My dad died when I was five, so as a little boy, my grandfather raised me in the LA Basin. We met people from all around the world and I remember a man pulling up his sleeve and showing me his concentration camp tattoo. He said, “Mark, the Nazis almost killed me. They killed my Mom and Dad. When they were shooting us, my parents shoved us behind them, and their bodies fell on top of us. We laid there and pretended like we were dead. We got out of there and ended up in a camp. Here are the tattoos. If anybody tells you that this Holocaust didn’t happen, you remember this.”
He wasn’t a believer in Jesus, but he was praising God for America because he knew that he could have been one of those who had died. There are many other stories I could tell you.
A study that was recently published showed that 20% of our population between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that the Holocaust never happened and that it’s all mythology. Another roughly 23% of that same demographic believe it’s “exaggerated.”
Friends, it’s not exaggerated. Satan wants us to believe it never happened.
Jesus said there’s going to be another holocaust that’s coming which is even worse and that’s why we need to learn the lessons of history and be courageous. You and I need to make decisions today about how we’re going to live as things unfold. Lawlessness is unfolding. The contempt for the Jews is unfolding. The decisions we make today matter as we go forward.
I want to quote a presentation from PragerU, which we, and especially our younger generations, need to understand:
The Holocaust is widely regarded as the greatest evil ever carried out by any government in history. Given the magnitude of this crime, it’s disturbing that so many people, especially those under 40, know little or nothing about it. According to a recent study, young people have a “worrying lack of basic Holocaust knowledge.”
So, here are some facts that everyone should know.
The Holocaust was a relatively recent event. It took place between 1939, when Germany invaded Poland sparking World War II, and 1945, when Germany surrendered. During those years, the Nazi regime headed by Adolf Hitler set out to murder every Jew in the world, starting with every Jew in Europe.
One of the things that made Nazi anti-Semitism different from other forms of ethnic hatred was that Hitler drew no distinctions among Jews. He regarded every Jew as an enemy worthy of death—Jewish children no less than Jewish adults. The SS, the Nazis’ Elite troops, would line up Jewish children next to parents and grandparents and have firing squads shoot them all.
When the Nazis decided that murdering Jews by gunfire was too slow, they opened death camps in which they installed gas chambers. The Nazi SS would force hundreds of Jews into these chambers and pipe in poisonous gas. After about 15 minutes of hell, all the people inside would be dead—suffocated.
The Nazis then forced other Jews to extract the bodies from the gas chambers and, as a final indignity, examined the dead Jews’ mouths to pull out gold teeth. They would examine hands as well. When Rings were too tight, they would simply cut off fingers. They would also cut off the victim’s hair, which German businesses use for mattress stuffing. Nothing was wasted.
What explains the Nazis’ murderous obsession with the Jews? After all, the Jews were a very small portion of Germany’s population, as well as the world’s population. In 1938, just prior to World War II, there were about 17 million Jews—less than 1% of the world’s population of 2 billion. The Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, [consisting of] 2/3 of Europe’s Jews and one 3 of all the Jews in the world. Why?
The most commonly offered explanation is racism. The Nazis, they say, were racists and hated Jews and all other non-Aryans. Was Hitler a racist? Yes. Did he speak in derogatory terms of people other than Aryans? Yes. Is that why he murdered the Jews? No.
It’s easily proven that racism alone wasn’t the primary reason for Nazi Jew-hatred. Throughout World War II, the Nazis allied themselves with the non-Aryan Japanese. The Nazis also allied themselves with the non-Aryan Arabs, whose anti-Semitism made them natural allies of the Nazis. And while the Nazis certainly denigrated black people, they made no effort to persecute, let alone exterminate, them.
So, though Nazi anti-Semitism was racist, it wasn’t solely or even primarily the product of racism. There was something much deeper behind this hatred.
What infuriated Hitler and the Nazis about the Jews was their influence— moral, intellectual, and economic. If Aryans were the superior race, how could Jews be so influential? Hitler believed that the greatest battle on Earth was between the Aryan and the Jew. Therefore, Aryans could prevail only if the Jews were destroyed.
The Nazis blamed the Jews for creating everything they hated: communism, capitalism, Judaism, and Christianity.
He regarded [Christianity] as a Jewish creation. Jesus was a Jew. The apostles were Jews. Two-thirds of the Christian Bible is the Jew’s Bible. Hitler yearned for Germany to return to its pre-Christian pagan roots. Tragically, however, while Hitler hated Christianity, most of Germany’s Christians didn’t hate Hitler.
That was the tragedy.
You and I need to be thinking farther down the road and following the example of people like the Ten Boom family. Because of their commitment to Jesus Christ and realizing the Messiah and the Bible came through the Jewish people, this one family rescued 800 Jews before they themselves went into concentration camps. Most of the family died except Corrie Ten Boom.
Those are the kind of Christians that we need to be in the midst of a world that is becoming filled with contempt and hate for good, righteousness, truth, the Jewish people, and everything that God loves. Why? Because Satan is a “roaring lion seeking who he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
