The Holocaust DID Happen

The Jewish world community was outraged this week when the Vatican lifted the excommunication of Holocaust denier Richard Williamson. Williamson is a British Bishop who claims no Jews died in gas chambers, and that the number of Jews killed in any manner at all was not near 6 million.

This reversal of excommunication came Monday, January 26, one day before Holocaust Remembrance Day as designated by some countries, January 27. What a shame.

Williamson has stated that the historical evidence is against Jews being deliberately gassed by Adolf Hitler or his troops.

The Vatican denies that the Catholic Church shares Williamson's views. In March, 1998, a Papal Apology was issued for any actions or inactions by the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, in either turning a blind eye to what was happening or the possibility that any diocese actually helped the work of the Nazi party.

I don't get it. Churches ordaining and excusing clergy who "don't share the view" of their church organization. Why?

There are many current attempts circulating to make people doubt or forget that there was actually a Holocaust. Middle Eastern Terrorist leaders have even held press conferences to explain the Holocaust away and call it a myth.

"The Holocaust" - for anyone who somehow doesn't know - is when Hitler attempted to take over governments and wipe out the entire Jewish population. When Western powers got involved to stop him, this became known as World War II.

Hitler started with his own country and then invaded others. He took away the property, imprisoned and executed people of the Jewish faith and anyone else that didn't match his view of the "perfect person" - the "Aryan Race" he was trying to create. He wanted to rid the world of the mentally and physically disabled, those who didn't look like the perfect German (which, incidentally Hitler did not himself match), known dissidents such as artists and writers, and known protectors of the Jews and other groups of people. Beside the estimated 6 million Jews, approximately 2 million others perished.

The very suggestion that the Holocaust never happened is outrageous. The Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, Israel holds 62 million pages of documents, over 267,000 photos from a great variety of sources, thousands of films and taped testimonies of survivors, all open to public viewing.

A recent addition to Yad Vashem is "The Visual Center", founded in part by film director Steven Spielberg. The Visual Center collects, stores and shows Holocaust-related films and offers seminars about the Holocaust.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. also has permanent exhibits and traveling ones, and The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida has similar photos and artifacts.

Dr. Michael Rydelnik, Professor of Jewish Studies at the Moody Bible Institute and author of "Understanding the Arab Israeli Conflict: What the Headlines Haven't Told You" is the son of Holocaust survivors. He has told his story on the radio. His mother had her tear ducts removed in an experiment to see if people could cry without them, and his father had his gold teeth ripped out with no anesthetics. He explains the Nazis had three ways of killing the Jews:

1. Make them dig their own graves, lie down and be executed by gunfire.

2. Starvation and overwork in the death camps. They were fed 200 to 400 calories a day, working hard labor.

3. The gas chambers.

It is unknown how or why certain Jewish people were chosen to be murdered in each method.

For anyone who may never have seen Holocaust photos, go to the USHMM website: and call up these pages: Gas chambers and concentration camps. Or just go to "Archives" and enter whatever you're interested in viewing. Yes, the photos are disturbing to look at. But we must believe it happened. Genocides and religious killings are happening all over the world today, and people are still in denial.

It's also been said that Christians are trying to deny the holocaust. This is untrue! Sincere, Bible believing, Christ-following Christians must continue to work to assure the Jewish world community that there are millions of decent Protestants and Catholics who do not hate Jewish people, do not desire their destruction and do not try to claim the Holocaust never happened.

There are Neo-Nazi racists calling themselves "Revisionists" who are re-writing the history of the Holocaust. Because of today's environment of "political correctness" and "tolerance of everything" (except Christianity, of course), they are managing to gain a following for their work, which promotes hatred, violence and genocide against the Jews TODAY. Unfortunately, among these ranks of "revisionists" are people claiming to be Christians, but I don't know what twisted version of the Bible they are reading.

The Yad Vashem Museum has a section called "Avenue of the Righteous", where the Museum's Jewish founders have set up an honorarium to Christians and others who helped many Jewish people escape, like Oscar Schindler (as portrayed in the movie "Schindler's List") and Corrie Ten Boom (author of "The Hiding Place").

Try telling the descendants of Corrie ten Boom's family that the Holocaust never happened. The ten Booms were a Dutch Christian family who hid Jewish people in a secret room of their home, above their father's renowned watch shop, until discovered by the Nazis. Corrie, her father, her sister Betsy and a nephew were taken to concentration camps, where all but Corrie died.

We don't need to go any further than Genesis 12:2-3, where God says to Abraham (then called Abram), "I will make you a great nation... I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you." I hate to think where America will be headed if we ever stop defending God's chosen people and nation.

It's also disturbing to think that the Judgment at Nuremburg, the trial of multiple Nazi leaders, would not even take place if their crimes were committed today. Now we have to be "nice" to foreign murderers, and allow for different ideas, because "there is no absolute truth".

Rod Serling, mastermind behind the original TV Show "The Twilight Zone" tells us so succinctly why we must never forget the Holocaust. In one haunting episode called "Death's Head Revisited," a man keeps re-living the horrors of what took place in a concentration camp. Serling's closing narration says:

"Why do we keep the Dakows standing? All the Dakows, Bergen-Belsens, Auschwitzes, they are a memento to a moment of time when men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all their reason, logic, knowledge, but most of all their conscience. And the moment we seek to forget this is the moment we become the gravediggers."

There are many Christian-Jewish alliances and ecumenical councils which have been formed to show solidarity for Judaism and Christianity together today against anti-Semitism and also against persecution of Christians around the world.

Sources:

"Anger as Pope reinstates Holocaust denier", Emma Alberici, ABC News, January 26, 2009 - http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2008/s2474115.htm.

Dr. Michael Rydelnik on "Prime Time America", Segment #4, Moody Radio, 4/16/07, "Dr. Rydelnik shared reflections and thoughts on the Holocaust on this day of remembrance".

Papal Apology: The News Hour with Jim Lehrer Transcript,

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/religion/jan-june98/vatican_4-8.html. Retrieved 1/29/09.

Catholic Bishops of Italy Letter to the Jewish Community of Italy (March 1998) http://www.sacredheart.edu/pages/12659_catholic_bishops_of_italy_letter_to_the_jewish_community_of_italy_march_1998_.cfm. Retrieved 1/29/09.

The YadVashemMuseum: http://www.yadvashem.org/.

USHMM photo queries: http://inquery.ushmm.org.

"Eiland: Iran leadership poses threat", David Horovitz, The Jerusalem Post, 8/25/06. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525940677&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ retrieved 8/26/06.

"Ahmadinejad to Iranians: Israel 'will be removed' President threatens to abandon Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty", WorldNet Daily, 2/11/06, http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48790 retrieved 3/1/06.

"Death's Head Revisited", Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone", original release 1961, still available in script form, "The Complete Twilight Zone Scripts of Rod Serling", Gauntlet Press, Colorado Springs, CO.