The Holocaust

Background

The term Holocaust derives from a Greek word meaning "a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire," that is, a burnt offering. Jews also call it the Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning "catastrophe."

Antisemitism, the hatred of and discrimination against Jews, had long existed in Europe. Within the church as well, a tradition persisted that regarded the Jews as "the people who killed Christ." In his late work On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), Martin Luther harshly attacked the Jews, and the Nazis later exploited this text for propaganda. From the nineteenth century onward, this hostility was compounded by a racism that regarded Jews as an inferior race.

Course of Events

• 1933: Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.
• 1935: The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews.
• November 1938: During Kristallnacht (the "Night of Broken Glass"), synagogues and Jewish-owned shops throughout Germany were destroyed.
• 1939 onward: After the outbreak of World War II, Jews in occupied territories were confined to ghettos (segregated residential districts).
• 1941: With the invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen) carried out mass shootings of Jews.
• 1942: At the Wannsee Conference in January, the implementation of the "Final Solution" for the elimination of European Jewry was discussed. Thereafter, mass murder by gas intensified at extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka.
• 1945: Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in January, and the killing ended with Germany's surrender in May.

The Roma (Gypsies), people with disabilities, homosexuals, political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others were also persecuted and murdered.

Consequences and Influence

After the war, Nazi leaders were punished at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–1946). In 1948 the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in the same year the State of Israel was founded. The United Nations designated January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

During the Nazi era, German Protestantism was split into two camps. On one side was the "German Christians" movement, which sympathized with the Nazis. On the other was the Confessing Church, which sought to preserve the church's independence through the Barmen Theological Declaration of 1934; Karl Barth took the lead in drafting this declaration. Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the Confessing Church joined the resistance movement and was executed in April 1945. In October 1945 the leadership of the German Protestant Church issued the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. The Roman Catholic Church, in the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate (1965), rejected attributing responsibility for the death of Christ to the Jewish people as a whole.

After the war, many churches and theologians reexamined replacement theology, the view that the church has replaced Israel as the people of God. Drawing on passages such as Romans 11:28–29, they reread these texts as teaching that God's calling of Israel has not been revoked. In the Korean church, the Holocaust became widely known through Bonhoeffer's writings and through the autobiographical account of Corrie ten Boom, a member of the Dutch Reformed Church who was imprisoned in a concentration camp for hiding Jews.

Assessment

Views differ on the question of the church's responsibility.

• One side emphasizes that Nazi ideology was essentially an anti-Christian racism.
• The other side holds that the church's long-standing anti-Jewish tradition provided fertile ground for the genocide.

Some critics contend that even the Confessing Church failed to actively oppose the persecution of the Jews as such. Others point out that the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt did not directly mention the Jews. On the other hand, there were Christians who risked their lives to hide Jews.

Assessments of replacement theology are also divided. The dispensationalist camp, which distinguishes between Israel and the church, has criticized replacement theology. Some within the covenant theology camp counter that their position, which affirms continuity between the church and Israel, cannot be summed up by the word "replacement," nor can it be equated with antisemitism.

Holocaust denial, the claim that the Holocaust did not happen or has been exaggerated, has been refuted by historians on the basis of documentary evidence, and it is punishable by law in Germany and a number of other countries.