Eighty years ago this week, on January 27, 1945, the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz death camp, likely the most notorious of the Nazi extermination centers, where at least 1.1 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others were tortured, worked, and gassed to death [1]. On November 1, 2005, January 27 was designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day [2].
Only a handful of survivors took part in this week’s commemoration, as only a few remain alive. One of these was Jona Laks, now 94 years old, who was 12 years old when she was first taken to Auschwitz, and 14 when the camp was liberated [3]. Speaking of her painful return to the site of so much horror, she told CNN, “It doesn’t do any good for your heart, for your mind, for anything.” [4]. However, she went on to say, “It’s necessary. It’s necessary for the world to know” [5].
Auschwitz
The Auschwitz extermination camp, located in southwestern Poland near the city of Cracow, comprised the largest mass murder/slave labor complex in Nazi-ruled Europe—indeed, the largest mass murder facility in human history [6]. Here the Nazi industrialization of death was perfected to a clinical art. Upon arrival, the inmates were given spot medical examinations by SS guards who were also physicians. Those perceived to be physically able to work were sent to the selection officer’s right, while the very old, the very young, and those perceived to be too physically weak or ill, were sent to the selection officer’s left, to be immediately gassed [7]. The belongings of all who arrived were seized and sorted by fellow inmates [8].
When the camp was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945, close to 7,500 prisoners were found alive [9]. Items found included 837,000 women’s garments, 370,000 men’s suits, 44,000 pairs of shoes, and perhaps the most grisly find of all: 7.7 tons of bags stuffed with Jewish hair, estimated by the Soviet war crimes commission to have come from 140,000 people [10].
What can we learn from remembering one of the most grotesque horrors in the history of humanity? A great deal, to be sure, but the two lessons which stand out most for me are those we will presently consider:
Lesson No. 1: Death of an Illusion
The late Jewish author Chaim Potok, in his book The Promise, quotes the words of a fictional Jewish scholar—an atheist—as he described the impact of the death camps on human thought:
The concentration camps destroyed a lot more than European Jewry. They destroyed man’s faith in himself [11].
This, if I may dare say, was the only legitimate casualty of the Holocaust.
Unless one lived through those years, it is difficult to understand the surge of optimism and faith in the human potential which dominated intellectual circles—including theology—in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The bullets in Sarajevo and the bloodbath that followed did much to dash these hopes. In the words of historian Barbara Tuchmann, “Illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 sank slowly beneath a sea of massive disillusionment. For the price it had paid, humanity’s major gain was a painful view of its own limitations” [12].
Man’s faith in reason dissipated even more in the chimneys of Auschwitz than on the blood-soaked battlefields of World War I. This was not because the Holocaust was necessarily the worst atrocity in the human record, but because of the kind of society responsible for it. Ever since the eighteenth century, German-speaking nations had given the Western world some of the greatest contributions to education, science, philosophy, theology, and the fine arts. German composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart presented the world with perhaps the most stellar achievements in music. German philosophers and theologians—such as Hegel, Schleiermacher, Van Harnack, Heidegger, and Bultmann—did much to move Western man beyond religious traditions and the Biblical view of ultimate reality, toward an elevation of human reason as the world’s new savior. Largely because of the work of these men, Western intellectuals saw their civilization as having outgrown the narrowness and savagery imposed by authority and superstition.
And yet it was the culture which produced these men and honored their achievements, that made lampshades out of human skin! Historian Paul Johnson informs us as to where Hitler’s earliest and most fervent supporters were found:
Indeed, the German academy, taken as a whole, far from acting as a barrier to Hitlerism, assisted its progress to power. . . . . Above all, Hitler achieved his greatest success among university students. They were his vanguard. At each stage in the growth of the Nazis, student support preceded general electoral support. . . . The students were among the first to organize boycotts and mass petitions to force Jews out of government jobs and the professions, especially teaching, and these forms of action soon developed into actual violence [13].
There are Christians, even some Seventh-day Adventists, who seem to have forgotten this. They place inordinate and undeserved trust in the church’s intellectual community, extolling scholarship and worldly education as the keys to understanding inspired writings, perceiving human needs, and discerning where to go from here. Absolute standards of right and wrong are placed by too many at the mercy of these so-called “experts,” who are often every bit as dogmatic in their assertions as they allege their opponents to be. (One recalls the old saying, “People who think they know it all are very annoying to those of us who do.”)
The services of remembrance this week should instill once more in the consciousness of Christians the depths to which humans can fall when the vagaries of the mind are left to their own devices. The illusion that the unfettered intellect can solve the human dilemma breathed its last in the cyanide vapors and stench of mass cremation in the Polish countryside. May Seventh-day Adventists play no part in bringing this illusion back to life!
Lesson No. 2: Creeping Compromise
Theologically conservative Adventists are well acquainted with this phrase, as it represents one of the adversary’s most successful strategies for weakening the defenses of the human soul. This phrase can apply as much to corporate communities and nations as to individuals.
Ellen White speaks in this manner of the spiritual fall of the wisest of kings:
So gradual was Solomon’s apostasy that before he was aware of it, he had wandered far from God. Almost imperceptibly he began to trust less and less in divine guidance and blessing, and to put confidence in his own strength. Little by little he withheld from God that unswerving obedience which was to make Israel a peculiar people, and he conformed more and more closely to the customs of the surrounding nations [14].
Though it didn’t happen overnight, the consequences of this incremental journey became, in time, horrific:
From the wisest and most merciful of rulers, he degenerated into a tyrant. Once the compassionate, God-fearing guardian of the people, he became oppressive and despotic [15].
During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, when comparisons began to be made between certain political movements in America and the Nazi experience, one conservative talk show host said in an interview: “We all look at Adolf Hitler in 1940. We should look at Adolf Hitler in 1929. He was a kind of a funny kind of character that said the things people were thinking” [16]. Few who followed Hitler before he came to power, or in the early years of his rule, could have imagined the horrors of Auschwitz any more than Solomon, when he married his first pagan princess (I Kings 3:1), could have imagined offering his children to Molech (I Kings 11:5-7; II Kings 23:13).
Ellen White describes the path of creeping compromise in the following statement:
The mind of a man or woman does not come down in a moment from purity and holiness to depravity, corruption, and crime. It takes time to transform the human to the divine, or to degrade those formed in the image of God to the brutal or the Satanic. By beholding we become changed. Though formed in the image of his Maker, man can so educate his mind that sin which he once loathed, will become pleasant to him [17].
This same principle does its baleful work when individuals and nations permit cultural grievances and racial stereotypes to color their perception of societal problems. When a charismatic, entertaining figure tells the masses that their challenges and dilemmas are the fault of persons different from themselves, the notion can gradually, logically be nurtured that once these troublesome people are marginalized, even eliminated, all will be well.
Thus can a highly educated, intellectually sophisticated society be led to asphyxiate millions, and to use their hair and skin for commercial purposes. Thus can a nation founded on liberty, whose diverse mosaic has blended from the start the varying cultures of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, allow itself to make ethnic animus the engine of its policies, to denounce certain nationalities as “poisoning” the nation’s blood, and to witness the heart-wrenching breakup of families without unquenchable and righteous indignation.
Conclusion: Remembering
Such hardheartedness doesn’t develop overnight. It takes time, and it needs to be arrested early. Remembering horrific history is an imperative start. The events attending the rise and fall of the Third Reich have long been an unwelcome subject for a majority of Americans. In the words of Jewish author Herman Wouk: “Ordinary people prefer to forget it—a nasty twelve-year episode in Europe’s decline, best swept under the rug” [18].
But it dare not be. The timeless admonition of George Santayana still rings true: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For those Christians tasked with the responsibility of hastening their Lord’s return through the reproduction of His character before men and angels (I Cor. 4:9; II Peter 3:10-14), history both dark and bright cuts a way forward for the wise and consecrated.
REFERENCES
1. Sophie Tanno, Lauren Kent, and Billy Stockwell, “’Nothing will be easy about returning:’ Survivors mark 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation,” CNN, Jan. 27, 2025 https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/27/europe/world-leaders-auschwitz-commemorations-holocaust-intl/index.html
2. “International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Holocaust_Remembrance_Day
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “Auschwitz concentration camp,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Chaim Potok, The Promise (New York: Fawcett Creek, 1969), p. 315.
12. Barbara Tuchmann, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York: The Macmillan Co, 1966), p. 463.
13. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 474-475.
14. Ellen G. White, Prophets and Kings, p. 55.
15. Ibid, pp. 55-56.
16. Melissa Chan, “Glenn Beck Compares Donald Trump to Hitler,” Time, March 6, 2016 https://time.com/4248841/glenn-beck-donald-trump-hitler/
17. ----Testimonies, vol. 2, pp. 478-479.
18. Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1978), p. 726.
Pastor Kevin Paulson holds a Bachelor’s degree in theology from Pacific Union College, a Master of Arts in systematic theology from Loma Linda University, and a Master of Divinity from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University. He served the Greater New York Conference of Seventh-day Adventists for ten years as a Bible instructor, evangelist, and local pastor. He writes regularly for Liberty magazine and does script writing for various evangelistic ministries within the denomination. He continues to hold evangelistic and revival meetings throughout the North American Division and beyond, and is a sought-after seminar speaker relative to current issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He presently resides in Berrien Springs, Michigan