Seriously, Adolpf Hitler, a Roman Catholic, was shaped by Protestant excess?
Sounds like the sort of story Joseph Goebbels (also a Roman Catholic) would have made up.
Most of Hitler’s staff, and the commandants of the extermination camps were Roman Catholics.
Not a one of them have been excommunicated. Hmmm?
hmmm... I would defer to William L Shirer’s seminal work “the rise and fall of the third reich” - where Shirer was a journalist in Germany chronicling the rise of the Nazis.
Shirere was a Protestant as well.
Yet he pointed out, as CondoleezzaProtege did about Protestant “EXCESSES” shaping the Nazi ideology. Let’s repeat that - excesses, not any particular Protestant sect mainstream belief (* caveat)
Luther was a man of passion who called ANYONE who disagreed with him as a scoundrel, of the devil, fit to be killed. he called Catholics this, Zwingli (a fellow protestant this) and he called Jews this. He also had choice words for peasants who rose against German lords.
Luther was not an anti-semite (a misanthrope perhaps) - if you were a Jew who converted to Luther’s beliefs, he loved you. If you were a German who disagree with him he hated you.
but Luther’s rantings were a core part of Nazi ideology. They twisted his rantings of “I hate those who disagree with me” to “I hate Js”
In addition, the other core factor of Nazi ideology was the 1800s “scientific understanding of evolution” coupled with biblical literalism that was the vogue of both Calvinists in Germany and in the US (leading to Millerites, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons etc.)
This went on to talk about race evolution and applied it to religious evolution.
Hitler and Goebbels, born Catholic, hated Catholicism as a “Jewish religion” that “held back the German people”
That being said - neither of them became “Protestant” - rather they were more worshipers of Nordicism and the occult.
Nazi-ism can’t blamed on Protestantism or Calvinism specifically, but as CP said, the excesses did play a role in its shaping.