The failure to understand the dark reality of original sin has nullified from the outset the vast majority of attempts to come to grips with the evils of the Third Reich. People with no firm convictions concerning righteousness, holiness, sin, or evil wander in a maze when they try to understand these matters. They are certain that the Nazis were evil, but are unable to provide any convincing or coherent explanation of the delight in cruelty that is one of the most outstanding features of the Holocaust. A real explanation is possible within a biblical framework. For those who see human nature as basically good, Hitler will forever remain an insoluble riddle—as will many of life’s other problems.
For example, in Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a scholar who tries to understand these things without reference to that reality of God which alone gives meaning to ethics and moral standards lists conventional secular explanations for the cruelty of the Nazis.[i] Those who persecuted Jews were (a) coerced, forced to go along to avoid death or imprisonment; (b) blindly following orders with no moral sense; (c) conforming to peer pressure; (d) petty bureaucrats concerned only with their careers; (e) unaware of the big picture, committing individual acts without having a sense of the enormity of the whole. (more…)
