I John 2: Hitler an anti-christ?

I am no kind of student of prophecy. Like St. Francis of Assisi, I tend my garden as well as I can, occasionally gazing up at the heavens, knowing that the Lord of the Harvest may return today to bless or anyway assess my co-laboring with Him. So it was a surprise to me when our brother Tim Steiner pointed out the other day that the actual term “anti-Christ” appears only in the letters of John. A quick Google search shows this to be true.

John notes that there will be many anti-christs. Well, he was right, huh? History both BC and AD is full of them, including some we students of history (I am one of those) at least half-heartedly celebrate and “give the devil his due” as it were.

A brother has prepared a somewhat tongue-in-cheek look at figures considered at one time or another to be anti-Christs. I know more about Hitler than I do about the anti-christ(s), but I see some similarities. Hates the Jews. Despises Christianity and the cross. Great military leader. Evil charisma. Proponent of false religion (weird teutonic Norse stuff that Himmler and SS really took seriously). And then there is the seven year cycle in Daniel (?) in which he will have his way the first half, and get pounded by the nations the second half. If one construes the beginning of his war to be the annexing of Austria in April, 1938, and the end when he died by self-inflicted gunshot (probably to the head?) on April 30, 1945, that’s seven years. At the mid-way point in October/November 1941, the Germans were conquering Russian territory and the Americans were not yet “in the game”. During October, 1941, Hitler met with Palestinian Islamic leaders to plan the eventual extermination of all Jews in Palestine.

American neutrality to Hitler was already disappearing by November, 1941. Then of course everything shifted for good on Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day. America signed up to fight Hitler fulltime and in a big way. Perhaps in a fulfillment of prophecy, English Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it “perhaps not the beginning of the end, but at any rate the end of the beginning.” After that it was pretty much one long slow retreat for Hitler, thank God, and I mean that literally.

I have always been intrigued by any possible numerological connection with the anti-Christ and the time and date of the first wave of the D-Day invasion: shortly after 6 am, on June 6. 6/6/6. Probably nothing.

If these thoughts lack the breathless certainty of many an essay on prophecy, I would say that is probably a good, and anyway honest, thing.