Papers reveal Nazi aim: End Christianity

A Rutgers journal will put rare Nuremberg documents online. A
plan to rout the church and install a Reich faith is shown.

Raymond Soloman, Rutgers law school dean,
with papers from Nuremberg. (April Saul/
Inquirer)

The fragile, typewritten documents from the 1940s lay out the Nazi plan in grim detail:

Take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit,
jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants.
Give them a new faith - in Germany's Third Reich.

More than a half-century ago, confidential U.S. government reports on the Nazi
plans were prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and
will be available online for free starting tomorrow - some of them for the first
time.

These rare documents - in their original form, some with handwritten scrawls
across them - are part of an online legal journal published by students of the
Rutgers University School of Law at Camden.

"When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against
Jews, but here's a different perspective," said Julie Seltzer Mandel, a third-year
law student who is editor of the Nuremberg Project for the Rutgers Journal of
Law and Religion.

"A lot of people will say, 'I didn't realize that they were trying to convert
Christians to a Nazi philosophy.' . . . They wanted to eliminate the Jews
altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."

Mandel said the journal would post new Nuremberg documents about every
six months, along with commentary from scholars across the world, on its Web
site at www.lawandreligion.com.

The material is part of the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan, who served as
special assistant to the U.S. chief of counsel during the International Military
Tribunal after World War II. The trials were convened to hold accountable those responsible for war crimes.

The first installment - a 120-page report titled "The Nazi Master Plan: The
Persecution of the Christian Churches" - was prepared by the Office of
Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.

"Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this
situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the
substitution of a purely racial religion," said an OSS report in July 1945. "The
best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan is to be
found in the systematic nature of the persecution itself.

"Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of
denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational
schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in
the whole area of the Reich . . . and were supported by the entire regimented
press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers."

A second online journal posting - to be added in about six months - will
spotlight a secret OSS document, "Miscellaneous Memoranda on War
Criminals," about the efforts of various countries to bring Nazis to justice.

A third installment - to be included in the journal in a year - focuses on
translated, confidential Nazi documents. A message sent during the
Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom of November 1938 is titled
"Measures To Be Taken Against Jews Tonight." Authorities were given specific
instructions: "Jewish shops and homes may be destroyed, but not looted. . . .
Foreigners, even if Jewish, will not be molested."

Mandel, whose 80-year-old grandmother is a survivor of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, said that allowing the public access to such documentation
is "phenomenal."

"Some of the papers will answer questions that scholars have been asking for
years," said Mandel, 29, of Berlin Borough, Camden County. "What did we
know? When did we know it?"

The documents are part of the collection of the Cornell University School of
Law library, which has about 150 bound volumes of Nuremberg trial
transcripts and materials. They are housed at the school and are being
cataloged.

"Gen. Donovan kept extensive, detailed records of Nazi atrocities," said
Mandel, who taught at Triton High School in Runnemede and at Shawnee High
School in Medford, where she led a course on "Literature of the Holocaust."

She and other journal editors - Daniel Bahk, Christopher Elliott, Ross Enders
and Jessica Platt - examined hundreds of documents at Cornell before choosing
those to be posted on the journal site. "The project could not be published in a
conventional journal without losing the international accessibility that it
demands," said Rayman Solomon, dean of the School of Law. "This student
initiative will make a significant contribution to legal history scholarship while
being of great interest and importance to the general public, especially at this
time in our history."

Greg Baxter, marketing editor of the journal and a third-year Rutgers law
student, said the online project was "definitely pertinent in light of the Sept. 11
terrorist attack" and Bush administration plans to hold a military tribunal to try
the accused.

"The Nuremberg trials provide a framework for today's trials," said Baxter, 24,
of Winslow, Camden County.

Most of the nazi party members were go along to get alongs that had no interest in politics and no concept of the horror taking in place in their name, their Christianity would have been nominal at best. Its doubful many of them were "go to church Christians"

Agreed. I think it is worth stating, however, that some nazi officials, soldiers, etc. would have been torn in their loyalty between the Church and its moral obligations and their obligations to the nazi pogroms and ideology. The SS, which was the militant and ideological force of the National Socialists, was fundamentally pagan in its teachings and indeed strongly discouraged Christian sentiments and Church attendance. This didn't stop, some SS members from running off to church from time to time to assuage their consciences momentarily, get married, etc. It is therefore facile to state some officials were Christians, or at least churchgoers (for one is not denying there is no necessary spiritual and logical relationship between going to church and being a Christian, i.e., going to church doesn't make you a Christian) without a great big caveat as to what this entailed. In the end, as the article states, the fundamental pogrom of nazism was to have all members of the new Reich shed every vestige of Christian sentiment. Thus could be born the Nietzschean Ubermensch (superman) notions which Hitler was fond of. For in this sense, while Nietzsche considered Judaism bad he thought of Christianity as worst whereas Hitler saw Christianity only derivatively bad as it was spawned out Judaism. Either way, both were to be eradicated.

I've, uh, got a lot of dying to do.

We all do, Mary. I don't know why, but very few of us come to understand the grace, mercy, and love of God until we're in the middle of some suffering that is way beyond our ability to control. For some, it's a serious illness; others, it's a psychological illness or addiction; or the loss of a loved one; or the loss of one's material security.

I will say, though, that everyone I've ever spoken to who has gone through this "crucifying of the self" or flesh, has come out of it with a deeper appreciation and love for God. The thing is that "flesh" cannot cast out "flesh," so the crucifying of the "old man" is God's work, and His alone. We only submit. And with our eye on Him as He does it, we come out looking more like the kind of people He intends us to be. This isn't just dry theology, but I know this from experience.

In the meantime, I'll remember you when I meet with my prayer group this coming weekend. God bless.

Wise, wonderful post.

There is power and authority in the name of Jesus Christ.

This is what the Nazis hated about the Judeo-Christian worldview. That God or Jesus has authority that transends the power of government and the laws of man. The Nazis wanted a state church that would serve the needs of the state and to fold all the Christians into it. If you did not join their Nazified church, you would go to a concentration camp. All real Christians are a threat to Fascisim because they answer to a higher authority than the state. When the Nazis were done with the Jews they were going to go after the Christians. They didn't want to do that until later after the war, so they never got that far in their religous program.

The Nazis wanted a state church that would serve the needs of the state and to fold all the Christians into it.

And this is also the reason that leftists in the media and in politics in this country had religious conservatives. They refuse to acknowledge as legitimate any religious convictions that run contrary to or oppose their political agenda.

"...were not forced to ditch Christianity."

Not always at gun point, but it was made clear, in subtle and not so subtle ways, that Christianity and Nazism were incompatable. Based upon personal testimony that I've read, any SS man w/ the guts to attend a Chrstian service at a minimum put his career in jeopardy and quite often much more.

Nevertheless, this slender loop hole doesn't even provide a fig leaf of cover for your salacious accusation that the atrocities of the Third Reich are attributal to Christianity. Especially when it was the Christian Churches that provided the only resistance to nazism in Europe for years, how else to explain the 100,000s of pastors, priests, and other witnesses to Jesus Christ that were murdered by the nazis for that profession of faith. Or the 100,000s of other, everyday Christians, that risked their own lives to protect those hunted by the nazi animals.

It is true that many Christians failed the searing test of faith presented by the nazis, and surely that was the nazi intent, but pray (if you can) that your own character is never tested so steeply less you too fail to live up to the test.

Give it up Lex, you've allowed your hatred of Christ to lead you into a blind alley.

Thanks a lot. I would appreciate it. My kidneys are problematic because I'm a diabetic and I may be having a problem with heavy metal toxicity (probably mercury fillings that need to be replaced). I'm getting my teeth rechecked. Doctors NEVER think of that. That's why I ALSO go to an alternative to medicine as we know it, provider. I hope this will do the trick. I keep praying and asking God for his healing. I know eventually it will come. This is my "dying to self" experience, I'm sure. Hurry up, please, Lord! Love, Maryxxx

No, you're not going to weasel word your way out of this. Let's recap, you said:

"but the rank and file Nazis, the ones who actually carried out the atrocities, were church-going Christians"

This statement is an indictment not merely of the general Christian population of Germany but w/ the use of the adjective "church-going" it clearly refers to those people that are schooled in and practice Christianity. It is not then a stretch to infer that Christianity itself bears culpability w/ the atrocities carried out by the Nazis and indeed, I believe, that was your intent.

I have pointed out that the atrocities of the Nazi regime were carried out almost exclusively by the virulently anti-Christian SS. Rather than acknowledge this simple historic truth, you instead imply that just because the SS hierarchy didn't issue written orders expressly forbidding Christianity your statement somehow retains validity. I assure you, it does not.

And so, in desperation, you drag out the old, tired strawman gambit thinking, no doubt, to slip the hook. Alas, that too will not work because your original statement remains untenable. Your attempt to link Christianity w/ Nazism is clear; and it is false.

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