Posted on 01/21/2002 9:27:46 PM PST by GeronL
Dave Shiflett is coauthor of Christianity on Trial.
January 21, 2001 8:40 a.m.
A shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity. This news flash comes courtesy of a group of students at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, who have posted papers on a website detailing Hitler's desire to eradicate Christianity. The documents are from the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan and were originally prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, so we can safely assume they are authentic.
To be sure, Hitler's antagonism toward Christianity will not be news to everyone. That its central figure hails from a Jewish family did not set well with him, and its teachings of universal love ran contrary to his violent precepts. Yet one could easily get the impression, these days, that Hitler believed himself to be something of an altar boy on a mission for God.
The Rutgers project's editor, for example, seems to have been taken a bit by surprise. Julie Seltzer Mandel told the Philadelphia Enquirer that "When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews, but here's a different perspective." The Nazis, she says, "wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."
That will unsettle those who have been taught that Hitler was a Christian of some stripe — and indeed, by some accountings, an enthusiastic Catholic. Bill Clinton, for example, said at the 1999 National Prayer Breakfast that "I do believe that even though Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity, God did not want him to prevail." Meanwhile, at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, a film portrayed Hitler as an overzealous son of Rome. "Enter Adolf Hitler," the narrator intoned, "Austrian born and baptized a Catholic." Hitler's mission: "In defending myself against the Jews," he is quoted as saying, "I am acting for the Lord. The difference between the Church and me is that I am finishing the job."
That film was altered after protests by, among others, conservative Jewish writers. But the same message crops up elsewhere. Soon after the September 11 attacks, a spokeswoman for the Freedom From Religion organization pronounced Hitler a Catholic. In 1999, Maureen Dowd included Hitler as yet another Christian zealot. According to Dowd, "History teaches that when religion is injected into politics — the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo — disaster follows."
Hitler was indeed a baptized Catholic, but his rejection of the faith was profound. "My pedagogy is strict," he once explained. "I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication."
That domestication, of course, was in large part due to the influence of Christianity. Hitler was blunter still on other occasions. "It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," he said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both."
Indeed, he understood all too well that Christianity, in the long run, was his enemy. "Pure Christianity — the Christianity of the catacombs — is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." Switch a few words around and you'd think you were listening to Joseph Stalin. And like Stalin, Hitler believed history was on his side: "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished... but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves."
That promise was to come true in a frightful number of cases. Polish Christians felt the full force of the persecution, as historian John Morley reminds us. "In Poland, both Jews and Christians were objects of Nazi oppression and manipulation." The clergy were a chief target: "In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested, and the remainder escaped only by fleeing from their parishes. After a month's imprisonment, no less than 214 of these priests were executed... by the end of 1940 only twenty priests were left in their parishes — about three percent of the number of parish priests in the pre-war era." The toll of murdered Polish priests would rise into the thousands; their Protestant counterparts (though a much smaller group) fared no better, with many members of the clergy perishing in the camps.
The Rutgers site's presentation is entitled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches," and it notes a deep hatred of Christianity throughout the higher echelons. "Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion." Their assault was massive: "Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich... and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers."
None of which is to suggest that Christians were uniformly opposed to Hitler, or that some did not actually embrace the Reich. The lesson from Rutgers, however, is that Hitler was no altar boy, acting on behalf of the Christian faith. Indeed, his hope was to be its undertaker — which was another of his profound miscalculations, and should not be forgotten today.
Good to hear that a few "intellectuals" are catching up with a little of the truth.
What Hitler did and didn't has been and is being consistently reworked and reinvented by many groups of differing stripes. Documentation is not always demanded of a few of the groups. Neither is legitimate documentation acknowledged by other groups because it fails to further their cause or disproves it.
"Truth lies dead in the streets."
Thanks for the ping. Liberals link hitler to religion because it fits their bashing of religion.
The fact is that governments (german, russian, and chinese) killed 100 million people in the 20th century. Liberals would have us think it was because of religon.
An excerpt from "RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH"
--"...As Bohrman, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publically in 1942, "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable":
What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly set out in a thirty-point program for the "National Reich Church" drawn up during the war with Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his other offices held that of "the Fuehrer's Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party." A few of the articles convey the essentials:
1. The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich.
5. The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably...the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.
7. The National Reich Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.
13. The National Church demands the immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany...
14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German Nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer's "MEIN KAMPF" is the greatest of all documents. It...not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.
18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.
19. On the altars there must be nothing but "MEIN KAMPF" (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.
30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels...and must be superceeded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika."
Page 240, Simon and Schuster edition, 1960.
Many Catholic and Prostestant clergy were sent to camps, killed, held prisoner in their parish houses. This used to be well known !
Like Jerry Falwell??
Meanwhile, at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, a film portrayed Hitler as an overzealous son of Rome. "Enter Adolf Hitler," the narrator intoned, "Austrian born and baptized a Catholic." Hitler's mission: "In defending myself against the Jews," he is quoted as saying, "I am acting for the Lord. The difference between the Church and me is that I am finishing the job."
A bump to you GeronL for posting the article and a bump that the U.S. Holocaust Museum needs to set the record right instead of it using Hitler to bash Christians.
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