In the chapter entitled “Judaism and the Holocaust,” Mr. Schoeman asks other probing questions: if the Israelites are God’s chosen people and God is all loving, how does one explain the Holocaust? While some Jews like Elie Wiesel renounce their orthodox Jewish faith (“I believe during the Holocaust the covenant was broken”), Mr. Schoeman argues, “Judaism was founded on Abraham’s fidelity to God . . . in the face of what appeared to be the most unjust and cruel act of God imaginable—his requirement that he sacrifice his son Isaac.” God demands noble, heroic suffering of his faithful servants from Abraham to the death of the Son of God to the martyrs and saints. While Elie Wiesel depicts God as unfaithful, Jewish converts like Edith Stein—a victim of the concentration camps—see the suffering of the Jews in World War II as Christ’s Cross “being laid upon the Jewish people.” Just as Christ’s first coming resulted in the slaughtering of the Innocents, “There is a symmetry in the idea that the final return of the Messiah, the Second Coming, would be preceded once again by a slaughter of the innocents, centered on the Jews.” A human birth is preceded by suffering. The grace of conversion is also often foreshadowed by suffering. Grace itself is purchased by suffering. Thus Mr. Schoeman reasons, “Suffering is the coin that brings heaven to earth”—a fact that hints that the Holocaust is possibly “a harbinger of the Second Coming,” an event not far off according to the revelations of Sister Faustina in 1936–1938. This is another of the remarkable epiphanies the book offers.In his chapter “The Ideological Foundations of Nazism,” the author relates the war crimes of Hitler and the Third Reich not only to Margaret Sanger’s eugenics policies but also to diabolical influences, pagan religions, and new age cults. The sexual degeneracy of Hitler, the storm troopers, and the Hitler youth—their casual acceptance of homosexuality, sadism, and other perversions—Himmler’s preoccupation with black magic and occult mediums, the Nazi neo pagan religion that glorified the orgies of Walpurgis Night, and Hitler’s involvement in Satanism and his suicide on April 30, the very day of the Walpurgis Night bacchanal all provoke another searching question: why was Satan through Hitler and the ideology of Nazism perpetrating this atrocity on the Jews? Because the first coming of the Messiah came from the Jews and because the Jews will play a major role in the Second Coming as St. Paul explains in Romans 11, then “the eradication of the Jews might have been an attempt to prevent the Second Coming.” A second diabolical strategy to thwart the Second Coming, which depends on Israel’s conversion (“and so all Israel will be saved” as St. Paul writes in Romans 11), might be the prevention of Israel’s conversion by destroying the Jewish people through the atrocities of Nazism or by forcing Jews in the aftermath of World War II to doubt the goodness and love of God.
Thank you so much for that post.