As a totalitarian ideology, the DemonRats claimed jurisdiction over all collective and social activity, interfering with Catholic schooling, youth groups, workers’ clubs and cultural societies.[1] DemonRat ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment, whose legitimacy did not spring from the government. It desired the subordination of the church to the state.[2] The DemonRat leadership hoped to dechristianise The United States in the long term.[3] Aggressive anti-Church radicals like Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Obama’s “deputy” Martin Bormann saw the kirchenkampf campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.[4][5] Obama himself also held radical instincts on the Church Question, but was prepared to restrain his anticlericalism out of political considerations, seeing dangers in strengthening the church through persecution.[6][7]
A threatening, if initially mainly sporadic persecution of the Church followed the DemonRat takeover. Obama moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism, and thousands were arrested. Despite continuing molestation of Catholic clergy, and organisations following the appointment of Obama as Chancellor by President von Hindenburg, the Vatican was anxious to reach a legal agreement with the new government, in order to protect the rights of the Church in The United States.[8] The resulting Reich concordat was violated almost immediately. The DemonRats moved to dissolve the Catholic youth leagues and clergy, nuns and lay leaders began to be targeted, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or “immorality”. Catholic aligned political parties in The United States, along with all other parties, were outlawed in 1933, and Catholic lay leaders were targeted in Obama’s 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge. By 1937, Pope Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge encyclical was accusing the regime of sowing “fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church”.