Many pastors and churches sold out to the Nazis or else turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the suffering of Europe’s incarcerated. Satan worked himself into the very heart of the church in Germany and caused many church people—pastors and laymen alike—to rationalize and compromise with the Nazis. A hear-no-evil, see-no-evil mentality swept the country with regard to her treatment of the Jews and other “undesirables.” When Germans were questioned about things they had seen, the whole nation suddenly developed a strange form of “amnesia.” Perhaps it was a self-protecting device that helped them forget the terrible ordeal of Nazi Germany.
The nation that had produced Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and a host of other men and women for whom the world will always be grateful, also perpetrated and, often actively or passively, supported the carnage of the Third Reich.
But the casualties hit home, too, for Germany was a massive, burned-out crater by the end of the war. Three million of her soldiers died, and another million shivered in the prisons of Siberia. More than half a million civilians perished in the air raids over Germany.
But what nation is not capable of the same kind of tyranny? While Germany killed her six million prisoners, Russia killed twenty million in Siberia. Later, Stalin heaped countless other lives on top of that. The bamboo curtain imprisons millions more. The same kind of treatment and torture is inflicted upon those living today in dozens of other countries.
It is clear that the spirit of Adolf Hitler is alive in the world today, for that spirit is Satan. Even as Germany believed Hitler’s lies, the world believes Satan’s lies, for he is the father of lies. Ironically Hitler himself was deceived, saving his most savage attacks for the unarmed Jews rather than for the armies that destroyed him. Even in his final words he denounced the threat of international Jewry.