World War 2 and the Holocaust of European Jews by the Nazi Germans were horrific events. So horrific that people tend to be stunned and revulsed by the enormity of the crimes and carnage involved. This is a particular problem for Christians, who must also deal with the dual problems of overt anti-Semitism by the historic Church and somehow reconcile the historic events of World War 2 with the Christian claim of a loving God.
Other works on World War 2 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews tend to focus on a single subject area such as military strategy, religious persecution, social disruption or legal issues. This article, on the other hand, draws upon a much wider range of subjects such as general history (religious, military, social and scientific), geology, geography, climatology, and economics. By stripping away the underbrush and debris that obstruct our view, the reader will clearly see the hand of God at work in both natural and human history as they relate to Christian Biblical end-times prophecy.
A proper understanding of World War 2, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, and the formation of the modern nation of Israel will strengthen the faith of Christians and constructively challenge the worldview of skeptics.
World War 2 (WW2) was the most important historical event during the Twentieth Century of the Christian ‘Common Era’ (C.E.). The course of modern human history had come to a major crossroads and the fate of European Jewry hung by a thread. But how are we to regard this titanic event? Was it just historical happenstance; a horrible convergence of basically random unguided factors? Or can more be reasonably read into the event than what simply appears in the history books?
The object of the following work is to try to determine, from a Christian end-times Biblical prophetic perspective, whether or not there is deeper purpose in WW2, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews and the subsequent formation of the modern nation of Israel.
“Before examining these important issues, consider this observation about forecasts: There are few inevitabilities in the course of human conduct. Decisions taken—or not taken—at various points along the road can and do shape history. In hindsight, events may appear to be inevitable. But they rarely are.”
(Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. at The Center for Security Policy(1))
“History is full of explanations. Indeed, knowing what the future had in store, one can search the past and find so many explanations and write so confidently and persuasively about them that it is quite easy to convince oneself that Hitler was bound to happen. …Hitler was neither a historical necessity, the inevitable and logical result of the past, nor an accident, totally estranged from past German experience.”
(Prof. Robert G. L. Waite, from The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (2))
To understand the true meaning and purpose of World War 2, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, and the formation of the modern nation of Israel we must clearly recognize that from the human perspective there is little in history that was actually inevitable. A long chain of events, some very specific in their nature, connected the destruction of Herod's Temple and Great Diaspora of the Jews in the First Century C.E. with the rise of the blood-racist Adolf Hitler and the genocidal Nazi Third Reich in the Twentieth Century C.E. This chain could have been broken in any of a thousand-and-one different places, resulting in a significantly different history for the Twentieth Century.
The Hebrew Jews have suffered much in the last two thousand years, and Christian anti-Semitism was a shameful reality contributing to that suffering during the intervening centuries. It can hardly be denied that this anti-Semitism was a major enabling factor of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews. But did it make the Nazi Holocaust inevitable? Most of the rest of this section deals with the question of inevitability during that period of history from the Crucifixion of Jesus to the assumption of dictatorial power in Germany by Adolf Hitler and the racist Nazis. However, to set the stage for history as it actually happened it will be helpful for us to consider the history of Europe had Christianity never existed. This is a fair question because human history can in no way be said to require someone like Jesus at any time in history, let alone a specific person doing specific things at a specific time and place. So it is quite proper and relevant to consider the effects of His absence from the world stage. For simple convenience the C.E. dating system will be retained.
Tremendous social, political, economic, military and religious forces were at work in Judea during the one hundred and fifty years prior to the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in 30 C.E. So intense and disruptive were these forces that by the time of the Crucifixion at least half of all the Jews were already living in diaspora outside of Judea. But these forces were also totally independent of Christianity. Because the Jewish Zealot revolt that resulted in the destruction of Herod's Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and Great Diaspora would almost certainly have occurred with or without Christianity, this part of history would be little affected (3).
Also mostly independent of Christianity and therefore virtually certain was the decline and eventual fall of the Roman Empire. The fifty-year period after the destruction of the Jewish Temple saw the Roman Empire at the peak of its power and geographic extent. The next three to four centuries, however, were a long slide into social, economic and military decay, along with the adoption of elaborate Greco-oriental mysticism and full-blown Caesar worship. Pagan Germans had been migrating south into the Empire for many centuries. During the period in question, that migration turned into a flood. These Germans were, however, deeply and favorably impressed by what they encountered and quite willingly assimilated into the Empire. It is highly likely that a stable but utterly pagan Roman/German hybrid culture would have emerged (4). The Hebrew Jews would simply have continued in Diaspora, local conditions prevailing.
However, from about the Fourth Century C.E. onward things get very murky. It is unknowable how this pagan Roman/German hybrid culture would have fared during successive waves of migratory invasions by hordes of barbaric Huns, Avars, Mongols, pagan Arabs, marauding Vikings, and whoever else may have come rolling through Europe and the Mediterranean. And bear in mind that these invasions were totally independent of Christianity and would have occurred anyway.
A brief comment on the Arabs is in order at this point. Because Mohammed of Mecca was as singular a historical character as Jesus of Nazareth there was no fundamental historical requirement for him to even exist. Yet without Mohammed and his religion-forming prophetic ministry, Islam would never have been. Islam seems to have had a moderating and unifying effect on what would otherwise have been multitribal/multireligion Arabs. But the Arab migratory expansion would almost certainly have occurred with or without Mohammed and Islam (5). The only points in doubt would have been the character, geographic extent, duration, and long-term impact of the Arab expansion.
In the absence of Christianity, any alternate histories would be radically—unrecognizably—different from what actually unfolded. The present day spiritual state of European society could very easily be that of Islam, paganism or outright barbarism. Also, the science, mathematics and technology of the past five hundred years were by no means inevitable and might never have occurred. The high-water mark of American civilization today might be the Aztecs, with little or no communication between the two hemispheres. How Diaspora Jews would have fared in these alternate histories is also unknowable. Their fate could have been anything from influential most-favored minority to humble obscurity down to despised vermin hunted to extinction. There's just no way to know what would have happened to them, though several of the books in the Jewish Old Testament (e.g. Exodus, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations, etc.) describe Hebrew encounters with pre-Christian pagan societies. Such encounters were often threatening or violent. The absence of Christianity would not necessarily have been a panacea for Jewish problems during the past two thousand years.
Christianity, of course, is a historical reality and has been a major factor in European history. That anti-Semitism was taught and practiced is beyond doubt or dispute. But how did this come about? Jesus of Nazareth (a Semitic Jew) was preaching the kingdom of God. Even a cursory reading of the Christian New Testament will show that Jesus was not seeking to establish an earthly government through earthly methods. Jesus admonished his followers to seek first the kingdom of God; to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's. He did not instruct them to seek empire and to become Caesar. Yet that is exactly what was to happen with Christianity as it grew and prospered.
Christianity began among the Jews in Judea shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in 30 C.E. From there it spread to already established diaspora Jewish communities and then to the Gentiles. First Century Christianity was practiced by small groups of people who were for the most part disadvantaged, persecuted, weak and scattered. Anti-Semitism would have been ineffectual at this point even if it was desired. But three or four centuries down the road things would be much different. For various reasons Christianity was growing in numbers, geographic extent and influence. This rise in the fortunes of what was becoming a formal Institution coincided with the decline of the Roman Empire. Institutional Christianity was perfectly positioned to catch the power, authority, wealth and territory that were falling into its hands (6).
The Church did not drop the ball; and herein rests the problem. During much of the past sixteen hundred years of European history, Institutional Christianity was either itself the government or had significant influence over prevailing secular governments. When the Church became a governmental power, the top-level leaders of the Church became Caesar. Their opinions, preferences, prejudices and errors had effect far out of proportion to their numbers just as the President of the United States has effect greatly out of proportion to that of the ordinary citizen. This mixing of Church and State would adversely impact not only Jews but also pagans, barbarians, Muslims and anyone else who would not submit to the authority of the Church.
Now, some straightforward reasonableness is in order here. Institutional Christianity was, to a significant extent, a human construct; a flawed compromise between the oft-times counterintuitive teachings of Jesus and the harsh demands of running a large organization in the real—and fallen—world. The historic Christian Church was not implemented directly by God from a pillar of flame and thunder nor was the non-Christian reprogrammed like a computer by deleting out the non-Christian mind and downloading in the new Christian mind upon conversion. People came into the Church as they were and developed (for good or bad) from there like children.
The term ‘Institutional Christianity’ as used above is somewhat of a misnomer, for the Institutional Church was actually made up of several different and mostly independent organizations both large and small, cooperative and hostile, covering vast stretches of territory. From its start to the present day, Institutional Christianity has been neither monolithic nor uniform, which greatly complicates historical considerations. Also, “Christians” within the Institutional Church fell into at least three broad categories:
From here things got downright messy—and dangerous. All three groups brought with them into the multifaceted Institutional Church a welter of previously held beliefs, cultures, knowledge, traditions, prejudices, fears, personal agendas, apathy, disinterest, malicious objectives, hate, greed, etc., etc., which corrupted that which was true, good and proper in Christianity. The above explains (but does not excuse) how Christianity went from the “whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” and “love your enemies” (Matt 5:39-44 KJV) of Jesus' original teachings in the First Century C.E., to the overt anti-Semitism and persecution several centuries later of those who refused to join the Church. Formal institutions—especially governmental institutions—tend to react harshly towards those who will not submit to the authority of the institution, and Institutional Christianity has been no different. Jews (and many others) have run afoul of this tendency. Throughout much of its history Institutional Christianity either acted as or behaved like a worldly government.
Before proceeding, let us consider a few speculative counterfactual scenarios for Christianity in order to see how history might have played out differently. At the one extreme, suppose that the leaders of early and medieval Christianity had been directed by God to scrupulously avoid any and all large-scale structure and organization. That is, that Christianity as a whole remained to the present day as it was in the First Century C.E.: individuals, families and disconnected communities practicing the teachings of Jesus, much like the Jews practiced Talmudic Judaism during the Great Diaspora. This would probably have had the same historical effect as if Christianity had never occurred. With no Institutional Church as an obstacle, the barbarian/pagan migratory invasions would have been the dominating events shaping European history to the present day—with all the aforementioned uncertainties. Anti-Semitism within Christianity would have had minimal impact on history.
Moving away from that extreme, another possibility (which might be considered a “best case” scenario) would have been an Institutional Church of a very tolerant and benign character. While providing enough cohesion and structure to weather the various migratory invasions, its policy on evangelism would have been to simply preach the Gospel of Jesus in a non-coercive manner. Its reaction to those who rejected the Gospel would have been to say, “Go in peace.” This scenario would have minimized anti-Semitism and Aryan racism within Christianity, thereby undercutting those tendencies in Germany and reducing the likelihood of holocaust at any point in history. But this scenario would also have virtually guaranteed open religious pluralism throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Competing religions might very well have overwhelmed the Institutional Church by sheer numbers. Again, the final impact on history would be unknowable.
Moving towards the other extreme we encounter the tough, complex, resilient Institutional Church of actual history, with all the faults noted above. Near the opposite extreme would have been an openly anti-Semitic Institutional Church. That is, a brand of Christianity utterly divorced from and deeply hostile towards its Jewish origins. The far extreme worst case would have been the above anti-Semitic Church turned lethal; justified in its own mind by an alternate history in which the Jews themselves had killed Jesus (8), especially if the gentile Romans had tried to prevent the killing. European and Mediterranean Jewry would quite likely have been exterminated centuries before the birth of Adolf Hitler.
Although the teachings and policies of the early and medieval Church cleared the field for later events, Adolf Hitler and the genocidal Nazi Third Reich were still far from inevitable. The four hundred year period of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, however, bridged the gap from the First Reich (Holy Roman Empire) to the Second Reich (Bismarck's reign) and paved the way for the Third Reich in the Twentieth Century. The cumulative effects of the Protestant Reformation, the German Peasant Revolt of 1525, Martin Luther's anti-Semitic teachings and his siding with the ruling princes during the Peasant Revolt, the waging of the Thirty Years War (9), the fragmentation and social isolation of Germany into petty principalities, the rise of militarist Junker Prussia and its most famous son Otto von Bismarck (10) left the field of historical possibilities well plowed and fertilized for future disaster.
Before proceeding, a little extra expansion on Luther and Bismarck would be beneficial. The teachings, policies and actions of these two men did much to shape the mind and character of the German People to that of anti-Semitism and subservient unquestioning obedience to governmental authority. Luther was quite direct about this in his Treatise on Good Works: “The princes of this world are gods, the common people are Satan, through whom God sometimes does what at other times he does directly through Satan, that is makes rebellion as a punishment for the people's sins. I would rather suffer a prince doing wrong than a people doing right (11).” William L. Shirer also observed in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that, “The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of “all their cash and jewels and silver and gold” and furthermore, “that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed and that they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us (12).””
Regarding the ‘Iron Chancellor’, German historian Theodor Mommsen said that Bismarck had “broken the political backbone of the nation (13).” And German sociologist Max Weber wrote that, “He taught us to distrust our own political intelligence (14).” As William L. Shirer put it, “It is true that he [i.e. Hitler] found in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to the time, a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends (15).”
But even with all of this the rise of the genocidal Nazi Third Reich was by no means a certainty. Different decisions and different actions during this period could easily have yielded a vastly different history for the Twentieth Century. To underscore this point, consider that Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany of WW1 had all of the intense anti-Semitic and Aryan supremacist sentiments accumulated to that point, an arrogant and autocratic (if only mildly anti-Semitic) leader, plus the technological and industrial capabilities to commit full-scale holocaust genocide against the Jews. Yet no such thing occurred during that time. The people of Germany were not quite ready for racist madness. But things would soon change.
As we approach the 1930s it becomes easier to see that even a small twist of fate could have had a significant impact on final outcomes. Consider a few major points from which myriad smaller points may be derived:
Any decent history text will give details of what actually happened with each of the preceding points. But let us consider the effects on history had they occurred differently—or didn't occur at all.
Adolf's father Alois was born in Austria in 1837 the illegitimate son of an unknown father (rumored by some to be Jewish). His mother married five years later, but the marriage did not last long and the husband did not adopt Alois or claim the boy as his son. Alois kept his mother's name of Shickelgruber until he was thirty-nine years old. Then, for reasons he never explained, he prevailed upon the aged brother of his long lost stepfather to swear an affidavit before the parish priest that the stepfather (named Johann Hiedler) was Alois' actual biological father. The priest cooperated, but when writing the name in the original birth register he misspelled “Hiedler” as “Hitler”.
The implication here should be fairly obvious. Historians have found no reason that would have truly compelled Alois to bother changing his name; he could have left it as it was. Had he done so the as-yet unconceived Adolf would have had the dual political liabilities of a bastard (and possibly Jewish) father and a last name that sounds as silly to Germans as it does to Americans (shout “Heil Shickelgruber!!” a few times and try to keep a straight face). But the simple act by Alois of changing his last name not only gave Adolf a legitimized Christian paternity, the completely fortuitous misspelling of “Hiedler” gave Adolf a short, crisp, martial sounding name that would serve him well in the political arena. The above is a good example of how history could have turned on small points.
Now consider Adolf Hitler's troubled youth. It is known without doubt that Alois was a strict disciplinarian who was frequently away from his family for long periods of time while performing his duties as a customs official. There are, however, darker stories of Alois as a drunken brute who physically abused both his wife and Adolf. At any rate, young Adolf was deeply disturbed by what happened in secret behind the closed doors of his home during his childhood. We may reasonably ask what the outcome might have been had Alois been a more gentle, tolerant and attentive parent and husband. It can never be proved, but the difference in Adolf's childhood would likely have deprived the Twentieth Century of its most infamous player and greatly changed the course of history these past hundred years.
The same can be said of Adolf's military service in WW1. Whatever his future crimes, Hitler was not a battlefield coward. The recipient of two Iron Crosses for valor, he very intentionally put himself in harms way as a frontline soldier (as did Churchill), suffering a leg wound in 1916 and temporary blindness in a poison gas attack in 1918. Now, either of these injuries could easily have been crippling or fatal. Again, the impact on history would have been extreme. As William L. Shirer stated, “But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and—until toward the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself—an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich (25).”
No Adolf Hitler, no Third Reich. No Third Reich, no Holocaust of the Jews. All it would have taken was one better-aimed bullet, a lucky artillery round or a slightly greater dose of poison gas. How easily history could have turned onto a totally different road.
Expanding outward, we can see that WW1 itself was rich in plausible alternate histories. Consider the Providential timing in German chemist Fritz Haber and chemical giant BASF developing commercial mass-scale nitrogen production just before the start of the War, thereby liberating German farmers and munitions makers from dependence on Chilean nitrate imports. Otherwise Kaiser Wilhelm II would hardly have dared to enter a major war with England on the enemy side for fear that the British Navy would blockade the agricultural and munitions-essential nitrate imports, eventually leaving his farms with stunted crops and his army with empty guns (26). So assuming that it even happened at all, virtually everything about WW1 could have been different. Its alliances, political maneuverings, threats, intimidations, timing, start, battles and final outcome could have varied from what actually happened, with significantly different impacts on history to the present day.
But assuming a German defeat in WW1, the victorious Allies could have made a better peace. The terms of the Versailles Treaty did not have to be so harsh. President Woodrow Wilson was not required by history to be a poor negotiator with an obnoxious personality, nor were the other Big Four leaders from Great Britain, France and Italy required by history to be vindictive towards Germany. The postwar Allies did not have to starve the people of Germany into submission to the Versailles Treaty with a food blockade, thereby traumatizing a young generation that would grow up to man the Nazi war machine. The French did not have to take the Ruhr Industrial Valley away from Germany, further traumatizing the nation with monetary hyperinflation and currency collapse. These things simply did not have to happen. They were not required by history nor were they inevitable. For the most part they represented deliberate choices made and deliberate actions taken by specific people. All with terrible consequences.
We now come to another turning point. After the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 Hitler was arrested, tried, convicted of treason, sent to prison, and the Nazi Party was banned. It was entirely within the authority of the government of Germany to have made the ban permanent, kept Hitler in prison for five or ten years and then to have banished him back to Austria. The Nazi Third Reich would have died aborning and history would have taken a totally different road.
The previous five hundred years had left the German people poorly prepared by history to attempt democracy at the end of WW1, but the attempt was made anyway. The new Weimar government established on 9 Novermber, 1918 was weakened from the start by public misperceptions that its leaders were the ones responsible for Germany's defeat in WW1 and for willing acceptance of the despised Versailles Treaty. This government was never to gain a firm footing due to civil and political unrest, severe economic difficulties and downright poor leadership. This poor leadership was probably best demonstrated in the fateful decision by Chancellor Bruening in 1930 to dissolve the German parliament and hold new elections. Economic and social conditions being what they were at the time, Hitler and the Nazi Party achieved major gains in that election over their very poor showing in 1928. The leaders of the other political parties in Germany were also weak and vacillating, which allowed Hitler to eventually maneuver his way to absolute power and control in Germany. Once again, there was nothing inevitable about any of this. The occurrences, decisions, actions, inactions, and final outcomes could have been different. Very different.
“In the autumn of 1929 the New York Stock Exchange, under roughly its present constitution, was 112 years old. During this lifetime it had seen some difficult days. …A common feature of all these earlier troubles was that having happened they were over. The worst was reasonably recognized as such. The singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen. What looked one day to be the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few as possible escaped the common misfortune. …The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.”
(Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith (28))
To conclude the first section of this article let us consider a factor that was of vital importance to the subject at hand yet was totally out of the sphere of European control: the New York Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent worldwide Great Depression. Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith examined this subject in his book The Great Crash: 1929, and three main points emerge from that work:
As Prof. Galbraith remarked, “After the Great Crash came the Great Depression which lasted, with varying severity, for ten years. …On the whole, the great stock market crash can be much more readily explained than the depression that followed it. …We do not know why a great speculative orgy occurred in 1928 and 1929. The long accepted explanation that credit was easy and so people were impelled to borrow money to buy common stocks on margin is obviously nonsense. On numerous occasions before and since credit has been easy, and there has been no speculation whatever. …As noted, it is easier to account for the boom and crash in the market than to explain their bearing on the depression which followed. The causes of the Great Depression are still far from certain (29).”
But a speculative stock market bubble did occur in the mid-to-late 1920s, and with that bubble came good times in Germany. Investment capital flowed into the country, factories reopened, production increased, employment was up and the future looked bright. However, good times for Germany meant bad times for Hitler and the Nazi Party. Membership and financial support were dropping during this period, and they were losing political ground (30). It was just a matter of time before the Nazi Party would have faded to political insignificance and historical obscurity. A lesser man would have thrown in the towel and quit. But Hitler was a man of Destiny. And Destiny was soon to deliver.
The New York Stock Market Crash of 1929 brought the good times in Germany to a screeching halt, and the Great Depression gave Hitler what he so badly needed: poverty, fear, despair, and rage. Although Hitler was a masterful orator and the Nazi Party had a strong organization and inner core, there was no way that they could compete with or succeed against prosperity. Prof. Waite concluded that, “The Depression was of absolutely basic importance to Hitler's success. Without it, it is unlikely that any amount of demagoguery, however clever or compelling, could have brought him to power (31).”
The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to dictatorial control over Germany represented a pinpoint focus of a wide array of historical forces and specific events. Hitler slipped through a razor-thin crack in the doorway of history. Many things could have happened differently so as to have rendered the historical field infertile to Hitler, to have eliminated him outright, or frustrated his political efforts. The history of the Twentieth Century could easily have been different. Radically different.
Prelude to Holocaust not only examined history as it actually happened but also examined history as it might have been. Many people (especially professional historians) are leery of ‘counterfactual’ histories. After all, actual history can be difficult and murky enough without tossing “What if?” into the pot. But to get a firm handle on what actually happened in history we absolutely must consider reasonable and likely alternatives.
The various human interactions that produce history are extremely complex. Compounding and confusing this complexity is that most situations in life do not present just one single option or course of action nor are humans uniform or consistent in their response to real-life situations. In most instances an individual or group is presented an array of options. Each option will have a consequence and lead to another (or ‘secondary’) array of options. The consequences of different options may be very similar or widely divergent and the resulting secondary arrays may or may not be connected. For example, take the simple act of greeting the boss in the morning. The array of options could include phoning in sick (thereby avoiding the issue); burying your head in paperwork and ignoring him as he passes by; giving a cheerful “Good morning, sir.”; or throwing your resignation in his face and shouting, “Take this job and shove it!”
Depending on the boss involved, the consequences of burying your head in paperwork and the polite greeting would probably be much the same and lead to connected secondary arrays of options. On the other hand, the consequences of a polite “Good morning, sir” and “Take this job and shove it” would probably be exactly opposite, and the secondary arrays would most likely be totally disconnected thereby leading to radically different courses of future events. Now, the above example had only two people in a trivial situation with a simple (if wide) array of options. But imagine the possibilities in an entire office of complex people; or a whole company; or a whole nation; or the interaction of nations. And this is assuming only the normal flow of events with nothing in particular out of the ordinary.
Human history is like the ripples on the surface of a pond sprayed with a random mix of sand, pebbles and gravel. Even the most powerful supercomputer could not accurately predict even briefly the occurrence and interactions of all of the ripples. But many of the events in history are monumental in their effect and utterly out of the ordinary. You simply cannot predict a Jesus, or a Black Plague, or a political assassination, nor can you pre-gauge their effect on history. They are like armed hand grenades tossed into the pond at random intervals. They utterly overwhelm the ordinary; and the ordinary is already difficult enough.
Counterfactuals will be encountered throughout this work. Although the author has done his utmost to ensure that all such posits are plausible, reasonable and relevant, this work is not intended as an academic tome and no attempt has been made to achieve rigorous detail or exhaustive completeness.
From the human perspective there was absolutely nothing inevitable about the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to total power in Germany. But once they achieved that power, war and Holocaust did become all but inevitable. This section will briefly examine three questions:
The first question deserves attention because in retrospect it seems amazing (even miraculous) that Hitler lost WW2. The Nazi Germans were brutally aggressive and effective in their early offensives while the rest of Europe was psychologically, politically, and militarily unprepared for war. High-ranking Nazi leader Albert Speer shed light on this question by describing the warped and limited thought processes that tended to blind and mislead Adolf Hitler:
“His illusions and wish-dreams were a direct outgrowth of his unrealistic mode of working and thinking. Hitler actually knew nothing about his enemies and even refused to use the information that was available to him. Instead, he trusted his inspirations, no matter how inherently contradictory they might be, and these inspirations were governed by extreme contempt for and underestimation of the others. In keeping with his classic phrase that there were always two possibilities, he wanted to have the war at this supposedly most favorable moment, while at the same time he failed to adequately prepare for it. He regarded England, as he once stressed, as “our enemy Number One,” while at the same time hoping to come to an arrangement with that enemy (32).”
Upon reading Chapter 25 of Speer's Inside the Third Reich and Chapter 5 of Prof. Waite's Psychopathic God we can fully comprehend this very important distinction: the Allies did not win the war in Europe; Hitler lost it. Through a series of suicidally bad decisions, actions and inactions, Hitler brought disaster down upon his own head. He repeatedly snatched defeat from the gaping jaws of victory. The following six points were crucial to the fall of Hitler's Third Reich:
These points are particularly important because all of them represent decisions made by, or options known to, Hitler; the resources and capabilities were ‘in hand’; and none of them fell under the heading of the ‘Fortunes of War’. Had Hitler chosen correctly on just one of the above points the course of the war would have been changed, either winning him victory in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, or greatly prolonging the war and the progress of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
The implications for European and Mediterranean Jews of a Nazi victory are painfully obvious: utter extinction and the closure of Palestine to the rest of world Jewry. But assuming an eventual protracted defeat for the Nazis, the outcomes of plausible alternate histories are just as bleak from the Jewish perspective for most of them would have resulted in Final Solutions even closer to total completion than what actually occurred. The extermination could have proceeded to the point that there simply would not have been enough Jewish survivors to mount a meaningfully significant Exodus back to Palestine. The modern nation of Israel quite likely would not have formed.
It is proper to point out that the Nazis were general purpose racists and that several million non-Jews were also murdered in Hitler's death camps for political, sexual, religious or racial reasons. Ironically (or fittingly) a Nazi victory would have meant that European Christianity would soon have followed European Judaism into the concentration camps for extermination. Hitler was obsessed with Aryan racial supremacy and grand Wagnerian paganism. Although Hitler retained nominal membership in the Catholic Church (and ordered his top leaders to maintain their respective church memberships) he was at best merely a Pew Warmer, and in his heart-of-hearts was fundamentally a pagan Aryan blood-purity racist who had little respect for Christianity, regarding it as meek and flabby (36). Had the Nazis prevailed in WW2 or prolonged the war before defeat, the number of non-Jewish victims of the overall Nazi Holocaust would ultimately have far exceeded that of the newly extinct European Jewish race.
In 1934, after consolidating his control over Germany, Hitler required all military personnel to swear the following binding oath of obedience and loyalty not to Germany or even to the German Constitution, but to Hitler himself: “I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath (37).” In the spring of 1938 Christian clergy were required to swear a similar personal oath to Hitler.
The period of 1934-1937 saw the arrests of hundreds of Protestant pastors. The Nazi Party made the fate of Biblical Christianity crystal clear on 13 February 1937 when Minister of Church Affairs Hans Kerrl told a group of shocked Lutheran churchmen that, “The Party stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism. …National Socialism is the doing of God's will. …God's will reveals itself in German blood. …Dr. Zoellner and Count Galan, Bishop of Muenster, in similar words have tried to make clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh. No, the main thing is deeds. Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle's Creed. …True Christianity is represented by the Party, and the German Volk are now called by the Party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity. …The church has not been able to generate the faith that moves mountains. But the Fuehrer has! The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation (38).”
A Nazi victory in WW2 would have resulted not only in the extinction of European and Mediterranean Judaism but also the total suppression of true New Testament Christianity. Weak Christians would have been intimidated into silent submission to the Party while strong Christians would have followed the Jews into the gas chambers. European Institutional Christianity would have been absorbed into the Nazi Party; the parent devoured by its own mutant child (39).
This section closes with an interesting counterfactual speculation. Most people are under the vague impression that nuclear fission was discovered at the end of the Nineteenth Century or early in the Twentieth Century. In fact, nuclear fission was discovered quite by accident in late 1938 by the nuclear chemists Drs. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Nazi Germany. While trying to form heavier isotopes of Uranium by neutron bombardment of pure uranium targets, they were dumbfounded when their test targets showed traces of elements about half the atomic weight of uranium (27).
Unable to account for the strange results, they conferred with a Jewish colleague, Lise Meitner, who had fled to Sweden to escape Nazi persecution. Meitner and her physicist nephew Otto Frisch figured out what was happening and published their results in the scientific journal Nature in January of 1939, thereby broadcasting the news throughout the scientific world. The race for the A-bomb was on.
However, it really wasn't much of a ‘race’ because the Nazis had effectively decapitated their own scientific community by driving out their most able scientists—the Jews! Considering that the Manhattan Project cost the United States a cool two billion 1940's dollars and several years of extremely difficult research and development, it was highly unlikely that Hitler's wartime Germany could have developed the Bomb at all.
To close, let us realize that the timing of the discovery of nuclear fission (like the timing of the discovery of nitrogen mass production mentioned earlier) was entirely Providential. Had the state of nuclear physics been retarded by just a few years (or had Hahn and Strassman kept their work secret within the Nazi scientific community) the start and successful conclusion of the Manhattan Project might also have been retarded. If Hitler had played just one or two of his cards correctly (as suggested above), the Allies might very well have desperately needed the A-bomb as soon as humanly possible in order to force an entrenched Third Reich to its knees before the ultimate completion of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
What if? We'll never know. Fission History
“Brichah [the European ground-transit portion of the postwar Exodus] was also partly motivated by anti-Semitism; but when all is said and done, there is a world of difference between even the worst kind of postwar anti-Semitism and the war of extermination waged against the Jews by the Germans. The motivations of Brichah were based on the question of how to live, because the overwhelming will to live was there. We shall try to show the way in which the Jews in the postwar world tried to escape not from death to life, but from unsatisfactory or even dangerous conditions to what was hoped would be a better future.” [Explanation and emphasis added]
(Yehuda Bauer (40))
One of the most important and relevant outcomes of WW2 and the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews is the formation of the modern nation of Israel. There seems to be differing opinions as to the significance (or even desirability) of modern Israel as a physical Jewish homeland, and the reader is referred to Feuerlicht's book The Fate of the Jews for a deeper treatment of the issue. The remainder of this work, however, assumes modern Israel to be of great importance.
One question that must be seriously considered is whether an Israel-like nation would have come into being if WW2 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews had not occurred. Virtually any alternate history lacking the genocidal Nazi Third Reich would have left European Diaspora Judaism intact and Jewish communities in place to the present day. By the start of WW2 the Zionist Movement had encouraged several hundred thousand Diaspora Jews to return to Palestine. But it is probably unknowable as to whether the Zionist Movement by itself would have sufficed to bring about a full-fledged nation.
As history actually played out, the Nazi Holocaust utterly uprooted and decimated European Jewry, leaving a remnant inclined toward Exodus back to a Palestine that already had a sizable Jewish population. Also, WW2 left an international alignment sufficiently conducive to favoring (even supporting) such an Exodus and the formation of modern Israel as an independent recognized nation. Again, it is probably unknowable whether such an alignment would have existed in the absence of WW2 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. But bear in mind, as Feuerlicht points out, that the Exodus and formation of modern Israel did not have to happen; they were not historically inevitable. Were it not for the social, political and economic fears fostered by residual anti-Semitic sentiments (which in the case of many “liberated” areas had turned downright murderous), the approximately half million Jewish Holocaust survivors could simply have returned to their former countries to rebuild their communities, or been absorbed into the populations of the Allied nations. Had this occurred, the Exodus back to Palestine most likely would not have happened; modern Israel would not have formed; and what we call the “Middle East Crisis” would today be nothing more than intra-Arab feuds of little concern to the rest of the world (41).
“Because geography is taught in grade schools along with spelling and arithmetic, most of us are likely to think of it as something very simple and rudimentary, something like “What is the Capital of Afghanistan?” or “Bound Iowa.” Few of us realize that it is the prince of disciplines, combining the fruits of geology, meteorology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and dozens of other specialties. The good geographer is a philosopher. The medieval Arabs, who wrote some of the finest geographical treatises ever penned, knew this. They knew that the culture of a people bears an intimate relationship to the landscape on which they live. They knew that the geography of a region shapes the way of life of its inhabitants, as the bones and muscles of a healthy man shape his skin. …If one is to understand the civilization of a people, one must start with the geography of the land they inhabit.”
(Prof. Carlton S. Coon (42))
We must now broaden our horizon to include geology, climatology, and world geography (43). There is no fundamental requirement that petroleum oil exist on planet Earth, and certainly no reason why commercially recoverable oil deposits must exist in any specific area. Yet without the vast reserves of easily recoverable oil in the Arab/Persian Middle East there would today be no particular international interest in that region, even with the presence of Israel. And recall from earlier in this work that the science, mathematics and technology of the past five hundred years were by no means inevitable. But without the petroleum dependent inventions of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (e.g. internal combustion engines, oil fired furnaces and electric generators, jet aircraft engines, etc., etc.) there would be no demand for Middle East oil, nor a “Middle East Crisis” worth worrying about.
Now consider the very real possibility that the above named inventions could have been fueled by alcohol or liquefied coal. If the North American oil fields had not formed or had been geologically inaccessible to drillers at the turn of the Twentieth Century, what we now regard as “alternative” fuels could very well have gained the same type of strangling monopolistic ‘lock’ on design, distribution, political protection, marketing and governmental regulation enjoyed today by the producers of petroleum fuels. At the very least this would have taken the United States out of the equation as far as the significance of the Middle East was concerned. Having no dependence on Arab oil, we in the U.S. could afford to wash our hands of the whole area. And the more countries that adopted petroleum alternatives, the less important the Middle East would be in international affairs (44).
Also, the geography and climate of the whole Mediterranean area could have been different. There was no fundamental planetary or geological requirement that the Pangaea landmass of the Permian Period two hundred million years ago had to break apart in any particular way or form. Had they even come into existence, Africa was not required to collide with Eurasia, nor was the Indian subcontinent required to form the climate-shaping Himalaya Mountains by colliding with the Asian landmass (45). Both could have remained as offshore continents to this very day.
Or assuming that the continental collision between Africa and Eurasia occurred, Morocco could have slammed against Spain so as to have permanently sealed off Gibraltar. This would have left the Mediterranean Basin as a desert canyon. On the other hand, the land that formed the Mediterranean could have been thrust upwards by geological forces instead of being pushed down, thereby leaving the whole area above sea level. Either way, there could be dry landmass all the way from the Baltic Sea down to Cape Algulhas in South Africa. The differences in geography and climate would have changed the course of European and Middle Eastern history, and had a significant impact on WW2, the Nazi Third Reich, the Jewish Holocaust and the postwar Exodus. (See Appendix D — World War 2 Geology )
When Abraham left Ur in the land of Chaldea the whole world was before him. In his long life he could have gone in any direction and settled on any location from Asia to Europe, Arabia to Africa. Providentially, the hand of God was upon him and eventually led him to the southeast corner of the Mediterranean coast. When Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt he also had the world before him. But the hand of God was guiding him and he led his people back to the land given to Abraham.
This would be of critical importance thirty-four hundred years later at the end of the Nazi Third Reich and WW2. The Mediterranean coastal location of Palestine would allow relatively easy passage of Jewish Holocaust survivors and Zionists back to their ancestral homeland. Although the voyage was certainly not a pleasure cruise thanks to the British naval blockade, once the Jews reached the Palestinian coastline they had but to step off the boats and they were there! (46) If the Mediterranean Sea did not exist the resulting land would either have been a deep dry hole or hundreds of miles of harsh extension of the Sahara Desert leaving Palestine utterly landlocked. Or if Abraham and Moses had been led by God to an already landlocked location, the postwar Exodus to the original Jewish homeland might have been just as difficult. Either way, the new nation of Israel could have been surrounded by enemies and cut off from aid and support.
There is a major difference between being surrounded and being cornered. An animal that is surrounded must contend with enemies attacking from every direction. All aid to the animal could be cut off by the attackers, and escape might not be possible. An animal (or nation) caught in this position would be in a desperate state. On the other hand, an animal pressed into a corner is in a much different situation. The animal knows that the ‘corner’ itself is not hostile and presents no direct danger. And since the attackers most likely can't get through the corner, the animal can use the corner as a shield to protect its back. The corner also forces the attackers to approach from a limited number of directions. The animal (or nation) can focus its defensive force in those specific directions thereby maximizing the effect of its own force. This is why a cornered animal is so dangerous and difficult to attack.
Israel has been cornered with its ‘back’ to the Mediterranean Sea from the very start. Many times the Arabs have attacked Israel, threatening to drive the Jews into the sea. However, since the Arabs have never had much in the line of a navy or amphibious assault capability, they have not been able to ‘surround’ Israel. Not only has this constrained the Arabs to attacking from the north, east, or south thereby allowing Israel to focus its own forces, but the internationally protected shipping lanes and aircraft corridors in the Mediterranean Sea have allowed aid, supplies and reinforcements to flow into Israel even during the height of war. The ‘corner’ has actually been a lifeline.
The above observations also apply to the World War 2 situation at Dunkirk. Had the Germans taken solid possession of the entire French coastline early-on and prevented any breakthrough to the beaches, they could have enveloped the British Army inland. The outcome of the battle may have been much worse than it was.
A wide-ranging examination of geology, climatology, geography, history, and technological developments allows the conclusion that modern Israel is in the one location on Earth where it could simultaneously come into existence, survive, and have maximum impact on world events and human affairs. Had modern Israel been formed outside of the Arab Middle East or if there was no commercial demand for Arab oil then Israel would be no more significant on the world stage than Ghana, Mongolia, Borneo or Ecuador. Change the timing, technology, geography, or move Israel anywhere else on planet Earth and it would fail on one or more of the above points.
NOTE: at this point I abandon all pretense of academic objectivity and editorial style “we” and “us”. What follows is strictly my own opinion.
If my examination of the evidence had indicated that Christian anti-Semitism would cause a wide range of plausible (i.e. equally likely to happen) counterfactual histories leading easily and naturally to a Nazi Third Reich, WW2, Jewish Holocaust, and a modern Israel, then the preceding work would be without any merit. But what I find most striking in all this is the utter improbability of something like a genocidal Nazi Third Reich, even with a history of Christian anti-Semitism. Or to put it another way, history should have taken the Jews anywhere but to the Nazi Third Reich and its monstrous death camps. However, once war began there was the amazing fact that Adolf Hitler managed to lose the war thereby allowing a Jewish remnant to survive for Exodus. And finally the rise—against all odds—of modern Israel.
Christians may hang their heads in shame for the violations of the teachings and commands of Jesus and the instituting of anti-Semitism by the historic Church. This was certainly and undeniably a major and inexcusable factor contributing to the Jewish portion of the Nazi extermination campaign. But this anti-Semitism was by no means the sole cause of the Jewish Holocaust. There were other very significant and independent historical forces at work over the centuries.
Now I must answer the question I posed at the beginning of the article: can more be read into WW2, the Nazi Third Reich and the Jewish Holocaust than what simply appears in the history books? My answer is an unequivocal “Yes!” For I have come to firmly conclude that God is real and is not a passive observer of human affairs. Quite the contrary, God is actively involved in shaping both natural and human history along a particular path. To truly come to grips with WW2 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, the reader must face up to two harsh realities:
Nor is God a respecter of men. From the Egyptians to the Babylonians; from the Romans to the Nazis; from the heights of the reigns of Kings David and Solomon to the Great Diaspora to the depths of the Jewish Holocaust the Almighty will raise up nations, empires and peoples, use them to His ends, and then bring them down to the dust. They are all instruments in God's hands. And the shaping of those instruments is entirely at the discretion of the Sovereign Creator. Adolf Hitler was finely crafted—carefully sculpted—to be what he was and to do what he did, as were the German people of his time.
Now, the Christian concept of a loving Father God may seem hopelessly at odds with the horrors of WW2 and the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. I will leave it to professional philosophers and theologians to try to reconcile human free will, divine predestination, and the righteous yet loving character of God. But one of the main purposes of this present physical creation is to allow a loving God to work out the difficult solution to the spiritual problems of rebellion, evil and suffering in a safely quarantined environment. There has already been one war in Heaven (which continues in some form or other to the present day) and God is not going to allow sinful unregenerated humanity to break loose so as to start another one. We will be confined here on Earth until all of God's purposes are achieved, no matter how hard the road we must travel. However, once that road has been traveled, those who have found salvation through Jesus Christ will regard the price of temporary suffering in this world to be trivial compared with the reward of eternal life in the coming perfected Kingdom of God (47).
In the meantime, we are inflicting on one another great violence, suffering and injustice. God's chosen people the Hebrew Jews have frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire of historical forces almost always beyond their direct control. It's likely that if the issue were put to a vote that most Jews today would choose to live their lives and practice their religion in peaceful harmonious obscurity. But with modern Israel as it is, where it is, obscurity is simply not an option. Whether they like it or not, the Israeli Jews are ‘center-front’ on the world stage. Now, what are we all to make of this? Is modern Israel just random happenstance; a historically curious but insignificant phenomenon?
My conclusion is that modern Israel is the anvil on which God Almighty will hammer the final fate of mankind. It is of prime importance because Christian New Testament ‘end times’ prophecy cannot even begin without it. Consider the close occurrence of the following five points relating to Christian New Testament ‘end times’ prophecy:
I am well aware of the numerous Second Coming false alarms that have occurred down through the centuries. However, the world has never before seen such a conjunction of events and capabilities as now exists. Just as history should have taken Diaspora Jews anywhere but to the Nazi Third Reich, the sixteen to eighteen hundred year period from the writing of the last canonical Christian prophetic work to the present day should have take all of us far away from the above five points. If Christian New Testament prophecy were not from God and if God has not been actively shaping human history, most prophetic predictions would never see even the possibility of fulfillment and the few that did occur would have been scattered randomly and meaninglessly across the centuries. After almost two thousand years of unguided history, modern Christianity should be holding an empty bag.
Before World War 2 many Christians had resigned themselves to viewing New Testament ‘end times’ prophecy as mere allegory, mystic symbolism or extraneous nonsense. However, from 1945 to the present (a very short period of time), the fulfillment or ready possibility of fulfillment of the above five major points has allowed Christians to take all of Biblical prophecy literally and at face value with the hope of ultimate fulfillment: the physical return of Jesus as Messiah and the establishment of God's Millennial Kingdom in preparation of the New Heaven and the New Earth. In Matthew 24 Jesus described several signs of his return and told the parable of the fig tree. That is, when you see the fig tree with tender branches and leaves (i.e. prophetic fulfillment) then summer (Christ's return) is near. The fig tree is now in full bloom. I feel that Christians today have ample good reason for excitement and confidence. As the Apostle John concluded the Book of Revelation, “Surely I come quickly: Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
In final conclusion, I realize that people can differ in their perceptions and interpretations of human history. The passage of time may very well show that there really isn't anything special about the present conjunction of world events and capabilities. Modern Israel may just be historical happenstance; peace could break out in the Middle East; the Russians might disarm and join the European Union; Communist Red China might shut down its military and become a leading force for democracy and humanitarianism; and technology may be used only for good and peaceful purposes. That is to say, the present conjunction might pass away with nary a hint of the return of Jesus or the Millennial Kingdom. However, if sense is to be made of what has happened since the turn of the Twentieth Century, the reader must answer (at the very least) these three questions:
If this work has succeeded in its purpose, the Christian reader will have realized that rather than being subjects of confusion, doubt or intimidation, World War 2 and the Jewish Holocaust can actually open opportunities for outreach, apologetics, and a strengthened faith. But it is to the skeptic—the nonbeliever—that this Epilogue in intended.
Life is short, and then you die. And you are going to be dead an awful lot longer than you will ever be alive. There is no subject of inquiry more important than determining what happens to the individual human spirit upon death. That is, what will become of you when you die? I hope that by now you will at least consider the possibility that the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible is real and actively at work in this world. The promise and hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is adoption into the family of God and eternal life in the coming perfected New Heaven and New Earth. The cost of adoption into this new family is for you to humbly admit to God that you have sinned against His holy character; that you cannot possible pay the penalty of eternal death for your sin; and that you believe that Jesus is God's uniquely born Son who paid the penalty of death in your place, rose from the grave victorious over death, and ascended to the throne of glory power and grace at the right hand of God until the time of His return to Earth.
There is no way that this short work can cover all aspects of the Christian faith and its foundation. I have barely scratched the surface of one aspect of it. But if you are still unsure—if you still need more information or evidence—it is worth every last waking moment of the rest of your life to seek out the truth. Your eternity depends on it. Trust in this promise of Jesus: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matt. 7:7 KJV)
The best place to start your search is the Word of God: the Holy Bible. If you are not comfortable with the Middle English of the King James Version, I recommend the New International Version. Begin with the Gospel according to John, then the book of Romans. After that, start with the Gospel according to Matthew and then read straight through to the end.
For those with science related or general questions, the following website has an excellent bookstore, links list, and a phone line for personal calls: Reasons to Believe . I recommend the following three books: Creation as Science; A Matter of Days; and Beyond the Cosmos.
I hope to see all of you at the banquet feast of Jesus.
“A far graver danger was added to these problems. The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. …I was even more anxious about this battle than I had been about the glorious air fight called the Battle of Britain.”
(Winston Churchill, from his wartime memoir Their Finest Hour (53))
“There are only two types of ships: Submarines and targets.”
(Bumper sticker)
When Adolf Hitler consolidated his control over Germany in 1933 and 1934 he had first and foremost in his mind the establishment of a grand Thousand Year Reich. He knew that his plans would eventually lead to war, but Hitler was hoping that war would come at his convenience. Hitler was shocked when Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939 after the German invasion of Poland, for this was years ahead of his (and Mussolini's) timetable.
Hitler and his Nazi Naval High Command were in the process of building a fully formed navy, complete with aircraft carriers. But they knew that this goal would not be reached until well into the 1940s (54). Competing with the naval shipbuilding program for resources and funding were the civil construction programs. A Thousand Year Reich deserved magnificent monuments and edifices worthy of the Master Race, and Hitler had embarked on a truly breathtaking plan to rebuild the major cities of Germany, especially Berlin (55).
Perhaps it was the headiness of the times or maybe the emphasis on manly capital ships. Whatever the reasons, Hitler and his Naval High Command let slip through their fingers the six and a half year free period of peace during which the most important weapon in the entire Nazi arsenal—the submarine—was left neglected. Complicating the situation was the prejudice of the admirals in the Naval High Command against submarines. They simply didn't understand them. In their thinking a submarine was primarily a gunboat intended to ‘slug it out’ with enemy surface ships and then escape by disappearing below the waves in order to pop up at a different location to shoot some more. However, the primary purpose and utility of a submarine was to sneak up on an enemy target and launch a torpedo at close range, and then escape totally undetected. If the U-boat (Unterseeboot) achieved success, the enemy would be taken completely by surprise.
Although Nazi Germany was nominally respecting the terms of the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement that severely limited German naval tonnage (Note: the German Naval High Command did not even utilize all the tonnage allowed for U-boats under the Agreement), there was much that could have been legally and properly done during that period to put the submarine service on an excellent footing for war in 1939. At the very least, the entire U-boat fleet could have been replaced with brand new North Atlantic-grade submarines, taking advantage of every last ton allowed under the Agreement.
Most important would have been to redesign submarines to take advantage of modern modular fabrication and assembly line construction techniques, and then established the business contracts and industrial base for the mass production of submarine modules. When needed, the industrial base could have been activated and the resulting modular sections could quickly have been sent to shipyards for rapid assembly. At the same time, a major program for crew training could have been implemented. This would not have violated the Naval Agreement. As new submarines slid out of the shipyards, pre-trained crews could have stepped aboard and quickly brought the new submarines to battle readiness.
The techniques for doing all this were readily available in the mid to late 1930s, and Hitler was well aware of these techniques (56). Indeed, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz and Minister of Arms and Munitions Albert Speer set such a program into motion in 1943. Had this program not been frustrated by the Allied bombing campaign, forty brand new U-boats would have entered Nazi service per month. It takes little imagination to envision the devastating effect this would have had if such production levels had been achieved soon after war began in September 1939. Doenitz could have had a fleet of three hundred fully operational U-boats at his disposal before the end of 1940. All it would have taken was the firm recommendation of the Naval High Command and authorization by Der Fuehrer.
But the opportunity passed them by. When war started in 1939 there was no U-boat mass production program, no large-scale crew training program, and just 56 submarines available to the whole German Navy—only 46 of which were operational and only 22 which were suitable for North Atlantic duty. However, lurking in the background was a subtle but extremely serious problem for the existing Nazi submarine service: defective torpedoes.
A submarine is only as effective as the torpedoes that it fires. The torpedoes used by the Germans in WW1 were very dependable and effective, though they did tend to leave a visible bubble trail leading back to the submarine. During the twenty-year period between the wars the German Naval Torpedo Inspectorate corrected the bubble problem, but then effected other changes in design that actually degraded the torpedoes available in 1939. The two most serious defects were in the areas of torpedo depth control and warhead detonators.
Most of us recognize a torpedo as a long metal tube with propulsion and control systems at one end and an explosive charge at the other end. The object here is for the torpedo to zip straight through the water, strike the side of an enemy vessel, then explode so as to blast a hole in the target and cause it to sink.
Two things are critical at this juncture. First, the torpedo depth control must be accurate so as to allow the torpedo to actually strike the target. However, due to defective changes in design and insufficient testing and quality control by the Torpedo Inspectorate, a significantly large percentage of the torpedoes supplied to the Nazi U-boat fleet ran much deeper than their depth-setting indicated, so as to totally under-run the target. This defect was known by the Inspectorate well before war broke out but was not corrected until long after the start of the war. Many a torpedo was wasted and many an Allied ship spared due to this totally inexcusable defect. Several officers and officials in the Torpedo Inspectorate were punished by court martial for their dereliction in this matter.
Secondly, the detonators must dependably explode the warheads. In 1939 the Torpedo Inspectorate was supplying two types of detonators: contact and magnetic. As its name implies, a contact detonator is triggered when it physically strikes the target. Aside from the quality control problem of outright defective and useless detonators was the problem of strike-angle sensitivity. In an ideal attack, a torpedo would strike its target at a perfect 90-degree angle. In an actual attack, however, the torpedo might strike the target at a much shallower angle due to the relative positions of U-boat and target, or the contours of the target's hull. The redesigned contact detonators supplied in 1939 required an angle of impact much closer to a perfect 90 degrees than the detonators used in WW1. Again, the change in design was for the worse, not the better.
The concept of the magnetic detonator is a little more complex. The Germans found in WW1 (and statistically verified in WW2) that modern compartmentalized steel ships were difficult to sink with hull-striking torpedoes. German submarines were routinely expending two, three, even four torpedoes in order to cripple or sink each enemy target. Since the German submarines of 1939 only carried twelve to fourteen torpedoes, anything that could improve the killing effectiveness of torpedoes would literally multiply the combat utility of the submarine—hence the magnetic detonator.
The idea here was for the torpedo depth control to be set so that the torpedo would run directly underneath the target. The magnetic detonator would detect the magnetized iron in the hull of the target and set off the warhead. The force of the blast would break the back of the ship, and the resulting bubble cavity from the explosion would cause the target's already damaged hull to collapse into the bubble void, either crippling or sinking even a capital ship with a single blow.
What a brilliant concept! Unfortunately for the Nazis, this concept was defeated by defective design and faulty manufacture, and by lack of adequate testing and quality control by the Torpedo Inspectorate. Now, the lack of U-boat mass production and crew training programs might be chalked up as ‘The Fortunes of War’. From the Allied perspective, however, the defects introduced into previously good German torpedo design could only be called Providential. Had the German Torpedo Inspectorate simply done nothing from 1919 until 1939 beyond correcting the ‘bubble trail’ problem, the combat effectiveness of the Nazi U-boat fleet during the critical first two years of the war would have been greatly increased. Consider these examples:
On September 17, 1939 the German submarine U-39 attacked the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal (whose planes would figure prominently in the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck). Three torpedoes armed with magnetic detonators were fired and ran true towards the target. But all three of the torpedoes detonated prematurely. Not only did a critically important capital target escape destruction due to faulty detonators, the carrier's escort hunted down and sank the U-boat.
On October 30, 1939 the U-56 penetrated a thick destroyer escort to attack the capital ships HMS Hood, Nelson and Rodney. Three torpedoes were fired and ran true to their marks. But due to faulty contact detonators the U-boat crew heard only the sound of their torpedoes breaking harmlessly against the sides of their intended targets. The commander of the U-56 was so unnerved by this incident that he was relieved of his command and reassigned to a desk job.
In April 1940 the Germans invaded Norway. The British immediately recognized the deadly danger of Nazi naval and air bases operating out of Norway, so they launched a sea-mounted counter-invasion force in order to drive out the Nazis. The Germans detected the invasion fleet and sent every available U-boat to attack it. Targets were sighted in periscope crosshairs, torpedoes were launched (often at ships lined up at anchor!) yet only a few torpedoes actually found their mark and detonated. The British suffered only trivial U-boat related casualties. An invasion fleet that should have been annihilated was allowed to almost completely escape due to the defective torpedoes launched by the mere handful of U-boats available to the German Navy.
Although counterfactual speculation, this author feels that the outcome of the battleship Bismarck fiasco in May 1941 might have been much different had the Germans been able to screen the breakout of the Bismarck and its escort cruiser Prinz Eugen with dozens of U-boats armed with fully functional and potent torpedoes. The British warships sent to sink the Bismarck (minus the previously sunk Ark Royal and the damaged or sunk Hood and Rodney!) could easily have been set upon by wolfpack after wolfpack of German submarines. The Bismarck, acting as bait, could have been the cause of the destruction or neutralization of the whole British North Atlantic Fleet and gone on to become the absolute terror of the vitally important North Atlantic supply convoys. England could have been brought to its knees by a single ship! But it was not to be.
In the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and formal declarations of war between Japan and the USA, Adolf Hitler decided to declare war on the USA in support of his Tripartite partner. The German Navy soon assaulted the east coast of the United States with an armada of (drumroll, please!) six U-boats. That's all they could spare that were fit to make the voyage (68).
The combination of shortsightedness by Hitler and his Naval High Command regarding U-boats and the hidden incompetence and dereliction of the German Naval Torpedo Inspectorate set the stage for the triple defeats in Norway, the strategically critical Battle of Britain, and the overall Battle of the North Atlantic. As relates to the subject of this work, had Hitler and the German Naval High Command placed a proper (not extraordinary; just proper) emphasis on the U-boat fleet, and if the Torpedo Inspectorate had supplied truly improved and perfected torpedoes, the Nazis could very well have sealed off the Atlantic long enough to bring England to its knees in the Battle of Britain, achieved victory in Western Europe, and allowed for the total completion of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. There would have been no European Jews left alive for Exodus, and no Palestinian Jews to greet them. They all would have been sent up the smokestacks at the death camps. Modern Israel would never have been.
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets, and on the hills. We shall never surrender.”
(Prime Minister Winston Churchill, June 4, 1940)
When you hear the term “Battle of Britain”, chances are that earth geology is not the first thing that springs to your mind. But the geology that shaped the geography of Europe largely determined not only the waging of the Battle of Britain but the outcome of World War 2 in Europe. The very existence of the British Isles and their location are entirely Providential. They are not required to exist by any law of science or principle of geology. There could be wide-open ocean from the Low Countries and the north coast of France all the way to Newfoundland. On the other hand, had Britain formed only a few miles to the east, it (like the Jutland of Denmark) would have been part of the continental landmass and therefore open to invasion by ground forces.
Great Britain has figured prominently in European history these past thousand years. But assume for a moment that the British Isles never existed. This, of course, would send shock waves through any alternate histories imaginable. Further assume, however, that history unfolded (to the extent possible) just as it did so that France declared war on Germany in September 1939. Once Hitler defeated the continental armies he would, in effect, have won World War 2 in western Europe! The Mediterranean Sea, North Africa and the Middle East would eventually have fallen to the Axis. Any American military response would have been years in the making and would have been a most arduous and dangerous undertaking across U-boat and battleship infested waters against what would have been by then a thoroughly entrenched Nazi Third Reich. The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe and the Middle East could have been brought to total completion at Hitler's leisure.
Returning to actual history we find that the British Isles are located close to the European Continent. Tantalizingly close. Maddeningly close. Hitler was not the first conqueror to find that seeing Britain is one thing but taking it is something else entirely. However, the British Islands are rather small and they are poor in the natural resources needed to support the large industrial economy developed by the British. This brings us to the twin weaknesses of Great Britain: its utter dependence on overseas shipping for supplies, and the fact that virtually the entire nation was within range of Nazi fighter planes and bombers.
Hitler had two options for taking Great Britain: physical invasion and siege. Hitler's battle plan for invasion was code named “Operation Sea Lion (57)”. Central to the success of that plan was a navy with enough transports and high-speed barges to quickly get his army across the English Channel. But because Britain and France declared war before the Nazis were ready, Hitler's navy didn't have nearly enough of the necessary ships. An attempted invasion of Britain in 1940 would almost certainly have been a disastrous failure. Of course that leaves siege, and Hitler's best bet for starving the British into submission was a strong U-boat fleet (as outlined in Appendix A above) in order to cut off all imports and reinforcements.
But as affects the immediate subject, Hitler also had an air force, and the alternate method of starving the British would have been to destroy their military/industrial/supply assets quicker than they could be repaired or replaced. This indeed was what Hitler and his top military commanders set out to accomplish in mid-1940 and the ensuing conflict was named “The Battle of Britain”. However, midway through the battle Hitler became irritated that the British showed no signs of surrendering to him. In fact, the British were putting up a hell of a good fight! They were aided by their island geography insomuch that their defences were maximized, the length of their supply lines was minimized, the English Channel and North Sea held Wehrmacht ground forces at arms length, and British fighter pilots who survived being shot down could quickly get into another plane in order to fight again. All of this worked against the Nazis.
Reich Marshall Hermann Goering, committing a serious blunder, eased up his Luftwaffe attacks on the RAF while Hitler, in a fit of anger over British retaliatory nighttime bomber air raids against Berlin, decided that he was going to bludgeon the people of Great Britain into submission through a campaign of aerial terror by destroying purely civilian targets. So they diverted the Luftwaffe away from the essential, strategic military/industrial/supply targets in order to destroy homes, shops, schools, hospitals and churches. The people of Britain showed why they were called “Great” by taking the drubbing and never, Never, NEVER giving in to the Nazis.
Had Hitler and his top commanders remained true to their original battle plan of unrelenting U-boat attacks on British shipping and aerial bombardments of strategic British military and industrial targets, there was a very good chance that they could have defanged the British by grounding the RAF and then starved England into surrender. For all intents and purposes this would have ended World War 2 in Hitler's favour and sealed the fate of European and Middle Eastern Jewry. But after suffering severe losses in the skies over jolly olde England, Hitler called off the air offensive thereby letting go his chance for victory. The later sinkings of the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz (which effectively ended the danger of the German surface navy) and the defeat of the German U-boat fleet in the Battle of the North Atlantic allowed the Allies to use the British Isles as a staging area for Continental invasion and as a stationary aircraft carrier for bombing missions against the Nazi Third Reich. Hitler was ‘done in’ not only by the limitations of his psychopathic mind but also by geological forces operating across millions of years by the hand of God.
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”
(Winston Churchill, lauding RAF fighter pilots)
“When Hitler was forced to the conclusion that his offensive was broken, and he must go on the defensive, he started boasting that he had converted Europe into an impregnable fortress. But he neglected to provide that fortress with a roof. He also left various other vulnerable spots in the wall of the so-called fortress—which we shall point out to him in due time.”
(Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt (58))
The above quote was from a message sent by President Roosevelt to the U.S. Congress in September 1943. FDR's dry humor downplayed the fact that Allied bomber groups had been suffering terrible losses due to a very vigorous Nazi anti-aircraft defense network of cannons and fighter planes. Allied per mission bomber losses at that time were upwards of 9 percent, with more than forty percent of the planes sustaining serious damage (59). And remember, those losses were per mission. Still, most of the bombers were getting through to their targets and doing severe damage to the manufacturing facilities vital to the supply and support of the Nazi war machine. It was not until early 1944 that the Allies began fielding long range fighter escorts for the bomber groups which would help fight off the Luftwaffe and bring down the casualty rates. ( P-51 Mustang )
Although Adolf Hitler certainly had a roof over his Fortress Europe, it was just as certain that it was a very leaky roof. The purpose of this appendix is to show that Hitler had in his arsenal two weapons that could have rendered the ‘roof’ all but impenetrable.
The first weapon was the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter. The advantages of turbojet propulsion over that of piston engines and propeller drives are considerable: greater thrust per pound of engine weight; greater efficiency as speed and altitude increases; and better aerodynamics (60). Both the Germans and the British were developing jet engine technology, but the Germans were the first to develop a fully functional weapon using this new and vastly superior type of engine.
The Me-262 first flew on July 18, 1942. It was an agile, twin-engine aircraft that could attain level flight speeds in excess of 500 mph—far faster than the propeller planes the Allies had in their arsenals. But what really set the Me-262 apart from other fighter aircraft was its absolutely awesome firepower: a battery of four 30mm machine cannons easily capable of quickly blasting Allied bombers to pieces (61). ( Me-262 )
So, what happened here? Why weren't the Allies swept from the skies by this new wonder weapon? The simple answer was that although Adolf Hitler was fully aware of the capabilities of this new aircraft, he refused to allow its mass production. Hitler was afraid that the additional physical stresses put on pilots by the extra speed of jet planes would be excessive, so he limited the few planes produced to use mainly as high altitude light bombers, thereby wasting a weapon that might have turned the tide of the war (62).
The second potentially ‘tide turning’ weapon was the Waterfall anti-bomber guided missile system developed by the German rocket scientists at Peenemunde in 1942. This twenty-five foot long radio-guided missile could carry a six hundred and sixty pound warhead and accurately hit targets up to fifty thousand feet of altitude. No Allied bomber could escape this weapon that operated day or night in virtually any weather. Minister of Arms and Munitions Albert Speer was confident that several thousand of these anti-bomber missiles could have been produced per month.
So, what happened? Why weren't Allied bombers dropping out of the sky like Raid-soaked flies? Once again, Hitler's warped thought processes misled him into believing that the best way to deter the Allied bombing campaign was to inflict hurt onto Britain's civilian population. Therefore he ordered that top priority be given to the production of the big V-2 ballistic missiles instead of the anti-bomber missiles. By Hitler's twisted arithmetic it made sense to expend the tremendous time, effort and resources required by the V-2 program in order to hit the British with twenty or thirty tons of poorly aimed missile-launched explosives per day (see V-2 strike locations V-2 strikes) even as the Allies were raining down two or three thousand tons of carefully aimed bombs per day on German targets (63).
The mass production and deployment of the Me-262 as an actual anti-bomber jet fighter along with the Waterfall guided missile system (in addition to all of the existing fighter aircraft and A-A cannon) would simply have shut down the Allied air war against Germany. These two weapons would have turned the already hazardous Allied bombing campaign into outright suicide. This stainless steel roof over industrial Germany would have given Grand Admiral Doenitz and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer the cover they needed to mass produce the new and improved U-boats and torpedoes on their drawing boards, with serious consequences in the Atlantic. At the very least, Hitler could have won a temporary stalemate thereby delaying defeat long enough to have completed the Final Solution to the problem of European Jewry. There would have been none left to make the Exodus back to Palestine. Modern Israel would almost certainly never have come into existence.
An exodus is a gathering together and going forth of a large number of people from one location to another. However, it helps if it is physically practical to get from the starting point to the final destination. Had the Children of Israel found favor in the sight of God at the start of the Biblical Exodus, Moses could simply have led them along the Mediterranean coastal road and arrived at the Promised Land after about two weeks of easy travel. Their disobedience and unworthiness cost them a forty-year detour through a nasty desert.
The post-WW2 Exodus of Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe to Palestine did not take forty years, but the distances and difficulties involved were much greater. After an arduous journey out of the European interior through the clandestine Brichah underground, most of the survivors traveled to Palestine by boat, departing either from Italy or France. The coastal location of Palestine allowed for a direct passage (64).
The Mediterranean Sea is such a fixture on our maps that few people stop to think about how human history might have played out in its absence. This is not empty speculation, for the existence and characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea are entirely Providential. That “Providence” could have served up dry land. Indeed, natural history showed the world a period during which the Mediterranean Basin was drastically different from today. Scientists have named that period the Messinian Salinity Crisis, and it bears directly on the subject at hand (65).
Around twenty million years ago the African Continent began colliding with Eurasia. This slow-motion collision began with a deep abyssal sea between the two continents that was filled with Atlantic and Indian Ocean seawater. Around six million years ago this continental collision had permanently closed off the connection with the Indian Ocean at Suez while the northwest part of Africa butted up against Spain forming an earth dam at Gibraltar that cut off the Mediterranean Basin's only remaining connection to the world's oceans. Atmospheric aridity caused the enclosed sea to deeply evaporate, leaving a pair of abyssal basins (one descending 15,000 feet below sea level to the east of Italy and one dropping 10,000 feet to the west) bottomed with either sterile ‘dead sea’ lakes or salt strewn deserts (66).
As natural history actually unfolded, a little over five million years ago the Atlantic sea-level rose to a point where it overflowed and broke down the earth dam at Gibraltar, forming a razor thin strait that eventually re-flooded the two basins (67). This, however, was by no means an inevitable outcome. The geology of that period could easily have formed a permanent and impenetrable barrier at Gibraltar just as it did at Suez. The perpetual draw-down or outright desiccation of the Mediterranean Basin would have had a profound effect on human history to the present day.
On the plus side, a low-water or waterless Mediterranean would have exposed open land connecting Turkey with Greece, Italy with North Africa, and of course Gibraltar would have united Morocco with Spain. On the negative side, an arid Mediterranean canyon would have provided no food; the hot, salt encrusted abyssal depths of the eastern and western basins would have discouraged travel through the basins to all but the most determined or desperate; the Black Sea would have been cut off from Atlantic sea water, rendering it a much smaller fresh water lake; with no significant standing water to contribute to the weather of the region through evaporation, the Basin would have been a dead sink for any precipitation coming in from the Atlantic; weather patterns throughout the region would have been disrupted from their present norms (69), especially the winter rains that fed the headwaters of the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers, with serious implications for Mesopotamian civilizations (70); most of the islands of the Mediterranean would have been difficult to inhabit pinnacles rising from the poisoned desert canyon floor; and all of the rivers flowing into the Basin (especially the Nile) would have cut deep gorges into the landscape, seriously impeding travel around the Mediterranean Basin and rendering Egypt useless as a seat of civilization.
This last point needs a little further explanation. Rivers prefer to travel a straight line from beginning to end, although obstacles generally force a serpentine course. But rivers also try to cut as direct a decline through the earth from the elevation at their headwaters to the elevation of wherever they finally end. The force and effect of this erosive cutting action depends on the length of the river and the difference between the starting and ending elevations. For example, consider the Mississippi River. Its headwaters are 1,475 feet above sea level at Lake Itasca in Minnesota. It reaches sea level at the Gulf of Mexico about 1,300 miles away after a meandering journey of about 2,300 miles ( Mississippi River ). This works out to a very shallow decline of a little over one foot per mile, which is just enough to keep the Mississippi River from turning into a long lake, but leaves little opportunity to cut gorges and canyons.
On the other hand, the Jordan River drops from about 1,000 feet above sea level at its headwaters in Lebanon to 1,300 feet below sea level at its end in the Dead Sea 104 miles away after snaking about 200 miles from start to finish. This works out to a 22 foot decline per mile ( Jordan River ). There are sections of the Jordan River that pass through deep gorges and qualify for white water rafting trips.
Now consider what would happen to the Nile if the Mediterranean went dry. Going just 100 miles northwest of the present mouth of the Nile out into the Basin, the land descends over 5,000 feet below sea level. The Nile River would do its very best to cut a direct decline of at least 50 feet per mile. The situation would actually be much more severe because the Blue Nile tributary would try to cut as straight a decline as possible from the high elevation of its headwaters at Lake Tana in Ethiopia at about 6,000 feet above sea level down into the abyssal depths of the eastern Mediterranean Canyon ( Lake Tana ). The Nile River would be a raging torrent flowing through Egypt in a gorge cut hundreds—if not thousands—of feet deep into the landscape. The baby Moses would have had a truly wild ride in his little reed boat, and come to a very bad end in the poisoned depths of the Mediterranean Canyon.
During ice ages, a large portion of both atmospheric and oceanic waters become bound up in polar icecaps and glaciers. This makes for cool but arid atmospheric conditions and lowered sea levels. Geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman went into considerable depth in their book Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History explaining the importance of the Black Sea to the history of civilization. Around twelve thousand years ago the most recent significant ice age resulted in lowered worldwide sea levels that exposed land bridges allowing human migration to the Americas and caused an earth dam to form at the Bosporus thereby cutting off saltwater inflow from the Mediterranean Sea (and by extension, the Atlantic Ocean) to the Black Sea. Atmospheric aridity then caused the Black Sea to evaporate to a level hundreds of feet below that of the Mediterranean, and significantly reduced its surface area. Runoff from the European glacial icecap turned the Black Sea Basin into a fertile and inviting freshwater oasis. Meanwhile, the atmospheric aridity and lowered levels of the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers of that period almost totally depopulated the Middle East as the refugees flocked to the Black Sea for relief from the drought. But the earth dam at the Bosporus was a disaster waiting to happen.
After the end of the last ice age, warmer global temperatures melted most of the icecaps and glaciers, returning tremendous amounts of water to the oceans and atmosphere, and closing off the land bridges. Around seventy-six hundred years ago rising sea levels in the Atlantic caused the Mediterranean Sea to break the Bosporus earth dam and catastrophically re-flood the Black Sea Basin with salt water, scattering the survivors to the four winds, especially back to the Mesopotamian and Nile River valleys.
The rest, as they say, is history. Or at least history as it actually played out. Human history, however, hinged on Gibraltar. Had that ancient earth dam been just a little higher, a little thicker, and a little stronger it would have held fast, and history would have changed dramatically. The Mediterranean would have been a dry hole for the past several million years, and the Black Sea would have been a smaller freshwater lake to the present day. Those who sought refuge by its shores in that prehistoric period of drought would have had little reason to ever return to their original homes.
Those who did return to the Mesopotamian River Valley might possibly have established civilizations much as they actually happened, but the Nile River Gorge would have emptied into a totally inhospitable desert canyon. There would have been no Pyramids or Pharaohs in this version of history. Also, that strip of land we call Palestine would have been indistinguishable from the rest of the desert on the downhill slide into the Mediterranean Abyss.
Returning to the subject at hand, it is difficult to imagine human history without the Mediterranean Sea. But assuming such a history delivered up WW2, the post-war Jewish Holocaust survivors would have had a much more difficult journey ahead of them for their Exodus back to Palestine. All of their choices would have been hard and long: cross the Italian land bridge and go around North Africa; cross the mountains of Greece and skirt the lip of the eastern Basin around Turkey; or go around the Black Sea, cross the Taurus/Zagros Mountains, then approach Palestine from the northeast. And having done all this, their ‘backs’ would not have been towards an internationally protected life-giving body of water but to a yawning hellhole deathtrap of a desert canyon with no help or resources for hundreds of miles. If modern Israel even came into existence, it would have been in dire straits from the very start to the present day.
As conclusion to this Appendix, I would like to briefly comment on the book Noah's Flood. Ryan and Pitman present an absolutely fascinating account of the Black Sea flooding event and make a very persuasive case that this was the basis of the many flood myths from antiquity, including the Genesis Flood in the Hebrew Torah. However, since this whole work is written from a Christian position, this author is inclined towards regarding Torah as more than just a myth or badly garbled history. The Genesis account makes three basic points regarding Noah's Flood:
Paleoanthropologists and geneticist have bracketed the appearance of modern man somewhere between 30,000 and 200,000 years ago; that is, in the very recent past. If the Genesis account is accurate, then the actual Genesis Flood would have occurred many thousands or even tens of thousands of years before the Black Sea flooding event. Regarding point 2, God commanded early Man to be “fruitful and multiply and to replenish [i.e. fill] the Earth” (Gen. 1:28 KJV). Archaeological evidence clearly shows that this had already occurred by the time of the Black Sea flooding event. Indeed, humans had made their way to everywhere on Earth but the Antarctic Continent. But it is clear from the Genesis account that mankind in Noah's time had disobeyed both parts of the command from God thereby exposing the small and clustered human population to a localized extinction event (71). The sudden, utterly unexpected, severe and prolonged rainfall of point three (which would not necessarily have been a feature of the Black Sea flooding event) was critical for two reasons: first, it would have pinned down both the human and animal populations, preventing flight; and secondly, it would have totally obscured the actual flooding event until it was too late for anyone but Noah and his family to do anything about it
I am neither qualified nor inclined to speculate as to how this event could have actually occurred so as to have suddenly wiped out humanity in the Mesopotamian River Valley, floated Noah's Ark for a year, and then to have left the Ark on (or near) the Mountains of Ararat. But considering that the titanic events of the Messinian Salinity Crisis and Black Sea flooding event have only been brought to light by science in the past forty years, your humble author is confident that God has geological and archaeological surprises in store for the future.
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