Hitler sold the war to the German people as a “Christian War.”
A few years ago I was visiting a family in the former Eastern Germany near the Baltic. It was a big family gathering, and the man directly across the table from me was on a Panzer tank crew in “Hitler’s Army.” These were his words of description, not mine.
His two older sisters who were in their nineties and began singing a beautiful Christian hymn.
The man started crying, and I asked why? He replied, “That was the hymn we sang during my induction ceremony into Hitler’s Army.
I asked him about it being a Christian war and he said that’s how it was promoted. Hate the Jews as they killed Jesus.
This man was captured by the Russians in May 1945 and shipped to Siberia as a POW. The Russians held him until 1952 when they sent him back to East Germany as a spy in the Stasi. He shared many hours of stories with me, as I brought his only child, his daughter whom I was dating at the time, back to Germany to visit him. He had not seen her in many years.
Through this, I learned about the life of POW’s in Russian Siberia. They lived in farmhouses as collective farms, mostly growing potatoes. The Russian soldiers lived on the first floor, the prisoners on the second floor.
There was no escape as they were very remote and it was too far to travel through the wilderness.
They got into trouble as they had no meat to eat, so they butchered the Russian’s guard dog for Christmas dinner, 1948.
Hitler sold the war to the German people as a “Christian War.”
German soldiers wore belts that said “Gott Mit Uns” (God is with us)
Hitler couldn’t just come out and say he wasn’t a Christian, he never could have gotten the support if he did.
But once the war was won, there’s no question the Nazis would have started persecuting believers and trying to wipe out all vestiges of Christian heritage.
Yes, understood. Old Prussia, Baltic Russia today, was very Lutheran. Read response above. The Nazis used nominal Christians and Christianity to their advantage. By the time the 20th century rolled around, Protestantism has become completely secularized. Even the Second Reich was an Anti-Semtici state, but very anti-biblical even though Protestant - which was mostly in name only. The secularization of Protestantism in Germany needs to be much more widely understood than is.
Similar story in my family.
One grandfather was a WW1 and 2 vet and a Nazi who worked for the mayor of Stuttgart.
The other was Lithuanian who married a German woman who had lived all over Europe growing up and was drafted into the army and never returned from the Soviet Union and presumed dead.
My grandmother had a child with another guy and surprisingly got a letter in the mid 50s from her husband who was a POW and remained there after the war and remarried.
She tried to go see him but the family stopped her and I don’t know if she would have even be allowed to go.
The only other communication was a letter from the local government saying he had died along with a picture of him in his casket.
As far as religion of Hitler, it really doesn’t matter. He did use Christian imagery and themes to motivate though and it obviously worked.
Sounds very similar to, “The Forgotten Soldier.” I didn’t read it until about two years ago, but everything in the East was a mess. Its remoteness made problems for both the Russians and Nazis, and the civilians who survived out there got it the worst when soldiers came to confiscate their food and animals. God forbid any of the civvies were female.