Posted on 01/20/2014 10:22:55 PM PST by Enza Ferreri
I've shown in the first and second articles of this series - concluding with the present article - that Hitler was neopagan and anti-Christian and that the new pagan religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s gave Nazism part of its ideological foundations.
It is only to be expected, then, that the Hitler regime tried to tear German society away from Christianity and return it to pagan beliefs. While Hitler made public proclamations that he would protect Christianity in order to be acceptable to the German people who were in their majority Christian, his recorded private statements and his actions tell a very different story.
Many absurd, unbelievable claims about Hitler's presumed Christianity have been made and, in this day and age when anything about Christianity, even the most preposterous assertion, as long as it's bad of course, is accepted as undisputable fact, Michael Coren has produced an excellent book, relatively short and easy to read, which I recommend to everybody who is interested in the truth. It is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) . In it he says:
In January 1942, the New York Times, certainly not now and not really even then a particular friend of Christianity, published a thirty-point program listing the central dogmas of the National Reich Church, a body established by the Nazis to replace Christianity and to eliminate Christian ideas from the next generation of young Germans. It's significant that the Times published this, because if such an internationally important newspaper was aware of Nazism's hatred of Christianity, we can be sure it was a known and accepted fact elsewhere.This is the final statement of the program of dogmas:
On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany - the swastika.And this is from another source that, like the NYT, can be accused of anything but conservative, pro-Christian bias, Wikipedia:
In power, the Hitler regime conducted a protracted Struggle with the Churches. Hitler moved to eliminate political Catholicism, while agreeing a Reich concordat with the Holy See which promised autonomy for the Catholic Church in Germany. Hitler then routinely violated the treaty, moved to close all Catholic organisations that weren't strictly religious, and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church... He angered the churches by appointing the neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist, and generally permitted or encouraged anti-church radicals such as Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann to conduct their persecutions of the churches.Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and as such he believed that the universe is governed by the struggle between weak and strong, ideas that ran counter to Christianity, then prevailing in Germany.
The Nazis promoted paganism before and especially after coming to power in 1933.
Soon after coming to power they replaced Christian holidays and festivals with pagan ones such as "The Day of the Summer Solstice" and "The Day of the Winter Solstice". Wedding ceremonies were celebrated according to neo-pagan rites:
"After the bridal couple's exchange of rings, the votive warden pronounces the blessing: Mother Earth, which lovingly bears us all, and Father Sky, who blesses us with his light and his weather, and all the beneficent powers of the air, may they rule over you until your destiny is fulfilled." [Once again, we see the evidence of the pagan: the Co-Rulership of the god and goddess are recognized, and once again, the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator.]Crucifixes were gradually removed from hospitals and schools. Just as it's happening in our days.
Schools were massively targeted as part of a strategy to deChristianize the young. In 1935, Christian prayers in schools were stopped, and from 1941 onwards all lessons concerning Christianity were banned for all students over 14. Schoolchildren were taught what the Nazis called the "glorious pre-Christian German history".
The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious education, and many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils. Later on, teachers were explicitly and totally forbidden to attend voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic Church.
The Nazis even used former Christian religious facilities, seized by the government, as schools where students were trained in male supremacist ideology, through the works of homosexual theorists like Otto Weininger.
Rites and ceremonies from Germany's pagan past were held all over the country. All Nazi meetings and rallies, under the shadow of flaming torches and where slogans full of hate and violence were shouted, were following pagan ceremonies undistinguishable from those held thousands of years before at pagan temples and altars.
The Nazis also used art to re-awaken paganism, using ancient Greek concepts and symbols and imitating Greek statues, showing strong men and women of the Aryan race. Hitler admired the Spartan model and dreamed of a superior race created by eugenics.
Laurence Rees, the contemporary British historian who wrote, directed and produced many BBC series and documentaries on the Second World War and in particular on Nazism, in his book (also on DVD) The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) described the thrust of Hitler's semi-autobiographical work Mein Kampf (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) as "bleak nihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy:
What's missing from Mein Kampf, and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should—is any emphasis on Christianity.And this despite the fact that Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, he concluded:
The most coherent reading of Mein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul"... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed.Hitler believed much more in, and was much more influenced by, Charles Darwin than Jesus Christ.
It's not entirely surprising that today, like in Hitler's day, we witness a return to paganism in conjunction to a return to strong nationalist sentiments. We should be wary of nationalism, which is not bad per se at all, in fact can be a positive force, but taken to extremes can become very irrational and dangerous, as indeed Hitler's example illustrates.
The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis is real, but doesn’t come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, “Islamophobic”, neo-Nazi groups, as from a much more mainstream, Leftist direction. The threat has two sources: one is the rise of Islam in the West – aided and abetted by the Left - with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent historical, in-depth and ground-breaking research, thanks to the opening of national archives - previously closed to the public - after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK), Gene Edward Veith's Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) and others go much further than that.
Regarding Poewe's work, which took 10 years of painstaking historical research, I can only agree with this review:
Inevitably claims that deny that Nazism was rooted in Christianity draw fire. As a scholar in modern and early modern Europe at the University of Victoria, I affirm this book as extremely well researched. The onus is on those who would disprove its assertions to do more thorough research--a daunting challenge indeed. The Nazis were as hostile to Christianity as to Judaism. The preparation for the ascendency of National Socialism provided by the advocates of new religions like Jacob Wilhelm Hauer is a sobering reality that needs to be understood more widely today.It's an eerie feeling to recognise that Nazis, as I showed in the previous two article of this series, shared our days’ most cherished and growing ideas, from the normalisation of homosexuality to the decadence of the family, from the rise and destigmatisation of illegitimacy to the pantheism and anti-human feelings of environmentalism.
Photo by Marion Doss (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).
Yep, pretty wicked.
Part of the problem there was Christians who were disengaged from what was going on around them. As long as they were going to be officially tolerated, they didn’t care much. Well the devil doesn’t keep bargains. And the devil hates God. Christians were double crossed and Jews were murdered.
bump
I think this is a cautionary tale for modern times.
Barack Obama hasn’t ginned up a full fledged paganism. Yet. He’s even fairly honest about hating Christians. What could really throw American Christians (and Jews) for a loop would be a sweet talker who ballyhoos some cockamamie spirituality. By the time we catch on to what’s happening it could be too late to prevent an earthly disaster from playing out.
I’m amazed at how many parallels there are between the anti-Christian socialists of WW2 Germany and today’s anti-Christian socialists in the USA. Anyone who is not frightened is a fool, or evil.
"If you like your religion, you can keep it."
Anyone know any good books or documentaries that present an accurate picture of Germany prior to or at the very beginning of Hitler’s ascent.
More like "If your like your anti-Christ delusion, you can keep it."
Hitler on Religion: http://library.flawlesslogic.com/religion.htm
“So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it.”
“Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that’s why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.”
“We’ll see to it that the churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.”
“Indeed, it’s most important that the higher belief should be well established in them before the lower belief has been removed. We must finally achieve this.”
“We do not want to educate anyone in atheism.”
“The observatory I’ll have built at Linz, on the Pöstlingberg, I can see it in my mind ... In future, thousands of excursionists will make a pilgrimage there every Sunday. They’ll thus have access to the greatness of our universe. The pediment will bear this motto: ‘The heavens proclaim the glory of the everlasting.’ It will be our way of giving men a religious spirit, of teaching them humility — but without the priests.”
“The final state must be: in St. Peter’s Chair, a senile officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga and as poor in spirit as anyone could wish.”
“For my part, in his place [the Duce] I’d have taken the path of revolution. I’d have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out — reserving the right to apologize later: ‘Excuse me, it was a mistake!’ But the result would have been, they’d have been outside!”
“But a pope, even a criminal one, who protects great artists and spreads beauty around him, is nevertheless more sympathetic to me than the protestant minister who drinks from the poisoned spring.”
“Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics”
“I have six Divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.”
“The soul and the mind migrate, just as the body returns to nature. Thus life is eternally reborn from life. As for the ‘why’ of all that, I feel no need to rack my brains on the subject. The soul is unplumbable.”
Hitler’s Table Talk is a series of informal, private conversations among Hitler and his closest associates, as recorded by Martin Bormann. The ex tempore remarks excerpted above are from July 1941 to June 1942, most late at night or in early morning.
These were recorded by his secretary and published in a book called Hitler’s Table Talk (Adolf Hitler, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1953). I have lifted the text of these from the soc.religion.christian newsgroup’s Hitler FAQ.
Night of 11th-12th July, 1941
“National Socialism and religion cannot exist together....
“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity....
“Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.” (p 6 & 7)
10th October, 1941, midday
“Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” (p 43)
14th October, 1941, midday
“The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity....
“Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that’s why someday its structure will collapse....
“...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little....
“We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State.” (p 49-52)
19th October, 1941, night
“The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.”
21st October, 1941, midday
“Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism, the destroyer....
“The decisive falsification of Jesus’ [who he asserts many times was never a Jew] doctrine was the work of St.Paul. He gave himself to this work... for the purposes of personal exploitation....
“Didn’t the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, faggots? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. Today, it’s in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday the instigator was Saul: the instigator today, Mardochai. Saul was changed into St.Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” (p 63-65)
13th December, 1941, midnight
“Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.... [here insults people who believe transubstantiation]....
“When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who are immunised against the disease.” (p 118-119)
14th December, 1941, midday
“Kerrl, with noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don’t believe the thing’s possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself....
“Pure Christianity— the Christianity of the catacombs— is concerned with translating Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics.” (p 119 & 120)
9th April, 1942, dinner
“There is something very unhealthy about Christianity.” (p 339)
27th February, 1942, midday
“It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors— but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie.”
“Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn’t... behold its [demise].” (p 278)
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/66911
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