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Posted on 01/26/2002 1:14:46 PM PST by Paul Ross
The Cross vs. the Swastika
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The Cross vs. the Swastika |
I vividly remember a high school conversation with a friend I’d known since we were eight. I’d pointed out that Hitler was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, but my friend absolutely refused to believe it. No matter how much evidence I presented, he kept insisting that Nazi Germany was an extension of Christianity, acting out its age-old vendetta against the Jews. Not that he spoke from any personal study of the subject; he just knew. He’d heard it so many times it’d become an article of faith — one of those things “everyone knows.”
Flash forward 25 years. A few weeks ago my last column (http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000528.html) refuted a number of familiar charges against Christianity, including the Christianity-created-Nazism shibboleth. Even though I only skimmed the subject, I thought the evidence I cited would’ve been hard to ignore; I quoted, for example, Hitler’s fond prediction that he would “destroy Christianity” and replace it with “a [pagan] religion rooted in nature and blood.” But sure enough, I still heard from people who couldn’t buy that.
Well, sometimes myths die hard. But this one took a hit in early January, at the hands of one Julie Seltzer Mandel, a Jewish law student at Rutgers whose grandmother survived internment at Auschwitz.
A couple of years ago Mandel read through 148 bound volumes of papers gathered by the American OSS (the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA) to build the case against Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. Now she and some fellow students are publishing what they found in the journal Law and Religion(www.lawandreligion.com), which Mandel edits. The upshot: a ton of evidence that Hitler sought to wipe out Christianity just as surely as he sought to wipe out the Jews.
The first installment (the papers are being published in stages) includes a 108-page OSS outline, “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” It’s not easy reading, but it’s an enlightening tale of how the Nazis — faced with a country where the overwhelming majority considered themselves Christians — built their power while plotting to undermine and eradicate the churches, and the people’s faith.
Before the Nazis came to power, the churches did hold some views that overlapped with the National Socialists — e.g., they opposed communism and resented the Versailles treaty that ended World War I by placing heavy burdens on defeated Germany. But, the OSS noted, the churches “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.” Thus, “conflict was inevitable.”
From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within partly ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power.
So the Nazis lied to the churches, posing as a group with modest and agreeable goals like the restoration of social discipline in a country that was growing permissive. But as they gained power, they took advantage of the fact that many of the Protestant churches in the largest body (the German Evangelical Church) were government-financed and administered. This, the OSS reported, advanced the Nazi plan “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”
The Roman Catholic Church was another story; its administration came from Rome, not within German borders, and its relationship with the Nazis in the 1920s had been bitter. So Hitler lied again, offering a treaty pledging total freedom for the Catholic church, asking only that the church pledge loyalty to the civil government and emphasize citizens’ patriotic duties — principles which sounded a lot like what the church already promoted. Rome signed the treaty in 1933.
Only later, when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, did his true policy toward both Catholics and Protestants become apparent. By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church, and dissidents like the Lutheran clergyman Martin Niemoller openly denounced state control of Protestant churches. The fiction of peaceful coexistence was rapidly fading: In the words of The New York Times (summarizing OSS conclusions), “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.”
The Nazis still paid enough attention to public perception to paint its church critics as traitors: the church “shall have not martyrs, but criminals,” an official said. But the campaign was increasingly unrestrained. Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading. Protestant churches issued a manifesto opposing Nazi practices, and in response 700 Protestant pastors were arrested. And so it went.
Not that Christians took this lying down; the OSS noted that despite this state terrorism, believers often acted with remarkable courage. The report tells, for example, of how massive public demonstrations protested the arrests of Lutheran pastors, and how individuals like pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (hanged just days before the war ended) and Catholic lay official Josef Mueller joined German military intelligence because that group sought to undermine the Nazis from within.
There is, of course, plenty of room for legitimate criticism of church leaders and laymen alike for getting suckered early on, and for failing to put up enough of a fight later. Yet we should approach such judgments with due humility. As Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett write in their book Christianity on Trial (to repeat a quote used in my last column), “It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do, but it is an expectation that will often be disappointed. . . . it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives.”
At any rate, my point is hardly to defend every action (or inaction) on the part of German churches. In fact, I think their failures bring us valuable lessons, not least about the dangers of government involvement in — and thus power over — any churches.
But the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You can’t be both.”
This is something to bear in mind when some folk on the left trot out their well-worn accusation that conservative Christians are “Nazis” or “fascists.” It’s also relevant to answering the charge made by the likes of liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “History teaches that when religion is injected into politics — the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo — disaster follows.”
But it’s not Christianity that’s injected evil into the world. In fact, the worst massacres in history have been committed by atheists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) and virtual pagans (Hitler). Christians have amassed their share of sins over the past 2,000 years, but the great murderers have been the church’s enemies, especially in the past century. It’s long past time to set the historical record straight. 
The complete text of this article is available at http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000541.html
I wouldn't begin to know how to dig it up (no doubt there's an ace here who could) but his assertion was that "Nazism was a perverted form of Christianity."
I suspect it was one of his vaunted posturings in which he appeared (to himself at least) to be dispensing the wisdom of caution against having any faith in the western Judeo-Christian ethic, just as when he equated us to the terrorists, because of the Crusades, at Georgetown not long ago.
Sick f*er fits right in with the great liars of history doesn't he?
Yeah, and Jeffrey Dahmer was a creationist. (Rev. Jim Jones devinitely was.)
Serbian Orthodox Christians were murdered and/or transported to nazi concentration camps by the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS! The Patriarch of that Church and many hundreds of his clergy were imprisoned in Dachau.
nazi allies: the Albanians, the Bosnians and the Croats also assisted the nazis in killing Serbian Orthodox Christians. OR, they, themselves, murdered thousands of Orthodox Serbs in concentration camps.
Dahmer was homosexual. Hitler and the Nazis practiced evolution and forced on Germany's society. Social Darwinism was the driving force behind the desire for a master race.
Clinton on Hitler's "Christianity"
Without provoking a syllable of subsequent criticism from the Christians in attendance at the February 4th National Prayer Breakfast, Bill Clinton told his audience that "Adolph Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity...." Bearing in mind that Mr. Clinton takes pains to be seen and photographed each week exiting church, his Bible conspicuously in view, and also that he is given to pontificating about the "lessons of history;' it is fair to perceive his comment as either the product of culpable ignorance or premeditated slander.
In 1942, Martin Bormann, who at the time was the second-highest ranking member of Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party hierarchy, issued a secret memo to Party district leaders to emphasize the fact that "National Socialist and Christian concepts are incompatible." Referring to "the ideological hostility" directed against the Nazi Party by Christians throughout the Reich, Bormann explained that "the Evangelical Church poses us with the same hostility as the Catholic Church" and predicted that in the future "it must be made absolutely impossible for the Church to exercise its old influence" in Germany and wherever else the Swastika flew in triumph.
"Hitler was made possible by the triumph of scientific naturalism in Europe, not by organized religion," points out Rabbi Daniel Lapin in his valuable new book, America's Real War. "Nazism was, after all, 'National Socialism,' and any form of socialism has intellectual roots in the secular Left, not the religious Right." At great personal peril, recalls Rabbi Lapin, "in Lutheran countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, devout Christians, and often the church leadership itself, turned the rescuing of Jews into a religious mission.... Many Catholic and Protestant church leaders in Europe realized that Hitler hated God and the church. Many lost their lives. Only a society in which the church had already been weakened could breed Nazism."
Although he hated God, Hitler was rapturously in love with himself and his movement was built upon institutionalized loyalty to his person — fuhrerprinzip. The Democratic Party's prevailing doctrine, which holds loyalty to Bill Clinton above fidelity to the law or to the Constitution, is near kindred to the Nazis' pernicious doctrine. As to Bill Clinton's self-infatuation a trait he shares with the late, unlamented Fuhrer — one need look no further than this presidential remark from the January 25th "Fifth Millennium Evening" at the White House: "You all know that I am a walking apostle of hope and progress." Worry not, however: The Apostle of Hope assures us that he bears his mantle "without arrogance, [and] with appropriate humility."
Jeff Dahmer wasn't a creationist so much as he was a cannibalistic sick you-know-what. Rev. Jim Jones was a socialist people's temple leader who had nothing to do with christianity and everything to do with marxism and it's accompanying theories. Read up on J.Jones and you'll wonder why he is used as a christian example.
Oops again--You deserve a BUMP! for this truism...
Unless the ones linking Naziism to Christianity are secretly in Aryan drag. ;^)
In 1895 Alfred Ploetz had, as we have seen, introduced Social Darwinism into Germany and founded Racial Hygiene. In his book "Fundamental Outline of Racial Hygiene" he calls for the elimination of counter-selective processes i.e. those processes which eliminate the strong and favour the weak. Amongst these he includes war and the protection of the weak and the ill. As an illustration he gives the example of a newly married couple who give birth to a weak or malformed child who would be given an easy death with a small dose of morphine by a Board of Doctors.
http://www.observations.net/questions/question11.html
Darwin’s thought would become an important influence on Adolf Hitler. Historian Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler, Profiles in Power, wrote: “The social darwinist view of history as a struggle between individual races with victory going to the strongest, fittest and most ruthless, seems to have occupied its place at the center of Hitler’s world view by 1914-1918 at the latest.”
The centrality of darwinism in Hitler’s thinking can be seen in this quote from chapter 4 of Mein Kampf:
By leaving the process of procreation unchecked and by submitting the individual to the hardest preparatory tests in life, Nature selects the best from an abundance of single elements and stamps them as fit to live and carry on the conservation of the species. But man restricts the procreative faculty and strives obstinately to keep alive at any cost whatever has once been born. This correction of the Divine Will seems to him to be wise and humane, and he rejoices at having trumped Nature’s card in one game at least and thus proved that she is not entirely reliable. The dear little ape of an all-mighty father is delighted to see and hear that he has succeeded in effecting a numerical restriction; but he would be very displeased if told that this, his system, brings about a degeneration in personal quality.
For as soon as the procreative faculty is thwarted and the number of births diminished, the natural struggle for existence which allows only healthy and strong individuals to survive is replaced by a sheer craze to ‘save’ feeble and even diseased creatures at any cost. And thus the seeds are sown for a human progeny which will become more and more miserable from one generation to another, as long as Nature’s will is scorned.
The title of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, means, My Struggle, in English, and alludes to the darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest. In Hitler's view, the Aryans were the fittest race, while all others were unfit. Hitler believed that the Aryans would win the darwinian struggle through warfare.
By reducing man to a mere accident, and advocating survival of the fittest, darwinism has contributed to the genocidal holocausts of the 20th century. This unscientific philosophy, which has been responsible for much human misery, has seen its day. It is now time for darwinism to be discarded.
This is one of the dumber ideas that surfaces in the evolution threads from time to time. First, let's consider REAL evolutionists, starting with Darwin himself, and continuing to today's biologists, physicians, etc. None is a mass murderer. This alone is overwhelming evidence that studying biology is not something that triggers genocidal insanity. The simple fact is that Hitler was no biologist. He used a few phrases about evolution to justify his madness. So what? He was also a believer in astrology, pagan mythology, and probably a dozen other ideas. And he was a vegetarian too. Do all those things lead to genocidal insanity? Besides, the Taliban are creationists. Does that tell you anything? Actually, it means nothing. Guilt by association is an absurd method of thinking.
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