Adolf Hitler didn’t consider his National Socialist party a movement; he thought of it as a religion. He saw himself as a religious leader. He was motivated and inspired by his evil god.

The Nazis had a colossal assembly hall, and they called it a hall of worship. Nazism was an extreme cult worship in a way. Hitler said he followed the Jesuit order, the part of the Catholic leadership that expresses fierce allegiance to the pope; he patterned the elite SS after that. It was a religion. It was, in fact, the Holy Roman Empire.

Pope Pius xi subscribed to the same principles. These two men formed quite a church-state relationship. This was proved in 1933 when the Vatican and Hitler signed a concordat: “The church agreed to keep priests and religion out of politics while Hitler, among other things, granted complete freedom to confessional schools throughout the country, a notable victory for German Catholics,” wrote John Toland in his book Adolf Hitler. “The Vatican was so appreciative of being recognized as a full partner that it asked God to bless the Reich. On a more practical level, it ordered German bishops to swear allegiance to the National Socialist regime. The new oath concluded with these significant words: ‘In the performance of my spiritual office and in my solicitude for the welfare and the interest of the German Reich, I will endeavor to avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it’” (emphasis added throughout).

This is history you would think people would never want to forget! It’s right there in the history books for everyone to see. But few pay any attention to it. They think it is all in the past. But it isn’t, really. The worst is yet to come, if you look at it prophetically.

One million Jews were killed in Auschwitz! Seven hundred and fifty thousand Jews died in Treblinka. Over half a million perished in Belzec; 200,000 were murdered in Sobibór, and another 200,000 in Chelmno and Lublin. All told, 50 to 60 million people died in World War ii.

This is what the Holy Roman Empire is all about: destroying people. Above all, it is a machine of destruction! That is what it is famous for.

This is pretty recent history. We need to understand that—because it’s only a small forerunner of what is about to spring upon us.

A Warning Ignored!

Thursday, July 21, was a historic and powerfully prophetic day. I would imagine that almost 100 percent of Americans were totally unaware of it. They were wrapped up in discussion over the debt ceiling—and yet they don’t even realize what that means. It means America is finished, but they won’t look at it that way.

None of us would understand the historic and prophetic significance of July 21 if not for the Bible’s prophecies revealed through a man named Herbert W. Armstrong. God sent a message through this man to warn the world of what was coming—yet few listened. Now the world is on the threshold of World War iii, and we are trumpeting that same warning as loudly as we possibly can.

Back in 1945, at the conclusion of World War ii and during the inaugural session of the United Nations, Mr. Armstrong said to his radio program listeners, “The war is over in Europe. Or is it? We need to wake up and realize that right now is the most dangerous moment in United States national history, instead of assuming we now have peace.” What this man warned about over 65 years ago is exactly what this world is coming face to face with today, though people are very ignorant about it.

“Men plan here to preserve the peace of the world,” he continued. “What most do not know is that the Germans have their plans for winning the battle of the peace. Yes, I said battle of the peace. That’s a kind of battle we Americans don’t know. We know only one kind of war. We have never lost a war—that is, a military war—but we have never won a conference, where leaders of other nations outfox us in the battle for the peace. We don’t understand German thoroughness. From the very start of World War ii they have considered the possibility of losing this second round, as they did the first—and they have carefully, methodically planned in such eventuality the third round, World War iii!” This was really a warning from God—yet people laughed and scoffed.

“Hitler has lost. This round of war, in Europe, is over, and the Nazis have now gone underground,” he said. “In France and Norway they learned how effectively an organized underground can hamper occupation and control of a country. Paris was liberated by the French underground, and Allied armies. Now a Nazi underground is methodically planned. They plan to come back and to win on the third try” (May 9, 1945).

Today’s headlines prove that Mr. Armstrong was exactly right. What happened on July 21 was a giant step toward fulfilling that prophecy!

Some years later, in the June 1952 Plain Truth, Mr. Armstrong wrote, “The United States is determined now to let nothing stand in the way of building up a rearmed independent Germany. This will be the heart and core of the united Europe, and that will revive the Roman Empire.”

The February 1957 issue reminded readers, “Even during World War ii, while Allied bombers were busily pounding Germany to a shattered, bleak pile of rubble, Mr. Armstrong was warning his listeners and readers that Germany was going to rise again!” He was ridiculed for those warnings: People thought the world would never let Germany do such a thing. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an agreement saying, “‘It is our inflexible purpose to destroy German militarism and Nazism and to ensure Germany will never again be able to disturb the peace of the world.” Germany has the worst history of any nation when it comes to starting wars! Have we forgotten that it started World Wars i and ii?

But what is happening today? How much do you know about what’s happening in Europe right now?

In a letter to Plain Truth readers on July 24, 1983, Mr. Armstrong wrote, “The very first issue of the Plain Truth magazine appeared February 1934—just 50 years ago lacking about six months. The article starting on the cover page warned of a coming sudden appearance of a resurrected ‘Holy Roman Empire’ in Europe—a union of 10 nations in Europe under one government, with one united military force. For 50 years I have been crying out to the world the Bible prophecies of this coming ‘United States of Europe’—a new united superpower perhaps more powerful than either the Soviet Union or the United States!”

In 1984, nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Armstrong explained to his readers exactly how Europe would unite. A global financial crisis could erupt, he wrote, which “could suddenly result in triggering European nations to unite as a new world power larger than either the Soviet Union or the U.S.”

On July 21 this year, a giant part of that financial crisis erupted.

What Happened on July 21?

The July 21 edition of the Telegraph featured this headline by that newspaper’s chief political commentator, Peter Oborne: “The euro crisis will give Germany the empire it’s always dreamed of.”

That stunned me when I read it. Germany has been dreaming all this time of having an empire again—the Holy Roman Empire! Mr. Armstrong warned about this for 50 years! So many people ridiculed him—but today’s headlines say exactly what he warned about!

I have to tell you, this sends a few chills through my body—because I know what is coming! I know what the Bible’s prophecies say! The suffering of World War ii was nothing compared to what is about to descend on this world very soon—probably in less than five years!

Mr. Oborne was commenting on a eurozone meeting in Brussels that took place on July 21. Many observers thought it was just another meeting. Some economists thought European leaders just kicked the can down the road once again. But the truth is that Europe’s leaders made several important long-term decisions that catapult the continent toward becoming a European superstate!

Oborne wrote, “It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of the decision which European leaders seemed last night to be reaching.” That sounds like he understands the prophecies Mr. Armstrong talked about! There are quite a number of people out there who do—but they don’t want to talk about it!

This is the Holy Roman Empire that Mr. Armstrong prophesied of so many times! It is proof that those prophecies did not come from a man. The God who gave him that prophetic understanding lives! Mr. Armstrong has been dead for over 25 years—but his God lives on, and everything He said through Mr. Armstrong in those prophecies is coming to pass in detail!

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a lady not prone to exaggeration or speaking in dramatic terms, announced, “This is a historic day.”

Oborne continued, “By authorizing a huge expansion in the bailout fund that is propping up the EU’s peripheral members (largely in order to stop the contagion spreading to Italy and Spain), the eurozone has taken the decisive step to become a fiscal union.”

What does that mean? Well, if the eurozone becomes a fiscal union,somebody must have the political power to make it work! And whom do you suppose it will be? Germany. The Germans just pushed themselves into domineeringoverthe European Union. Germany has the economic might and the political will to do what it feels must be done, and nobody else does. Whoever controls the money controls the empire.

The eurozone leaders’ decision turns the bailout mechanism into a “European Monetary Fund,” and even the prototype of a European treasury. The fund will now be allowed to help out Spain and Italy without those nations having to submit to a formal bailout. It will also be allowed to buy government debt from banks and investors.

In essence, it subjugates southern Europe to Germany!

Oborne explained, “Their economic sovereignty has been obliterated; they face a future as vassal states [or, you could say, slave states], their role reduced to the one enjoyed by the European colonies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They will provide cheap labor, raw materials, agricultural produce and a ready market for the manufactured goods and services provided by the far more productive and efficient northern Europeans.”

Germany is now telling these countries how to run their business. These countries are not democratic anymore. Germany is calling the shots.

“It is important to understand that the crisis is not fundamentally about Greece or even about the indebtedness of the entire currency bloc,” wrote Marko Papic. “[T]he real crisis is the more fundamental question of how the European continent is to be ruled in the 21st century” (Stratfor, June 28). How true that is! And as has become clear, it is to be ruled by Germany!

“For all practical purposes, the next chapter of history has now opened in Europe,” wrote Peter Zeihan and Marko Papic for Stratfor on July 26. “Regardless of intentions, Germany has just experienced an important development in its ability to influence fellow EU member states—particularly those experiencing financial troubles. It can now easily usurp huge amounts of national sovereignty. Rather than constraining Germany’s geopolitical potential, the European Union now enhances it;Germany is on the verge of once again becoming a great power. … Germany’s reemergence does force a radical rethinking of the European and Eurasian architectures.”

“Yesterday’s witching hour of the European Union means that Germany has come very close to realizing Bismarck’s dream of an economic empire stretching from central Europe to the eastern Mediterranean,” Oborne wrote. And that is very similar to what Hitler was striving for as well.

This was a giant-size leap into what we have come to know as the Holy Roman Empire. And it is almost totally controlled by the very people who tried to obliterate the Jewish race and killed 6 million of them in World War ii! People say we shouldn’t talk about such things—that those horrible events are in the past, and we don’t want to give the Germans or the Vatican a guilt complex. They want to pretend the truth doesn’t exist.

But it does! This is the power that is rising before us! Mr. Armstrong warned it would happen. He prophesied that Europe would consist of 10 kings, dominated by one king, helped by a great universal church. Today there are 27 nations in the European Union, and they’re beginning to morph into 10 kings already—and are about to gain unprecedented power!

‘Be He God or the Devil’

“It was always obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment that a single currency would fail in the absence of political union.” These words were written on July 20 by a man with the pseudonym Archbishop Cranmer; he runs the sixth-most influential independent political blog in the UK.

So—that currency is on the verge of failure, and in order to rescue it, Europe is about to have a full political union. Who will lead it? Everyone is looking to Germany, in spite of that nation’s history. I am not saying this to condemn the Germans, because the prophecies say that God is doing this work through them. But they have a history of starting wars time and time again, and prophecy tells us they will do so one more time. Then comes the best news this world could ever hear!

“When we hear talk of ‘German destiny,’ we are talking about the self-perceived divine mission to preside over a unified Europe, achievable through a dominating German state,” Cranmer wrote. He is right. The Nazis talked about that plan over and over, and here it is. Now they have it, and they’ve gotten it through what most people would call peaceful means.

Cranmer continued, “Such a notion of ‘destiny’ or ‘divine right’ was also in the mind of Kaiser Wilhelm ii, when he said: ‘[A]fter the elimination of the British and the Jews … the result will be a United States of Europe. The hand of God is creating a new world: a United States of Europe under German leadership.’” They think they are the chosen people!

“Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for many years declared his dissatisfaction with a common market of independent states, and believed it was German ‘destiny’ not merely to lead a European union, but to dominate it”—in true Holy Roman Empire tradition! “Another former chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer [who came to power right after Germany’s defeat in World War ii], declared: ‘Germany has a divine mission to save Western Europe.’” Did Germany save Western Europe in World War ii? Is that what it was doing in those concentration camps all over the Continent?

“Since the era of Charlemagne, the notion of a ‘German destiny’ has been deeply ingrained in the national psyche,” Cranmer wrote. They believe they have a divine right and that God has appointed them to rule Europe and even the world—and they’re ready to take on the job! And repeatedly throughout history, they have shown that if you don’t believe in God the way they believe in God, they think they need to kill you! Isn’t that what they have done time and time again?

What Europe needs most of all right now is strong leadership. Cranmer concluded his blog entry, “[W]e await the man of sufficient stature to hold the allegiance of all people; the one who will lift us out of the economic morass in which we are sinking. Send us such a man and, be he god or the devil, we will receive him. … And so the plan will be perfected: the ‘Germanization of Europe’ will be complete; her ‘destiny’ fulfilled.”

We have often written about how Germany is waiting for a strongman. But these events show that all of Europe is waiting for some kind of a strongman to make this system work. They must have somebody with real authority.

“The broader concern” in Europe, warned Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is that “we are still waiting for some sort of true leadership out of Europe.” Even people in America are waiting for that!

As Greece, Ireland, Portugal and now Italy wobble, Europe is realizing that it must take drastic and far-reaching measures, which require active, decisive,streamlinedleadership. That aligns perfectly with Germany’s thinking.

“[I]n attempting to quell the economic crisis, policymakers may only have succeeded in creating an almighty political one,” Jeremy Warner wrote in the Telegraph (July 21). Of course that is what they have done. It’s prophesied. “Despite the compromises won from reluctant political leaders, this crisis is far from over,” Warner wrote. What does that mean? It becomes increasingly clear as you look into this. We are seeing how a strongman is going to come on the scene very soon—a man prophesied in Daniel 8, Habakkuk 1, Isaiah 10, Daniel 11, and other scriptures.

They need a strongman. The power is already there, and Germany is directing nearly everything—though people won’t admit it. But the leadership they have now simply isn’t up to the job. The Europe project can’t really move forward until they have a strongman with the power to make it happen! Once he gets in there, he will be the most destructive leader in human history!

Where Is the Man?

Right now, Germans are upset, and Chancellor Merkel is walking a rough road. Before the July 21 meeting, she told people not to expect a spectacular step, but just a “controlled process of gradual steps and measures.” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the Telegraph, “Given the simmering wrath from top to bottom of German society, it may be impossible for her to do much more” (July 19). The Germans are angry that their taxes went to pay off the debt for the Greeks. They see the economic crisis in Europe and they’re getting anxious and afraid.

Every time the German mindset becomes that way, they want a strongman to lead them!

This is exactly what happened before World War ii. The German economy had runaway inflation; it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread. They all wanted someone to solve the crisis—and in stepped Adolf Hitler. The same thing happened with the Kaiser in World War i.

But people say not to worry. Don’t worry about what the Germans did in 1870, or World War i, or World Warii, or repeatedly over the centuries.We’ve got to get this economy straightened out!

The German people are upset, and if this crisis doesn’t end soon—and it won’t—Merkel is probably going to go, perhaps even this year. “Above her head hangs a sword of Damocles, a ruling by her constitutional court in September that may curb or even block German participation in the EU’s rescue machinery,” Evans-Pritchard wrote. That would really throw things into chaos! Yet it probably will happen, and that may be the beginning of the end of Angela Merkel—and the beginning of the strongman coming on the scene to get things under control.

On July 12, Evans-Pritchard wrote about the overarching structural question that Europe’s economic crisis poses: “The implications of this are profound. Germany must now be willing either to buy or guarantee Spanish and Italian debt, and in doing so to cross the Rubicon to fiscal and political union, or accept that [European Monetary Union] must break up with calamitous consequences for German foreign policy. Large matters, beyond the intellectual vision of Germany’s current leaders.” That is putting it bluntly. None of the current leaders have the intellectual power and strength of character to do the job! Of course the Germans can see that.

Where is that man? They’re looking and waiting for him! And we think we know who he is.

Once this man comes on the scene, the world is going to be deceived, and then shocked, frightened and brutalized by him!

On July 21, Germany crossed the Rubicon. There is no looking back. It is committed. The Holy Roman Empire is here! All they’re waiting for now is a strongman to whip everybody into line financially, politically and militarily—and the Holy Roman Empire is in business once again, for the final time!

A Mind Change

The Prophet Daniel said this of the coming strongman: “And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries” (Daniel 11:21). He’s not even going to be voted in, but he’s coming into power! And he’s doing it because God wants to correct the modern nations of Israel—chiefly the United States and Britain (this is proven in our free book The United States and Britain in Prophecy).

In Habakkuk 1:6 God says, “For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwellingplaces that are not theirs.” God is going to bring the Chaldeans, or the Holy Roman Empire, into the U.S. and into Britain and into the Jewish state called Israel today, in order to correct them for their evil! Verses 7 and 8 describe what a fearsome war-making machine they are, “terrible and dreadful.” Just look at the concentration camps to see how true that is!

Verse 11 says of the strongman leading this empire, “Then shall his mind change, and he shall pass over, and offend, imputing this his power unto his god.” Isaiah 10:7 tells the same story: “Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few.” There will come a point when this man will realize what power he really has, and he will probably become possessed by the devil—and his mind will change!

The devil loves concentration camps! He loves to see humanity suffer! He hates the exalted potential God has given human beings, who are made in His likeness and image. The devil doesn’t want human beings to rule as God intended. He is going to seize this opportunity and annihilate as many people as he possibly can—especially Jews and the descendants of the Israelites!

“O mighty God, thou hast established them [the Germans] for correction,” Habakkuk 1:12 tells us. Verses 14 through 17 speak of how utterly meaningless human life is to these warmongers. “Shall they therefore empty their net, and not spare continually to slay the nations?” (verse 17). They slay nations over and over again!

When will we learn from history? What will it take to finally awaken the modern nations of Israel—the only people to have a history with God? It’s going to take the Great Tribulation, and a lot of correction from God.

A Wonderful Sign

Many experts believe the measures put forward on July 21 aren’t enough to fix Europe’s problem. The drama is definitely not over. Europe just took a giant leap toward becoming a German-led superstate, but expect this crisis to force Germany and Europe to take more radical steps toward unification.

As I wrote to you back in our January edition, “Watch closely. Germany will use this crisis to force Europe to unite more tightly.” That is exactly what is happening now. “In the process, some eurozone countries will be forced out of the union,” I continued. There are still more turbulent times ahead for the euro. But as I wrote, “Every country that leaves the EU puts us one step closer to seeing the German-led 10-nation European superstate! … We are witnessing one of the most significant moments ever in the history of Europe.”

How can I know this? Because it is exactly what Mr. Armstrong told us years in advance would happen, based on the sure word of Bible prophecy. He forecast “a sort of soon-coming ‘United States of Europe’—a union of 10 nations to rise up out of or following the Common Market of today.” The Bible tells us that when this government is fully empowered, it is going to plunge this world into the most terrifying and violent period in human history.

But the Bible also tells us that at the end of this “great tribulation,” Jesus Christ is going to return! As we watch the rise of this Catholic-inspired, German-led beast, we must never forget: The emergence of this institution is a sign that the most joyous event in history is about to take place.

Above all, this is the most important lesson to take from these events: After July 21, the world is now a giant step closer to the return of Jesus Christ!