How the Nazis tried to take Christ out of Christmas

We've known from documents since 1998 that Hitler and his fellow socialists in Germany intended to destroy Christianity after the war ended.

The vegetarian Hitler, after all, was a big fan of syncretism and paganism. He was an even bigger fan of scientific racism, a consequence of a Darwinian, naturalistic worldview. Hitler's Christianity, like other aspects of his life, was at many points pure theatrics and sophisticated propaganda.

These two outlooks go together-- when people stop believing in God, a common problem is that they don't believe in nothing, rather, that they will believe in anything.

Note-- while evolution is true, Darwinian fundamentalists have always had trouble incorporating altruism (other-regarding behavior) into their outlook. They always waffle between saying altruism doesn't exist, and that is does exist and is really something else (e.g. selfish genes).

Perhaps we need a genuinely *social* Darwinism that takes cooperative behavior in the animal kingdom, including humanity, at face value. Social Darwinism as a whipping boy usually refers to something unsocial, that is, an individualist war of all against all, which is a product of a competitive capitalist culture more than anything else. After all, mothers in the animal kingdom don't survive by eating their protein-rich children.

You have been on FR for 22 days and you think you can post this Crap and not get the truth shoved in your face?
WRONG

Fröhliche Weihnachten!

and Old Fritz rocked :)

Hitler a devout a Catholic? What are you talking about? He loathed Christinity, considered it a weak religion. On the History Channel last night there was a program called Hitler and the Occult. Hitler believed in a lot of weird things including the superiority of the Aryan race as well as certain pagan concepts as well. Hitler believed in euthanizing the mentally ill and the retarded. He believed in the supremacy of the state and the master race. He held to Darwinian concepts of the survival of the fitest. There is nothing Hitler believed in which could remotely be considered Christian. He would not have been in agreement with the Sermon on the Mount in any way shape or form.

Good. I didn’t post this article.

Forget it. The SS moved alongside the German army destroying Catholic Churchs and it is well documented that Priest and Nuns were murdered for standing up to the wanton murder of “undesirables”.
Admit it, you are a virilent Anti-catholic. Living in the dark ages.

But, but, but ....... several blithering imbeciles right here on FR have fervently asserted their absurd delusion that Hitler and the Nazis were all devout Christians who believed they were carrying out God's will.

These putrid examples of colossal ignorance could not possibly be wrong ........... could they?

Adolf Hitler was politically astute enough to maintain some public distance between himself and the Neo-Pagan ideologues of the Nazi Party. But he was not far from them at heart. After his death documentation became available showing that Hitler had approved grandiose plans to wean the German churches away from Christianity and into the Neo-Pagan fold. To quote Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

“...under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, ‘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 by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan...

“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: it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.

“The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably...the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800...

“The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.

“The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany...’”

“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.

“On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels...and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.”

(The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer, p. 240 in some editions, p. 332 in others. Chapter headed “Triumph and Consolidation”, subsection “The Persecution of the Christian Churches”)

Martin Bormann was faithful to Hitler till the end, sprinkling gasoline on the bodies after Hitler’s suicide. This true believer put it this way:

“National Socialist and Christian concepts are incompatible. The Christian Churches build upon the ignorance of men and strive to keep large portions of the people in ignorance because only in this way can the Christian Churches maintain their power. On the other hand, National Socialism is based on scientific foundations. Christianity’s immutable principles, which were laid down almost two thousand years ago, have increasingly stiffened into life-alien dogmas. National Socialism, however, if it wants to fulfill its task further, must always guide itself according to the newest data of scientific researches.

“The Christian Churches have long been aware that exact scientific knowledge poses a threat to their existence. Therefore, by means of such pseudo-sciences as theology, they take great pains to suppress or falsify scientific research...No one would know anything about Christianity if pastors had not crammed it down his throat in his childhood. The so-called loving God by no means reveals the knowledge of His existence to young people, but amazingly enough, and despite His omnipotence, He leaves this to the efforts of a pastor. When in the future our youth no longer hear anything about this Christianity, whose doctrine is far below our own, Christianity will automatically disappear.

“[...] When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God...[we mean] [t]he force which moves all these bodies in the universe, in accordance with natural law, is what we call the Almighty or God. The assertion that this world-force can worry about the fate of every individual, every bacillus on earth, and that it can be influenced by so-called prayer or other astonishing things, is based either on a suitable dose of naivete or on outright commercial effrontery.”

“Any influence that would impair or damage the leadership of the people exercised by the Fuhrer with the aid of the NSDAP has to be eliminated. To an ever increasing degree the people must be wrested from Churches and their agents, the pastors...Only the Reich leadership, together with the party and the organs and associations connected with it, has a right to lead the people. Just as the harmful influence of astrologists, soothsayers, and other swindlers has been suppressed by the state, so it must be absolutely impossible for the Church to exercise its old influence.”

(Martin Bormann, Reich Leader, 1942, ‘National Socialist and Christian Concepts are Incompatible’, From Kirchliches Jahrbuch fur die evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, 1933-1944, pp. 470-472, quoted pp. 245-247, George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: A Documentary History).

Hitler’s contempt for Christians and the Bible was genuine and well-attested. Of Roman Catholic upbringing, he was, however, a theist, who seems to have had a vague religious faith, attributing his escape from Stauffenberg’s bomb to “Providence.” (Colonel Stauffenberg had placed a briefcase containing a bomb at the Fuhrer’s feet, then hastily departed. Not owing to any break in the course of nature, but simply because somebody found the clumsy briefcase to be in the way, it had been moved before exploding, and Hitler survived.) He spoke to the nation: “The bomb planted by Colonel Count Stauffenberg exploded two meters to the right of me...I myself an entirely unhurt, aside from some very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence...” (The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer, p. 1069). He considered this “Providence” to favor the strong over the weak:

“...I may be no pious churchgoer, but deep within me I am nevertheless a devout man. That is to say, I believe that he who fights valiantly obeying the laws which a god has established and who never capitulates but instead gathers his forces time after time and always pushes forward-—such a man will not be abandoned by the Lawgiver. Rather, he will ultimately receive the blessing of Providence.”

(Adolf Hitler, in his June 26, 1944 speech to industrialists, quoted by Albert Speer, p. 555, Inside the Third Reich.)

But He was no Christian, and his movement was no celebration of Christianity. He thought ill of Christianity, preferring Islam for its warrior spirit:

“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”

(Adolf Hitler, quoted by Albert Speer, p. 96, Inside the Third Reich.)

The “meekness and flabbiness” to which Hitler objected in Christianity fell straight from the lips of its Founder: “But whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also.” (Matthew 5:39).

While it is difficult to fix the boundary between the fringe and the mainstream, the general tenor of Nazi ideology was in favor of the old Nordic paganism and against Christianity:

“The German people is no longer blinded by illusions as at the time of the Reformation. It has come to recognize not only Judaism, but Christianity too, as foreign to its genius.— Der Blitz, January 12, 1936, quoted p. 6, The War Against God, edited by Carl Carmer).

“But today a new faith is awakening: the myth of the blood...Then in place of the Old Testament stories of cattle breeders and the exploitation of prostitutes, we shall have the Nordic sagas and fairy tales, at first simply recounted, later assuming the form of symbols.” (Alfred Rosenberg, Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1932, quoted p. 6, The War Against God, edited by Carl Carmer).

“The teaching of mercy and love of one’s neighbor is foreign to the German race and the Sermon on the Mount is according to Nordic sentiment an ethic for cowards and idiots.— Hans Hauptmann, Bolshevism in the Bible (Nazi textbook), 1937, quoted p. 28, The War Against God, edited by Carl Carmer).

“If Jehovah has lost all meaning for us Germans, the same must be said of Jesus Christ, his son...He certainly lacks those characteristics which he would require to be a true German. Indeed, he is as disappointing, if we read his record carefully, as is his father.— E. K. Heidemann, ‘What the Christian Does not Know about Christianity,’ September, 1935, quoted p. 105, The War Against God, edited by Carl Carmer).
And perhaps a summary of the conclusions of Michael Burleigh should also form a summary here. Burleigh is the historian who has perhaps done most to look at the relationship between Nazism and religion:
“In both The Third Reich and Sacred Causes, Burleigh emphasizes the widely unknown or deliberately ignored fact that the strongest opposition to Nazi ideology and criminality came from conservative “men of God.” This is no accident. While left-wing critics of Nazism wrongly saw in it only a virulent version of either “late capitalism” or German nationalism, its conservative Christian opponents were far more sensitive to the movement’s profoundly antitraditional character. The more discerning among them saw in Nazism nothing less than a “revolution of nihilism.” And not a few of them courageously rose to the challenge of resisting the new barbarism.

In addition to Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, the “lion of Munster,” who in a series of famous sermons in 1941 denounced the murderous Nazi euthanasia campaign, some of the Austrian and German bishops did not shrink from attacking the “racist madness” of Nazism. In his great encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1938), written pointedly in German and clandestinely smuggled into Germany, Pope Pius XI attacked modern racialism, the cynical Nazi appropriation of Christian symbolism, nationalist idolatry, and a false cult of human greatness. Likewise, in the first encyclical of his pontificate, Summi pontificis, released in the fall of 1939, Pius XII affirmed the “fundamental unity” of the human race and expressed his profound sympathy for the plight of Poland. The whole world had no doubt at the time whom the same pontiff had in mind in his 1942 Christmas message when he spoke of “the hundreds of thousands of innocent people put to death or doomed to slow extinction, sometimes merely because of their race or descent.” This prudent, perhaps too prudent, diplomat-pope, despising National Socialism but solicitous of putting an end to a suicidal total war, helped inspire the heroic witness of groups like Temoignage chretien in France (whose anti-Nazi pamphleteers included such eminent philosophers and theologians as Gaston Fessard and Henri de Lubac) as well as the Italian Catholics who saved tens of thousands of Jews in the fall of 1944 when the Nazis unleashed full scale war against the Jews in occupied Italy.

The rewriting of history to suggest that the Christian West was somehow culpable in the murderous agenda of the National Socialists is one of the greatest intellectual distortions of our time. Burleigh has done a great service by recovering an appreciation for the impregnable wall that separated the Christian religion — with its affirmation of the fundamental unity of the human race and of conscience informed by right reason — from both the “horrors of applied rationality” (communism) and the National Socialist religion of the absolutized human will. This project of historical and moral restoration achieves something like its finished form in his magisterial two-volume history of political religion, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes.

The above article is adapted in part from here by John Ray (M.A.;Ph.D.).

If you would bother to read the Myth of Hitler’s Pope by RABBI David Dalin you would know that Pope Pius XII loathed the Nazis and was directly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. The liberals did the same hatchet job on Pius XII that they did on Sen. Joe McCarthy. The completely distorted and twisted the truth.

OK now you have id’d yourself as a pathetic purveyor of Chritian hatred.

Also by destroying the Jews he could destroy Christianity too. However Hitler was a pragmatist and before the war ordered the Nazi Party to tone down their displays of outright pagan beliefs as he knew the German people were very uncomfortable with them. He was still concerned about maintaining the support of the majority of the German people.

This is pure nonsense. Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolph Hess while in prison for the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch. He did not dictate it to a Catholic priest.

Hitler had a strikingly similar background to one of his contemporaries, Joseph Stalin. Both had alcoholic fathers who beat them senseless. Both had devoted mothers who tried to shelter them and encouraged them to join the priesthood.

Both committed genocide—Stalin actually slaughtered more people liquidating 8 million Ukrainians alone in the 1930s. If it follows that Hitler’s native Catholicism was responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich, then it follows that Stalin’s native Orthodox Church was responsible for the crimes he committed as dictator of the USSR.

Can you see now that you are not making an ounce of sense? How does the platform and teachings of the Nazi Party comport with teachings and Catechism of the Catholic Church?

I know but it is next to impossible to reason with trolls.

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A little off topic, but I've posted on occasion of Hitler's unsuccessful attempt, particularly as regards Catholics, to establish the pagan Reichchurch as an alternative to Christianity, with pseudo Christian symbology. Having failed, he opted for the slower option of reeducation through Hitler youth, after all he had 1,000 years.