Posts Tagged ‘Hitler’

Lighthouse Trails has now released our own edition of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. One of the sections we included was on Luther and his great role in the reformation.  While many Christians rightly admire the great accomplishments of Luther, to ignore his later views toward the Jews (views that Hitler is said to have used to persuade the Germans to turn against the Jews) would be irresponsible of us. We included the following statement in the endnotes section of our book:

Toward the end of his days, Luther became profoundly anti-semitic, and the publishers of this book wish to dissociate themselves utterly from the views he expressed on the Jewish People during these final few years. As Perry, Peden and Von Laue point out, “Initially, Luther hoped to attract Jews to his vision of reformed Christianity. In That Jesus Was Born a Jew (1523), the young Luther expressed sympathy for Jewish sufferings and denounced persecution as a barrier to conversion. He declared, ‘I hope that if one deals in a kindly way with the Jews and instructs them carefully from the Holy Scripture, many of them will become genuine Christians . . . We [Christians] are aliens and in-laws; they are blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of our Lord.’” Based on this point, Luther went on to say: “if it were proper to boast of flesh and blood, the Jews belong more to Christ than we. I beg, therefore, my dear Papist, if you become tired of abusing me as a heretic, that you begin to revile me as a Jew.” Thanks in no small part to the appalling extent of Rome’s past persecution of the Jews ‘in the Name of Christ’, the vast majority of Jews did not convert to Christianity, and this, combined with Rome’s many false teachings about the Jews, prompted Luther towards his violent diatribes against them. It should also be borne in mind that he lived in a very anti-semitic time, and in a very anti-semitic part of the world. Therefore, while totally opposing this feature of his latter years, the publishers feel we should not forget his many astonishing achievements for Christ earlier in his life. from the endnotes section of the Lighthouse Trails edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

This week, Diet Eman turns 90. Seventy years ago, Diet was a young Christian woman living in Holland when Hitler invaded her country. She watched in horror as her fellow Jewish countrymen were increasingly persecuted by the occupying Nazis. Like many others in Holland, such as Corrie ten Boom, Diet knew she could not passively stand by and do nothing to help save the lives of the targeted Jews in Hitler’s final solution to annihilate millions. Diet joined with other Christians who were going underground – By the end of the war, Diet’s particular group, Group Hein, (consisting of a number of Diet’s young peers including her fiance) was responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of Jews. Sadly, many of her co-resistance workers did not survive the war. Diet did, and years later she wrote her story. Lighthouse Trails was privileged a couple years ago to publish our own edition of Things We Couldn’t Say, Diet’s amazing experience during the Holocaust. Today, we learned that Diet is turning 90 years old this week. Below is an excerpt from her book:

July 1941
Last night we walked past the synagogue. Horrible: on the doors was written with large letters “Jude Suss.” On the pillars a swastika and a large V and horribly drawn Jewish faces. In the street on the boarded-up shop windows, “Jew,” “Pest Jude.” How long still, O Lord?

September 16, 1941
Yesterday the paper had a “short” summary of the places where Jews are not allowed! I can better mention where they are still allowed “in their homes and in the streets!”…

There came a day when my Jewish friend Herman, who worked with me in the bank in The Hague, began to understand that for him, as a Jew, life could not go on in the same way anymore. He thus became the first Jewish person that we helped during the Occupation.

First the Jews weren’t allowed on the trams anymore, or on the buses, in parks, or in shops. Rules like that were printed in the newspapers, and they were displayed on the trams and in shop windows. It was an enforced limitation of freedom for Jews in all kinds of ways. Next, Jews weren’t allowed to visit most places in the city anymore; they had to stick to their own Jewish areas and shops. And though Herman and his family did not live in the Jewish area of the city, they, like all Jews, were no longer allowed to visit non-Jewish people.

[from Diet's diary] May 6, 1942 Seventy-two Dutch men have been executed. From last Saturday till Tuesday, six-thousand people have been arrested. Ex-military, pastors, all people of the first and second chamber [the Dutch parliament], etc., etc.

The worst is, I remain so stone cold. Does this war make you an “alive-dead person”? Is it not possible to remain yourself in this chaos? How long still?…

The next law the Germans made was that non-Jews could have nothing at all to do with Jews. Even after that, my mother and father wouldn’t have minded Herman’s coming over, but at that point he did not want to endanger them. Actually, the Germans might have punished my family a little bit for breaking the rules; but Herman would have gotten into major trouble. My parents loved him, but suddenly he couldn’t come anymore.

Much of what had preceded the Jewish persecution had seemed an annoyance to most of us–no display of the royal colors, prohibitions against listening to the BBC–and for the most part we simply put up with it for a while. No one liked the restrictive laws, but in many people’s eyes these relatively trifling laws were something we could tolerate. But when signs and notices suddenly appeared saying that the Jews had to leave their homes and could not live near us because, as the signs said, they were “infectious” (the Germans called them lice and rats and all kinds of names), when they were told they had to leave their homes in the Netherlands completely, then we stopped putting up with the injustices.

The Germans explained to us that the Jews were to be transported to East Germany from all the other European countries. There they would live only with each other, and that way they could harm only each other. When it started to go into effect, we knew we could simply not tolerate this horrible plan. We knew we had to do something.

According to Hitler, we were the great ones–the people with blond hair and blue eyes, the Aryan race. The “Jewish scum,” as the Germans put it, had to be quarantined, rounded up, and separated from the decent, blue-eyed people of what he thought was the super race…. And they were beginning to implement this kind of policy.

At first, the Jews would get notices at their homes that they had to report to such and such an address on a particular night, say, after curfew. They were to report to schools, for instance, where the Germans gathered all of them and took them away in trucks. Or the Jews were told they had to go to the railroad stations, and they would show up, very scared. The Germans always did it after the curfew hours so the rest of us wouldn’t see what was going on….

[A]t one point, my friend Herman’s family got their notice to report. Like everyone else, Herman was instructed to take only one suitcase, small enough to carry…. The Jews had to leave behind almost everything of sentimental value to them personally, not to mention goods of dollars-and-cents value. And they had no choice but to report; they couldn’t just throw away the summons.

July 21, 1942
A lot has happened again: the Jews are walking with their yellow stars on, are not allowed outside after 8 p.m., are not allowed to visit non-Jews, some streets are forbidden to them, etc., etc.

From Amsterdam many were sent to–??? Many are committing suicide!
O God, don’t You see that they are touching the apple of Your eye? Is it still not enough?
O let us, in the midst of all these things which drive us crazy, still remember that You are the ruler of everything and that the punishment You will give them for these things will be more just than all things we think of to punish them….

Please teach us Christians now to be true Christians and to put into practice what we confess, especially to these Jews. O Lord, make an end to all this, only You can do it. We know that You give strength according to our cross, but it is getting to be so very heavy, Lord.

Herman wasn’t working at the bank anymore at that time because he was not allowed to take the tram, the bus, or anything, and he was not allowed to enter that area of the city. So he asked me to come to meet him when he got his summons, because Jews were not allowed to visit non-Jews.

“If you were me, would you go?” Herman asked.

“I don’t think so,” I told him…

Herman’s parents were middle class; his father was a decent man with a good government job. His parents really believed that this whole thing would only last a year. They figured the Germans would place them somewhere in Eastern Europe for a little while, a place where they might have to live a little more simply than they were accustomed to living at home. And then, when it was over, they could come back. That’s what many people thought–Jews and non-Jews. Nobody thought they would be exterminated in gas chambers. Therefore, many of them went as meekly as sheep to their deaths.

German Jews who had lived from 1933 to 1937 or 1938 in Germany had seen how the Nazi system developed, had experienced Kristallnacht, and had fled to the Netherlands in the late 1930s. Many of those people had committed suicide during the German invasion of the Netherlands. The night Hitler invaded Holland–and in the five days of war after the invasion–there was no place left for them to run: Belgium was overrun, and Spain was pro-Nazi. There was no place for them to go but the North Sea….

Herman was only a year older than I, and we thought of the possibility that what was really happening was far worse than anyone had imagined. We thought about those suicides, and we considered Hitler capable of anything.

[T]hat evening when I saw Hein, I asked him, “What do you think, should Herman go?”
“You remember what the German Jews did,” he said “They committed suicide.” So I said to Hein [Diet's fiance'], “You say he shouldn’t report, but what can he do? If he shouldn’t go there, what else is there?”

And that moment was the real beginning of our Resistance work. Hein immediately said he knew plenty of Christian farmers around Holk–in the area of the Netherlands called The Veluwe.
“Any of those farmers I know around Nijkerk,” he said, “any of them we ask will take Herman. He can work there on the farm.”

The whole business grew so fast that within two or three weeks we had over sixty people who wanted places out in the country, in The Veluwe. Sixty Jews in two weeks, and that was just the beginning. Hein … placed many Jews on the farms around that little town. But the list of Jewish people who wanted to hide kept growing….

At first we thought that was all we had to do: simply help the Jews who wanted to be helped when they began to understand what might happen to them. But we immediately learned that if we were to move these Jewish people out to the country, we would have to get them false identification cards. It was simply too risky to put them on trains when they were carrying IDs which were all marked with that big “J” and which the Germans required, to indicate the holder was Jewish….

By 1943 the group we worked with needed over eight hundred cards every month. The men from the knokploeg did that work, and of course it was very dangerous. But they did it for good reason, not simply because it was high adventure. I went to a few of their planning meetings, and those men always got down on their knees first to ask God to protect and help them….

December 3, 1942
… Jewish people are put out of their homes and into the street–without any shelter. All of Scheveningen has to evacuate.All the beautiful buildings are being razed! The coal [used for heating] has to be left behind, and when they raze the buildings this ends up under the rubble, while thousands are sitting without heat. All the government departments have to leave.

I think that Hitler is fulfilling his prophesy that if he goes under, he will drag all of Europe along with him….

(From chapter six of Things We Couldn’t Sayby Diet Eman)

  LTRP Note: The following is from Diet Eman’s book, Things We Couldn’t Say. In Holland, during WW II, Diet was a young Christian girl who joined the Christian resistance in the Netherlands. While many of her fellow-resisters died before the war ended, Diet lived to tell this story of courage and faith.

Invasion (from chapter 2)  by Diet Eman

It was May 9, 1940, when some friends were visiting my family in our home. We had the radio on and were listening to Hitler give one of his fine speeches. There were quite a few people in our house that night, and we all knew German. We heard Hitler say that the Netherlands did not have to fear because the Dutch had been neutral during the First World War, and he would respect our neutrality. We were not important to his campaign, so we didn’t have to worry.

After our guests had left, we all went to bed. But only a few hours later, I awoke to what I recognized as a familiar sound. It was the staccato sound of someone beating a rug. In the Netherlands of that era, housewives kept a regular weekly schedule: Monday was laundry day; Tuesday was for ironing; Wednesday you cleaned the living room; Thursday, perhaps another room; and on Friday you cleaned the rugs with mattenkloppers, rugbeaters.

When I awoke very early that Friday morning, I immediately thought, “This is crazy! Some idiot is beating rugs right now, and it’s pitch dark outside.” What I heard was the “pop-pop-pop” as if someone were spanking rugs—only much faster. It was the first sound of the war.

Father and Mother were up too. They had gone into the street in front of the house, so I joined them. There in the dark sky above us we could see an air battle—planes and shooting. We could hear it too, of course, and we could see what was being shot at the planes from the ground, what they call flak. We all ran back into the house and turned the radio on. The broadcaster sounded very nervous; he told us we were at war and that German paratroops had landed.

This happened only hours after Hitler had assured us that we in the Netherlands needn’t worry! I don’t think that I had ever been lied to by a government leader before that time, and I was furious that this liar had told us not to be worried at the very moment he was sending troops onto our soil.

And our Dutch army, what were they? Our government did not believe in having a real standing army, and they certainly hadn’t planned on this war. Our soldiers were on bicycles—can you imagine?—with their aging rifles slung over their shoulders. Against the Germans they were powerless. On top of that, many Germans came into the Netherlands that night wearing Dutch army uniforms. It had been reported from time to time in our papers that many Dutch uniforms had been missing, but no one had put two and two together. Not, at least, until those first Germans came over our borders looking so much like our soldiers that our boys didn’t even know whom to shoot at. Some Germans even invaded our country wearing priests’ habits!

We didn’t sleep at all that night. After going back inside and listening to the radio reports, we talked and made tea. We were very nervous. Finally, we went back to bed to try to get an hour or so of rest. But there was no rest. We were at war.

Yet, the next day, what was there to do but go back to work? I had been working for some time at the Twentsche Bank, a very good bank in the center of The Hague. So that morning I got on my bike as usual, I didn’t worry about air bombardment or any kind of danger; I just went to work. My regular route was via Vondelstraat, a main artery into the city. At one point I was stopped on that street by the Dutch police, who commanded me to say the words Scheveningen and Schapenscheerder, to pronounce them slowly. It was a shibboleth. If you were a native speaker of Dutch, you could pronounce those words perfectly. Germans, however, could not. It was just hours after the initial attack, but there had already been so much infiltration into the country that those precautions had to be taken.

There had been fighting on the outskirts of The Hague that morning, and paratroopers were all around the airports. Adriaan, a young man who was then dating my sister Fanny, was in the service like Hein. He had taken a job that required a certain amount of time in the army. The deal he had signed up for was this: if he agreed to go into the military service, he would get a good government job once he got out. And his time in the service was almost over. Fanny and Adriaan were planning to get married in September, four months from the time of the invasion.

That night of May 9^th, Adriaan was standing guard with his buddy at Ypenburg, the little airfield just outside The Hague, where the Germans dropped hundreds of paratroopers. He and his buddy were killed guarding that little airfield; they were among the very first Dutch soldiers to die. (from Things We Couldn’t Say – click here to read this entire chapter in pdf format.)

The Hiding Place: A listening adventure A dramatic audio presentation adapted from The Hiding Place, the story of Corrie ten Boom

At one time Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a story to tell. For the first fifty years of her life, nothing at all out of the ordinary had ever happened to her. She was an unmarried watchmaker living contentedly with her sister and their elderly father in the tiny Dutch house over their shop. Their uneventful days, as regulated as their own watches, revolved around their abiding love for one another. However, with the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland, everything changed.

Corrie ten Boom and her family became leaders in the Dutch Underground, hiding Jewish people in their home in a specially-built room and aiding their escape from the Nazis. For their help, all but Corrie found death in a concentration camp. THE HIDING PLACE is their story.

Narrated by Susie Sandager
Click here to listen to a 6 minute preview of this amazing presentation.

Narrator:

Susie is the developer of a one woman show based on the life of Corrie Ten Boom. This moving drama recounts the efforts of one family to stand for God, and to stand with and for the Jewish people during the darkest days of the Holocaust. Audiences are constantly surprised that the 80 year old Dutch woman they see on stage is really the much younger Susie.

by James Hutchens
courtesy Kjos Ministries

This week an above the fold headlines of the Washington Times stated: “Israelis may stay home to avoid arrest.” The lead article went on to say, “Israel is seriously considering restricting travel to Europe by its senior officials and military officers fearing they might be arrested in the wake of a disputed U.N. report [The Goldstone Report] that accuses the Jewish state of targeting civilians in its Gaza war earlier this year.”

This is but another example of the growing anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment (that Dr. Martin Luther King, in 1967, correctly labeled anti-Semitism), which many see as rising to pre-WWII levels, especially in Europe, but also in the U.S.

As a matter of fact Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu is on record as saying “It is 1930 and Iran is Germany.” Others have noted the similarities of the anti-Semitism of the 1930s, not only in Iran, but in Europe and even in the United States. This is particularly true with the world wide growth of Islam and its inherent antipathy toward both Jews and Christians. Speaking of the Mahdi, who is Islam’s coming Messiah, Ayatollah Ibrahim Amini has declared, “The Mahdi will offer the religion of Islam to the Jews and Christians; if they accept it they will be spared. Otherwise they will be killed.” (Amini, Al-Iman Al-Mahdi).

Which begs the question, will safe houses be needed again? Some of our Jewish friends look realistically at what is occurring and ask, “Do we have any friends out there?” They see that Iran’s President continues on-going threats to wipe Israel off the map. They see Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is on fast track. This is no idle threat. This man means what he says! Remember the sequence, first the Saturday people, the Jews, and then the Sunday people, the Christians. The Nazi concentration camps are a living testimony to this chilling truth.

Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, opened in 1933. In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of whom two-thirds were political prisoners and nearly one-third were Jews. 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its sub-camps. Dachau had a special “priest block.” Of the 2720 priests (among them 2579 Catholic) held in Dachau, 1034 did not survive the camp. The majority were Polish (1780), of whom 868 died in Dachau. First the Saturday people then the Sunday people. Should we expect anything different if authoritarian national socialism reigns?

Prior to WWII there were about 8,300,000 Jews in Europe. Six million perished in Nazi ovens. A little over a million were able to emigrate to various countries throughout the world, including what is now Israel. Over a million survived not only in Germany but in other European countries controlled by the Third Reich. How? Christians put their lives on the line to save fellow human beings by providing safe houses for those fleeing the Nazi death machine. Click here to continue.

Related Information:

Media misleading on Jews evicting Arabs from Jerusalem

Splitting the Evangelicals from Israel

A Time to Remember … Lest We Forget