In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the complexities surrounding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the societal conditions that made it possible. With a focus on the charismatic attributes widely attributed to Hitler, we explore whether it was the German people themselves who imbued him with such influence. Reflecting on historical milestones and Germany’s rich cultural heritage, the narrative seeks to unpack the confluence of desperation and hope that propelled a nation towards darkness.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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The German people are in every sense of the word a great people. Intelligent, innovative, accomplished people. But for me, the question about the Germans is always colored by the dark shades of Adolf Hitler and the question of how it happened to them and to the Jews of Europe. Not long ago, I presented a program titled How Freedom is Lost. I turned back the pages to an episode in the history of Israel. You can read it for yourself. It’s in 1 Samuel 8. It came at the end of what may have been a period of unparalleled freedom that has never been before and has never been since. And the story of why they laid that freedom down and of what followed after is an object lesson we must never let ourselves forget. Now, I’m not going to retell that story today. I will tell you how to get a free CD of that program a little later. What I want to do today is to draw another lesson from much more recent history and to consider the implications for Christians living right now. I knew that Germany was a great nation in European history. Christianity was strong there and the Protestant Reformation was born there. I’ve heard people puzzle over how a people like the Germans of that era could possibly allow a man like Adolf Hitler, such a lowbrow, corruptible little man, to come to such absolute power. Strange as it may seem, it may have been for some of the same reasons I discussed in that program, How Freedom is Lost. I knew of the great intellectual and artistic accomplishments of the Germans and their great universities. Did you know the University of Heidelberg was established in 1386? the University of Leipzig in 1409, University of Rostock in 1419, the University of Grießwald in 1456, Freiburg 1457, Munich 1472, and the universities at Mainz and Tübingen were established in 1477. Are these dates registering on you? It was not until 1492… that Columbus set sail from Spain and discovered a new world no one even knew existed. It was in 1517 that Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Great Cathedral. In the early 1700s, Bach was turning out some of the greatest music ever heard, including a cantata a week. In the late 1700s, Beethoven was at his peak. America? Well, we were just figuring out who she was. And it was in 1776 we published our Declaration of Independence. And the great German universities were more than 300 years old when this nation was born. And here is a burning question for us and the Germans to consider. How could a nation like Germany produce an Adolf Hitler? I think maybe it’s fair to say that she didn’t produce Hitler. She became vulnerable through European wars, and by the time the First World War was over, the people of Germany were dispirited, defeated, and craving leadership. The years following that war were desperate for many Germans. The economy was crushed. Hyperinflation made the currency worthless. Some feel this led to Hitler’s rise, but in fact, Germany came out of that era before Hitler came to power. The 1920s saw the German economy in recovery. When a new currency was brought in, it was based on land instead of paper. And we had a chancellor that actually brought them back on the road to full recovery. What we in this country called the Roaring Twenties, the Europeans called the Golden Twenties because they were coming on. Now, it’s fair to say that the Great Depression that came on in the early 1930s played a role. I’m not the only one by a long shot who is puzzled by the Hitler phenomenon. I came across a remarkable book by Ron Rosenbaum entitled Explaining Hitler. Its subtitle was The Search for the Origins of His Evil. I bought the book because it came advertised in a flyer I got as a thumping good read, and I was really needing a good read at that moment in time. The book turned out to be not merely about Hitler, but about the Hitler explainers, and boy, have they been many. One of them, Alan Bullock, said, The more I learn about Hitler, the harder I find it to explain. Now, this is not an idle remark. This is made by a man who had spent already some 50 years studying Hitler, and he says, The more I learn, the harder it is to explain. Emil Falkenheim, another explainer, said there will never be an adequate explanation. The closer one gets to explicability, the more one realizes that nothing can make Hitler explicable. Yehuda Bauer, it is not impossible to explain Hitler, but it just might be too late. Too many witnesses have died, too much evidence destroyed, too many gaps in the record that will never be filled. But these quotes reveal a truism, that things are inexplicable doesn’t keep us from trying, and the people who have attempted to explain Hitler are legion in number. And I can’t help wondering after my reading on the subject if they aren’t trying to explain the wrong thing. Perhaps it is the German people of that era who need explaining even more than Hitler. For murderers are never in scarce supply. Brutal, evil men are a dime a dozen. Have you been reading your newspapers? You watch television news to see what people are doing? I mean, the evil of some men is beyond calculation by normal people. You can probably take off a few nasty, evil, brutal murders from memory right here in North America. Charlatans are on every corner. Why are some people at a given moment vulnerable to them? Petty tyrants are a dime a dozen, and their ascension to power may say more about their people than it does about them. Another Hitler explainer, George Victor, who followed his trail, observed, charismatic leaders are masters of an illusory type of intense sincerity. Hitler boasted that he was the greatest of liars, a boast he fulfilled, but he came across as sincere. One observer said, not only did he say what seemed most advantageous to say at the time, he actually believed it. passionate oratory, combining underlying sincerity with false words as opposed to honesty, well, that’s what gives words the ring of truth. End of quotation. But then, Victor quotes a well-known German philosopher named Nietzsche. He said, “…in all great deceivers, a remarkable process is at work to which they owe their power. In the very act of deception, with all of its preparations, the dreadful voice, the expression, the gestures, they are overcome by their belief in themselves. And it is this belief which speaks so persuasively, so miracle-like to the audience.” That’s really an incredible thing that Nietzsche said here. Victor unaccountably stops at this point, but Nietzsche goes on. He said, not only does he communicate that to the audience, but the audience returns it to him and strengthens his belief. How many times does this have to happen in history before we learn what it is and call it by its name? It’s in this last thing he said here, how that he has this incredible belief in himself that overcomes him. He’s actually come to the place to where he starts out lying and comes to believe his own lie, overcome by his belief in himself, that then the audience returns that to him and strengthens his belief. This, I think, is where we may come to understand not so much Hitler, as would-be Hitlers are a dime a dozen, but where we can understand how people can put him in power. And it was in this light I came across an interview Rosenbaum had with Daniel Goldhagen, which kind of blew me away. Grab a pencil and a pad. I want to give you an address and a phone number and a free offer, and I will be right back.
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How is it possible for a free people who enjoy all the benefits of liberty to lose it all, to lay their freedom down? Write or call and ask for your free CD, How Freedom is Lost. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.
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Rosenbaum spent some time with Daniel Goldhagen, another person who has researched Hitler. He said this, Charisma, as we know, although it is not often treated this way, but as Max Weber first expressed it, Charisma is not a property of leaders. It’s a property of the people, really. The extent to which the leader is charismatic depends on the belief of the people in his infallibility and the prophet-like nature of the leader. They grant him his charismatic quality. Maybe. Maybe Goldhagen is right. In that case, what we have is a feedback loop that grows in intensity until it becomes vulnerable to great evil. The Apostle Paul said something like that. He wrote his second letter to Timothy when he was kind of winding up his life, and he said, know this too. In the last days, perilous times shall come, for men shall be lovers of their own selves. In the process of time, we have found a word for this. The word is narcissism. Do yourself a favor. Look it up. Look it up in the dictionary. Look it up on the Internet. Look it up wherever you can find it. Narcissism. Paul goes on to describe what they would be like. They would be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, their word isn’t worth a dime, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good. Traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying the power of it. From such, turn away. You know, until I read this scripture in the context of what I was learning from Ron Rosenbaum, I had not considered how narcissism initiates and then develops all the evil that follows on its heels. So it becomes almost impossible to separate the Germans of that generation from Hitler, though we must separate the Germans of today from that. They are not the same people who did that, just as we are not the same people who engaged in the slave trade. Fair enough? Do you remember the fairy tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen? There was an emperor of a prosperous city who cares more about clothes than he did about government, as a matter of fact, about military pursuits. or even entertainment. He hires two swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the most beautiful cloth. They tell him the cloth is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position. The emperor cannot see the non-existent cloth, but he pretends he can for fear of appearing stupid. His ministers do the same. When the swindlers report that the suit is finished, they dress him in mime. The emperor then goes on a procession through the capital, showing off his new clothes during the course of the procession, in which the people by and large are cheering him and admiring his new clothes and everything else involved, because all the spade work has been done. The mob are going along with it. However… A small child cried out, but he has nothing on. The crowd realized the child is telling the truth. The emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the procession. Now, when you think about it, this is what Jesus was driving at when he spoke about how we were all supposed to be like children. He told his disciples, Matthew 18. At the same time, the disciples came to Jesus saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child to him and set him in the midst of them and said, Verily I say unto you, except you be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same as the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. If you want to understand what Jesus wrote or what Jesus said to his disciples here, just read Hans Christian Andersen’s little story. What is he talking about? He is talking about the fact that we don’t let ourselves get cluttered up, led astray, led down the garden path, confused by liars. It may seem odd, but it is true. It is vanity that blinds great men to the things the least of us can see. But we become vulnerable to swindlers through our need and our ego. For the Germans of the 1930s, they had been humiliated by the loss of World War I. And they had a need for restored self-respect. So they were willing to believe a lie to get it back. The German people were worn out. They were tired. They were dispirited. So they grasped at the lies Hitler was telling him and in turn reinforced his own belief in himself. They wanted to believe the lie. Now, Don’t consider what I’m saying as a complete explanation of the horror of Hitler and the Nazis. What I’m driving at is not an explanation, but understanding. Understanding that might be useful to us where we stand. Evil can creep up on people in ways they cannot even imagine. And the only defense against it really is to rely on a higher power. Christian people… Believers in Scripture should be, but aren’t always, immune to this sort of thing. Following the breadcrumbs, I came upon a statement by the Spartacus School about what happened back there in Nazi Germany. In the original program of the Nazi Party drawn up by Adolf Hitler, Anton Drexler and Gottfried Feder in 1920, February, In this document, the Nazi party promised religious freedom for all those religions except those which endangered the German race. Once Hitler gained power, he was quick to express his hatred of the Jews. Based on his readings of how blacks were denied civil rights in southern states in America, Hitler attempted to make life so unpleasant for Jews in Germany they would leave, they would immigrate. The campaign started April 1st, 1933, when a one-day boycott of Jewish-owned shops took place. Members of the SA, the brown shirts, picketed the shops to ensure the boycott was successful. In other words, if you wanted to go shop there, even though you weren’t participating in the boycott, you’d get beat up if you tried to go in there. Now, I have noticed recently in remarks of some people references to brown shirts. And I wonder how many of today’s listeners have any idea what they’re talking about. They’re talking about Hitler’s essay. They’re comparing sometimes what’s going on right now to the brown shirts of Hitler. Listen for it. People talk about it. The hostility toward Jews increased in Nazi Germany. This was reflected in the decision by many shops and restaurants not to serve the Jewish population. Placards saying, Jews not admitted, and Jews enter this place at their own risk began to appear all over Germany. In some parts of the country, Jews were banned from public parks, swimming pools, and public transport. Did you ever hear that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted too? Killed off in concentration camps? They were. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were persecuted because they refused military service. But the Nazis also hated the sect because they believed in the imminent return of a Messiah. The rejection that this Messiah was not Adolf Hitler led to its members being sent to Germany’s concentration camps. You know, I knew the JWs were persecuted. I did not know the second reason why. It’s chilling. They were looking for a Messiah, and they wouldn’t accept Hitler as the one, and so they were sent off to concentration camps and up the chimneys of crematoriums. And it’s chilling, but so is what the Spartacus group said next. Leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches remained silent throughout this period. The main opposition to Hitler came from a group of young pastors led by Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Heinrich Gruber. Initially, the main complaint was the decision by Adolf Hitler to appoint Ludwig Müller as the country’s Reich Bishop of the Protestant Church. That was a new one for me. I knew Constantine did that for the Catholic Church. I did not know that Hitler had done the same thing. With the support of Karl Barth, a professor of theology at Bonn University, in May 1934, these rebel pastors formed what became known as the Confessional Church. Over the next years, hundreds of these pastors were sent to concentration camp, and some were executed. One wonders what the outcome would have been had Christians with one voice opposed the actions of the Nazi regime right from the start. Perhaps they would have ended up where the Jews were. Perhaps not. But they were divided.
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I’ll be right back. After this short message. For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only. And request the program titled Opposing Evil. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.
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Ron Rosenbaum introduced one more idea in his book about Hitler. Primitive hatred. According to a well-known German physician at the time, Hitler’s attitude toward the Jews is a primitive hate typical of half-civilized or even uncivilized persons. What struck Rosenbaum was the concept of primitive hatred. The reason that this is important is that the source of Hitler’s hatred, which nobody dismisses, focuses on what might have caused it. Rosenberg continued to say that one of the things that made the Holocaust so unique and uniquely horrifying was precisely that it arose from a society widely regarded as the most civilized in the sense of learned or cultured and philosophically sophisticated and convinced of its own rectitude in the world. Another author characterized Hitler as convinced of his own rectitude. He considered Hitler’s hatred as sincere, that is, based on rational belief and ideologically based hatred. But Rosenbaum acknowledges that there is another kind of hatred that is not intellectual. It’s visceral. It’s personal. An irrational hatred that can assume the guise, the mantle of an ideological antipathy, but which is primitive in the sense of being prior to ideology, the source of it rather than its product. You know, there does come a time When the human mind, being sick, becomes open to something far more evil than we would ever expect of human beings. Not merely sinister, but actively evil and destructive. Some people have rejected the idea of a demon-possessed Hitler because it mitigates his evil. Some of these guys, they’re not willing to have any explanation for Hitler because they feel like it may tend to let him off. But it doesn’t really. No one who believes the New Testament can deny the existence of demons or the possibility of demon possession. And Scripture tells us categorically that Satan himself entered Judas. In a strange sort of way, this may explain the hatred of the Jews, not merely among the Nazis, but of anti-Semitism in general. For the Jews are the oldest of all the representatives of God in the world, the chosen people. Chosen by whom? Chosen by God. And so if you hate God, it’s a very small step to hating Jews. Why not Christians? Well, there have been too many of them. and oftentimes too much in power to be able to attack them successfully. Remember, we’re not talking about objective hatred here. We’re talking about primitive hatred. And so there can be no hatred more primitive than one arising before the creation of man. Now, what lessons can Christian folks take away from this? One, we cannot, we must not remain silent and passive in the face of evil. It is never true to say there is nothing we can do. There is always something we can do. We can always speak out. We can always persuade. We can always vote. Too many Christians have remained silent while more than 50 million prospective citizens have been destroyed in abortion mills and sent up the incinerators, the chimneys of the incinerators in hospitals. No politician can be elected who loses the vote of all the Christian folks in his district. You follow me on this? No politician can be voted into office if he loses 100% of the Christian votes. If all of us are together and opposed to this, Now, maybe we need to draw some lines. Maybe the law does draw lines. Maybe we can work on the third trimester, or maybe omit the first trimester, because law does have limits in how far it can go and what it can do. But the truth is, all the pro-abortion congressmen, senators, and presidents in this country were elected with the consent and participation of many Christians. We’re not united. Remember the German Christians? There were too many of them to kill, but they were divided and remained silent. This is not to say they didn’t all attend the same church. All Christians should recognize evil when it appears and should oppose it no matter where they go to church. Why didn’t the German Christians do it? Because they would not call evil by its name. Was it fear? Could be. Was it apathy? Possibly. But you do understand, don’t you? Both fear and apathy are unworthy of us who name the name of Jesus Christ. By coincidence, I was reading the 83rd Psalm a day or so ago, which begins, Keep not thou silence, O God, hold not thy peace, and be not still, O God. And it occurred to me, the voice of God in the world is his people. We cannot complain that God is silent when we will not speak up for him. There’s the bottom line. We have challenges. Like little children, if we don’t see the emperor wearing clothes, we ought to say so. The simplicity…
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the courage, we must do it. You have heard Ronald L. Dart. If you would like more information or if you have any questions, write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. In the U.S. and Canada, call toll-free 1-888-BIBLE-44. and visit our website at borntowin.net.
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In this thought-provoking episode, we delve into the complexities surrounding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and the societal conditions that made it possible. With a focus on the charismatic attributes widely attributed to Hitler, we explore whether it was the German people themselves who imbued him with such influence. Reflecting on historical milestones and Germany’s rich cultural heritage, the narrative seeks to unpack the confluence of desperation and hope that propelled a nation towards darkness.
