Why did God allow Hitler to come to power? And why did He allow the Holocaust to happen? These are two questions often asked by both believers and sceptics alike. And these are fair questions even if they are unanswerable since as scripture says, “the ways of God are above the ways of man.” I will try to give an answer. Be warned, my answer is intellectually consistent and visible, but like many intellectual explanations, it is emotionally unsatisfying.

To answer the first question, (Why did God allow Hitler?) recall the old joke of customer service. “You want it cheap, fast and good. Choose any two!” We should all recognize the old dilemma of tradeoffs. This was driven home to me when I saw a three-dimensional representation of a control theory problem. I could see the peaks and valleys representing the three variables of the problem. Push down on one peak of a particular variable and what was once a valley becomes a mountain as another variable runs out of control. In this problem, your choice is not to remove all the mountains, but where and under what conditions to have the mountain. I postulate that God allowed Hitler to rise up because the alternatives were worse.

I’m not a historian, but I do have a keen interest in history in general and World War II in particular. My limited studies have forced me to come to the conclusion that the Allies greatest advantage was that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were leading Germany. There is a common misconception that the Nazis were extremely efficient. That myth is wrong, they were extremely incompetent. At their core, all totalitarian regimes are incompetent. The Nazis were fortunate that their particular ineptitude was cobbled on a society that had several institutions that compensated for Nazi ineptness. The main ones being the Wehrmacht and the General Staff. Goodspeed in his book The German Wars, pointed out there were key elements in the German army that felt war was inevitable, but they had set the timeline for 41 or 42. Had Hitler waited, the Luftwaffe could’ve developed a strategic bomber that could have changed the Battle of Britain. That delay could have also changed the political situation in Britain so that Churchill might never have been Prime Minister. Without his leadership, Britain would have made an armistice, giving Germany a free hand in the east. We should all be thankful that a man of such vanity and stupidity as Adolf Hitler was leading Germany. Stalin wasn’t any better, but he had the good sense to back off and let Zhukov run the war. To drive the point home, a more judicious leader could have bidden his time and set up an empire that would’ve been harder, if at all possible, to bring down. Couple that with the antisemitism that was pervasive in Europe as whole, and Germany in particular, as well as the “stabbed in the back” theory, things could have been far worse for the Jews.

Which brings us to the second question. Why did He allow the Holocaust? When we ask this question, we also have to ask why He allowed such a radical form of Bushido take hold in Japan? We need to remember that the Japanese POW camps were just as brutal as the Nazi concentration camps (minus the gas chambers and ovens).  Earnest Gordon document this in his book Miracle on the Kwi (republished as To End All Wars) just how horrid the Japanese POW camps were. Also note that the Britain and its Empire had more soldiers die to the Japanese in the POW camps than on the battlefields. So, what can explain God allowing this?

Again, we have to remember that God’s ways are beyond us, but we can get a glimpse of His mind. Man can only see from birth to death while God sees eternity. Man looks at lives while God looks at souls. He is playing a much heftier game than we could ever see, and I believe He is willing to trade lives in order to save souls. Now consider mankind in relation to God. All of it falls into three categories: those who adore God, those who hate God, and those who are apathetic towards God. If God were to address the first group and ask if they were willing to endure pain and degradation in hopes of bringing even one soul to Him, they would say yes. Some emphatically, some reluctantly, but all would eventually say yes. The group that hates God would even listen. So, what does it matter if they live six more years or sixty more, in the end they are still lost for all eternity. The apathetic is the problem. It would take an extreme action to wake them up. Something like a concentration camp or seeing their homeland destroyed by war. Ernest Gordon became a devout Christian in the Japanese POW camps. The Doolittle Raider, Jake DeShazer made the decision to become a missionary to the Japanese people after being captured by them. Mitsuo Fuchida, the man who led the Pearl Harbor attack, became a Christian because of DeShazer. Victor Frankl tells of how many of the concentration camp prisoners became more spiritually oriented because of their suffering. Cory Ten boom tells of the women she brought to Christ will being in the camps. We will never know how many souls God claimed because He allowed the Holocaust and the war.

Man, maybe willing to sacrifice a million dollars to save one life. Maybe God is willing to sacrifice a million lives to save one soul.

#Holocaust, #Hitler, #SavingSouls