Human history is full of hatred and cruelty. For thousands of years, people have been abusing other people through slavery and persecution, war and suppression. However, no chapter of human history is perhaps quite so dark, as the 6 short years between 1939-1945. The Second World War will be remembered for many things but none are quite so infamous as the Holocaust. The Holocaust, in simple terms, was the attempted extermination of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany. It was the methodical, systematic, mass murder of 6 million human beings.
Throughout the world, the name of Auschwitz is notorious. It is a symbol of fear, torment and cruelty beyond imagination. The largest of the former death camps of the Third Reich, it was here, just outside the Polish town of Oswiecim, that over 1 million Jewish, Polish and Gypsy men, women and children were murdered. Every year, thousands visit the 2 main camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau and are astonished at the size of the camps. The exhibits show shoes, suitcases, glasses, hair, children’s clothes and many other things all seized from the murdered Jews. The artifacts, on display today, were left by the SS garrison in Auschwitz just before the camp was liberated. In another area of the camp, one can see the standing and starvation cells in block 11, where prisoners were tortured and starved to death. The SS soldiers were not the only ones to indulge in such cruelty. The medical staff at Auschwitz performed horrendous acts of sadism as infamous Dr. Josef Mengele and his teams performed unspeakable experiments on prisoners, many of whom were young children. Perhaps the most harrowing building is the remaining gas chamber and crematorium. Some people cry as they leave this building and indeed one could weep in every block and in every room of this awful place. Everywhere in the camp, the dark shadow of death hangs over the atmosphere. Anatoly Shapiro, a Jewish Red Army Commander whose troops liberated the Camp, said, "I want to say to all people around the world, this should not happen again. I saw the faces of the people we liberated, they went through hell." The camp was the scene of countless acts of evil, some so twisted that many would scarcely believe human beings capable of such barbarism. However, we do know that the Holocaust happened because of the eyewitness testimonies of those who survived and because of the documentation which exists, due to the fact that the Nazis were so methodical and detailed in their record keeping.
The true horrors of the Holocaust can never, of course, be properly appreciated by those who were not there. Yet most sensible people are disturbed, repulsed and angered when they hear of what took place in the death camps over those short years. People often ask of the Holocaust, “how could people do such things to other people?” This is an important question for two reasons. Firstly, it may help us to find out why and how it happened. Secondly, it may be a step towards preventing it from happening again.
The Holocaust did not just happen suddenly; like most things in society, there was a slow, progressive build up. From January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, Germany gradually became a racist state. Four months after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor there was a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops. What followed was a series of increasingly harsh steps towards expelling Jews from society. Propaganda combined with Nazi ideology and racial theory, provided the backdrop for the atrocities which were to follow. By the early 1940s, Jews, Gypsies and other groups were being arrested and transported to ghettos and concentration camps, culminating in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other death camps. But why did the Nazis hate the Jews and what made them think that they could do with the Jews as they pleased?
The Nazis, through propaganda, had made the Jews the scapegoat for the loss of the 1st World War and for every social problem which the nation faced. They also believed that white Europeans were racially superior to the inferior Jews and East Europeans and that they were, therefore, justified in eliminating these ‘trouble makers.’ Adolf Hitler himself said, “If I can send the flower of the German nation into the hell of war without the smallest pity for the shedding of precious German blood, then surely I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.”
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS) and many other leading Nazis, were strong believers in the theory of evolution and “the survival of the fittest.” They believed that all life on Earth had evolved, accidentally, from single celled proteins into complex creatures. They thought that white Europeans were the most evolved beings on the Earth. They believed that this racial superiority, combined with ‘the survival of the fittest’ gave them the right to treat the less evolved Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other groups, in any way they desired. Hitler said, “The Jews are definitely a race, but they are not human.” The Nazi leaders were fanatical in their conviction of the rightness of this racial theory and of social Darwinism. An example of this is the law which was passed in 1935, which forbad Jewish people to marry non-Jewish people. This was because the Nazis did not want the ‘pure’ blood of the Aryan people being contaminated with the inferior Jewish blood. Himmler, in a letter to Albert Forster, the Nazi governor of Danzig in Poland, wrote, “You, as an old National Socialist, know that just one drop of false blood that comes into an individual’s veins can never be removed.”
Nazi ideology was essentially one of atheism and the survival of the fittest. It was founded on men’s opinions and on the evolution of the human race. Its starting point was independent of God and the Bible and thus the state did not believe that they were subject to any higher authority. This meant that they believed that they had no objective moral plumb line by which to judge their actions. In fact, many viewed their murderous ways as a good thing. Heinrich Himmler, Head of the SS, said in a speech he made in Posen, Poland, in October 1943, “Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard. This is a chapter of glory in our history which has never been written, and which never shall be written.”
In the Bible, in Matthew 22:39, we find that Jesus said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But since the Nazis did not base their society on the Bible they treated their neighbours, the Jews, in whatever cruel way they desired. They indulged in mass murder and genocide because they did not build on the commandment found in the Bible, in the Book of Exodus, chapter 20:13 “Thou shalt not kill.” When one does not start from a source of absolute and objective morality, one then decides for oneself what is good and evil. In the case of the Nazis, they chose to decide that it was good to murder, steal and make war.
Alarmingly, from an atheistic viewpoint, in which there is no God to determine what is right and wrong, the actions of the SS in Auschwitz are not only acceptable but also justifiable. This is because atheism and the theory of evolution completely destroy any possibility of there being any real significance to humanity and sanctity to human life. Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent paleontologist and professor at Harvard University wrote in Life Magazine in December 1988 “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the Earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer -- but none exists.” If all life is the result of an accident and the product of genetic mutations and chance, then it is obviously devoid of any meaning and purpose. Under these conditions, we are all therefore entitled to make up our own values and live by them regardless of the consequences to other people. If God does not exist, then who is to say that one set of morals is more valid than another? After all, it is the survival of the fittest, and no one human being’s opinion of what is right and what is wrong, is more valid and objective than anyone else’s. Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous philosopher and atheist who popularized the phrase “God is dead,” said, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” Nietzsche’s writings influenced Adolf Hitler and although there is debate over how closely his writings correlate with Nazi ideology, it is no secret that Hitler admired Nietzsche. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and friend, records in his book “Inside the Third Reich” an occasion when he and Hitler visited Nietzsche’s house. “We went on to Nietzsche’s house where his sister, Frau Forster-Nietzsche, was expecting Hitler… Hitler undertook to finance an annex to the old Nietzsche house.”
With this backdrop of the insignificance of human life and the absence of absolutes, is it then any wonder that the Nazis went as far as they did in their merciless destruction of lives and in particular the lives of Jews and Eastern Europeans?
So if atheism creates moral relativism how then can we deplore the actions of the Nazis? Without a moral framework provided by a supreme being, their actions cannot be condemned as being, truly evil. C.S Lewis writes in his book “Mere Christianity, “If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others… Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think… Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something -some Real Morality- for them to be true about.”
So we see that to condemn the crimes of the Holocaust, we must do so from the standpoint of the existence of objective morality and therefore, if there is objective morality then where can it come from except from God. The truth is that most of us do condemn the Nazis’ crimes, but we do so, not realising what that implicitly implies. We say that they were wrong to murder people, but that is a moral absolute found in the Bible, “Thou shalt not kill.” Many people say that they do not believe in God, let alone the God of the Bible, and yet hold to certain moral absolutes found in the Bible, such as ‘murder is wrong’. This is surely a contradictory worldview. Once you accept the morality laid down in the Bible, you must surely realise that we are all accountable to God, since it is He who has made up the rules. This is a fearful thing to consider and it surely must cause us to then consider the rest of the Bible.
The truth is that we do not have to be Nazi war criminals to know that we have all broken God’s laws to greater or lesser degrees. Our state before God is therefore very obvious, we have all sinned, therefore, we all are guilty. The Bible says in Romans 3:23, “all have sinned,” and in Romans 6:23 “the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” So, because we have all sinned, we are all destined to die and to go to Hell unless we heed the warnings in the Bible and obey the way of escape God has provided for us. So how can we be saved from Hell? “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved,” Romans 10:9. We need to repent of our sins and put our faith in Jesus Christ. We must receive His death on the cross as payment for our sins and follow Him.
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These are the opening words of a political campaign poster in the UK in early 2010. They refer to the economic climate, they are trying to say that Britain needs a change of political policy and a change of Government at the election that will happen in the first few months of 2010.
Sir Chris Hoy won three gold medals in cycling in the Olympics in 2008. He also got his knighthood for his cycling. What most people don't know is that he started cycling in bmx competitions and he was inspired to try cycling by watching the famous Hollywood film "ET". 
