The Holocaust Ideology:
A Theological Threat to Christianity and Islam
By Paul Grubach © 2007
What is meant by the term, “Holocaust
ideology?” It encompasses these propositions. The Nazi government
formulated a master plan to murder all the Jews of Europe. This master
plan was primarily carried out with the use of homicidal gas chambers in
six concentration camps in Poland, and with mobile gas vans on the
Eastern Front. In addition, planned, forced starvation and mass
shootings were also employed as instruments of mass murder. Finally,
approximately six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis.
Another of the standard claims of the
entire package called the “Holocaust” is that Western Christendom
created the climate of opinion that made the alleged mass murder of six
million Jews possible.1 Accordingly, European Christianity is to a
large extent responsible for this horrendous massacre.
Not only is this a major theme of
standard works on Holocaust, such as Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction
of the European Jews, but it has been a major theme of many
Holocaust conferences in the past. For example, this theme played a
prominent role in the “Remembering the Future” Conference at Oxford,
England, in July 1988.
Establishment Holocaust
intellectuals never tire in pointing out that Lutheran Christianity in
Germany was a major force behind the rise of virulent anti-Semitism
“that led to the Holocaust.” Martin Luther himself is accused of being
one of the major figures in the pantheon of intellectual demons who
conjured up anti-Semitic hatred in Germany.2
These are serious charges that are
leveled against Western Christianity. Before one can evaluate the
charge—“Western Christendom is to a large extent responsible for the
Holocaust.”—we must first determine if the mass murder of six million
Jews actually occurred.
But this is not the only way in which
the Holocaust ideology affects Christianity. There is a way in which
the Holocaust issue affects world Christianity, and not just European
Christendom. A quite popular, avant-garde school of philosophy claims
that “God died with Auschwitz.” According to this line of thought, a
morally perfect, omnipotent God that deeply loves all mankind would
never allow something as horrendous and monstrous as the Holocaust to
take place. But the Holocaust did occur. Hence, the God of
Christianity probably does not exist.
The Jewish theologian, Amos
Finkelstein: “The admission that God—or ethical theism—died in Auschwitz
because Auschwitz defies all meaning calls, we are told, for a radical
change in the most fundamental premises.”3
The Christian theologian, Robert McAfee
Brown: “This is the crisis of belief that the Holocaust forces on us.
For who, whether Jew or Christian, can believe in a God in whose world
such things take place? The perennial mystery of evil, the source of
our greatest vulnerability as believers, reaches unique expression in
the Holocaust. No theodicy can encompass this event so that is wounds
are closed or its scars healed. It forever precludes easy faith in God
or humanity. Both are placed under judgment, and a verdict or acquittal
may not be lightly rendered, if at all, to either party.”4
(Finkelstein’s and McAfee Brown’s
statements also imply that the Holocaust doctrine is a challenge to even
Jews that believe in God, but a discussion of how it affects theistic
Judaism is going beyond the bounds of this short essay.)
According to influential Jewish and
Christian thinkers then, the whole Holocaust ideology destroys, or could
destroy, the very credibility of the Christian religion or a belief in
God. Let us continue with this theological speculation in relation to
the Holocaust.
The ardent Jewish-Zionist and Nobel
Peace Prize laureate, Elie Wiesel, has claimed that “the sincere
Christian knows what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but
Christianity.”5 The Catholic theologian and Gentile-Zionist, Harry
James Cargas, has cast a sympathetic glance upon Wiesel’s claim. For he
has written: “The Holocaust is, in my judgment, the greatest tragedy for
Christians since the crucifixion. In the first instance, Jesus died; in
the latter, Christianity may be said to have died.”6
If I understand Wiesel and Cargas
correctly, their argument goes something like this. It is not
conceivable that a religion which is directly inspired by God could be
responsible for something as horrendous and monstrous as the Holocaust,
the mass murder of millions of Jews in gas chambers and by other means.
But the Holocaust did occur, and Christendom inspired it and is largely
responsible for it. Hence, Christianity is probably not inspired by a
morally perfect, omnipotent Being, or this Supreme Being may not even
exist.
Clearly then, the whole Holocaust
ideology represents a direct challenge to the credibility and the very
existence of Christianity and a belief in God, as a significant number
of intellectuals and laymen give credence to this
“God-died-with-Auschwitz” theology.
The Holocaust ideology has
created a major crisis of faith among contemporary Christians and other
believers in ethical theism. The speculations of theologians like
Finkelstein and McAfee Brown are simply expressions of this crisis. In
order that Christians may successfully deal with the crisis of faith
that the Holocaust ideology has created, it is necessary to first answer
the most obvious question: Did the Holocaust actually occur? In order
to answer this question in a truthful way, one must examine and evaluate
both the traditional and revisionist views of the Holocaust in a fair
and objective manner.
But in contemporary mainstream society,
this is not possible. The Holocaust ideology can be used to discredit
and disprove God’s existence, and attack and undermine the Christian
religion. Yet, it is not acceptable in our Western mainstream society
to attempt to show the Holocaust ideology is not true. According to the
prevailing mores, it is “evil and immoral” to disprove the Holocaust
ideology.
Indeed, according to the prevailing
mores that reign supreme in academia, mainstream society, and in
mainstream Christian circles, it is morally wrong to even attempt
to argue the revisionist viewpoint. This was stated many years ago by
the Lutheran theologian, Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, in Christian
News. In regard to the piles of bodies found in some concentration
camps at the end of WWII, he stated: “It is immoral to argue that these
people [the Jews] were the victims not of an extermination program, but
of disease and malnutrition brought on by the total collapse of
Germany.”7
Even more generally it was recently
reported in the news that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the Catholic
Archbishop of Westminster, has said “that Holocaust denial is tantamount
to ‘sacrilege.’”8
In other words, it supposedly violates
Christian morality to reject the traditional view of the Holocaust and
argue that revisionism is correct.
To put the “Holocaust”
beyond the realm of rational critique, to make it sinful and immoral to
debunk it, is tantamount to elevating it to the status of a sacred
dogma. Yet, the Holocaust ideology is a human interpretation of
history created by human officials and historians, and is
propagated by human ideologues and their sympathizers. There is
nothing “sacred” about the Holocaust ideology, it was not in any way
sanctioned by the Supreme Being. God did not hand down the doctrine of
the “Holocaust” to Moses on Mt. Sinai along with the Ten Commandments.
One could cogently argue that to endow a totally human doctrine
with an aura of holy, religious sacredness is, according to Christian
morality, to engage in idolatry. How so?
In Exodus 20, we read: “I
am the Lord thy God…thou shalt not have strange gods before thee.” In a
word, in contemporary Western society, the Holocaust ideology is
before the concept of God. You can use the Holocaust ideology to
“disprove” and discredit the concept of God, but it is “evil and
immoral” to attempt to disprove the Holocaust ideology.
There is no commandment in Scripture that says: "Thou
shalt believe in the Jewish Holocaust ideology." However, there are
statements in Scripture that command the Christian to search for truth.
In John 8: 31-32 it is stated: "If ye continue in my word, then are ye
my disciples indeed: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free." In1 John 2: 21, we read: "I have not written unto you
because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie
is of the truth." Finally, to illustrate the point, let us quote Exodus
20: 16: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor."
These statements clearly imply that they who
follow the words of the Bible will search for truth and reject lies. A
Christian does not find the truth about the alleged Jewish Holocaust by
blindly accepting what the Zionist influenced mass media tells him. The
real Christian strives for the truth. He gives the revisionist and
traditional view of the Holocaust a fair hearing, and then attempts to
determine where the truth really is. The “Holocaust” is an ideological
interpretation of history that is propagated world wide by various power
elites. It is to be evaluated with the same set of rational-scientific
methods that historians and political scientists apply to other
doctrines of this nature.
In recent years, the Holocaust ideology has
been used in a developing assault upon the Islamic religion. Consider
this example. In the January 8, 2006, issue of the San
Francisco Chronicle, the ardently pro-Zionist writer Edwin Black
made this statement: “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot to the forefront of
Holocaust denial with his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it’s
more like self-denial. The president of Iran need only look to his
country’s Hitler-era past to discover that Iran and Iranians were
strongly connected to the Holocaust and the Hitler regime, as was the
entire Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem.”
The implication here is that Iranians and Muslims are also “guilty of
the evil mass murder of the Jews.”
The very same arguments that we have seen in
this essay used against Christianity could very well be used against the
Islamic religion. For example, Muslims believe that God is absolutely
good and perfect, and He directly inspired the Islamic religion. So the
argument then proceeds. Islam could not be inspired by an infinitely
good and perfect God, because its followers are connected with something
so horrific as the Holocaust.
My ultimate point here is this. The
Holocaust doctrine is a theological attack upon and a threat to both the
Christian and Islamic religions. Christians and Muslims must deal with
this theological threat in an honest and forthright manner by giving the
both the revisionist and traditional views of the Holocaust a fair
hearing, as is consistent with the teachings of both the Bible and
Koran.
Footnotes
1.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews: Student
Edition (Holmes & Meirer, 1985), passim.
2.
ibid., pp. 13-15, passim.
3.
Francois Furet, ed., Unanswered Questions: Nazi Germany and
the Genocide of the Jews (Schocken Books, 1989), p.296.
4.
Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern
University (Evanston, Ill., 1977), p. 49.
5.
Quoted in Harry James Cargas, A Christian Response to the
Holocaust (Denver, Col., 1981), p.31.
6.
Ibid., p. v.
7.
See Christian News, March 13, 1989, p. 10; Paul Grubach,
“A Response to Dr. John Warwick Montgomery: Exterminationist Fallacies,”
Christian News, April, 10, 1989, p.14.
8.
Archbishop of Westminister Labels Holocaust Denial as
“Sacrilege.” Online:
http://www.totalcatholic.com/universe/index.php?news_id=652&start=0&categ
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