply couldn’t keep pace with their slaughter. About 80 to 85 percent of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust had already been murdered.
1944 – Hitler took over Hungary and began to deport 12,000 Hungarian Jews each day to Auschwitz.
1945 – Hitler was defeated and World War II ended in Europe. The Holocaust was over and the death camps are emptied. 6 million Jews perished.
This was the sequence of events between 1933 – 1945 leading to the rise and fall of Hitler but how did it connect with the spiritual conditions of the times?
THE CATHOLIC RESPONSE
After the Nazis came to power in Germany, they signed an agreement (concordat) whereby the Vatican would accept the Nazi government so long as the Nazis didn’t interfere with the Catholic Church.
In 1939, a new Pope was elected, Pius XII, and accordingly did not protest against any anti-Jewish policy of the Nazi State, or made any attempt to save the lives of Europe’s Jews although they knew through their networks how Jews were being slaughtered in the occupied countries. There were a few individual priests who put their lives at risk by attempting to protect the Jewish people.
THE PROTESTANT RESPONSE
Perhaps the greatest condemnation of Jews was by Martin Luther contained in his treatise, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” written in 1543, three years before his death. His views greatly influenced the spread of anti-Semitism and were used to justify all forms of persecution against the Jewish people. Almost every anti-Jewish publication of the Third Reich referred to Luther’s anti-Semitic views which influenced the majority of Protestant clergy.
The German Evangelical Church contained a group of Christians called “The German Christian Movement” who fully supported Hitler in his attempt to exterminate the Jews. They believed in the purity of the Aryan race, and their slogan during church elections in 1937 was: “We fight for the Jew-free German Evangelical Reich Church.”
They advocated barring from membership all Jewish believers and establish their own separate church, opposed only by a few people such as the theologian, Martin Niemoeller. The German Christian Movement pronounced that:
• The Christian Bible should be stripped of the Old Testament,
• The influence of ‘Rabbi’ Paul should be removed,
• The focus of Christianity should be upon Yeshua as a model hero, rather than the One crucified for our sins.
During the Nazi period, there were a handful of Church leaders such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth who had the courage to speak out against these things and anti-Semitism in general. But, the vast majority of Protestant evangelicals supported anti-Semitism including Jewish believers who were members of the same denomination.
Even within a tiny movement of evangelicals known as “Confessing Christians” who spoke out strongly against the Nazis, their concern was with the intrusion into church affairs rather than any interest for the plight of the Jewish people. Some Confessing Christians even belonged to the Nazi party.
These facts may be hard to digest but nonetheless it should cause us to reflect whether the same may yet happen in these end times as anti-Semitism continues to increase from within the church.
So now let’s move briefly to consider how Jewish people wrestle with the Holocaust through ta religious perspective? There are basically 4 models which attempt to explain why God permitted it to occur:
- The ‘Binding of Isaac.’ (Gen.22:1-19) By comparing the victims of the Holocaust to Isaac, the Jewish people are seen as innocent victims who were sacrificed as a test of their faith. This is not convincing biblically since throughout Scripture it clearly states that there are none righteous (innocent).
2. A second view is that Holocaust victims are likened to the “Suffering Servant” of Isai. 53, who bore the sins of others. Israel is the sacrificial lamb who have been the victims of constant persecution and suffering throughout the ages. Again, this is a poor attempt to take a passage out of context and apply a false narrative.
3. Some religious Jews explain the Holocaust as a consequence of God who “hides” Himself and withdraws when people collectively reject Him and are sinful and rebellious. This inevitably leads to consequences whereby innocent people suffer. (Eg., why do bad things happen to good people?) This line of thinking is based upon cause and effect, which is partially biblical but it falls short because in Jewish thought there is a clear understanding that people are inherently good rather than sinful. (Opposite of what the Bible teaches)
4. There are are also some religious Jews who explain the Holocaust through the lens of suffering in the sense that God has allowed the Jewish people to suffer as a ‘test’ to challenge their faith, as He did with Job. Again this is based upon the false premise that humanity is like Job who was “perfect in all his ways” (i.e., godly).
5. Another view from some people (eg,. Fackenheim) suggests that a proper response to the Holocaust is to consider it a victory for the Jewish people insofar as God did not to allow Hitler a posthumous victory by letting Judaism die out.
Since world Jewry, and in particular European Jewry, were at the time of the Holocaust (and continue to be) mostly secular, one could say that the majority remove God from the Holocaust altogether and claim that the horrors of the Holocaust prove that God cannot exist.
6. And finally, there are those Jewish thinkers who have chosen to keep silent, as the only thinkable response to the unthinkable.
From a biblical perspective, the question most frequently asked is, “Why did God allow the Holocaust?” Although, perhaps one should be asking instead why man allowed the Holocaust? With the latter, there is a simple answer: through a sequence of apathy, self interest, sin and rebellion. To blame God for the Holocaust, or to use it as the basis to deny that there is a God, is simply blame shifting – moving the blame from man to God whilst ignoring humanity’s inescapable complicity. Once we agree that humanity has free will we must also accept the consequences of our decisions.
It was impossible for the Holocaust to be the will of God, because it is against the laws of God. So from this logic, the key solution to prevent future holocausts is for the will of man to be aligned to the will of God. Believers understand that this will indeed occur at a future point known as the “Day of the Lord” when Yeshua returns to take His place to rule and reign in the millennium. (Zech 12:10) One person put it this way: “We can be mad at God for the Holocaust or for other human tragedies, but this is like a teenager who begs you to let him drive a car – promising to be responsible – gets drunk, crashes in to a telephone pole, and then blames you for giving him the keys. If we agree that humanity must have free will, we must accept the consequences of its decisions. As Elie Wiesel wrote, “After the Holocaust I did not lose faith in God. I lost faith in mankind.”
Ultimately, when we attempt to synthesise the many explanations for the Holocaust, or conversely to extract any one of them as an all embracing solution, we will always fail to make complete sense of it. As such, at some stage we must rest our case by surrendering our limited knowledge and understanding into the hands of a God who is in full control at all times even when the worst catastrophes occur. This is not to promote a passive mode of thinking that divorces us from reality, but rather the very opposite. And when we seek to understand better the mind of God, we do so through the mind of Messiah revealed through His Word. And in this respect, we can gain many useful insights. For example, in Ezek. 37:10-14 is the famous vision of the “dry bones” where Israel is brought back to life. This impossibility became a reality in 1948, only three years following the end of the Holocaust, despite the massacre of two-thirds of European Jewry and one-third of it’s entire population. This unprecedented miracle could not have occurred separately to the Holocaust! Isai 6:7-8 states that, “Before [Zion] travailed, she gave birth; before her pain came upon her, she was delivered of a male child. 8 Who has heard of such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Or shall a nation be brought forth in a moment? For as soon as Zion was in labour, she brought forth her children.” Most people understand the labour pains referred to in these verses relate specifically to the Holocaust.
Also in Jer.16, is the statement that “Before [Zion] travailed, she gave birth; before her pain came upon her, she was delivered of a male child. 8 Who has heard of such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall a land be born in one day? Or shall a nation be brought forth in a moment? For as soon as Zion was in labour, she brought forth her children.”
So, although we cannot rationalise the establishment of Israel as a sovereign State as the all-embracing reason for the Holocaust, there are clear associations which are intricately connected.
Let’s pause here for a moment.
Discussion Points
1. What reasons were given to justify the slaughter of millions of innocent victims in the Holocaust?
2. Why did most nations turn their backs on the Jewish people trapped under Hitler and refuse them a place of safe refuge?
What do you think are the causes of anti-Semitism?
3. How could a loving God have allowed the Holocaust to occur?
4. Why do you think that Martin Luther was anti-Semitic and how can one reconcile this with his Christian faith?
5. Why did most nations turn their backs on the Jewish people trapped under Hitler and refuse them a place of safe refuge?
6. Why do you think that God allowed some people to survive the Holocaust and others not?
7. Some people claim that God is unfair. How would you respond to a Holocaust survivor in this respect?
