Hitler, Germany and the Holocaust

The secular origins of Hitler's thought

There is nothing in the teachings of Christ and the apostles that is even remotely close to the horrors of the Third Reich. If we want to understand the Holocaust, it will not do to hunt through the bible or look at the crimes of medieval Catholicism, or Eastern European pogroms. If we want to see the origins of the Holocaust, we need to look at some trends and some thinkers of the 19th century. National Socialism was essentially a modern phenomenon; its roots spiritually speaking lay in Satan and in man's sinful nature. Humanly speaking they lay not in Roman Palestine, or in the Middle Ages, or in the Reformation, but in modern Europe, and in the hearts and minds of civilized men who prided themselves on their science and on their culture.

The Nazis did not invent hatred, cruelty, inhumanity, torture, and murder - they did take them to inspired degrees, and in a dark reevaluation of values proclaimed these evils to be good. In this they were assisted by technology and ideology, both exclusively the products of the modern age. Concerning ideology, it took the repudiation of Christianity and of classical western culture and the adoption of a new set of values to provide the presuppositions of which the Holocaust was the logical outcome. This repudiation of Christianity was one of the dominant trends of 19th-century western culture.

Technology

Not enough has been said about the extent to which technology was not merely a means of the Holocaust, but also a primary cause. If the Germans had not had railroads, and had not been able to transfer the Jews from all over Europe to designated killing points, but had been limited to local actions, the Holocaust could not have occurred on such a fantastic scale - and the idea of exterminating all of the Jews was born not merely of the twisted ideology which we can examine shortly, but it was also born of the possibility. Technology provided the possibility which contributed to the formation of the idea itself - for without the possibility of transporting people all over Europe there would have been no conception.

If, moreover, the Nazis had not had modern weapons, but had been limited to using bows, arrows, spears, swords, and so on, or even if they had been restricted to using muskets that had to be manually reloaded after each shot, the intensity and horror of the Holocaust would have been vastly diminished. The industrial and technological progress of the previous century served not only to make life easier, more comfortable, and more convenient (for those with money) - it also served to give evil men more power.

There is an important principle about technological progress that needs to be considered. We read in the book of Genesis that as punishment for the Fall God condemned man to labor. Thus, the age-old tasks of cutting wood, digging, ploughing, preparing meals, travelling, building, obtaining heat and water - these and many other tasks required a salutary physical effort. They were difficult and time consuming, but because of our innate laziness, selfishness, and conceit, they were beneficial, an integral and necessary part of life. Man, however, in his deepest heart being a rebel against God, deemed it wise to escape from God's judgement and make things as easy for himself as possible. Some natural improvements were normal and necessary, but in the modern era, as man's scientific knowledge increased - and his spiritual knowledge decreased - he devoted more and more ingenuity to making life easier for himself. In this he was quite successful, and travel, as well as the ability to perform many necessary tasks, became easier and easier.

Supposedly, this made life better - but was the character of human nature improved thereby? It was not. Are we better now than we were two or three hundred years ago? We are not. Indeed, it is possible to argue that as a rule people now are more selfish, more conceited, more lazy, more immoral, more neurotic, and more unhappy than ever before. All of these contrivances - including of course the disaster of the entertainment industry, which with its movies, TV shows, and pop music rubbish has debased countless millions of souls - have helped to corrupt and trivialize life. As it says in Ecclesiastes, "God has made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions."

This is not to say that previous eras were golden ages. Sin and evil have been in the world since the Fall and will be until Christ returns. Christians are not supposed to look backward, but forward with hope toward the new heaven and the new earth that will come with Christ's return - but we do need to recognize the present for what it is. Nor is it to say that it was good for people to go to the opposite extreme and be crushed by brutalizing lives of unremitting toil. Some progress and improvement has been beneficial. Nevertheless, it was healthier for men in wooden ships with sails to have to battle the elements. It was healthier for society when people had to exert some strength in the dignified labors of digging, cutting, reaping, and building. It was healthy for women to have to spend more time in the simple physical labor of pre-modern homemaking. Then it was considered valuable and constructive work, to run a home and provide for the needs of family and children. Speaking of warfare, it was humanly speaking healthier for men to have to come to grips directly with the enemy instead of cowering in holes in the earth while their opponents blasted them from miles away with heavy artillery. In heaven there will be no wars - wars are a vivid illustration of sin - but it was more normal and more psychologically demanding to confront the enemy face to face and hand to hand, than to sit behind a machine gun and effortlessly gun down advancing opponents.

Parenthetically, who has ever said that the inventors of the machine gun and other modern weapons contributed to the Holocaust by altering the outcome of the First World War? Even with the tremendous advantage given to the defending forces by the machine gun, the Germans nearly reached Paris in the early days of the war. If they had won the war, there would of course have been no Weimar Republic, and no Third Reich. But this, too, was part of God's larger plan for the world.

The artificiality of the modern technological age contributed greatly to the Holocaust. Not only did it give the forces of evil more power, as has already been said, but it has deeply corrupted the natural character of everyday life, and given puny mortals delusions of pride and mastery over the environment that allow them to drift farther and farther from God, and deeper into unhealthy fantasy worlds. Such modern delusions as Naziism, Communism, unisex feminism, abortion, and gay pride, would have been unthinkable in simpler and harder times. Too much prosperity, too much entertainment, and too much ease of life, along with harmful pseudo-philosophies such as Darwinism, Freudianism, materialism, and pragmatism, have had a profoundly deleterious impact on the modern psyche.

The clock can not be turned back, nor should we be blind to the evils of other times, such as chattel slavery, or child labor. In assigning blame for the Holocaust, however, it is necessary to understand the corrupting and debasing role that technology has played in modern life. A much more direct and discernible cause, however, is ideology, modern ideology, for which the bible and all of the other cultures of pre-modern times furnish no precedent.

Gobineau, Lagarde, and Langbehn

I believe it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn who said in his Gulag Archipelago that it takes ideology to really develop the evil in man. With an ideology, one can slaughter millions of innocent people and inflict horrible suffering in the sincere belief that what one is doing is good, and necessary for the benefit of humanity. It was ideology that inspired the nightmare of the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust was also a logical outworking of an ideology. The origins of this ideology can be traced back without too much difficulty to some 19th-century thinkers who flourished in the dark and primitive jungles of modern blindness and egotism.

One such thinker was Arthur de Gobineau. In the 1850's he published a book entitled Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In this gem of modern intellectualism, Gobineau maintained that the Europeans were superior to other races (a fashionable view in the 19th century) and further imagined that among the Europeans, the fair-haired Aryans were superior. He did not specifically single out the Germans, preferring to associate the Aryans with the aristocratic elements in various countries, but his ideas became popular in Germany over time, and were elaborated on there by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, about whom more will be said later.

Looking a little more closely at Gobineau's ideas, we find that he fantasized about a white Aryan race that was the creator of all civilization, and dreamed that Aryans migrated at various times from India to Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome and created the civilizations there. He believed that only Aryans were capable of real virtue (such as honor, freedom, and of course clear thinking about life and ethics). He was not particularly hostile to Jews, but found them to be degenerate (like the Latins) as a result of too much racial intermingling. Moreover, Gobineau believed that race was the critical element in world civilization. Pure races rose and flourished, while racial impurity led to national and cultural decline. Gobineau did believe that members of inferior races were still human beings, and above the beasts - the concept of subhumanity would come later - but once the boulder starts rolling downhill it gathers momentum. Not surprisingly, he was hostile to the concepts of equality and democracy. Obviously, all people are not equal, and the best should rule, without being constrained by the inadequacies of their inferiors.

Whence did such ideas originate? Certainly no believer in the bible could ever imagine that one race was superior to another, since we all come from the same source, and are all guilty of sin before a righteous and holy God. Before the maker of heaven and earth, all of our strengths and virtues are nothing but filthy rags - as if one group of grasshoppers should boast that they were superior to another group of grasshoppers because they could jump a few inches farther. It was the decline of religion that left the door open for this noxious fantasy, which inflames one of our greatest areas of weakness - egotism.

If, however, God is left out of the picture, and if material progress and science are considered to be the most important things in life, then the Europeans were superior to the Asians and the Africans. They did have more science, more technology, more education, higher standards of living, and more conveniences to make life easier. By those material standards they were far superior, and if someone ignorant of moral values did not understand that there was more to life than material things and ease of life, they were fully justified in asserting the inferiority of societies without those things. And, among the Europeans, clearly the northern Europeans were more aggressively innovative and advanced than the eastern or the southern Europeans - and since the northern Europeans were basically Germanic, then the Germanic "race" was clearly and undeniably and demonstrably superior - given a very limited and inadequate set of criteria for judgement. But, it was precisely this limited and inadequate set of criteria, acceptable only to those ignorant of God, that was used. This is disobedience to the teaching of Christ, "Do not judge by outward appearances, but judge righteous judgement."

As to the decline of religion in the 19th century, ultimately it has to be assigned to the providence of God, who with an unseeing hand moves the world toward its final end in the return of Jesus Christ. Humanly speaking, however, it is more than merely coincidental that the decline of religion closely paralleled the rise of physical science. Since it was not Christianity but rather the turning away from Christianity that constitutes one of the key elements of the Holocaust, some elaboration will be useful later. First, though, a few more comments about Gobineau and other spiritual ancestors of National Socialism are in order.

About Gobineau's religious beliefs, he was some sort of a Catholic, according to one website, but according to another site was very liberal and felt that Christianity was not morally superior to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle - which, if true, means he was not a Christian at all, and had no understanding of the gospel of Christ, no matter if he had some outward form of religion and went to church 365 days a year. Whatever his views may have been, it is beyond controversy that his theory of racial supremacy directly contradicts not only the bible and the whole biblical philosophy of man, but also the Spirit of Christ himself - and here the church is at fault in the matter of the Holocaust: in its failure to sufficiently expose and condemn the dangerous pseudo-philosophies that were to explode with such terrible devastation in the following decades. Christians are supposed to represent truth, but this includes opposing falsehood. This is also a problem today - people are embraced as "Christians" and accepted in the church when they openly flout the fundamentals of the faith. This makes a mockery of Christianity. Why should unbelievers take the bible's teachings seriously, when even the Christians do not?

It is too easy to dismiss Gobineau as a lonely eccentric, walking around with food stains on his clothes muttering to himself about Aryan supremacy. It is also too easy to talk about the origins of the Holocaust without having the knowledge or the intellectual empathy necessary to glimpse, however imperfectly, the spirit and feeling of a bygone age. For those willing to do a little research, however, a picture of 19th-century Germany emerges that is far different from the staid placidity conveyed by photographs or by bourgeois paintings and novels. Gobineau had admirers and followers, and theories of racial supremacy were supported by an increasing number of sophisticated, educated, intelligent, lost, and confused modern people. Gobineau did not create racism single-handed; he was only the unwitting representative of a larger trend motivated by hidden spiritual forces which he himself was ignorantly serving. Daniel Gasman, one writer who (like Mosse and Viereck) has researched the origins of the Third Reich with an intellectual integrity and depth of scholarship all too often lacking, refers (to take one example) to a disciple of Gobineau's, a certain Ludwig Woltmann.

Woltmann (1871-1907), a physician whose medical studies left him hopelessly incompetent when it came to dealing with ethical and spiritual matters, was an embryonic Nazi who specialized in racial anthropology and eugenics. One writer cited by Gasman referred to Woltmann as " 'the most important representative of the Gobineau theory of the Nordic race' in Germany at the turn of the century" [p. 148]. He "founded a racist journal, the Politisch-anthropologische Revue, and in its pages campaigned for the forceful biological maintenance of the Nordic race" [ibid.].

He described the Germans as the highest species of mankind and contended that the perfect physical proportions of the Nordics expressed an inner superiority and a heightened spirituality. Like Haeckel, he argued that any mixture of the races would lead to the biological deterioration of the Germans. Woltmann, like Haeckel, taught that life was a constant struggle for existence and for racial purity, and he sought to forearm Germany against biological decay [ibid.].

Another precursor of Naziism was one Paul de Lagarde (1827-91), a professor of Oriental languages at the University of Gottingen. He was a real scholar, but like some other scholars was deeply confused, and when it came to deeper subjects such as ethics, truth, and God he knew no more than the average man on the street. In the church today there is far too much reverence for "scholars," whose wisdom is seldom proportionate to their book learning.

Returning to Professor Lagarde, one source labelled him a "Protestant," although like many 19th-century German "Protestants" he seems to have had little time for the bible and no real enthusiasm for the principles of the Reformation. He was however intoxicated with the idea of German supremacy, and (although such things are hard to pin down) has been said to have invented the phrase "Master Race" to describe the Germans. He advocated German domination of Central Europe and the Balkans, due to the need for Lebensraum, and was not only quoted by the Nazis, but was considered by them to be one of their forerunners. Viereck records that Alfred Rosenberg considered Lagarde to be one of the four chief originators of National Socialism, along with Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Nietzsche [p. 225]. It should not be necessary to point out that Peter, James, John, and Paul were not included.

Not surprisingly, this advocate of German superiority was hostile to the Jewish element in Christianity. Lagarde felt that too many Christian teachings were inimical to the exaltation of the Nordic master race, and advocated that Christianity be purged of its Jewish elements - meaning not only almost all of the Old Testament, but also anything in the New Testament that did not suit his personal preferences. This attempt to harmonize Christianity with the increasingly popular doctrine of German supremacy makes Lagarde, along with Chamberlain, one of the founders of "positive" or "German" Christianity, a Christianity tailored to fit the demands of the age which ceased to be Christianity altogether.

Lagarde was also hostile to Jews, unavoidably, since anyone intoxicated with German supremacy would of necessity have to be hostile to an alien body within the midst of the Volk (although there is much more to the phenomenon of antisemitism in its 19th-century German context). He advocated their expulsion to Madagascar, according to one source, and thought of the Jews as "pests" and "parasites." According to Viereck he looked on the Jews as "the arch-fiends of history" and "the curse of the nordic super-race" [p. 169]. Even more, according to George L. Mosse's The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, Lagarde saw the Jew as "the incarnation of evil" and advocated "the extermination of Jews like bacillae" [p. 39]. More will be said about this strange phobia later.

Lagarde's ideal was the simple sturdy peasant, uncontaminated by such ideas as democracy, pacifism, internationalism, humility, forgiveness, or faith in God. And, the peasant's simple and sturdy wife found her greatest fulfillment in breeding more warriors. Thus with the turning away from God the ideal of man sinks lower and lower, to the coarse and unthinking peasant, and then in the end to Nietzsche's beast of prey.

A paragraph from Viereck is suitable here:

Lagarde's new interpretation made such an influential sensation in the 1880's that Richard Wagner enviously accused him of trying to make anti-Semitism and the new German nationalism his private monopoly. It will be seen how Lagarde's anti-Semitic Biblical criticisms were to be applied in modern German church politics by his loyal disciple, the Nazi educator Alfred Rosenberg [p. 169].

Such writers as Gobineau, Lagarde, and many others were limited by circumstances to theorizing, writing, and preaching, but the sweeping away of the old conservative social, and political order created new opportunities for 20th-century men of action to put 19th-century theories into practice - and Hitler was familiar with their writings. A study of books taken from Hitler's library after the war (www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/library/Atlantic_Monthly.html) turned up a copy of Lagarde's German Essays with 58 pages marked by Hitler. But, that is not significant to people who want to bypass the entire 19th and early 20th centuries and jump back to Luther, the Crusades, Chrysostom, and some verses from Jesus condemning murderers.

A third 19th-century German thinker who illustrates significant cultural trends is one Julius Langbehn (1851-1907). There are too many now forgotten German pamphleteers and preachers of racialism to mention, but Langbehn is especially significant. Gasman describes Lagarde and Langbehn as "the chief nineteenth-century prophets of the Volkish movement" [p. 155]. More will be said later about this "Volkish movement," an elevation of German racial identity to an almost religious level and an influential element in the tangled mass of causes leading to the Holocaust. For the present, a few comments about Langbehn are in order. Referring once again to Viereck:

...His ideas are derived mostly from Lagarde, but are made far more readable and reached a far wider public...To be German is a matter of blood, Kultur, and heroic temperament...To a great extent blood subconsciously determines all art and all political ideology and action.

The future would be a contest of speed between the races. The goal is world dominion, with the Aryan naturally Langbehn's favorite horse and the Semite as a sinister dark horse plotting to steal victory by some dirty trick. Aryan blood has two supreme expressions: art and war, the former for itself and the latter for its neighbors...

Langbehn's book is another example of how almost every Nazi tenet was being widely circulated three decades before Versailles. He tries to prove that the German race is the natural ruling race all over the globe, whether in Europe or America. The sturdy Saxon stock of Germany is to dominate the globe... [pp. 171-72]

Mosse reveals that Langbehn saw the Jews as considerably more than sinister. He had more toleration for orthodox Jews that kept their distance and observed their own laws. "Assimilated Jews, however, had trespassed beyond their natural limitations and by infiltrating the body of the Volk they were polluting the purity of its blood inheritance. These Jews, identified as the 'pest and cholera,' had to be exterminated" [p. 44].

Why should the Germans have been particularly susceptible to such eccentric theories, more so than the Italians or the English? And why should the Jews have been singled out as the source of all evils? It is possible to speculate on that, but first more should be said about the background out of which these ideas emerged. That having been accomplished, it will be possible to discuss at greater length the Volkish movement, and also the "philosophies" of two more precursors of Naziism - Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. This will be followed by a longer discussion of the two thinkers that in my view, along with Wagner, help most to understand the true origins of the Holocaust: Haeckel and Nietzsche. Parenthetically, as was said some time ago, living in a foreign country with extremely limited access to research materials, I have been constrained to rely on a limited number of sources. However, forays into the internet which yield basic (if not always scholarly) information confirm the sources that I am currently relying on.

Descartes and the "Enlightenment"

To really understand the Holocaust, it is necessary to understand some deep currents in the 19th century. The authors just mentioned were not isolated individuals scribbling away in cold and barren garrets. They have since lapsed into a well-merited oblivion, but in their day they were quite popular in Germany, and had an influence far greater than their seeming insignificance from our vantage point in time would indicate. These aforementioned currents - nationalism, imperialism, militarism, racism, and anti-Semitism - had a depth of popular appeal and generated an enthusiasm that is difficult to comprehend today. To understand them, it is necessary to go back even further into time.

Not many people would trace the origins of the Holocaust back to the 17th- century French philosopher Descartes, but it was Descartes who, when Christianity had been the dominant social and cultural force for centuries, decided that to understand the meaning of life, divine revelation was not necessary. Starting from himself, using his own reason and logic, he attempted to arrive at wisdom - for this reason he has been called the first modern philosopher, or the father of modern philosophy.

From this starting point, human reason alone, without divine revelation, a thousand paths diverge. They go in different directions, some of them intersecting, some combining and separating again, some of them broad and well-travelled, some of them obscure and known to few - but all of them go downward and away from God, away from his glorious revelation in the Lord Christ Jesus, and deeper into the cold darkness of the lost and sinful world. One of those paths led to the dark abyss of horrors whose origins we are now discussing.

Descartes himself did not openly despise God, and even felt the need of some sort of a theoretical and inactive God to give his airy cogitations some coherence and stability, but he did despise the revelation of God in scripture, and considered it beneath his lofty and profound intelligence. From here - because of our sinful nature, and because of our guilt, which make us want to escape from God - it was a short step to the urbane and genteel mockery and witticisms of Voltaire, the so-called philosophe, and from thence to the open hostility toward Christianity that was manifested in the French Revolution.

Glancing briefly at the ideas of Voltaire (a distasteful task), it is not difficult to see the reasons for his hostility toward Christianity. Being too short-sighted to distinguish sufficiently between the teachings of Christ and the bible on the one hand and the abuses of the French Catholic Church and the failings of individual Christians on the other, he was rightly repelled by the cruelty and arrogance of a corrupt ecclesiastical power structure that allied itself to an oppressive monarchy and nobility. It must have been difficult to endure the sight of lordly church leaders who lived in palaces while the common people suffered great poverty; of princes of the church exercising political power in corrupt and cynical ways with total indifference to the teachings of Christ; of common and uneducated people deluded with relics and saints and other unbiblical dogmas such as transubstantiation and adoration of the Virgin or obedience to the "pope" while their real spiritual needs were unmet. Such abuses engendered or encouraged the hatred and contempt for Christianity that exploded with fury in the Revolution, and led to vain attempts to abolish Christianity altogether and replace it with a new religion more agreeable to corrupt human concepts of reason and common sense. Not coincidentally, all three attempts to replace Christianity with a new ideology - revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union - ended in disaster. America, on the other hand, a society that endeavoured, however unsuccessfully, to conform its government and society more to Christian principles, has been immeasurably more stable.

Those who want to hunt for every scrap, clue, or tenuous link connecting Christianity to the Holocaust have (not surprisingly) preferred not to discuss the clear, great, and obvious parallels between the French and the National Socialist revolutions (and Hitler's seizure of power and subsequent policies did constitute a revolution, even if achieved by legal or by quasi-legal means). The extreme French revolutionaries, like the Nazis, sought to create a new faith, a secular religion requiring the repudiation of Christianity. To buttress this new faith they used flags, symbols (the cap of liberty, the tricolor, the cockade), and ceremonies. Like the Communists and the Nazis, they achieved initial successes - culminating in a dictatorship, a great expansion of national power, and a final collapse. Differences between Hitler and Napoleon are obvious, but both were tyrants who caused countless suffering and huge numbers of casualties in their vain and evil pursuit of power and ephemeral human glory. In the end they overreached themselves and brought disaster and defeat upon their nations. Their similarities are much greater and in closer proximity than imaginary similarities between Hitler and the teachings Jesus Christ and the Apostles.

One major difference was that the church was much more respected in Germany, even if as a cultural memory - hence the Nazis were constrained (by the need for electoral appeal) to conceal the extent of their hostility to the church. They even made a few religious noises on occasion - tossing a bone to the foolish Christians every once in a while cost nothing and gained much. The blatant hostility of the French revolutionaries to the church was not so quickly evident among the Nazis - but their central racial ideology was founded upon a total repudiation of biblical teaching.

Once again, a quote from Conway is pertinent:

Though Hitler's political shrewdness and sense of political tactics induced him from time to time to moderate the radical measures which his paranoid followers advocated, there can be no doubt of his innate antipathy to Christianity and to the Christian Churches. Christianity, he believed, was a 'hoax', and 'gangrene' which must be cut out before it infected the new growth of Nazi racialism; Germans had too long been held in bondage by the alien beliefs of a Jewish-derived faith... [pp. 328-329]

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