“People have often asked, and we’ve asked ourselves—how could Nazi Germany participate in the Holocaust? How can you take entire segments of your society, Jews as well as Gypsies as well as dissenting pastors, and round them up, and exterminate them in the millions?” Brock Thoene says, “Germany was widely regarded as the most advanced, the most civilized, most cultured nation in Europe of that era. It seems almost imponderable. How can you reconcile those things?”…

Speaking on the phone from his office, Brock Thoene offers his own theories on the questions he has just posed to me. First, he notes, the Nazi regime demonized the Jews and other dissenters as the root of Germany’s economic problems. However, one of his theories touches rather shockingly on a very controversial issue: Abortion.

“There’s the other thing that’s often overlooked,” Thoene notes, “In the year before Hitler came to power, 1932 in Germany, there were one million abortions. Germany was not even that populous a nation—I don’t know what the German population was in 1932, but a million! A million is a significant number. If you don’t have regard for the segment of your society that is least able to defend itself, that being the unborn, then why do you accord protection to anybody else?”

This, of course, is a controversial point to say the least—but one that demands attention. Once the concept of “personhood” is separated the status of being a human being, it becomes an arbitrary label to be bestowed or rescinded by the state. Historical circumstances surrounding the denial of personhood, of course, differ widely—with one brutally evident similarity: in each case where personhood was denied to human beings—Jews, African Americans, Native Americans, and now the pre-born, the youngest members of our species—atrocities resulted. Or, in the case of abortion, are still ongoing.

To Brock Thoene, the logical progression from killing one subset of human beings into killing another is almost inevitable. “The only people who can protect the unborn are folks…who have the ability to stand up for themselves,” Thoene tells me, “Once you’ve made that decision that as a society you don’t extend the protections of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness to the unborn, it’s not really much of an issue then to say, the elderly are a drain on society, so whether they live or die is up to the state. The physically handicapped are a drain on society, so whether they live or die is up to the state. The mentally challenged, the mentally ill, all of these groups—and then it’s really not much of a stretch, it’s just one more step to say, ‘Well, the Jews…’ or whoever you want to target, Christian pastors, dissenting politicians, and so on. They are a drain on society because they are in opposition to what we know is progress.”

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