On April 11th, 76 years ago, the Buchenwald concentration camps were liberated by men and women of the U.S. military. Today, the President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, spoke at a ceremony in the nearby German town of Weimar. He didn’t mince words concerning the unthinkable horrors committed there during the Third Reich.
President Steinmeier said, “Communists and democrats, homosexuals and so-called asocials were incarcerated at Buchenwald. Jews, Sinti, and Roma were brought here and murdered. …With its diversity of victims’ groups, Buchenwald represents the entire barbarism of the Nazis, its aggressive nationalism to the outside, its dictatorship on the inside, and a racist way of thinking. Buchenwald stands for racial fanaticism, torture, murder and elimination.”
Mr. Steinmeier closed with a haunting statement about the ordinariness of the people who carried out these brutal misdeeds: “It was a dictatorship, a Nazi leadership that was responsible for the cruelest crimes and the genocide. But it was human beings, Germans, who did this to other human beings.”
Please keep in mind it was ordinary, nationalistic, patriotic people who perpetrated mass murder against those poor souls who found themselves outside the newly defined acceptable norms of German society in the 1940s. Out of the 280,000 inmates held there, over 56,000 were killed by the Nazis or died from illness, hunger or medical experiments.
Buchenwald was just one of the scores of death camps set up during the Third Reich. The monster Hitler and his evil Nazi officials may have ordered the killings, but it was ordinary folk who carried out the actual executions at Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Flossenburg, Dachau, Janowska, Kaiserwald, Majdanek, Treblinka, Stutthof, Sobibor, Ravensbruck, and at all those other factories of extermination.
Think of the insanity of arrogant, deceived human beings attempting to eliminate or enslave entire races of so-called sub-human beings. How evil is that! If Nazism is not a doctrine of demons (1 Tim.4:1), what is? The French infidel Voltaire spoke the truth when he said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, visited the Buchenwald camps on April 12, 1945. He cabled General George Marshall, the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, to describe the effects this visit had on him. He reported, “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality was so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where there were piled up 20 or 30 naked men, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.”
The people of America will do well to remember it was the "big lie" of racial supremacy that compelled ordinary, nationalistic, patriotic people to commit unspeakable acts of inhumanity to man. We must learn and relearn the awful truth that one sin leads to another and extreme racism leads to mass murder.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way, “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide, and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job, if one is not good enough to have access to public accommodations, if one is not good enough to have the right to vote, if one is not good enough to live next door to him, if one is not good enough to marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment, that person is saying the one who is not good enough to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism.”
John Howard Griffin is the white journalist who darkened his skin in 1959 to the point where he could pass as a Black man. He then took a journey throughout the American South. He later wrote about his "experiment" in the bestseller Black Like Me. Mr. Griffin agrees with Dr. King that racism leads to an eventual evil outcome. He writes, “If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the efforts of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions.”
On this very day seventy-six years ago, Buchenwald was liberated as American men and women of all races, creeds and colors stood shoulder to shoulder against a fascist regime. Our fellow American citizens - Red, Yellow, Black and White - fought and died to save the future of millions of people who were suffering under the heel of the Nazis throughout Europe .
I contend there's a similar oppressive spirit stirring in our nation today. An evil spirit of disinformation, confusion, conspiracies and conflict. A spirit that seeks to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10). Believers are called to be defenders of truth and soldiers of the cross (2 Tim. 2:3-4; Jude 3). During these latter times, we must stand strong in the LORD (Eph.6:1) and take on the mantle of Jesus Christ (Rom.13:14), our Savior and Brother, who proclaimed:
“The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD.” ~ Luke 4:18-19 NKJV
Grace, Peace and Jahspeed!
The sin of racism is one of three shortcomings we will overcome if we experience "The Spiritual Awakening of America." Our nation is in trouble. Political remedies have failed us. A true spiritual awakening is our only solution! Click on the title or here to learn more.