HITLER'S BATTLE AGAINST THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

Gary DeMar

© 2004 American Vision

Copyrighted material used by permission from American Vision

As an unapologetic bibliophile, I am always on the lookout for long-forgotten books that contain flashes of wisdom that offer counsel for our day. While on a trip to Michigan, I spent the day at John K. King Used and Rare Books in downtown Detroit and another full day rummaging through the used book departments at Kregel Christian Books and Baker Book House in Grand Rapids. Searching for books online has its advantages, but there is nothing like seeing tens of thousands of books you didn't know existed, and you've got to have!

During this latest book hunt, I came across The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler's War Against the Moral Code written in 1943. I was shocked at what I read in light of the present controversy over the Ten Commandments. Just a week before finding The Ten Commandments, I had read the following from Harold O. J. Brown's book The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization between Chaos and Transformation:

If there are no laws made in heaven, by what standards should human society organize itself? We do need laws by which to organize and structure our lives, but if God has not given them, where shall they come from? There is only one answer: We must make them ourselves. Of course, if we make our own laws they will have no more authority or force than what we ourselves possess and can assert by means of the power at our disposal. In other words, law comes to represent not the will of the Creator but the will of the strongest creatures. This became the widespread view, sometimes unexpressed but frequently explicit, of most Western societies in the first part of the twentieth century. America's great legal statesman, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., thought no differently in this respect from the great dictator, Adolf Hitler. Both of them believed that laws simply represent the will of the dominant majority. Holmes was a courteous, urbane, sophisticated gentleman, but his idea of law would have offered no opposition to the enactments of Hitler, who for a time reflected the will of Germany's dominant majority.¹

Can such a comparison be made? Holmes and Hitler? Through its abortion laws alone, America has killed nearly ten times the number Hitler killed. Appeals can no longer be made to a higher law in defense of the unborn or anyone else for that matter. To cite any of God's commandments is a violation of the court's commandments. In 1991, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned murderer's death sentence because the prosecutor quoted the Bible in his closing arguments.² A similar thing happened when a prosecutor quoted the Bible's instructions on the death penalty for murder.³ A fixed law anchored in the character of God must be censored so a flexible law can replace it, a law that can be shaped and molded to fit the agenda of the new gods, whoever they may be.

God Walking on Earth

The philosophy of George F. W. Hegel (1770-1831), followed religiously by Marxists, Fascists, Nazis, and modern-day legal theorists, expresses the argument with chilling consistency:

The Universal is to be found in the State. . . . The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. . . . We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth. . . . [T]he State is the march of God through the world.

After compiling these statements from Hegel's works, Karl Popper comments that Hegel's views mandate the "absolute moral authority of the state, which overrules all personal morality, all conscience."⁴ Once this happens, there is no longer a transcendent court of appeal for judges. All law is immanent, that is, localized in some human institution subject to control and defined by those who wear the black robes of judicial autonomy. The people are at the mercy of unelected elites and political panderers who appeal to the more base elements of society to impose their immoral worldview on the rest of us. The claim is often made that the Constitution is designed to protect the minority from the majority. Nonsense. The Preamble to the Constitution states that one of its functions is to "establish justice." Groups, whether large or small, are not in view.

The Voice of Destruction

This brings me back to the book The Ten Commandments. The Preface, written by Herman Rauschning, is frighteningly familiar given today's censorship of God's law from judicial consideration. At an intimate gathering in Berlin shortly after the National Socialists came to power, the author heard Hitler discuss his true intentions as they related to "the ethical foundation of life." Rauschning "wrote down the conversation as well and faithfully as" his memory allowed, and in 1937 passed parts of it to the future Pope Pius XII, Protestant clergymen, and published other parts in his book The Voice of Destruction. What was the response?: "skepticism, disagreement, and even confusion."⁵

Writing as an eyewitness to the events unfolding before him, Rauschning offered a warning that few people wanted to hear. "It concerns all of us," he wrote. "It deals with the deliberately planned battle against the dignified, immortal foundation of human society; the message from Mount Sinai. Let us name it clearly and simply: Hitler's Battle Against the Ten Commandments."⁶

Hitler and his malleable henchmen hated God's law. They knew that it was the only thing that stood between them and their new world order. The God of the Bible is described by Hitler as "that Asiatic tyrant." True freedom is freedom from God's law. Rauschning recounts the following ravings by Hitler while spending the evening with him and other Nazi party loyalists at the Reich Chancery:

The day will come when I shall hold up against these commandments the tables of a new law. And history will recognize our movement as the great battle for humanity's liberation, a liberation from the curse of Mount Sinai, from the dark stammerings of nomads who could no more trust their own sound instincts, who could understand the divine only in the form of a tyrant who orders one to do the very things one doesn't like. This is what we are fighting against: the masochistic spirit of self-torment, the curse of so-called morals, idolized to protect the weak from the strong in the face of immortal law of battle, the great law of divine nature. Against the so-called ten commandments, against them we are fighting.⁷

Sound familiar? For now, the materialists will permit us to hang our displays of the Ten Commandments in our homes and churches, but there can be no such standard for the State. People of good will in Germany and beyond did not believe Herman Rauschning in 1937, and there are too many Christians today who won't believe me about the Ten Commandments battle today and where it might lead. The courts are doing legally what Hitler did through terror. At least three Supreme Court justices have declared that international law should be America's standard of justice. And what is the foundation of international law? Are Americans willing to adopt the moral worldview of Europe? If Christians do not wake up, America is headed down the same dark path to destruction.

Notes:

1. Harold O. J. Brown, The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos and Transformation (Dallas, TX: Word, 1996), 88.

2. The Marietta Daily Journal (November 9, 1991), 6A.

3. "Court Rejects Bible," The Atlanta Journal (November 16, 1991), E6. Also see "Judge kills death sentence because jurors read Bible," (May 24, 2003), www.worldnetdaily.com

4. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, 2 vols. 5th rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1966] 1971), 2:31.

5. Some scholars dispute the authenticity of Rauschning's recounting of his time with Hitler. Richard Steigmann-Gall considered Rauschning's Hitler Speaks (1939), published in America as The Voice of Destruction, "to be fraudulent." (The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 29). There doesn't seem to be anything out of character in what Rauschning wrote. Hitler did do away with the Ten Commandments. Hitler was at war with the Old Testament. Others saw the true Hitler before Rauschning. See Cardinal Faulhaber, Judaism, Christianity and Germany (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1934). Then there are the public statements of Martin Bormann (1900-1945?), head of the Party Chancellery and Hitler's private secretary: "National Socialist and Christian concepts are incompatible. . . . Our National Socialist world view stands on a much higher level than the concepts of Christianity, which in their essentials were taken over from Judaism. For this reason, too, we can do without Christianity." (Martin Bormann, "National Socialist and Christian Concepts Are Incompatible" [1937], Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich, George L. Mosse [New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968], 244).

6. Herman Rauschning, "Preface," The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler's War Against the Moral Code, ed. Armin L. Robinson (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), x.

7. Rauschning, "Preface," xiii.

Article reprinted by permission of: American Vision P.O. Box 220, Powder Springs, GA 30127; (Phone) 800-628-9460; (Web) www.americanvision.org

                                         

 

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