Intervention Theory
Did a Higher Power Defeat the Nazis?
Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying Germans as part of what Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a homogeneous society, unified on the basis of "racial purity" (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum, while excluding those deemed either to be community aliens or belonging to an "inferior" race.
The utter defeat of Nazis is something of a historical oddity. The Nazi’s were the 20th century’s equivalent of the Mongols or the Huns. They were motivated, technologically advanced, disciplined, and man for man outclassed their rivals of the time. This advantage was seen in their multiple strategic triumphs. Until the fall of 1941 they went from victory to victory always one step ahead of their opponents. They conquered almost all of continental Europe and Norway quickly and decisively.
Hitler believed that the Soviet Union would rapidly collapse in the face of sustained attack and initially it appeared his assessment was entirely correct. In the first few months of the German attack the Germans captured millions of soviet prisoners. In the fall of 1941 German’s encircled destroyed the bulk of the armies guarding the approach to Moscow capturing over 500,000 prisoners. For a brief window the Soviets had only 90,000 men and 150 tanks left to defend Moscow.
Yet the Nazi’s did not capture Moscow they were repulsed and ultimately crushed. Three historical quirks of fate led to this defeat:
1) Extreme and unusual weather that started in October 1941.
2) Odd Nazi’s error in August 1941 that compromised secret German communications.
3) Historical oddities in August of 1941 that led directly to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
All three of these oddities played a role in the defeating the Nazi regime and all three involved an unusual element of chance or circumstance. Let’s examine each of these.
A) Extreme and unusual weather Unusual Fall Rains:
Following the defeat of the armies guarding Moscow in October situation was dire for the Soviets. General Georgi Zhukov the soviet commander said the following.
“The defensive front in the west has been destroyed a huge gap has appeared in our lines and there is nothing to fill it as there are no reserves. The roads leading to Moscow are open.”
The Nazi’s were confident of victory. German Army Chief-of-staff, Franz Halder, wrote in his diary, “To save Moscow the enemy will try to bring up reinforcements, especially from the North. But any such miscellaneous force, scraped together in an emergency, will not suffice against our superior strength, and provided our strategy is any good at all
(provided the weather is not too bad), we shall succeed in divesting Moscow.”
https://www.tcc.fl.edu/media/divisions/library/citation-guide/turabianx2fchicago/Turabian-Sample-2012-Footnotes_ADA.pdf
Then the heavens broke. On the night of October 6-7, snow fell on the southern German spearhead and was subsequently followed by nearly a month of cold rain, mixed with snow, across the entire front. A seasonal shift in the regional storm track had begun pushing a series of Scandinavian Cyclones into the greater Moscow region. These intermittent snow and rain squalls, driven by strong northeastern winds, frequently grounded the two German air fleets supporting the offensive. More ominously, when coupled with the much lower fall evaporation rates, this steady wintry mix soon turned the area‘s few existing roads into quagmires.
I will provide rain for your land in the proper time, the autumn and spring rains (Deut 11:14)
With the severe mud German mobility ceased. The mud also wreaked havoc on German machinery. Fuel was consumed at three times the normal rate. General Guderian recalled that,
“. . . the roads rapidly became nothing but canals of bottomless mud, along which our vehicles could advance only at snail’s pace, and with great wear to the engines. The next few weeks were dominated by the mud. Wheeled vehicles could advance only with the help of tracked vehicles. These latter, having to perform tasks for which they were not intended, rapidly wore out.”
http://www.allworldwars.com/Effects-of-Climate-on-Combat-in-European-Russia.html The entire German army was completely stopped by mud. The muddy season of that year began in mid-October and was more severe than any other muddy season experienced in World War I or World War II. During the first stages cart and dirt roads were impassable, and then the road from Roslavl to Orel became mud-choked. Supply trucks broke through gravel-top roads and churned up traffic lanes until even courier service had to be carried out with tracked vehicles. Finally only horse-drawn vehicles could move; all other transport and the bulk of the tanks and artillery were stopped dead…
Motor vehicles broke down with clutch or motor trouble. Horses became exhausted and collapsed. Roads were littered with dead draft animals. Few tanks were serviceable….
Second Panzer Group… lost 60 percent of its tanks in mud. A division of Fourth Panzer Group, operating in the area north of Gzhatsk during the same period, lost fifty tanks without a shot being fired…no replacements were received. Germany at that time was producing only eighty-five tanks monthly… Tanks, heavy wreckers, and even vehicles with good ground clearance simply push an ever-growing wall of mud before them until they finally stop, half buried by their own motion. A sudden frost in the autumn of 1941 cemented a crippled, buried column into a state of complete uselessness, and it never moved again.
By November 1, two-thirds of the German trucks had broken down. The muddy season destroyed much of Germany’s motorized transport. What followed was winter and it was not a normal Russian winter. Instead the Nazi’s faced the most severe winter of the twentieth century.
Germany‘s soldiers froze when the full fury of the Russian winter hit on December 5, and the temperature subsequently plunged to a staggering -40º. Over one hundred thousand German soldiers had fallen out ill during the month-long Rasputitsa. Between the first week of December and early March, Army Group Center suffered frightful losses: over 256,000 dead and 350,000 sick or hospitalized with winter-related maladies such as frostbite.
Cold reduced the efficiency of German locomotives which had been built for the milder temperatures of Central Europe. During the first winter of the war 70 percent of the German locomotives broke down In the winter of 1941-12, sometimes only one third, and frequently less, of the daily quota of twenty-eight trains got through to Army Group Center. The German Second Army and Second Panzer Army together required eighteen supply trains a day and received only two. In November 1941 these armies were unable to take Tula because their supply system had broken down. Even the most critical supplies did not reach the front in time…
Paralyzed by cold, the German troops could not aim their rifle fire, and bolt mechanisms jammed or strikers shattered in the bitter winter weather. Machine guns became encrusted with ice, recoil liquid froze in guns, ammunition supply failed. Mortar shells detonated in deep snow with a hollow, harmless thud, and mines were no longer reliable.
B) Loss of operational secrecy Prior to the Fall of 1941. The Nazi’s constantly surprised their enemies. Everything from the Invasion of Norway, to the assault on France, to the invasion of Russia came as a surprise to their opponents. After 1941 the Nazi’s lost all operational secrecy resulting in a dramatic loss of initiative.
The Allies achieved this advantage in part by breaking a top secret German code called Tunny. This was the high-level Nazi encryption machines used by Hitler and Mussolini to communicate directly with their generals in the field. The Germans were convinced that the Tunny cipher system was unbreakable. The system used 12 encryption wheels, four times as many as the famous Enigma machine, which was used in the field and carried standard military communications. How did the Allies break the code?
http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030109.htmlOn 30 August 1941 two messages with the same indicator were intercepted, B.P. suspected that they had found a depth (A mistake where the Tunny operator does not reset the encryption between messages). As it turned out, the first transmission had been corrupted by atmospheric noise, and the message was resent at the request of the receiving operator. Had the sender repeated the message identically, the use of the same wheel settings would have left (the allies) none the wiser. However, in the course of the second transmission the sender introduced abbreviations and other minor deviations (the message was approximately 4000 characters long). So the depth consisted of two not-quite-identical plaintexts each encrypted by means of exactly the same sequence of key—a codebreaker’s dream. Tutte deduced the design of the Tunny machine from this pair of intercepts.
So a German officer violated protocol sending a not quite identical message twice without properly encrypting the second message. This allowed the British codebreakers to reverse-engineer the German encryption machine, a process later described as "an incredible feat of dedication". This was all made possible because "random" atmospheric noise corrupted a transmission at the exact moment a lazy operator was sending a long message and did not follow protocol. Had this atmospheric noise not occurred the Tunny code may not have been broken.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/captain-jerry-roberts-bletchley-park-codebreaker-who-helped-crack-the-tunny-code-hitler-used-to-9219984.htmlThe stream of intelligence (from Tunny) proved vital at key junctures of the war. The Russians were warned three or four months in advance of a major German offensive, Operation Citadel, the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, which went down in history as the biggest ever tank battle. The Russians were told how the attack would be carried out – a pincer movement – as well as the numbers involved…Other intelligence enabled the Allies to ascertain German movements when planning D-Day, helping save thousands of lives.
Between 1943 and 1945, Roberts and the Testery codebreakers were accessing 90 per cent of the German traffic with, at a conservative estimate, around 64,000 top-line Tunny messages intercepted and broken. Sir Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran and official historian of British Intelligence during the Second World War, has estimated that the intelligence shortened the war by at least two years
However, Tunny was not fully broken in time to warn the Soviets of the German’s 1942 summer offensive towards Stalingrad. The 1942 German invasion plan was called Case Blue and was an attack on southern Russia. The goal of this attack was to destroy the Soviet forces of 1 million soldiers at the frontline in that area and capture the soviet oil fields in the caucuses. Stalin was entirely focused on Moscow certain a German attack would occur in the North. Yet despite this misconception a quirk of history would warn the Soviets of the upcoming German attack.
Early on the morning of the 19th of June 1942 an unarmed German liaison plan guided to earth near soviet army positions. There was no trail of smoke or obvious reason for its crash landing. When soviet troops captured the aircraft they found a single bullet hole through its petrol tank. The pilot was killed before he could destroy his briefcase which contained the top secret German plans. The dead German was Major Richter head of operation for the German 23 panzer division. He was carrying plans for the upcoming Case Blue Invasion. The single bullet hitting a moving plane at exactly the right spot apparently caused the plane to run out of fuel right over Soviets positions. The secret German plans literally fell in the Soviet’s hands out of “chance”. Unlike the the previous year when the Germans surprised and surrounded millions of soviet troops Case Blue lead to very few prisoners as the Soviets conducted an orderly withdraw in front of a German attack that was no longer a surprise.
C) Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor In 1941 the US was highly isolationist. Public opinion was strongly against entry into war. On December 7th, 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. This act would change public opinion and bring the massive strength of the USA down upon the Axis ensuring their defeat. Why did Japan attack the USA? That story is a very interesting one and revolves around a man named Dean Acheson.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=22899 As of June 1941, Japanese companies had already obtained approved licenses for "7.1 million barrels of gasoline, 21.9 million barrels of crude oil, and 33,000 barrels of lubricants, altogether worth about $50 million," which meant that Japan could legally purchase from the United States "gasoline for another nine months and ordinary crude oil for an astonishing thirty-two months--enough to supply it until the end of 1943!". To Dean Acheson and some other hard-liners the idea of freezing Japanese assets became increasingly attractive, for a financial freeze by a single stroke of pen could cut U.S. exports to Japan to zero despite the approved licenses for oil purchase Japan had already obtained.
In response to Japanese troops' occupation of southern Indochina, Roosevelt wanted to impose "a dollar freeze that would subject all transactions with Japan to licensing", which gave the United States flexibility to decide later how much trade Japan should be allowed to resume based on its future behavior. According to the plan, the State Department and the Export Control Administration would continue to grant Japanese export licenses for oil, but a newly created three-man interdepartmental policy committee, the Foreign Funds Control Committee (FFCC), had to release funds for licensed exports.
When the United States froze Japanese assets in the United states the president told his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, at the time, his goal was not war in the Pacific: “I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.”. He had earlier told Churchill that a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” The PM agreed their first objective must be to defeat Hitler. Roosevelt’s involvement is unclear but with or without approval it was in August of 1941 that Assistant secretary of state Dean Acheson set the USA on the course to war against Japan.
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/05/oil_led_to_pearl_harbor/ Roosevelt, his trusted adviser Harry Hopkins and U.S. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles were attending the shipboard conference off Newfoundland in and Secretary of State Cordell Hull was on vacation at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, the authority to grant licenses to export and pay for oil and other goods was left in the hands of a three-person interagency committee dominated by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson, whom one historian described as the “quintessential opportunist of U.S. foreign policy in 1941.”
Acheson favored a “bullet-proof freeze” on oil shipments to Japan, claiming it would not provoke war because “no rational Japanese could believe that an attack on us could result in anything but disaster for his country.”
With breathtaking confidence in his own judgment, and ignoring the objections of others in the State Department, Acheson refused to grant licenses to Japan to pay for goods in dollars. That effectively ended Japan’s ability to ship oil and all other goods from the United States. Acheson’s actions cut off all American trade with Japan. When Roosevelt returned, he decided not to overturn the “state of affairs” initiated by Acheson, (possibly) because he feared he would otherwise be regarded as an appeaser.
Oil was Japan's most crucial import, and more than 80% of Japan's oil at the time came from the United States. IJN headquarters informed Emperor Hirohito its reserve bunker oil would be exhausted within two years if a new source was not found. In August 1941, Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoe proposed a summit with President Roosevelt to discuss differences. Roosevelt replied Japan must leave China before a summit meeting could be held. On September 6, 1941, Japanese leaders met to discuss this crisis. Prime Minister Konoe argued for more negotiations and possible concessions to avert war. Prime Minister Konoe, was almost assassinated by pro-war fanatics wielding ceremonial knives. Weakened by the attempt to overthrow him and losing power and influence to militarist elements, Prince Konoe’s government fell on October 16, and he was replaced by hardliners.
In August of 1941 the Nazis appeared on the brink of total victory. The UK was in danger of being economically strangled by submarine warfare and armies of the Russians were collapsing. Two months later the vectors of fate had dramatically shifted. The severe weather was crippling the German army, top secret German communications were compromised, and the stage was set for US entry into the war. Tremendous sacrifice from the allies especially Russia would follow. The Nazi’s were now destined for defeat.
When asked to defend their belief that there is no God non-believers will often point to some horrific evil in the world and ask the following question:
“Why did God permit this why didn’t he stop it?”
The horror of the Holocaust is one example commonly cited. Here is one such argument:
https://whistlinginthewind.org/2012/05/07/why-did-god-not-stop-the-holocaust/Why Did God Not Stop The Holocaust?
I can only see three possible explanations. Either God refused to prevent this genocide, in which case he is a bastard who we should not worship and praise. Or he did not know about the genocide or could do nothing to prevent it, in which case there is no point worshiping him and praying to him. Or he does not exist and they would have been as well praying for fairies or unicorns to save them. Draw your own conclusions.
Such argument ignores another possibility. Perhaps God did intervene to stop the Holocaust! The books of Jeremiah and Genesis are Holy Scripture to both Christians and Jews. These books spell out a promise made by God.
For I am with you, says the LORD, to save you: though I make a full end of all nations where I have scattered you, yet will I not make a full end of you: but I will correct you in just measure, and will not leave you altogether unpunished. (Jer. 30:11).
I will keep My covenant between Me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, as an everlasting covenant to be your God and the God of your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:7).
Let us for a moment explore a hypothetical. Is it possible that God exists and that he created a world where humans are given free will even to do evil? Is it also possible that the promises written in Jeremiah and Genesis are promises from God that will be kept?
In their early years the Nazi’s discriminated against Jews but they did not try to exterminate them. This early Nazism was not an existential threat to the Jewish people. However, with the invasion of the Soviet Union that would change.
In June 1941. Four mobile killing groups were formed called special duty units Einsatzgruppen A, B, C and D. These squads would follow the German army, as it advanced deep into Soviet territory, and carry out mass-murder operations. At first, the mobile killing squads primarily targeted adult Jewish men. Initially there was a semblance of legality given to the shootings, with trumped-up charges being read out (arson, sabotage, black marketeering, or refusal to work, for example) and victims being killed by a firing squad.
However, by August of 1941 net had been widened to include women and children.
The Einsatzgruppen gathered Jews town by town, marched them to huge pits dug earlier, stripped them, lined them up, and shot them with automatic weapons with survivors being killed with a pistol shot.
A people can perhaps survive the murder of its adult male population but it cannot survive the deaths of its women and children. By August of 1941 there was no longer be any doubt that the Jewish people were in danger of complete destruction.
http://chosenpeople.com/main/index.php/the-bible-and-the-preservation-of-the-jewish-peopleThe late Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, made a similar point, speaking at the Western Wall… (he) reminded his audience how close Hitler and Nazi Germany came to winning World War II. Had Hitler been successful, it would have meant the murder of not only six million European Jewish people, but could likely have led to the murder of virtually all the Jewish people around the globe.
Perhaps it is all a giant coincidence that it was also in August of 1941 that the fortunes of Nazi Germany took a dramatic turn for the worse. Perhaps it is simply chance that simultaneously altered so many vectors of destiny.
Nevertheless when people ask why didn’t God stop the holocaust and save the Jews I answer with a query of my own.
What makes you think he didn’t?See:
Intervention Theory: Solar Activity and Earth's Climate
