Christians and Nazis

Christian Responsibility for the Holocaust

In 100 CE, a Jew who is known to history by only one name, Barnabas, converted to the new religion, Christianity. He then demanded that all Jews also convert. When this was not achieved, Barnabas wrote a malicious diatribe against his former co-religionists, denouncing Jews as hated by God, in league with the devil, and all the other denunciations familiar to European Jews. What Barnabas wrote then was repeated over and over again for centuries. When Martin Luther (1485-1546) wrote his book “On the Jews and their Lies,” he repeated the canards of Barnabas, as  did the German journalist Wilhelm Marr when he organized  the first “Anti-semitic Congress” in 1888 in Leipzig.

As late as 1933, Hitler and his followers again repeated the anti-Jewish hate tirades originating over the centuries from the pen of Barnabas.

Christian apologists like to claim that the mass murder of six million Jews in Europe from 1933 to 1945 was caused because a. Hitler was crazy, b. because Germany lost the First  World War, and c. because Germans suffered during the depression in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

All these excuses are nonsense. Consider this: Early in the Nazi years in Germany Hitler decided that physically and mentally disabled people were “worthless lives.” Therefore German doctors sent the disabled population to the Gestapo, or Secret Police, who pushed the disabled people into trucks whose exhaust was connected by rubber hoses to the inside of the trucks. That allowed the drivers to kill the people inside the trucks by sending the exhaust gas into the interior of the trucks. When these measures became public knowledge, a Catholic bishop denounced these killings in a sermon which he had duplicated and sent all over Germany.  That caused such an uproar that Hitler became afraid of a public uprising against him, and he ordered the end of this euthanasia.

Likewise, a public uproar against the Nazi regime occurred in 1938, when Jewish men married to Christian women were arrested and held in the Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo for deportation to concentration camps.

Thousands of Christian women assembled in front of Gestapo headquarters and shouted their demands for the release of their husbands. Fearing a public assault on his power, Hitler ordered the release of the Jewish husbands of non-Jewish women. 

Therefore we can conclude that the German people had it in their power to rescue the German Jews from deportation and murder. Yet, no such effort was ever attempted on behalf of the German Jews. On the contrary. The Christian clergy blamed the Jews for their murder on the grounds that God was sending His punishment for Jewish refusal to convert to Christianity.

No, Hitler was not crazy. He acted on the grounds which he had learned as an altar boy in his youth in  Braunau and Linz,  Austria.

Christianity caused the Holocaust and nothing can absolve those who committed the greatest crime ever undertaken.                                                

Shalom u'vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including Gender, Sex, & Status (2019).

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