by Brett Manero
January 27, 2025 marks eighty years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. Today, this date is known as Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January of 1945, Soviet forces, penetrating deeply into Nazi-occupied Poland, encountered the death camp and were astonished at the horrors which they found. Auschwitz was of course the most brutal of the concentration camps of the Third Reich, and the liberation of its prisoners is often seen as the beginning of the end of the genocide which the world has come to know as either the Shoah or more commonly, the Holocaust. It remains the single most horrific mass genocide ever committed by a government against a specific group of people. It shows the shocking potential for evil that humanity has within itself, while also showing the tremendous potential for good.
Some years ago, I had a conversation with a man who seemed very decent and kind. He was a church leader, although I won’t say his name or his particular church. He was incredibly jovial and polite, and seemed to radiate cheer. We were discussing the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. At the time, the horrific terrorist group, ISIS, was masscaring Christians on a shocking scale in both Iraq and Syria. I was enjoying my conversation with this man until he made a jaw-dropping claim. When I compared the slaughter of Middle Eastern Christians by ISIS to the mass slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust, he paused, and proceeded to claim that it was not 6,000,000 Jews who were systematically murdered by the Nazis, but only 6,000. I paused in disbelief as I heard this man, with a smile on his face, try to convince me of this absurd lie. His “proof” was in some book which, conveniently, had been lost at the end of the Second World War. Jews, according to him, had increased the numbers of the Holocaust to inspire sympathy for themselves and presumably, convince the world to support the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
My question then and my question now is: how can anyone be so incredibly stupid to believe such a lie? Perhaps he was ignorant, and I believe he genuinely was. If the Holocaust “only” killed 6,000 Jews, then it still was a horrific event. But if it truly was 6,000,000 (and it was), then we must look at the awful reality of it, and never cease to forget its lessons for our world. When one considers that roughly one-third of the entire Jewish race was wiped out by the Nazis by 1945, the awful reality sinks in all the more.
All people have dignity and the right to live. This includes the Jews. All too often, there can be the scourge of anti-semitism in our world. It can even be found in the Church. It is a cancer which has no place in the People of God. Our Lord Jesus Christ spoke to the Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews,” (John 4:22). If we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of the world, then I must take His claim seriously that the Jewish people have brought salvation into the world. How so? By being the nation they were called to be when God called Abraham in c. 1800 BC, and by bringing into the world the two greatest individuals ever to walk the earth: Jesus Himself and His mother, Mary of Nazareth. The very fact that these two figures came from the Jews is reason enough to give proper respect to the Jews. If my King and Queen are Jews, then I owe the utmost respect to their nation. Anti-semitism must be confronted wherever its ugly face rears itself.
Many others died in the Holocaust as well. Catholics were also a large target of the Nazi genocide. St. Edith Stein and St. Maximilian Kolbe are famous saints who died in the camps. Edith was a Jewish woman who converted to the Catholic faith and became a nun, consequently becoming a target of the Nazis due to both her Judaism and her Catholicism. Maximilian was a Polish Franciscan who famously and heroically gave his life for another man in Auschwitz. When we consider the number of non-Jews who died, the final number comes to some 11,000,000. All of them, Jew and Gentile, deserve to be honored.
The Holocaust reminds us that evil is real. Satan and the fallen angels are real, very real. The Nazi regime was a Satanic, horrific, occult-inspired sham that somehow took control of an otherwise great nation and used it for its diabolical purposes. The swastika – that infamous symbol of Nazi lunacy – is itself a mockery of the Cross of Jesus Christ. The Cross perfectly represents the balance of horizontal and vertical, of heaven and earth, of God and man meeting together. The swastika is a sick twisting of the Cross. That in itself is the perfect symbol of evil: taking that which is good and twisting it into something ugly.
Many good people did come out of it. I mentioned the saints Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe, but there were others who also showed their inherent goodness. Perhaps the most famous is Oskar Schindler, the main character of Steven Spielberg’s near-perfect 1993 film, Schindler’s List. Schindler was a real-life Nazi and war profiteer who, after realizing the true nature of the Nazi agenda, sacrificed his fortune to save the lives of some 1,200 Jews. Schindler perhaps reminds us that while evil is real, human nature remains fundamentally good, for he was a man who allowed his conscience to transform him.
Thank goodness the Second World War ended with an Allied victory. Thank goodness Nazi Germany was defeated. Thank goodness that leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill refused to surrender to Nazi Germany, choosing instead the long and necessary road of total warfare in order to remove this scourge from humanity. The world will always be a better place because Nazi Germany was defeated.
On this eightieth anniversary of the end of Auschwitz, let us remember the millions of precious human souls who were lost in that terrible time in human history. Like the entire generation of the Second World War, few remain with us in 2025. In some ten years or so, they will all be gone. Let us remember then, honor them, thank them, and never forget the lessons of that event.