I don’t really know where to begin. Over the past year, there have been hundreds of challenges to the things that I grew up knowing and understanding about the world we live in, the world we were given after World War II. Some will immediately point out that this disqualifies me from saying anything at all, because I’m a Boomer. But I throw that back at you, what qualifies you from knowing anything at all if you cannot trust the eyewitness testimony of the generation that preceded you?
For the atheist, that question will mean nothing. But for the Christian, that means everything. If you cannot believe eyewitness testimony, then you cannot believe anything at all, for the Christian faith is built upon, and rests upon the testimony of eyewitnesses, and witnesses to those eyewitnesses (think of the gospel of Luke.) Yes, we also have the testimony of the Holy Spirit. I get that. Yet, even then, we still believe the testimonies of those who have had the Spirit testify to them. Our faith is built upon witnesses.
But my discussion here isn’t focused on the Christian faith, but the simple realities of World War II and Hitler.
This started about a year ago, when someone put forth the view point that Churchill was the true enemy in World War II, and that Hitler was really the good guy because he really wanted peace. (See Tucker Carlson intrerview).
For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, hearing the stories from our fathers, about the war, we know just how absurd this was. We knew, from eyewitness testimony, what Hitler was. We didn’t believe what we believed because it was official news from the State Department, or from CBS News, although the latter was much more trustworthy back then that it has been in the last 30 years.
For instance, during the mid-1970s when I would visit my step-mother who worked in the Galleria in Houston, I met the secretary in her office who was a refugee from Germany. She went through the war as a German citizen experiencing the rise of Hitler and the war itself. She told us of the speeches that Hitler gave. My step-mother asked the woman why she went along with it. The woman couldn’t explain it, but said it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Please note two things that didn’t need to be said: the secretary knew what Hitler had said and done, were wrong. She made no excuses for Hitler. She understood what he was. She also accepted her own culpability in it as well. She wasn’t proud of the fact.
(I believe there was a spiritual element to Hitler, and this is why he was able to sway so many. We also have reports of his religious beliefs. He really believed he was something of a savior for Germany. And no, he was not a Christian. To say that he was is to show complete ignorance of the man, and the Nazis as well as Christ.)
There was a woman in my first church as a pastor in the mid 1990s who had the tattoos on our her forearm. She was Jewish. She had been taken captive by the Germans and put in a concentration camp with the rest of her family. She made it out. Her family did not. She would only speak in vague ways of the horrors. What she went through still brought her to tears.
I would like to say that she was also a Christian. She never accepted Christ as far as I knew. She came to our church because she was lonely. We did the best we could to love her. But despite our efforts, she drifted off in another direction.
But we don’t need to rely only on eyewitness testimony. We can know from Hitler’s own words what he believed. In fact, this is the very reason that Churchill so opposed Hitler. Churchill read his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler’s own book about his life, and his beliefs of what should happen in Germany.
I confess, I have not read Mein Kampf. But I have read William Manchester’s excellent biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, all three volumes. I have read William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a first edition copy that I got from my father. I have read Andrew Robert’s biography, Churchill: Walking With Destiny. And I have read Churchill’s own accounts of the war in The Gathering Storm.
Three of the four authors, actually lived during the war. They lived the war. Shirer was on the ground in Germany before the war, and was eventually kicked out when war was declared by Great Britain. He spoke both German and English. He gives firsthand accounts of what was taking place.
William L. Shirer
For example, Shirer wrote about the coming of Hitler in his chapter: The Nazification of Germany:1933-34, when 90% of the voting German population voted Hitler into power. The Nazi Party assembled on September 4th to take power.
“I watched him on the morning of the new day stride like a conquering emperor down the center aisle of the great flag-bedecked Luitpold Hall while the band blared for ‘The Badenweiler March’ and thirty thousand hand were raised in Nazi salute. A few moments later he sat proudly in the center of that vast stage with folded arms and shining eyes as Gauleiter Adolf Wagner of Bavaria read the Fuehrer’s proclamations:
The German form of life is definitely determined for the next thousand years. The Age of Nerves of the nineteenth century has found its close with us. There will be no other revolution in Germany for the next one thousand years!
Shirer continues:
“Even one returning to Germany for the first time since the death of the Republic could see that, whatever his crimes against humanity, Hitler had unleashed a dynamic force of incalculable proportions which had long been pent up in the German people. To what purpose, he had already made clear in the pages of Mein Kampf, and in a hundred speeches which had gone unnoticed or unheeded or been ridiculed by so many–by almost everyone– with and especially without the Third Reich (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p 230).
William Manchester
Manchester was alive during this time, and fought in the Pacific theater. What he does in writing The Last Lion is show us the man who was behind defeating Hitler: Winston Churchill. Manchester takes us meticulously through Churchill’s life, beliefs, upbringing, education, and military career in order to help us see why he was the man of the hour to stand against Hitler. Yes, Manchester also shows us Churchill’s flaws. All these writers do, including Churchill himself. He was not a perfect man, or perfect hero. But he was a hero, for he stood against popular opinion of the day, against those who would have subjugated their own people for peace, against even friends, in opposing Hitler. He understood the danger. Manchester writes the following after the fall of Czechoslovakia:
Although the full scope of Nazi atrocities in Czechoslovakia was concealed from foreign correspondents, they could not be prevented from witnessing clubbings, the persecution of Jews, and the disappearance of Czech intellectuals once concentration camps had been built, wired, and equipped with watchtowers for machine guns and searchlights. There was no blinking the fact that this time Hitler had acted not as the champion of Germans living in a neighboring country but as a Genghis Khan bent upon pillage, enslavement, slaughter, and destruction.
The Czechs were the first Slavs he had subjugated. He frequently broke his promises; his threats he always made good. In a secret Führerordnung he decreed that the Czechs were to be “assimilier,” chiefly as “Sklavenarbeit” (“slave labor”) in the Reich; the others, “besonders die Intellektuellen” (“particularly the intellectuals”), were to be “entmanntet und ausgeschaltet” (“castrated and eliminated”). All this had been set forth in Mein Kampf, the best-seller read by few and dismissed by most of them as ravings. Churchill, virtually the only public man who had taken Hitler at his word, published a collection of his own Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph columns under the title Step by Step. Clement Attle wrote him, “It must be a melancholy satisfaction to see how right you were,” and Lord Wolmer wrote: “The book is a record of perspicacity and courage on your part”‘ (Alone, p. 398).
In reading all these volumes of pages about Churchill, Hitler, and World War II, I never once came across anything that would lead me to believe that Churchill was the enemy, or that Hitler was being misrepresented, or that millions of Jews were not indeed killed by the Germans. Hitler felt anyone who was to a German, or was a Communist, was to be eliminated.
Operation Barbarossa itself reflected the attitude of Hitler and his command. When Germany invaded Russia, their goal was to eliminate all those they captured because they knew with the coming of winter, they would not be able to support and feed all the prisoners of war they had captured.
Shirer, if I remember correctly, brought about the fact that it was a major mistake on the part of Hitler. His hatred for the Russians was so great, that he could not see the reality that many of those who were captured, thought of Hitler as a liberator, and were willing to fight for him, against the Soviets. But Hitler’s hatred ruled the day. Had he not killed off so may Russians who were captured, or surrendered, he could have easily captured Moscow and overthrown Stalin.
Conclusion
Now some might accuse me of Post War Consensus which Rich Lusk does a great job of explaining. I think that is just a label that the younger generation has grabbed on to to foist upon Boomers in an attempt to attack Boomers. It’s not my point to win over Generation X, or Millennials, or whatever generation pops up. But all this is important, as Rich Lusk wrote, “Everything you’ve been told is a lie.”
If we continue down this road, then we can know nothing at all about history, and more importantly about Christianity. After all, everything we know, everything… is rooted in history, whether the history is personal or national. So we have to be vigilant about what we do know. Hopefully, you have discovered the following:
- Hitler had evil intentions for those not Germans. Yes, we can point to the fact that he was fighting for the blood and soil of his people, but he did so in an evil manner.
- Hitler told the world what he was going to do in his book Mein Kampf.
- Churchill read his book, and listened to his speeches, and opposed Hitler when everyone else was refusing to do so.
- Millions upon millions died because of Hitler’s maniacal quest to exalt Germany over every other nation in Europe.
- History repeats itself.
This last point, we need to know because it is repeating itself today. As I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I couldn’t help but think about how many of the situations the Germans faced, that we face today. The beauty for us is that I believe God has spared us a maniacal dictator… for now. That may change, but up until this point in our history, He has shown us grace.
For more on the Post War Consensus, watch Man Rampant with Doug Wilson and Rusty Reno as they discuss Reno’s book, The Return of the Strong God’s.
