Let us open with the Talmud’s words (Megilla 6b) on the verse “L-rd, do not grant the desires of the wicked; restrain him so he cannot act on his thoughts.” (Ps. 140:9)
“Jacob said to G-d: Master of the universe, do not let the wicked Esau have the desires of his heart. ‘Restrain him so he cannot act on his thoughts’ — this refers to Germany which belongs to Edom. If they would only go into battle, they would destroy the entire world.”
The Talmud goes on to say that Germany of Edom has three hundred duchies, and because of their constant bickering, they weren’t able to unite, and that is why they didn’t make war against the entire world. It is astonishing that the Hebrew Encyclopedia (under the entry of “historic Germany”) when discussing the relationship of the Roman empire with the various Germanic tribes, mentions among the rest that modern Germany is composed of 300 duchies. Indeed, when they all united under Hitler’s leadership, they went out to destroy the world.
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Here is another prophecy that sheds a little light on the spiritual circumstances that led to the terrible tragedy which we call the Holocaust, that fearful Holocaust which we had been warned about in advance.
The terrible pain which accompanied our people during the period of the Holocaust was double in nature: 1. Terrible torments and tribulations beyond all imagination. 2. Spiritual dilemmas which came to expression at that time in the agonizing words: “Where is G-d?”
A sharp expression of this feeling can be found in the words of Alexander Donath (A Voice from the Ashes, Machshevot, page 4):
“From the depths of our tragedy, in view of the hangings and gas chambers, and in view of the unfathomable revelation of evil, we called out: “Omnipotent G-d, Merciful and compassionate G-d, where are you?” We searched for Him and didn’t find Him. We were always accompanied by the upsetting and humiliating feeling that G-d was absent. This experience was never erased or forgotten.“
In the Book of Deuteronomy (Chapter 31), the Torah refers to a certain future period in which things will happen in this order:
1. The Jewish people will forsake G-d and will not punctiliously keep the Torah’s com-mandments.
2 . Terrible evils and sufferings will befall it. G-d will respond with “concealing His Face” (i.e. He will behave “as if” He doesn’t see the terrible suffering of His children).
3. The Jewish people will say “Is it not because our G-d is no longer among us, that these evils have befallen us?”
These are the Torah’s words:
“And the L-rd said to Moses: Behold, you are [about to] lie with your forefathers, and this nation will rise up and stray after the deities of the nations of the land, into which they are coming. And they will forsake Me and violate My covenant which I made with them. And My fury will rage against them on that day, and I will abandon them and hide My face from them, and they will be consumed, and many evils and troubles will befall them, and they will say on that day, 'Is it not because our G-d is no longer among us, that these evils have befallen us?' And I will hide My face on that day, because of all the evil they have commit-ted…” (Deut. 31:16-18)
For close to two thousand years of exile, the Jewish people in all its diasporas took pride in the Torah, bravely and proudly observed its commandments, and even gave up their lives for it.
But a hundred years before the Holocaust, a new movement was born in Berlin, Germany which called itself the “the Enlightenment” (Haskalah), whose whole purpose was to create a new Jew who renounced the Torah and its commandments. This movement spread from Berlin throughout Germany and in the end, swept up a large part of European Jewry.[1]
The grievous and inevitable result was the moral deterioration and the assimilation of the young generation, and a mad rush to Christianity of a magnitude which even shocked the leaders of the Enlightenment.
A century later, the Holocaust erupted which had been “born” in Berlin, spread at first through Germany, and in the end reached all European Jewry.
Now we can return to the above-mentioned verses while contemplating the order in which the future events mentioned there occurred, and the process of how they were completely (!) fulfilled during the period of the Holocaust.
If that is not enough, it is even more astonishing that when the computer was given an order to search the Torah for the word “Holocaust” in Hebrew (שואה) wherever it appears with all of its letters equidistant, the computer found it in these exact Biblical verses! It turns out that the word Holocaust was encoded in these very verses, because there exists a direct connection between the Holocaust’s characteristics and the simple meaning of these verses. Here is a computer printout (there is a distance of 50 letters between each letter)
[1]It’s worthwhile noting here that Yemot Olam (page 60) mentions that in 1870, 70 years before the Holocaust, when the Enlightenment was catching masses of German Jews in its net under the slogan “Equality with the German people”, the Preacher of Kelm gave discourses with the following warning: “The days will come and the Germans will not lackadaisically pursue the Jew. He will formulate his hatred into a Code of Laws, may heaven save us. My friends! Take it to heart! For the sin of the Code of Law which Geiger (the leader of the Reform Jews in German) invented, a new German Code of Laws will be devised against the Jewish people, and there it will be written: ”The best of the Jews — to die!”
Similar to him, after the Reform convention in Brunschweig, an assembly at which the Reformers made their notorious decision to permit intermarriage, Rabbi Israel Salanter responded: “It says in the Torah ‘I have separated you from the nations.’ The divine promise will be fulfilled no matter what. If the Jews decide to permit a Jew to intermarry, the day will soon come when the non-Jews will forbid a non-Jew to marry a Jew.” A few decades later, the Nazis legislated the Nuremburg race laws, one of which was a prohibition to marry a Jew.
We will conclude with Rabbi Y. Kanievsky’s words in his book Chayei Olam (Chapter 25): “We see G-d’s finger in the fact that the organized divestment of the yoke of heaven began in Germany and from there spread out to other countries. Similarly, the decree to kill and destroy all the Jews began from this evil nation.”