From Berlin to Gaza, the Cult of Death Marches On | The American Spectator

It’s eerie. Gaza 2025 and Berlin 1945 are so uncannily alike.

It’s not just the ruins everywhere. What grabs and shakes your attention are the executions.

In April 1945, the end of Nazi Germany was inescapable. The Red Army was smashing and raping its way westward towards Berlin. The Brits, the Americans, and the Canadians controlled the air, their armies had crossed the Rhine and broken through the Siegfried Line, and Patton was surging through Bavaria and nearing Czechoslovakia. The Nazi empire of death was being exposed to the world as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Buchenwald fell into Allied hands. The end of the Third Reich could come any day.

But the diehard Nazis refused to do anything other than double down on death. They executed anyone they thought was responsible for betraying them, anyone who seemed ready to welcome the swiftly approaching end of Hitler’s regime. Lists were drawn up of prisoners of conscience who were killed when liberation was only days away, taking away people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Wilhelm Canaris. Less famous people were targeted as well. Children were being shanghaied to fight, and those who tried to evade were slaughtered. Lampposts were decorated with the hanged, men, women, and children, often festooned with a sign spelling out their capital heresy. (RELATED: Truth & Treason: A Tale of Moral Courage)

Today, we see the videos of Hamas, still trying to play for time, not disarming, using every remaining second of their rump empire in service of their cult of death, hauling out Gazans from their homes and executing them in the streets for disloyalty to Hamas’s cult, doing what is their goal and their method at once – spreading death. (RELATED: Surprise! Hamas Has Already Doomed Peace)

Hitler was what stared back from the bottom of Nietzsche’s abyss. He knew people needed a faith, and he took the place occupied in the West by the God of life and brought in his God of death. He preached Darwinian victory and led his followers in an ecstasy of killing to almost achieve it.

But in casting aside civilization and by unleashing death on a massive scale, he knew that the surest victor was, in the end, death itself. Piers Brendon caught the essence of what Hitler’s followers either embraced in him or ignored, but never confronted.

Hitler’s path of glory led to the grave, to the final catastrophe which had long haunted his mind, to the twilight of the gods. Soaked in the romance of Wagner, whose great opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen culminates in Wotan’s burning Valhalla, Hitler seemed to relish the prospect of ending his days in an inferno of fire and blood. Shortly before becoming Chancellor, he adumbrated that terrible conclusion: in defeat “we shall never capitulate — no, never… We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world down with us — a world in flames.” And he hummed a motif from Götterdämmerung.

Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, professed a similar embrace of death and scorn of those who, following the teaching of the God of Israel, choose life: “We love death as much as the Israelis love life.” This idea was enshrined in Hamas’s 1988 charter, which said of itself: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” No Wagner for these fellows. They famously used the Nova Festival as an occasion to rape, torture, and murder a few hundred young Israeli music lovers. (RELATED: The Failing Cease-Fire)

Why might Trump have negotiated a deal with people who clearly are Hitlerian in every essential, proving again and again that death is their goal above all? (RELATED: The Trump Peace Plan: Promise, Pause, or Illusion)

A hint may be found in Churchill’s words as, in 1939, Parliament prepared to declare war on Germany following its invasion of Poland:

The responsibility of the terrible events that are now taking place rests upon one man — the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery to serve his own ambition.

His Majesty’s Government, by their patience and perseverance in seeking every avenue of peace, have preserved the moral strength and unity of the nation.

The preservation of moral strength and the unity of the nation.

If we did not know it before, Vietnam showed us that democracies cannot successfully make war if their nation does not have a united sense of the moral necessity to oppose evil. Until Hitler showed that his word meant nothing by his rapid dishonoring of the Munich agreements, Britain and France shied away from war, even when it was clear — to Churchill then and to us all in hindsight — that a tough stance, timely taken, could have averted the unparalleled misery of World War II.

The God-shaped hole in the heart of civilization is larger now than it was in the 1930s. Even more than then, a case has to be made that massacring babies, raping women, kidnapping hundreds, and celebrating the deaths online, on phone, and in orgasmic crowds abusing a half-naked woman’s corpse is actually morally problematic, and that a disciplined military campaign razor-focused on eliminating the ability of Hamas to fulfill its pledge to continue doing such outrages is morally sound.

Thus, enough people must see that the murders go on, as death must be worshipped by all accounts until Hamas at last gets its “loftiest wish” to die for what they call god. We trust the people have souls to see. We trust in that spark of the God of life in them all, even when it seems hidden or fast asleep. We must help that spark to grow, help awaken the sleepers from their slumber. We must demonstrate the highest of aims, help it to resonate in their souls. And so we must hold open the door for the return — the return of all to their own spark of holiness, the image of God granted to all. We defy the deification of death with the message of return to life.

Central to the Bible is that there is something higher than law, acknowledged by law itself as superior. Called teshuva in Hebrew, meaning returning, it means that we can always return from our failings if only we choose to do that. As Ezekiel put God’s message so succinctly millennia ago, “I do not desire the death of those who die — instead, return and live!” To the degree that we can do that without gravely endangering ourselves and the innocent, we must point to the pathway of teshuva, of return, even to the wicked.

What a miracle it would be if the death-lovers testified to the truth of the God of life!

Trump this last week was not sanguine. “They will disarm or we will disarm them,” he said. If they hear the message of life, what a celebration will be in order. If not, Trump has committed nonetheless to help them achieve their ardent desire with the cleansing hand of force applied righteously. In either case, the world will be better.

Let’s pray for the best of the options, while thanking God in either case for enabling the end of a vile and malignant movement and the emergence of a genuine hope for the lasting and true peace that is the very substance of victory.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

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The Religious Foundations of Freedom and Democracy

Empty Words From Western Allies