The Depths of Human Depravity

There are few people in this world who piss me off quite like Holocaust deniers, or mitigaters. Just felt like expressing that.

New data revealed on the Holocaust makes it quite clear that it was even more horrific than previously thought.

Researchers at the US Holocaust Museum have spent the last 13 years attempting to chronicle all of the death camps, ghettos, POW camps and other sites of torture, murder and dehumanization established by the Nazis from 1933 until the fall of the Third Reich.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing — first to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.
      

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, “Germanizing” prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

      

In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses, while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

And as for the revised estimated death toll:

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The depravity revealed in something like the Holocaust is in part why I am a Christian. I laugh when I hear people say things like "people are basically good." People are basically repugnant. People are basically depraved. People in their hearts basically enshrine evil. As the Apostle Paul put it:

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. --Romans 1:28-32

People basically deserve to go to hell forever, and are in need of a savior.

While you won't find many today who (openly) laud the Hitler, anti-Semitism or the Holocaust, my but weren't there countless masses who got swept up in the fervor of the moment. And though mindless zealotry may have given way to shame and regret with the passage of time, look at what evil can be accomplished in the heady passion of a season.

All of this, and ten times worse, could happen again. We're human beings, just as the Nazis were. Just as our descendants will be. Jesus help us.