Posted on 04/18/2003 3:21:14 AM PDT by gd124
Seems to support reports that Hitler's sexual tastes were sadistic (not that that's a surprise.) I wonder what Lothar Machtan (who has recently argued that Hitler was a practising homosexual at the time Schertel's book was published) would make of this. Schertel does not appear in Machtan's book, or Goodrick-Clarke's, or the lives of Hitler by Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest.
"He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world."
That line sounds like the Magick-Gnostic occult talk of those groups.
Germany elected Hitler and America elected Salon Newsreal | The mysteries of Bill Clinton "My only enemy is right-wing religious fundamentalism."
Some wonder why all the fuss about sodomy, abortion and Islam. The American immune system is increasingly becoming too weak to prevent futher erosion of Constitutional Republican principals, caused by the libertine acceptance/promotion of evils that break the moral will of the people.
Christianity provides the internal restraint against evil, while gov't/law provides the external restraint. Significantly breach both barriers for a sustained peroid and you will find moral anarchy ripe to worship a dictator that will legislate immorality.
[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion....Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (Source: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. 1854), Vol. IX, p. 229, October 11, 1798.) For all the vitriol Hitler spewed upon Judaism, he came to hold Christianity in equal disdain. "Christianity is the worst thing that ever happened to mankind," he declared during an after-dinner rant in July of 1941. "Bolshevism is the illegitimate child of Christianity. Both are an outgrowth of the Jew." Unquestionably the most significant unread volume in the Hitler collection is a 1940 edition of Alfred Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the Nazi classic that, with more than a million copies in print at the time, was second only to Mein Kampf for the Nazi movement. In the course of its 800 pages Rosenberg delivered the theological framework for a National German Church intended to subsume "the best of the protestant and catholic churches" and eliminate the "Jew-infested Old Testament." Denouncing the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a "counterfeit of the great image of Christ," Rosenberg envisioned a "fifth gospel" depicting Jesus as an Aryan superman—"The powerful preacher and the raging prophet in the temple, the man who inspired, and whom everyone followed, not the sacrificial lamb of the Jewish prophets, not the man on the cross."
Homosexuality and the Nazi Party
While the neo-pagans were busy attacking from without, liberal theologians undermined Biblical authority from within the Christian church. The school of so-called "higher criticism," which began in Germany in the late 1800s, portrayed the miracles of God as myths; by implication making true believers (Jew and Christian alike) into fools. And since the Bible was no longer accepted as God's divine and inerrant guide, it could be ignored or reinterpreted. By the time the Nazis came to power, "Bible-believing" Christians, (the Confessing Church) were a small minority. As Grunberger asserts, Nazism itself was a "pseudo-religion" (ibid.:79) that competed, in a sense, with Christianity and Judaism.
From the early years, leading Nazis openly attacked Christianity. Joseph Goebbels declared that "Christianity has infused our erotic attitudes with dishonesty" (Taylor:20). It is in this campaign against Judeo- Christian morality that we find the reason for the German people's acceptance of Nazism's most extreme atrocities. Their religious foundations had been systematically eroded over a period of decades by powerful social forces. By the time the Nazis came to power, German culture was spiritually bankrupt. Too often, historians have largely ignored the spiritual element of Nazi history; but if we look closely at Hitler's campaign of extermination of the Jews, it becomes clear that his ostensive racial motive obscures a deeper and more primal hatred of the Jews as the "People of God."
The probable reason for Hitler's attack on Christianity was his perception that it alone had the moral authority to stop the Nazi movement. But Christians stumbled before the flood of evil. As Poliakov notes, "[W]hen moral barriers collapsed under the impact of Nazi preaching...the same anti-Semitic movement that led to the slaughter of the Jews gave scope and license to an obscene revolt against God and the moral law. An open and implacable war was declared on the Christian tradition...[which unleashed] a frenzied and unavowed hatred of Christ and the Ten Commandments" (Poliakov:300).
"The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution Of The Christian Churches"
Gay Nazis: the Role of Homosexuality in Nazism & Hitler's Rise to ... Thus butch hypermasculinity, visibility for homosexuals, and organization were the three necessary ingredients in the mix which allowed the SA leaders to make their unique and essential contribution to the rise of Nazism. Another important consideration is that visibility is enabled when homosexuality assumes a political voice. In this way, the politicization of homosexuality, which supported gays in the process of socially identifying themselves as such, was a necessary condition for Hitler's success.
Was Hitler's Homosexuality Nazism's Best-Kept Secret?
Sadomasochism That sadomasochism and homoeroticism often occur together with Nazism in the Holocaust film is a fact that has long been recognized and is frequently observed. Ilan Avisar, in Screening the Holocaust, traces what he calls the connection of Nazism and "sexual deviance" to Rossellini's Open City.[1] Gerd Gemünden suggests that in 1942, "the association of male homosexuality with sadism and perversion [as in the effeminate portrayal of Heydrich in Hangmen Also Die] ... anticipates postwar films such as The Damned (Visconti 1969) and Night Porter (Cavani 1974)."[2]
[1] Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 134-48
[2] Gerd Gemünden, "Brecht in Hollywood: Hangmen Also Die and the Anti-Nazi Film," TDR 43 (4) (Winter 1999): 65-7; The earliest book in English to conflate Nazism with sexual perversion was Samuel Igra's Germany's National Vice (London: Quality Press, Ltd., 1945).
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