[ikka]

Professor John K. Roth, a prominent Holocaust scholar at Claremont-McKenna College, testified to his own deep Christian faith. At the same time, he acknowledged that while the Holocaust could not be solely blamed on Christianity, it was a "necessary condition" for the tragedy of the Shoah.

He's wrong. The Nazis suppressed Christians too and had a sort of Germanic/Norse paganism as their guiding ideology. Reality is that Europe has hated Jews for a long time, Christianity or no.

Also the Germans kind of go nuts every 3rd generation or so and start a war or invasion.

[ragnarocker]

The Nazis were not Christians. They tried to outlaw the cross and replace it with a swastika.

[CobaltBlue]

European anti-Semitism had/has numerous roots. Religious hatred of Jews as "Christ-killers" is one of them and cannot be denied or swept under the rug. It is an historical fact that many churches condemned all Jews for the death of Christ, especially in the Middle Ages.

Then there was racist hatred of Jews as being an "inferior race," as opposed to Aryans, supposedly the "master race," and other European races were also considered to be inferior to the Aryans. In this imaginary scheme, blacks were even more inferior, sub-human, and most Asians little better, except for the Japanese, who were "almost white."

Then there was class hatred of Jews for supposedly controlling all the money, and ideological hatred of Jews for supposedly being behind the Communist movement.

It seems to me that all these hatreds devolve backwards to religious anti-Semitism, but it may not matter. There were many alleged "reasons" for hating Jews, long before the Nazis came into power. Hitler's hatred of Jews was more virulent, more insane, but he could not have gotten the rest of Europe to cooperate in the Holocaust unless they, too, hated Jews.

Thus, in nations where anti-Semitism was not as pronounced as in Germany, such as Italy and the Netherlands, the population was willing to hide Jews and help them escape. In nations where anti-Semitism was even more pronounced than in Germany, such as Ukraine and Yugoslavia, the population willingly cooperated and even innovated.