Worldwide Church of God: WHY the Holocaust Happened

Although many theories have been proposed, all have been discredited, and as of today, the only honest answer is: Nobody knows. For example, some scholars maintained that it was caused by the Versailles Treaty and Germany's resulting Weimar-period economic collapse; but those circumstances and events can more accurately be said to have provided the opportunity to commit this massive crime of genocide, rather than to have constituted its motive, its cause. So the old idea that Versailles and Weimar "caused" the Holocaust is now discredited.

And to mention just one newer theory: Daniel Goldhagen of Harvard, in his 1996 Hitler's Willing Executioners, sought to find the Holocaust's cause or motive in "eliminationist anti-Semitism" amongst "the Germans" themselves; but the Holocaust was very much an organized crime, and as a matter of basic criminal law, the motive for any organized crime is to be found in its initiator and conceptualizer, which is to say in the leader or crime-boss himself, rather than in his footsoldiers who merely execute his orders. Furthermore, even if Dr. Goldhagen were to have instead postulated this motive of "eliminationist anti-Semitism" to Hitler himself rather than to his minions, it would still not legally qualify as having been a motive for this crime. To state that an organized-crime boss ordered a murder because he hated the victim so much as to want to have him killed, is to express a tautology, not a motive for a crime. An emotion never qualifies as a "motive." In order for a court to be able to convict the crime-boss and to prove his motive for a murder, it must know why he hated his victim so much as to have ordered him to be killed. For this and other reasons, Dr. Goldhagen's theory too is discredited.

This brings the issue naturally to the key role played by the Holocaust's initiator and conceptualizer, Adolf Hitler himself. Clearly, Hitler did feel, and long express, the emotion of "eliminationist anti-Semitism," to employ Dr. Goldhagen's phrase; but why? That has been the great mystery. Numerous published "psychobiographies" of Hitler have addressed this question, but the theories presented there, too, have all fallen into a heap of ashes, right along with the discrediting of Freudian theory itself.

One aspect of the Holocaust's cause that is part of this great mystery of Hitler's motive, but that has nonetheless thus far received virtually no attention, is the extent to which Hitler's personal religious views might have influenced his attitude toward Jews and even his ultimate decision to exterminate them. There is at least good presumptive reason to explore this question. Hitler's military adjutant during 1938-43, Gerhard Engel, quoted him as saying, "I shall always remain a Catholic as I have always been"; and the Papal representative in Germany, who had long been privy to confidential communications with the Nazi leader, ordered his priests, after Hitler's suicide, to honor the late Leader in a Memorial Mass for this "true son of the Church" that was held on 6 May 1945. Hitler, in private, always declared himself to be "devout" in his belief in "the Almighty," even when he had political differences with some of Germany's churches. But his proud religiosity seems to have been pronouncedly in the tradition of the long history of organized Christian persecutions of Jews, going back to the Middle Ages and even earlier. For example, at around 400 A.D., Saint John Chrysostom said, "God always hated the Jews; it is obligatory for all Christians to hate the Jews," and Saint Ambrose proclaimed, "I hereby declare that I set fire to the synagogue." If Hitler was a follower of the saints, then he might well have had such saintly models in mind. But actually, Hitler did not cite the saints, because he relied on a higher source--the same source they themselves did--as we shall subsequently document.

This broader socio-cultural history of Christian anti-Semitism has itself been widely covered as a causative background to the Holocaust, in books such as William Nicholls' 1993 Christian Anti-Semitism, among others. However, it would be more accurate to describe that tradition as having helped create, not really the cause or motive, but instead the opportunity to commit this crime. Indeed, one can make a good case that if Christian Germans had not had this cultural heritage to draw from as a demonizer of Jews, then Hitler's opportunity to carry out the Holocaust would probably not have existed, even with the Versailles Treaty and Germany's resulting economic collapse. In this sense, then, Christianity can be said to have been an indispensable contributing factor to the crime's opportunity, along with the Versailles Treaty.

A major part of Christianity's contribution to the opportunity for Hitler to have perpetrated this crime, certainly did consist in Christianity's earlier historical precedents for the organized mass demonization and even slaughter of Jews. To mention just a few medieval examples of this: in 1095-99, the Duke of Lorrain organized a Crusade to avenge the Crucifixion; Jerusalem's Jews were rounded up and burnt alive. In 1212, in France itself, Christians were prohibited from assisting any Jewish woman in labor; violators bringing "Satan's brood" (according to John 8:44) into the world were excommunicated. In 1320, 120 Jewish neighborhoods in southern France and northern Spain were exterminated. Treatment of Jews was similar throughout other parts of Christian Europe during this period. Thus, without a doubt, Christianity made major contributions to the opportunity for the crime, and may even be said to have helped prepare the groundwork for German Christians to elect Hitler as their leader, and then to follow him willingly in carrying out the extermination of Jews.

Of course, due to his own suicide, Hitler was never placed on the witness-stand during the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunals, to testify what his motive for the Holocaust was. But fortunately, he explained this in great detail during his lifetime, to his friends and followers, and in his personal notes and letters, all of which have been published and are of unchallenged authenticity, some (like his notes and letters, for example) written in his own hand. These are highlights from that voluminous record:

"The teachings of Christ have laid the foundation for the war against the Jews as the enemy of all Mankind," Hitler instructed a group of followers on the 18th of December 1926, concluding in a tone of steely determination, "the war that Christ began, I shall finish." Thus did the Nazi leader forecast, by more than a decade, his coming "final solution to the Jewish problem." In Mein Kampf, he had already indicated that it would have to be "bloody" and "by the sword," and that "the Sublime Founder of the new doctrine" had "made no secret of His disposition towards Jews," so that, "for this, of course, Christ was crucified."

Hitler's understanding of history was the key to his formulation of the "final solution," and "the teachings of Christ" were central to that. He never publicly credited his source for this understanding, but he did do so once (and only once) in the most private of all his expressions, his personal notes. There, in 1919, at the same moment when he was entering politics, Hitler outlined, for the very first time, what was subsequently to grow into his theory behind the Holocaust. This was, in fact, the only occasion on which he actually named his source for that theory: "The Bible--Monumental History of Mankind," as he there phrased it. The reason he indicated it only in his personal notes, and only at the theory's very inception, is that Hitler kept his source a secret from even his friends and supporters; he wanted to be viewed by them, as by the world-at-large, as a modern man of the world, not as any sort of religious fanatic. However, Hitler's study of this single book of "History" is what provided him with every one of "the teachings of Christ" that inspired the "final solution." Even late in Hitler's life, on the night of 8 January 1942, in his residence, he bragged to aides that when he was a boy "I completely mastered" the Bible. But even on that occasion, he gave no indication that this book of "History" was his sole source for the "teachings of Christ" that "laid the foundation for the war against the Jews," which is to say, for the "final solution," the Holocaust itself.

One of these "teachings" that Hitler drew from again and again (as I document at length in my WHY the Holocaust Happened) was John 8:44, in which Christ allegedly told the assembled Jews, "You are the children of your father Satan, and you follow your father's desires. He was a murderer from the start." This nugget of "History" informed the literal-minded Hitler that Jews, as Satan's descendants, must carry in their veins Satan's blood. This supposed "fact" was central to his decision to institute a "final solution" for the "blood poisoning" of "all Mankind." (He even told a friend, "Jews are not humans." They merely poisoned Man's blood by "miscegenation.")

Another pivotal "teaching" was Luke 19:27, a parable or morality-tale about a king who, like Christ the King himself, was rejected by some of his own subjects. The king in this parable concluded by saying, "As for those enemies of mine who do not want me to be their king, bring them to me and kill them in my presence!" What Hitler learned from this "teaching" requires no explanation.

Yet a third biblical passage that was especially significant to Hitler was John 2:14-7, in which Christ was described as whipping "the Jews" who were changing money in "God's Temple." This bit of "History" not only inspired Hitler to purchase a whip, which he carried with him for eleven years and posed with in photographs. More importantly, he cited it as "proof" that "Judaism is not a religion," and that "a Jew's real 'god' is money." Furthermore, this seemed to him naturally so, since Jews had Satan's "blood poisoning."

In those private notes of 1919, Hitler outlined the Holocaust theory that he derived from his analysis of that book of "History." In his convoluted reading of the role of the snake (read Satan, read Jew) in Genesis 3, he concluded that the source of "original sin" was the "blood poisoning" of "the Aryan" or "Children of God" by those he several times referred to as "the children of Satan," via "race-mixing" in violation of "Racial purity the highest law," which latter "law" he drew from Deuteronomy 7:3, in which God supposedly had ordered Jews never to have sex with non-Jews. Hitler later fleshed out his theory with over a hundred passages from the Bible.

Up to that fateful moment in 1919, Hitler's anti-Semitism had been of the then-common passive variety. But at around the same time when he scrawled into his notes what this book of "History" had taught him about the source of "original sin," he also wrote a letter urging the "elimination" of "the Jews." He had never said this before. Real history (not the mythological kind) records what the consequences were of Hitler's attempt to achieve a "final solution" not just to "the Jewish problem" but to the entire problem of "original sin." It was this ambitious private goal that Hitler likely had in mind when he confided to friends at the dinner-table on 21 October 1941, only shortly after the Holocaust had begun, "By exterminating this pest [the Jews], we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea." In his 1919 private notes about "original sin," and in his contemporaneous letter urging the Jews' "elimination," and in his entering politics then to do precisely that, the Bible was the inspiration, the motivation for the rest of his career, the sole source by which he had learned of "the teachings of Christ" that "laid the foundation for the war against the Jews" that he would "finish." Hitler said he must "atone."

A four-year-long church-state power struggle turned Hitler against organized Christianity starting in 1937. The culmination was a Papal encyclical on 14 March of that year, reaffirming the moral subordination of State to Church. (It presented no objection to Nazi anti-Semitic policies.) By 29 October, Hitler was already confiding to aides that he had, "after an intense inner struggle, been freed from the still-current childish imaginings of religion," and asserting, "now I feel myself as free as a colt in the meadow." Increasingly, he poured his old anti-Semitic wine into a new "scientific" bottle: the Jews' "blood poisoning" no longer came from Satan, but from a "virus." Whoever today believes Hitler's proud self-image as a "scientist," might be deluded by the same myths as Hitler. But the reality is that the Bible itself inspired the hatred that drove the Holocaust. Even so late as 25-6 January 1942, in the privacy of his home, Hitler condemned Darwin and evolution, and reaffirmed Creationism. To him, it was always so: the Satanic snake in Genesis was the first Jew; Adam and Eve the first "Aryans."

I have discussed this account, and its documentary sources, with some of the world's leading scholars of Hitler and the Holocaust. None challenge the facts or the authenticity of the sources, but all find the reasonable conclusion from them, that the Bible inspired so vast a crime as the Holocaust, too offensive to report. For that reason, the scholarly community has suppressed these facts. If they are news to you, this is the likely reason they are so. I have therefore proposed to scholars that they simply debate, since they evidently won't assert, the Bible's having inspired this crime. They have not been willing to do even that. The subject itself, evidently, is simply off-limits.

I am a journalist, not a scholar. To me, this hiding of important historical facts from the public in a democracy is not just wrong, it's dangerous. How can people know what harms might result from believing in myths if no one is honest about it? Religious beliefs are said to be private. But Hitler was not the only person whose religious convictions ended up producing public horrors. There can exist huge downsides to these myths. The Holocaust was an example. Hiding the true diagnosis for a societal disease of genocide can only increase the probability of its recurrence.

Who wrote the New Testament, and with what motives? This question is important because the New Testament is the distinctive Scripture of the world's largest faith, and therefore shapes not only the rituals by which billions of people live, but those individuals' values, and thus too, the behaviors of a large percentage of Mankind. Christians take the New Testament for granted, not because it is insignificant, but, to the contrary, because in a Christian culture it is so pervasive.

The traditional account of the authorship of the New Testament was that of the Roman Catholic Church, which held that it was written by apostles and followers of Christ, to tell the Truth about His message. According to this "history," the Gospels of Matthew and John, at least, were written by two of Christ's original twelve apostles, who recorded what they had heard Christ do and say. However, most scholars today assert that this cannot be so, and that all of the Gospels were actually written by people from a later generation, after the crucifixion, who could not possibly have met or heard the historical Jesus.

I was drawn to this question because I happened to be exploring the historical origins of the anti-Semitic New Testament passages that Adolf Hitler in his private papers acknowledged as having been his source and inspiration for the Holocaust. These passages prominently included John 8:44, in which Christ allegedly said of "the Jews" that they "are the children of the devil." Like some other Christians of a fundamentalist orientation, Hitler took these statements literally. However, such passages have always been viewed as historically problematic, coming, as they did, from a First-Century rabbi and leader of a Jewish sect whose members were expecting him to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy by liberating all Jews from oppressive alien kings and restoring the Jewish dynasty of King David. Those conditions defined for Jews the very meaning of Christ's title, "masiah." But that is only one of the many reasons why the veracity of the allegation that Christ had said this is widely questioned. Another is that if "the Jews" were descended from Satan, then Christ himself would likewise have been so. Even the New Testament never presents Jesus as denying that he is a Jew. Both Christian and non-Christian historians of the time accepted without question that Jesus was a Jew. The reason is that no one but a Jew--specifically a Davidic Jew--met the requirements of prophecy to be considered as being even possibly "Messiah." To believe that Jesus would have asserted that he himself was descended from Satan would stretch credulity. And neither can one attribute such a hateful statement to mere verbal hyperbole from Christ in a fit of rage. Such a statement could not possibly come from a loving, forgiving, and all-wise God, as the New Testament itself alleged Christ to be. In short, this statement is, at the very least, highly suspect even on the New Testament's own terms.

I have found that these key anti-Semitic lines were, in fact, written by Saint Paul and his followers, in what turned out to be a successful but tragic endeavor to adapt this Jewish sect to the very clear needs of the Roman Imperial regime, after that regime had, in fact, crucified the sect's founder. This was the only way that Paul could enable the sect, long-term, to survive and ultimately thrive in a world that continued to be ruled from Imperial Rome.

Let me acknowledge at the outset that I do not write as any sort of religious believer--I am, in fact, an agnostic--but rather as an investigative journalist, who six years ago was seized with an investigator's interest in never-before-explored strands of evidence regarding Hitler's personal motive for the Holocaust. I therefore caution anyone who believes in the Bible, that, for me, biblical Scripture is no different from any other as evidence; an investigator must view all evidence with skepticism. (Hitler himself did not.)

The key line, John 8:44, along with Matthew 23:31-8 and several other New Testament passages, gave Hitler his belief that Jews were, as he called them in private, "Satan's children," who therefore had Satan's "blood poisoning." Hitler concluded that Jews spread this "blood poisoning" to "God's People" (whom he publicly called "Aryans") or pureblooded Christians, by means of "miscegenation" or intermarriage with them, which caused "misery forever" for "God's People" and therefore required a "Final Solution." (All of these terms in quotes are from Hitler's own private statements.) Hitler's "Final Solution" to this "blood poisoning" of "God's People" would lead to their reign for a thousand years, because Hitler took literally Revelation 20:1-6 as the basis of his "Thousand-Year Reich," and this passage said that after Satan (the father of the Jews, in John 8:44) was defeated, God's People would rule for a thousand years. Hitler believed that all of this must be true because it came from, as he put in in his private notes, "The Bible--Monumental History of Mankind."

My reconstruction of John 8:44, of the crucifixion itself, and of the related founding events of Christianity, applies to the scholars' datings of the source documents, the methodology that forensic and legal investigators customarily employ to interpret documentary evidence and to reconstruct a sequence of events on the basis of the necessary chronological dating of evidence. But I start with the facts that no scholar has presented any reason to challenge.

All accounts of that time agree that Christ either asserted or else did not deny that he was "King of the Jews." Furthermore, Acts 1:6 states that his disciples expected him "to re-establish the independent sovereignty of Israel" as had existed under Jesus' own ancestor (according to both prophecy and fact), King David. Several passages in the New Testament also assert that the Roman-appointed kings of the Jews, the King Herods, hated and feared Jesus (Matthew 2:1-18; Mark 3:6, 8:15 and 12:13; and Luke 9:7-9 and 13:31). However, the historical veracity of those passages is not universally accepted by scholars.

It is, moreover, uncontested that the Jews were then a conquered people under Roman rule, and that Rome backed the Herodian dynasty as the Jews' kings, so that the very thing that Jesus' followers were expecting and that Jesus was either accepting or outright promoting--the "sovereignty of Israel" under a restored Davidic dynasty--could not have been seen by the Roman Emperor in any other light than as that most serious of Roman crimes, sedition.

The question therefore naturally arises: why did the New Testament attribute this particular Roman crucifixion to "the Jews" rather than to the Roman rulers themselves? This question was especially important to my investigation because Hitler, in private, acknowledged that he accepted as "history" the Bible's blaming Jews for the Deicide, and because he told a group of followers on 18 December 1926, on the basis of this key but evidently false belief, "The teachings of Christ have laid the foundation for the war against the Jews as the enemy of all Mankind; the war that Christ began, I shall finish." Hitler there lifted the phrase describing the Jews as "the enemy of all Mankind" not from Christ but from Saint Paul's letter 1 Thessalonians 2:15, which, however, is also in that book of "history," as Hitler privately described the Bible.

The earliest Christian author was Saint Paul himself, who wrote a large portion of the New Testament. Paul revealingly asserted (in his letter to the Galatians 1:16, 2:2, and 2:7) that his life's mission was to convert to this religion--which until his time had been a Jewish sect--non-Jews or "gentiles." According to Acts 11:26, the earliest people to call themselves "Christians" were adherents in Paul's own home congregation of Antioch. These and many other facts are consistent with Paul's having been the actual originator of "Christianity" as a non-Jewish religion. In several ways, Paul modified this Jewish sect so as to make it as appealing as possible to non-Jews and thus achieve his life's mission. One part of that endeavor was Paul's cancellation (in Galatians 2:16 and elsewhere) of Jewish Covenant or Law, which had required that all followers must submit themselves, as Jews, to circumcision, kosher diet, etc. Another was replacement of the painful medical operation of circumcision by the painless water-ritual of baptism, as Paul's new faith's initiation-rite. In Paul's era, neither anaesthesia nor antibiotics existed, and so baptism was vastly more acceptable than was the bloody operation, to the uncircumcised gentile adult males who were being especially courted by Paul, and who could very reasonably have felt terror at the very thought of being circumcised.

Saint Paul was a man of incredibly far-seeing vision. He therefore understood that in a world that was ruled by Rome, it would be fatal to his success, if he, and his followers who wrote the four Gospels, acknowledged that Rome itself had killed their faith's god. Furthermore, Paul recognized that if Jesus was not the Messiah for Jews, then he was certainly not for gentiles either, so that Jews who did not accept Jesus as their Messiah were a challenge to the sect's credibility among the non-Jews that Paul was struggling to convert. These Jews were thus an ideal scapegoat for the inconvenient fact of Rome's crucifixion of Jesus: Paul was understandably the first person in history to charge that "the Jews" did it, in his 1 Thessalonians 2:15 and Galatians 6:12, both of which were written only two decades after Jesus' death. This Deicidal accusation not only got Paul's prized Romans off the hook, it demonized people who threatened Paul's success. Therefore, too, Paul's followers who wrote the four canonical Gospels warped their accounts to flesh-out this highly useful, but ultimately genocidal, fabrication.

Paul also happened to live in a world where Rome's fear of his sect was routinely manifested by violent means. This sect, after all, worshipped a man who had claimed to be the real "King of the Jews" despite Rome, and whom Rome had crucified for that. In the view of Romans, Christ's followers worshipped an executed criminal. As is well-known, Jesus' followers were so despised that the Romans sometimes fed these Jews to lions for sport.

Paul therefore Romanized the Jesus sect, to make it appeal to the powerful. Not only did he, in Romans 13:1-7, order his adherents to follow Rome's rulers as agents of God. I also find strong evidence that he overthrew his sect's leadership, which both his own letter to Galatians, 2:9&12, as well as Acts 15:19-30, acknowledge to have been headed, after Christ's death, by Jesus' own brother, James, an early leader ignored as much as possible in the New Testament. A gospel account that Paul's subsequent Roman Catholic Church rejected and refused to canonize, The Gospel According to Thomas, asserted directly, in its twelfth line, that Jesus had appointed James to lead the sect following his death. There is strong evidence that Paul's successors rewrote this inconvenient fact of history to have Peter retrospectively appointed the group's leader instead of Jesus' brother. Peter was selected because, according to Galatians 1:18 and Acts 10:34-11:18, Peter had been Paul's own predecessor in the mission to the Romans and other gentiles. This is the reason why both Paul, in his 1 Corinthians 15:5, and also Paul's follower who wrote Matthew 16:18, claimed that Peter, not James, had been Jesus' favorite disciple and successor. By thus retrospectively reassigning this leadership to Saint Peter, Saint Paul and his followers were making Paul, in effect, the second leader of his own Roman faith, after only Peter himself. Paul might have preferred to have been the first, the "rock" upon which his Church was built, but in Paul's era, such a lie would have been recognized by everybody. Even Paul did not claim that he had ever met the historical Jesus (except in a "revelation"). So for Paul, the best available option was to be retrospectively recognized as Peter's "successor," and Peter retrospectively as Christ's; and therefore, this is what Paul's Roman Church declares Saints Peter and Paul to have been.

Although a faith speaks about things of another world, its success and growth depend very much on things of this world. A ruler in Saint Paul's era determined which religions were legal, and even possessed the power to impose upon his kingdom a religion of his personal preference. There is considerable evidence that Paul, from very early in his ministry, was aware of the enormous implications of this, and that therefore, his ultimate goal was to convert the Roman rulers themselves, so that the subsequent Holy Roman Empire did not emerge by mere happenstance. Acts 13:7-12, in fact, implies that Paul changed his given name from Saul to Paul in honor of the first Roman ruler that he had converted, Sergius Paulus, who was the Governor of Crete. And there are also other indications that Paul had a deep understanding of the way the world worked. For example, Acts 22:25 & 23:27 state that Paul had been born not just a Jew but a "Roman citizen," and received privileged Roman treatment for that, which was not available to normal Jews. His subsequent life displayed on many occasions the deep lessons he evidently learned from this. Furthermore, Acts 18:3 states that Paul earned his living by making tents. The chief (if not only) purchaser of tents was the Roman army.

My recent book, WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up, explains how Paul's vision of a future Holy Roman Empire, headquartered in Rome (where the crucifiers of Jesus had had their headquarters), rather than in the Jews' Jerusalem (where Jesus had had his), produced a global religion that inspired not just the Crusades and the Inquisition, but the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler privately considered himself to be Christ's successor. For more than a decade, he even carried a whip with him, modelling himself upon the Jesus of John 2:14-6, whipping the Jewish moneylenders; and as recounted by his friend Putzi Hanfstaengel, he confided while cracking his whip, not long after having purchased it, "I shall one day enter Berlin like Christ in the Temple at Jerusalem and drive out the moneylenders." This is what it meant to Hitler when he posed for photographs holding his whip. And his top aides, such as Himmler, Goebbels, and Goering, reciprocated in private, by accepting Hitler as Christ's return to earth. But Hitler was actually Saint Paul's successor. And Paul, instead of being Christ, was the skeleton in Christianity's closet.

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