I think it’s a big step to say that the state of Europe before the Holocaust is “THE WORST DEFECTION FROM THE TORAH SINCE THE BEGINNING OF OUR NATION’S HISTORY” (capitalization, I assume, Leyzer’s). From a historian’s perspective that’s risky to say as we can’t know everything that happens- we basically see the things that happen most recently and are prone to inflate their importance because that’s what we know most about. I’m not saying that for sure it WASN’T the biggest, just that how do we know?
You know, it’s funny- a lot of these posts (ON THE SAME SIDE!) all contradict each other. On the one hand, there’s the argument that R’ Miller brings up about the Holocaust obviously being a punishment for the Holocaust, because of basic cause and effect. On the other hand, the response to the “good things happening to bad people” question is that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. Personally, to me, these don’t seem to really match up.
Put it this way: the way this thread’s been going, the two CONFLICTING theories of the Holocaust are
R’ Miller: The Holocaust is a direct cause-effect result of aveiros on the part of many Jews, and the many who did NOT do these aveiros were collateral damage.
R’ Kelemen: The Holocaust’s effect on each person was based on their individual “account” with Shamayim.
(Yes, I know that this is overly simplistic, but I’m trying to make the point that logically, you can’t say that the two intersect. The only way they could is if you say that most of the people were punished for assimilation and the others were punished for their own individual aveiros, which would leave out the people who assimilated and survived.)
Basically, my point is that I don’t think we can really rationalize these kinds of things. They seem to be “teiku” at the very least and possibly insoluble by us even after me’ah ve’esrim.