The Third Reich was one of the most fascinating periods in human history, from which many lessons can be learned today by all lovers of freedom. Here are other ominous parallels between the emergency of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and the emergency of globalism in the West and subsequently the world.
Thousands of laws, Rules, and Regulations: the Nazis passed thousands of laws, to regulate and control every aspect of German people’s lives. There were so many that virtually anyone could be labeled as a criminal and have their property seized, jailed, or executed at the command of the Nazis. Highly complex financial, currency, cash reporting, and privacy laws were passed which almost no one understood.
Christians who sent money out of the country to missionaries had their assets seized and were often jailed under Nazi money-laundering laws. Raids on homes in the middle of the night by the Gestapo became commonplace along with widespread property seizures.
The same thing is happening in America which is being called a nation of criminals by one reporter who says for decades, Washington has been adding to the number of federal laws and regulations that all carry criminal penalties. It is been reported that the number is so high, and no one is actually sure how many there are.
According to some experts, anyone could be convicted of some sort of federal crime and it so easy for anyone to violate one of these laws and never know it. One congressman told CBN News that “We have made it dangerous just to be alive in America.”
One neurosurgeon said now that the healthcare bill has been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court, Americans should expect to hear more about death panels and bureaucrats deciding who lives and who dies like the Nazis did after they took the health care system in Germany. This is already happening in some countries in Europe.
Environmentalism and Animal rights. The Germans in the 1930s were preoccupied with environmentalism and animal rights, with the Nazis passing all sorts of laws, rules, and regulations to protect the environment.
Today, there are some environmentalists who believe that humanity is no more important than any other species on this planet. They think the world would be much better off without any people at all.
Paul Ehrlich (1854–1915), a German scientist and physician, was one of them. He wrote several books predicting famine as a result of population increase. One of them is the famous The Population Bomb, in which he described the increasing number of people in the world as a “cancer” that would have to be excised through “many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
His list included sterilization, abortion, and steep tax rates on families with many children. Ehrlich maintained that in light of a growing global affluence, reducing total population as well as reducing consumption was critical to protecting the environment and maintaining living standards. He maintained that current rates of growth are still too high for a “sustainable” future.
Occultic Dimension to the Third Reich. Hitler’s movement was not just a political movement; it was also a supernatural, occultic movement and was in strong opposition to Bible-based Christianity and Orthodox Judaism. The religious foundation of the Nazi Third Reich was from the Eastern religions that are the foundation of the present-day New Age movement, which now permeates the Liberal Eastern Establishment and energizes or provides the occultic dynamic behind the New World Order.
This preoccupation with the occult is one of the major factors in the growing Establishment’s hatred for Evangelical Christians in America and the West in general, and will be one of the major factors in the coming globalist persecution of American Christians—which is now beginning to accelerate.
Ignoring the German Constitution. Hitler completely ignored the German Constitution, just as some politicians and courts are doing today. Wherever Hitler wanted to something, he would just do it. He just wrote notes instructing people to carry out whatever he wanted. This is similar to Executive Orders which are have been issued by American presidents in the last 20-30 years.
According to Don, most of these Executive Orders, new laws, thousands of new regulations are unconstitutional as Hitler’s notes, orders, and edicts in the 1930s.
Rejection of Their Heritage. The German people, before and during the Nazi’s rise to power, began to reject their Christian Biblical heritage, their history, their national heroes and their traditions. The Nazis accelerated this obliteration of their history and heritage as they came to power. And this is precisely what the liberals, socialists, and the globalist have been doing in recent years. Our heritage, history, heroes, and traditions are being denigrated and obliterated.
Gun laws. The Nazis passed gun laws to disarm the German people so that they could control them and set up their dictatorship. Laws are being put in place to disarm the American people. This is a major element in the New World Order agenda and has been accomplished in many other countries in the West. History teaches us that genocide against disarmed victims in every nation was enabled by forcible disarmament.
Kitty Werthmann survived Hitler and she is a witness to history.
Aaron Zelman (1946–2010) was the head of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), which is the organization that aimed at educating the Jewish community about the dangers of being forcibly or voluntarily disarmed. He did a comparison of the Nazi’s 1928 and 1938 gun control laws and those passed in the U.S. in 1968, and found them to be almost identical—as if they had been copied!
Redefinition of Marriage. Hitler used homosexuals, drug addicts, and criminal elements to destabilize the country and advance the Nazi political machine. In the West today, marriage is being redefined to civil partnerships, thereby completely destroying the bedrock and foundation of society which is marriage between one man and one woman.
In his article Brendan O’ Neil explained how homosexuality has moved from being a crime to being celebrated as a way of life in modern Western nations just in the space of less than 50 years:
Everywhere from popular culture to the political sphere, the criminals are now those who criticize gay sex, not those who have it – as witnessed in such acts of authoritarianism as the imposing of a one-month prison sentence on a Swedish pastor who preached against homosexuality, the arrest of a preacher in Dundee for saying homosexuality was a sin, the banning of an advert in London that offended gays, the sending of American experts to Africa to preach about the virtues of homosexuality (in a similar way that Christian colonialists used to preach to Africans about the virtues of the Bible, including, er, anti-homosexual views), and so on. Gay-friendliness has become probably the key barometer of decency in the modern West; and those who fail the test can expect censorship or some other form of punishment.
The Church was Deceived, Divided and Persecuted. The German Christians were strongly nationalistic and patriotic. The German Christian church was officially founded in 1932 and the organization straightaway became an instrument in supporting the Hitler regime and the Nazi propaganda in joining the church and state.
To achieve this, their goal was to unite the regional churches of the German Evangelical Church into a German Reich church. They thought that by wedding the church to the state, they would restore the church and Germany to her former glory. They didn’t agree with him on everything, but they believed that if the church’s prestige were restored, they might be able to influence him in the right direction.
The Nazis first saw it as important to keep a good relationship with the Church, because they were worried that many Germans were committed Christians and if at all there was a conflict between the Church and the state, many German Christians would put their faith before the Nazi state.
So when the Church started opposing Hitler, he created new laws and then accused the leaders of breaking these laws, furthermore he also divided the churches by encouraging other churches to work with the Nazis in creating “socialist family values and to work for the greater good of the German people.”
In his book When a Nation Forgets God, Dr. Lutzer gives an eyewitness account of how some members of the church reacted to the Nazism of their times:
I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust. I considered myself a Christian. We heard stories of what were happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it because, what could anyone do to stop it? A rail road track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks.
We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by. We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars! Week after week the whistle would blow.
We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews en route to a death camp. Their screams tormented us. We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns. By the time the train came past our church we were singing at the top of our voices.
If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more. Years have passed and no one talks about it anymore. But I still hear that train whistle in my sleep. God forgive me; forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians yet did nothing to intervene.
Many Churches in Germany and throughout Europe were mostly silent while Jews were persecuted, deported and murdered. It was only a few Christians in the Christian Professing Church who believed that the German church had ceased to be the church of Jesus Christ, and therefore they must break away and form a new church which could be called the Confessing Church because it proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The State supported the Church. The churches were nationalized under Hitler. A strong section of the church also believed that Nazi regime was the answer to all their prayers. It was all about the economy. Nothing else seemed to matter, under no circumstances were the Christians allowed to sit down and reflect how all this could be handled.
The church did not heed the lone voices crying in the wilderness. The government said the churches needed repairs, so a “church tax” was created. Pastors were put on government salary, and therefore they were subject to state authority. This led to the silencing of pastors because they feared they would lose their funding if they spoke out. The church in Germany appeared to be too preoccupied with the problems of the nation and the economy to see what was happening before its eyes.
Today, it is the same thing; most of the church in Europe (Catholic, Protestant and Evangelicals) is supported through taxes. As a matter of fact I have heard an elder of a local Evangelical church saying “the government has been so good to us.” The so called golden rule often applies: Whoever has the gold has the rule!
Either the church will change its message to accommodate the state’s political agenda, or the political rulers will use the church to their own ends. Regardless, the purity of the church is compromised and this is more prevalent in African churches.
It is very helpful in understanding the times in which to live to study the rise and fall of the Nazi Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s, and the great evil it perpetrated on mankind as all these parallels are leading the West and other countries a similar path if there is no true repentance.
And when we finish, we should be on our knees asking the Lord to keep us faithful to the cross of Christ, no matter the cost, as we shall further examine in part 3.
