What enabled The Third Reich to rise – and are Liberals in America following the same playbook?

Historians cite Germany’s grave post-WWI economic depression and disarmament humiliation, but such factors do not explain how Hitler won millions of Germans over to Nazism. How did one of the world’s most infamous genocidal dictators get decent, law-abiding citizens to abandon their values?

Dr. Erwin Lutzer tackles this question, and his answers show some shocking parallels to liberal America today.

Like the communists before him, Hitler separated God and the practice of religion from public life.

Germany was nearly all Christian; one third Catholic and two-thirds Lutheran. So Hitler had to eliminate God in stages.

First the Fuhrer redefined Christian feasts and symbols. Christmas became “Yuletide.” Easter became an observance of Spring.

He also moved Christian holidays so as to disjoin them from their original, religious meaning. For instance, Hitler’s SS troops celebrated “Winter Solstice” on December 21st.

Today, God may not be mentioned by Name in schools, city meetings, courts, or on the job. Public schools take a secular “spring break” having nothing to do with the date or the celebration of the Resurrection.

Much like the Nazis, liberals in America have slowly taken God and religion out of law, government, education, and the workplace. The result is that government has become the Almighty Provider of material needs and Divine Arbiter of Human rights.

Hitler had to take away the powerful influence of Germany’s churches before he could ever start a war or imprison Jews by the millions. He effected a radical separation of church and state, and passed laws punishing critics of his Nazi government.

As early as 1936, Nazis arrested 800 pastors and church officials simply for opposing his party’s exclusion of non-Aryans from public office or civil service — and eventually owning any business.  Even where there were no laws, his “Brownshirts” mercilessly beat and murdered anyone who spoke against the Fuhrer.

The same silencing of conservatives is happening right now in the United States. Liberal politicians such as “The-Dogma-Lives-Loudly-In-You” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Democrat, have suggested — with many Democrats approving — that devout Christians should not be allowed in government.

Military officials have been fired or disciplined for their beliefs, while “progressive” politicians say practicing Christians may not serve in the armed forces.

County clerks like Kim Davis have been jailed for not going along with the liberal agenda — and Democrats are now saying conservatives such as Davis should not be allowed in civil service.

But liberals have not stopped with squeezing Christians out of government or the military. Adoption agencies have been run out of business by new, anti-Christian government policies. Pastors have been threatened by politicians demanding sermon reports to check for political correctness. Bakers, calligraphers, photographers, college administrators, hall renters, chapel owners, farm proprietors, flower shop owners, pizzeria restaurateurs, and others have been sued, fined, fired, threatened, slandered, vandalized, and forced to close their doors.

Violence against anyone that takes a conservative stand is increasing at an alarming rate. Death threats, assassination attempts, public calls for execution, “jokes” on social media about beheadings, car bombs, vicious beatings.

Even detailed instructions on how to murder law enforcement agents are being circulated online — all in the name of “tolerance.”

In the name of fighting fascism, liberals silence opposing ideas, carrying signs saying, “The only good fascist is a dead one.” Colleges explode in violence if a conservative speaker is so much as booked for a campus event. Even Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters publicly called for liberals to viciously harass members of the conservative Trump administration.

Let’s face it: Just as Christianity civilized the Western world, so the removal of Christianity leads to the vulgarization of society. Selflessness and a turning of the cheek have given way to “looking out for number one” and using violence as a means of “progressive” social change. Sound familiar?

Germany began paying war reparations by simply printing more money. They printed even more money to “stimulate” the German economy. The nation went off the gold standard in 1914, and flooded its economy with marks until they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.

Similarly, today’s tax-and-spend liberals never met an issue they couldn’t “solve” in the short term by throwing money at it. Perhaps the most egregious tanking of the U.S. economy came when President Obama finagled Congress into passing ObamaCare — at a cost to taxpayers of $1.34 trillion over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates in 2016.

A similar creation of money-out-of-thin-air was the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of October 2008, which threw $700 billion at the banking industry. Instead of buying troubled mortgages as promised so banks could ease consumer burden, the U.S. Treasury under former President George W. Bush basically handed taxpayer money to the very corporations whose greed caused the crisis. Then in early 2008 the Obama administration gave those same banking institutions the other half — in the name of “stimulating” the economy. In total, out of $700 billion taxpayer dollars “spent,” only $4 billion actually went to loan modifications and homeowner aid.

Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, an $825 billion “stimulus” package passed on party lines promised big, but delivered nothing.

As true conservatives have always said,you can’t tax-and-spend your way to financial prosperity. When the state tries to print money to pay its debts, the economy spirals quickly downward. The Obama recession loomed over the country until Trump administration conservative policies finally began reversing the trend. But our nation has yet to recover from its massive $21.5 trillion debt.

The complete collapse in 1929 of the already-depressed German economy left Germans eager to give power to a “savior.” Hungry and utterly destitute, Germans became desperate. “When the economy has come apart and the madness has begun, people will pay any price to live,” Lutzer observes.

Germans looked the other way on policies that harmed others, but kept their own government benefits.

They allowed their personal liberties to be whittled away in exchange for handouts in an increasingly national welfare state.

Today, many Americans are doing the same thing with Democrats. Casualties included free speech, freedom of the press, and the uninhibited exercise of religion.

Hitler created laws redefining non-Aryans as subhuman, leading to their persecution and mass slaughter. But such immoral laws didn’t come out of nowhere. They were the result of years of progressively abandoning the sanctity of human life.

The root of the Holocaust wasn’t just anti-Semitism, and it didn’t start with Hitler. It started with legalized euthanasia and abortion.

The Holocaust was simply an extension of an already-existing German policy. Its groundwork was laid in the 1920s by the German medical community, which proposed the idea that there is such a thing as a human “life that is not worthy to be lived.”

This secular, utilitarian view of the value of human life replaced the Christian principle of the intrinsic worth of every human being. It reasoned that killing a terminally ill patient ends her suffering, while helping save the German economy.

Once killing the most vulnerable and frail of human beings was considered “merciful,” the practice expanded. After the terminally ill came the chronically sick, then the mentally unfit, the socially unproductive, then the unwanted, then the racially unwanted, and finally all non-Germans.

Simultaneously, the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases made forced sterilization mandatory for those with imbecility, insanity, epilepsy, deafness, blindness, alcoholism, and other “serious hereditary diseases.”

Forced sterilization was logically followed by legalized abortion in 1933 for preborn babies “likely to present hereditary defects.”  oon after, newborns showing any defects were “destroyed” — legally. In the end, children with “badly modeled ears,” “bed wetters,” and those “difficult to train” were killed.

Gravely similar to modern abortionists who view the preborn baby as only a “mass of tissue,” the commandant of the Treblinka concentration camp explained, “It had nothing to do with humanity — it was a mass.  I rarely saw them as individuals.  It was always a huge mass.”

Germans were propagandized. The movie, “I Accuse,” showed a woman with Multiple Sclerosis being murdered by her doctor-husband while a sympathetic colleague played soft piano music in the next room. Film shorts depicted Jews in German cities as rats infesting a building.

Public schools propagandized German children. In schools, math tests included “problems” on the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the sick and crippled. A typical quiz asked how many new housing units could be built and how many marriage allowance loans could be given for the amount of money it cost the state to care for “the crippled, the criminal, and the insane.”

Hitler held mass rallies to intimidate doubtful Germans into silence. He demonized dissenters and held them up to public ridicule.

The Nazi government played with words to make the killing seem acceptable. When children were starved to death, it was referred to officially as putting them on a low-calorie diet. Killing Jews was “cleansing the land.”

And the Fuhrer made sure that his government schools, not parents, were the ones educating German children. “The children belong to the Reich,” he said.  In 1938 Hitler abolished all home schooling, and shut down all faith-based schools. How? By regulating them to death with code after code, fining them out of operation.

The parallel to liberals in America today is obvious, from school indoctrination to media complicity. President Ronald Reagan warned in 1984:  “We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide… There is no cause more important for preserving freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.”

Lutzer concludes that the same ideas that allowed Nazism to take over Germany are prevalent in America today. He concludes by asking, “What if all the Christians in Germany unitedly said ‘No’ to the Nazi regime? The history of Germany might have been different.”

One just might ask a similar question today: “What if all conservatives stood up against the liberal tide and its anti-life, anti-family, anti-patriotism, and anti-marriage agenda?  The future of the United States may well be changed for the better.”

— Father Mark Hodges is a reporter for The Horn News.