True Numbers of the Holocaust is Staggering Researched by Pastor Gary Boyd The latest revelation about the Holocaust stuns even the scholars who thought they already knew everything about the horrific details of Germany’s program of genocide against the Jewish people.
It’s taken more than 70 years to finally know the full facts because of scurrilous attempts to cover it up. What is almost beyond belief is that what really happened goes far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined. For the longest time we have spoken of the tragedy of 6 million Jews, some thinking that number covered all the dead in the holocaust. It was a number that represented the closest approximation we could come to the victims of Hitler’s plan for a Final Solution. Those who sought to diminish the tragedy claimed 6 million was a gross exaggeration. Others went further and denied the historicity of the Holocaust itself, absurdly claiming the Jews fabricated their extermination to gain sympathy for the Zionist cause. But now we know the truth.
The reality was much worse than whatever we imagined.
Holocaust Statistics and Real Numbers The unspeakable crime of the 20th century, more than the triumph of evil, was the sin of the “innocent” bystander. It wasn’t just the huge killing centers whose very names – Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen,
Buchenwald, Dachau, Majdanek, Belzec, Ravensbruck, Sobibor, Treblinka – bring to mind the ghastly images by now so familiar to us. It wasn’t just the Warsaw ghetto. It wasn’t just the famous sites we’ve all by now heard of that deservedly live on in everlasting infamy.
Researchers at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have just released documentation that astounds even the most informed scholars steeped in the previously known statistics of German atrocities. Here is some of what has now been conclusively discovered: There were more than 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe from 1933 to 1945. There were 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1000 prisoner of war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing� prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.
The best estimate using current information available is 15 to 20 million people who died or were imprisoned in sites controlled by the Germans throughout the European continent. Simply put, in the words of Hartmut Berghoff, Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, “The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought; we knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the actual numbers are unbelievable.� And what makes this revelation so important is that it forces us to acknowledge a crucial truth about the Holocaust that many people have tried to ignore or to minimize – a truth that has profound contemporary significance: The unspeakable crime of the 20th century, more
than the triumph of evil, was the sin of the “innocent� bystander.
For years our efforts to understand the Holocaust focused on the perpetrators. We looked for explanations for the madness of Mengele, the obsessive hatred of Hitler, the impassive cruelty of Eichmann. We sought answers to how it was possible for the criminal elements, the sadists and the mentally unbalanced to achieve the kind of power that made the mass killings feasible. That was because we had no idea of the real extent of the horror. With more than 42,000 ghettos and concentration camps scattered throughout the length and breadth of a supposedly civilized continent, there’s no longer any way to avoid the obvious conclusion. The cultured, the educated, the enlightened, the
liberal, the refined, the sophisticated, the urbane – all of them share in the shame of a world that lost its moral compass and willingly acceded to the victory of evil. “We had no idea what was happening” needs to be clearly identified as “the great lie” of the years of Nazi power. The harsh truth is that almost everyone had to know. The numbers negate the possibility for collective ignorance. And still the killings did not stop, the torture did not cease, the concentration camps were not closed, the crematoria continued their barbaric task. The “decent” people were somehow able to rationalize their silence, unable to do any critical thinking, almost like they did not want to know.
Just last year Mary Fulbrook, a distinguished scholar of German history, in “A Small Town Near Auschwitz� wrote a richly and painfully detailed examination of those Germans who, after the war, successfully cast themselves in the role of innocent bystanders. Here is a book review: The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twentyfive miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighboring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labor or the gas chambers.
The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had 'known nothing about it'; and that he had
personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. “A Small Town Near Auschwitz� re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authority, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a 'decent' man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical.
Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent
cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa 'knew' and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising was a battle the Jews could not hope to win against the more powerful Nazis. But they decided not to go quietly to certain death. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, the Nazis quickly destroyed Jewish life. After stripping Jews of all their rights, the Nazis forced them into a ghetto surrounded by brick walls. After more than three years of starvation, disease, and death, the Jewish people decided to resist. When the Nazis came to annihilate the ghetto, the Jewish fighters were ready to strike back. Author Linda Jacobs Altman chronicles this brave and heroic story from the Holocaust. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become a symbol of heroism throughout the world. A short time before the uprising began, Pawel Frenkel addressed a meeting of the Jewish Military fighters: Of course we will fight with
guns in our hands, and most of us will fall. But we will live on in the lives and hearts of future generations and in the pages of their history.... We will die before our time but we are not doomed. We will be alive for as long as Jewish history lives! On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, German forces entered the Warsaw ghetto equipped with tanks, flame throwers, and machine guns. Against them stood an army of a few hundred young Jewish men and women, armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails. Who were these Jewish fighters who dared oppose the armed might of the SS troops under the command of SS General Juergen Stroop? Who commanded them in battle? What were their goals? In this groundbreaking work, Israel s former Minister of Defense, Prof. Moshe Arens, recounts a true tale of daring, courage,
and sacrifice that should be accurately told out of respect for and in homage to the fighters who rose against the German attempt to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, and made a lastditch fight for the honor of the Jewish people. The generally accepted account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is incomplete. The truth begins with the existence of not one, but two resistance organizations in the ghetto. Two young men, Mordechai Anielewicz of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), and Pawel Frenkel of the Jewish Military Organization (ZZW), rose to lead separate resistance organizations in the ghetto, which did not unite despite the desperate battle they were facing.
So How Many Died? World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history in absolute terms of total casualties. Over 60 million people were killed, which was about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion). World War II fatality statistics vary, with estimates of total deaths ranging from 50 million to more than 80 million. The higher
figure of over 80 million includes deaths from war-related disease and famine. Civilians killed totalled 50 to 55 million, including 19 to 28 million from war-related disease and famine. Total combat deaths: from 21 to 25 million, including deaths in captivity of about 5 million prisoners of war. Recent historical scholarship has shed new light on the topic of Second World War casualties. Research in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union has caused a revision of estimates of Soviet WW2 fatalities. According to Russian government figures, USSR losses within postwar borders now stand at 26.6 million. In August 2009 the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers estimated Poland's dead at between 5.6 and 5.8 million.
Historian RĂźdiger Overmans of the German Armed Forces Military History Research Office published a study in 2000 that estimated the German military dead and missing at 5.3 million, including 900,000 men conscripted from outside of Germany's 1937 borders, in Austria, and in east-central Europe. The People's Republic of China puts its war dead at 20 million,] while the Japanese government puts its casualties due to the war at 3.1 million What Are the Numbers Dead in the Great Tribulation? The numbers are staggering, beyond comprehension, we can not put into perspective the horror of that nightmare from the thirties and the forties, but it is part of history. Now putting that aside for a moment
let us look at what is to come in the Great Tribulation.
World War Two was nothing, nothing, compared to the upcoming Great Tribulation. Let's look at what God promises for unbelievers left behind. Current world population (estimate) 7,321,593,981. That's 7 billion with a b. Revelation 6:7-8 says,
When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth. So in rapid order, 25% of the earth's people will die. A quarter of 7.3 billion people is 1,830,398,495 dead. That's 1.8 Billion dead. Remember the 2004 Banda Aceh Christmas day tsunami that killed 250,000 people? Bodies washing up everywhere? Multiply that by tens of thousands and millions and you have some idea of the deaths that will take place when the fourth seal is opened. It will happen fast, too.
The entire Tribulation will only be 7 years long, and the Seal judgments are opened at the outset, so pretty quickly bodies will pile up in the streets.
So after a fourth of the population dies, we have 5,491,195,486 remaining on earth. That's 5.4 Billion people.
Revelation 9:18 says that another third will die quickly also, this time in the Trumpet Judgment. "By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths." This means that a third of 5.4 billion people will die. That's another 1,812,094,510 billion dead. Billion with a B. By now there are 3,679,100,976 people left. Of course there are a great many fewer because countless numbers die in the wars, die or are killed due to violence because of no restraint on sin, and secondary causes like fires from unattended gas lines or cholera or starvation. So let's estimate another billion have died from all those causes. That leaves 2.6 billion people
and that is only halfway through the Tribulation. We have gone from 7.3 billion people down to 2 billion- or less. I suspect the death from sin will be much higher than we even can comprehend. The Holy Spirit will not be restraining sin at all. All men will be able to be as bad as they can be, moral depravity will be at highest levels ever. People will kill with impunity, for no reason, just to see you die. They will die from drugs and alcohol other bodily excesses, illness, starvation, and likely suicides. We know that the world will be used to looking at death with no problem, because by the time the Two Witnesses are killed their bodies are allowed to putrefy in the street for three and a half days while the entire
world looks at them and dances in joy over their death. (Revelation 11:9-10)
3,642,493,005 or half the current population will for a fact die. All those bodies laying around is unimaginable.
Jesus said that if he did not come back, ALL FLESH would die. (Matthew 24:22). When you try to imagine the numbers of corpses it become a horror, unimaginable and hopeless. Burials will not keep up. Every zombie/apocalypse/plague/outbreak/dystopian movie you ever watched won't even come close. The Left Behind movies were sanitized like meat under cellophane compared to the slaughterhouse the meat came from. The overriding feature of the Tribulation will be...blood. The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the
trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up. (Revelation 8:7) And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the winepress, as high as a horse’s bridle, for 1,600 stadia. (Revelation 14:20) When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" (Revelation 6:9-10)
The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea. (Revelation 16:3)
And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. When I saw her, I marveled greatly. (Revelation 17:6) I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. (Revelation 20:4) People say that the Bible is a tale of two cities, Jerusalem and Babylon. We could say without stretching it that the Age of Grace is about the blood of Jesus- Holy blood. And the Tribulation is about the blood of sinners- Judgment blood.
So when I hear someone say "I'm a pantheist, it'll all pan out in the end," I know that person has no conception of the prophetic plan of God. They have no care for the billions of people who will die like animals under God's judgment. The deaths, the stench of death, the desensitization regarding death, it all will be on a scale the mind will not be able to comprehend. Yet each one of those deaths represent a soul, made in the image of God. (Genesis 1:27) Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly
and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit. (Psalm 49:7-9) No person, regardless of his means, is able to escape death; it is inevitable. (Hebrews 9:27) This passage anticipates the second death of hell, (cf. Rev. 20-11:15), except those who by faith have repented of their sin and embraced the only adequate ransom, the one paid by the Lord Jesus Christ by His death on the cross. (cf. Matthew 20:28, 1 Peter 1:18-19). ~John MacArthur
Knowing we live in the Age of Grace and were saved in it should give us knee-weakening, heart stopping gratitude to Jesus. And knowing what is ahead for the world and its people should give us knee-weakening, heart stopping fear of God and His mighty power and Holy wrath. He is coming soon. Be ready.
Live like you're ready. Witness like it's your last day on earth, because it could be- for you when Christ comes for us in the rapture.