This is quite possibly the wrong forum to post this question…please move it as appropriate.
My wife received a combination glurge/revisionist history/hate mail in her e-mail. Here it is in all its gloriously bad linebreaking:
Leaving aside the fact that it’s a stupid chain letter…leaving aside the attempt to whip up religious hatred…
What do they mean by asserting the Nazis killed “10 million Christians”?
As far as I know, and I have some background reading about WWII history, the Nazis didn’t specifically single out Christians as holoocaust targets.
If they’re talking about “people the Nazis killed in battle and conquest other than Russians,” such as British and American soldiers, how do they know all those folks were Christian (by the narrow definition of American evangelicals, such as the person sending this item)?
Isn’t it pure spin to imply that the Nazis persecuted Christians with the same vigor they went after Jews?
It’s no accident the number comes up higher than the mere six million Jews killed, I’d guess. This smells of a revisionist attempt to paint Christians as bigger victims of Hitler than Jews. Sure, lots of those killed in WWII were Christians, I’m not denying that. But to say “6 M Jews and 10M Christians murdered” sounds different.
How do these worthies know how many of the 20 million Russians were Christian? Surely the communist soldiers for Stalin weren’t all party-line atheist s…surely a country with Russia’s religious traditions had a few Christians in her foxholes. Don’t they count?
Am I overlooking anything? I’d like to rebut the several implications of this item, specifically:
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That Christians were singled out and persecuted by Nazi Germany like the Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Romany;
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That more Christians than Jews died as a result of said persecution (admittedly more died in the war, but I’d argue the Germans shot at them because they were soldiers shooting back, etc.)
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That “Russians” is a bloc similar to and separate from Christians and Jews
And what does that part where the “Germans and Russians looked the other way” imply? One can impute serious evil to Stalin’s Russia…but the 20 million Russians who died in the war weren’t exactly ignored by Russia, and I just don’t think you can pin the Holocaust of the Jews on Russians “look<ing> the other way.”
All in all, it seems to me to be bad history, slanderous assertion, and consicious, revisionist, sinister spin with evil intent. But I lack firm cites – it’s not on Snopes for example. And it’s vaguely possible I’ve misunderstood some aspect of what the e-mail is really getting at…if so, please clue me in before I make a fool of myself “calling” the sender on it.
Sailboat