The Jewish Holocaust was a shocking tragedy and Jews were particular subjects of Nazi hatred for complex reasons stemming from the spiritual war underlying the Nazi horror, as described in various places in War Comes To God’s House. The following excerpt from War Comes (Chapter 1) is also true however:

“Those who think of the Nazi regime only as anti-Semitic fanatics miss the truth of Nazism. That is an exceptionally dangerous error. Nazism was anti-human – against human life and all the humane virtues Christianity has attempted for two millennia to instill into a fallen, depraved mankind. It is undeniable that anti-Semitism helped pave the way for the Jewish Holocaust, but the story neither begins nor ends with anti-Semitism. Let us remember that Jews were neither the first nor the only victims of Nazism. Political enemies and rivals for power were the first to learn that the Nazis’ daggers were not just for show. Those were small scale and personal murders to be sure, but the victims were no less dead; and they were a necessary and fitting beginning of the burgeoning blood lust of Nazism. They were the announcement to the world that Nazism rejected the moral laws of Christendom, and the civil laws based upon them.

The first official class of victims to die at the hands of the Nazis was the unborn. Like so many other victims, though, their tragedy has been obscured by the Jewish Holocaust. We will see that the gas chambers and crematoria in which the first wave of Jewish victims was consumed were constructed and used in the so called “mercy death” program conducted initially upon the non-Jewish population. They were built, in fact, for the children of Bethel and other institutions serving the helpless, and now unwanted untermenschen burdening the Third Reich (untermensch: subhuman – a term not reserved for the Jews alone). Indeed the whole murderous apparatus was already in place when Hitler signaled the opening of the “Final Solution for the Jewish problem” in 1941; only the enlargement of scale was necessary for the new task.

The Jewish “Final Solution” was simply the logical extension of the euthanasia program – the Jews, as inmates of concentration camps, were already wards of the state (and burdens on the state), and the same Nazi Social Darwinist philosophy masquerading as science that consigned unwanted “Aryans” to the gas chambers also consigned Jews to the gas chambers. The philosophy was the same, the apparatus was the same, even the mundane paper work required by the National Socialist bureaucracy was the same.

Those groups targeted for destruction in the euthanasia program, both the semi-official national program and the unofficial, local “wild euthanasia” make a long list. Chronologically, the list of victims begins with handicapped children institutionalized or otherwise under the jurisdiction of the state medical establishment. It includes the inmates of asylums in Germany and occupied countries – people who might have been committed for the “incurable insanity” of political opposition, alcoholism, chronic unemployment, homosexuality, as well as more traditional diagnoses of mental illness. The target list also includes the disabled and elderly, vagrants, shell-shocked soldiers, civilians who were driven over the edge by the Allied bombing, ailing slave laborers from conquered nations, and children born to the slaves. All those deaths, and yet the euthanasia program was only a small first step towards the goal of human annihilation.

Dr. Leo Alexander, Chief U.S. Medical Consultant at the Nuremberg War Crime Trials, notes that the euthanasia program “…was merely the entering wedge for exterminations of far wider scope in the political program for genocide of conquered nations and the racially unwanted.” Dr. Alexander adds to the list of planned victims, “…all the Jews and Poles and to cut down the Russian population by 30,000,000”… and, “…the genocide of the English (i.e. males, English females were to be kept for breeding)…” (Alexander, p-8)

Tragically, those were not idle dreams of madmen, but operational plans of the rulers of a powerful nation that were carried out to the fullest extent possible. The death count from the WWII Era holocausts is hard to determine exactly, it was of such a massive scale, but estimates range from fifty million to seventy million human beings roughly split between the European theater of horrors and Imperial Japan’s Asian genocide.

It is generally estimated that just under six million Jews perished, about half from Poland. Another two and a half million non-Jewish Poles and upwards of twenty million Russians were shot, gassed, starved or worked to death, along with … well, too many others to list here. Where the list would have ended, had not the Third Reich been cut short, is anyone’s guess; there is an insatiable evil abroad in the world.

The Germans themselves, those fighting and laboring for Fuehrer and Fatherland, had little more value in the eyes of Hitler’s crowd than the untermenschen consigned to the death camps. Millions of Germans died in the war Hitler & company brought down on them, capped by Hitler’s insane effort to turn a defeated Third Reich into a funeral pyre befitting a Wagnerian hero. Even the black clad SS, the backbone of Nazi power and genetic seedbed of the Herrenvolk (the Master Race) was mercilessly wasted by the fanatical amateur military strategists of the SS leadership.

Few Germans outside the SS medical/scientific hierarchy had any idea of the scope of national “hygiene” planned for the German people when time and circumstances permitted. Already doctor and patient confidentiality had been breached and data banks were being established on millions of Germans to identify those who should not, as Nazi racial science saw it, contaminate the gene pool of the future Herrenvolk. School children were being taught the principles of Rassenkunde (Racial Hygiene) and encouraged to build family trees to identify relatives with questionable genetic makeup – not only those carrying some non-Aryan racial taint, but any hint of hereditary diseases (and just about every infirmity was suspected to be of hereditary origin in the view of Nazi medical science).

Given a few generations of strictly enforced Racial Hygiene, and mankind, the Herrenvolk at least, would rise above the frailties that had afflicted mankind for so long – or so the ‘great humanitarian’ Adolph Hitler believed. To be sure, given a few more years, the Nazis would have created another holocaust that would have dwarfed the Jewish Holocaust and exceeded even the genocide of Soviet Communism in sheer numbers of victims.”