Holocaust was approaching, and nobody seemed to notice. It was 1936 and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime was putting forth its best public relations efforts through the Olympics, held that year in Berlin.

The Führer’s rhetoric and Josef Goebbels’ glowing propaganda presented a dichotomy to the world’s diplomats. On the one hand, there were growing armaments and militarism within the German industrial complex that caused potential Nazi victims to cast a wary glance Germany’s way. On the other, the world was–on the surface–welcomed with open, though swastika-banded arms to partake of the growing glory of the rising Third Reich.

Journalists of the world for the most part were swept up in the vacuum of movement into modernity that promised bigger, greater things through technological wizardry. The Hindenburg flew dominantly and majestically above the landscape of earth, and Germany welcomed all to a transparent view of life in Deutschland. Only, things were not so transparent, as promised to the duped, journalistic world.

War debt–reparations for the havoc the German aggressors wreaked in World War I hyper-inflation–and the fear of a Communist takeover of government had long broiled and brewed just beneath the surface. The German people were ready for their savior. They believed they had found him. The Führer needed a scapegoat to bring the national psyche into a synthesis of sorts–an internal enemy upon which to focus. The choice he came up with consisted of two antagonists: 1) the communists and 2) the Jews. The communists represented an ideological and militaristic threat that came from regions east of the homeland. The Jews represented an economic threat, and a threat to the purity of the Germanic race.

The house of Israel, like in so many eras of mankind’s anti-Semitic history, drew the attention of demonically inspired leaders. Under Heinrich Himmler’s evil scheming–aimed at centering hatred of the Jews around which to rally the Nazi regime–the Final Solution was formulated and its implementation begun.

Six million died in the genocide we know as the Holocaust. The resultant national battle cries of the reborn Jewish state–“Never again!”–have again brought God’s chosen people to growing world hatred of them. Their stance of defending their right to exist enrages enemies and even supposed allies the world over. Anti-Semitism is literally exploding across the planet. Hatred by Muslim nations across the world is a foregone conclusion. Therefore, its most troubling growth is found in the geopolitical West.

We remember a time not long ago that in a single week eight synagogues were attacked in France. A mob of more than four hundred enraged thugs firebombed a synagogue in Cacelles. A Jewish supermarket and pharmacy were attacked, looted, and greatly damaged. Those who attacked shouted slogans and carried placards. They chanted the same slogans written on the placards, which read “Death to Jews!” and “Slit the Jews’ throats!”

Stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags in the Barbes neighborhood of the capital that same weekend. In Germany, Jew-haters threw Molotov cocktails into the Bergische Synagogue in Wuppertal. It was the same synagogue previously destroyed during Kristallnach, the Nazi’s all-out assault that was the beginning of the attempt to eliminate the Jewish Race in November of 1939.

“These are the worst times since the Nazi era,” Dieter Graumann, the then president of Germany’s Central Council of Jew [said]. “On the streets, you hear things like ‘the Jews should be gassed’, ‘the Jews should be burned’ – we haven’t had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn’t criticising Israeli politics; it’s just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it’s not just a German phenomenon. It’s an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it’s very clear indeed.”

There are so many reports of such hatred against Jews that it would take several articles to list them all. And, America has  experienced vandalism and other acts of anti-Semitism, such as the destruction of headstones in Jewish cemeteries and worse incidents.

The point is that anti-Semitism is growing at an alarming rate while the world lurches toward man’s darkest time. Jeremiah the prophet called it the time of Jacob’s trouble: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it” (Jeremiah 30:7).

Indeed, the Lord will preserve Israel. It will be the apex nation during the Millennium! Today, however, holocaust is approaching, but not many seem to notice. Jacob’s Trouble is definitely simmering, and soon it will boil over to scald all who are left behind when Christ calls the church home to Heaven.