Christophobic Nazism: "Hitler was a Catholic," you'll hear, therefore Christianity is dangerous

American Thinker ^ | 02/26/2018 | Bruce Walker

[SeekAndFind]

Totalitarian systems are militantly Christophobic.  The comments to some of my articles on the dangers of materialism or the ignorance of atheism try to prove that religion is as dangerous to goodness as atheism repeat the false "fact" that "Hitler was a Catholic."  This is utterly untrue.  Moreover, all Nazism was viciously Christophobic as well as Judeophobic.

My American Thinker article of November 2007 covers some of the evidence found in old books about the hate all Nazis felt toward Christianity.  My book, Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity, covers many more documentary sources that reveal Nazi persecution of Christianity and Christianity's lonely war against Nazism.  Many writers at the time noted that Christianity was the only force resisting the Nazis in Europe.

Indeed, there were many books about the Nazi persecution of Christianity and hatred of religion published before the Second World War began with titles like The Nazi Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich and The Nazi Persecution of Christianity and The War against God and Nazism versus Religion. 

Hundreds of authors writing before and during the Second World War saw Nazism and Christianity as mortal enemies.  These authors were Christians – both Catholics and Protestants – and Jews and agnostics.  They were on the right and on the left.  They were Frenchmen and Germans and Poles and Americans and Britons.  The convenient rewriting of history that invents out of whole cloth the notion that Christianity and Nazism were in any way linked runs utterly contrary to the historical record of the time.

But were any leading Nazis Christians in any sense of the word?  Emphatically, no.  Consider first Hitler himself.  John Gunther noted as early as 1935 that "Hitler was born and brought up as a Roman Catholic.  But he lost his faith early and attends no religious services ...

[RGF]

Probably drank milk at some time. I swear it’s a gateway drug.

[Campion]

We talked about it for a while and he explained how Hitler made it easy to hate Jews as they killed Jesus.

That may have been the excuse given to the gullible, but the Nazis hated and killed Jews whether they stayed Jews or became fervent Christians. It wasn't about religion, ultimately.

[Campion]

Then Christian Fundamentalists find some quotes where Hitler criticizes Christianity to prove that he was really an atheist and that atheism is responsible for World War II.

Hitler criticizing Christianity doesn't prove he was atheist, it only proves he wasn't a believing Christian.

What Hitler actually believed is hard to find, because he lied routinely. Plenty of his followers were clearly neo-pagans, and plenty more of his followers worshipped a god named "Adolf Hitler".

[Zionist Conspirator]

This makes [Hitler] even more irrelevant as fodder for the Fundamentalists Creationism vs. Atheist Evolutionism websites that both use him in opposite ways to sell their cause.

I knew you were an atheist and an evolutionist with no sentimental attachment to Bible stories. This doesn't surprise me a bit. Neither does the "a plague on both their houses" attitude.

At least you, unlike some, aren't a total ------- about it.

[Wallace T.]

For the most part, the trials and executions during the Inquisition were conducted as a civil, and not an ecclesiastical, matter. Protestant nations such as England persecuted, tried, convicted, and executed Catholics, as well as Protestant dissenters such as the Puritans and the Quakers. As with the Catholic nations, it was performed through the civil government. Heresy and other infractions of the dogma of the state sponsored church were against the criminal code.

Revulsion against the excesses of religious persecution led to the Enlightenment, which undermined the prestige of the state churches. To a considerable extent, the reaction led to anti-clerical governments in revolutionary France, early 20th Century Mexico, and Spain before the rise of Franco. The Enlightenment ideas helped to foster the rise of Marxism, which led to the deaths of over 100 million human souls.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Christianity’s core understanding, that Christ is necessary for salvation, has been portrayed as a path to Hitler for over 70 years in an effort to use people’s rejection of Hitler to get them to also reject the core understanding that Christ is necessary for salvation.

I also had you pegged for a 100% ethnic identitarian whose only use for chrstianity was that it was the "European" religion.

However much I disagree with chrstianity, I am at least gratified to find evidence that this is not so.

[colorado tanker]

Hitler often said in his speeches that it was some kind of destiny or divine providence for Germany to rule Europe. But that was just fodder for the masses, many of whom were believers. Hitler himself was not a practicing or believing Christian. Himmler incorporated many pagan practices and symbols in his secret SS rituals.

What resistance there was to Nazism was often led by Christians. Many Catholic priests who resisted the Nazis were sent to the camps. Within the Lutheran Church, Martin Niemoller, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others led the Confessing Church. Many of them were also sent to camps. Bonhoeffer was executed.

Still, it must be understood that the Nazi regime was a totalitarian dictatorship that ruthlessly controlled the churches along with every other aspect of German society.

[Zionist Conspirator]

I never knew that Hitler sold the war as a Christian War until that moment. We talked about it for a while and he explained how Hitler made it easy to hate Jews as they killed Jesus.

This ridiculous "deicide" charge of the ancient churches is something I have never understood, as it is completely absent from any form of traditional American Fundamentalist Protestantism that I have ever been familiar with.

First of all, in Calvinist/Fundamentalist theology, the crucifixion was a vicarious eternal damnation visited on J*sus by G-d on behalf of every single human being who would ever live. Why not blame G-d? And besides, without this experience no one could ever go to heaven . . . right? (Not to mention that none of the people at the time had the free will to resit G-d's "redemption" scheme to begin with.)

Second of all, when one brings a goat to the altar as a sacrifice, someone has to slaughter it. If you're going to get mad at the priest for slaughtering the victim, why did you bring a sacrifice in the first place?

Now, this is the chrstianity that was the only kind I was aware existed until relatively late in my life. I thought chrstians and Jews had always been friends. I knew nothing of the "deicide" charge or the atrocities committed in its name. I later came to understand that if the church is going to (chas vechalilah!) "replace" the nation of Israel as G-d's agent in history, then an excuse has to be found. Even though all chrstianities agree that the crucifixion was 100% necessary, it became from the very beginning the stick to hit Jews over the head with so a new group and a new religion could allegedly take over. Essentially, the traditional (as opposed to American Fundamentalist) tradition has replaced `Amaleq as the Accursed Nation with, G-d forbid, Israel.

[BipolarBob]

the trials and executions during the Inquisition were conducted as a civil, and not an ecclesiastical, matter.

Yeah right. What civil trials were done was thinly disguised as such. The local magistrates were cooperating, colluding and under directions of the Church authorities.

[Skooz]

Years ago, I debated a few blithering imbeciles here who insisted that Hitler and most other Nazis were Christians.

Facts and reason had no affect on their opinion.

If they are still here, they will be drawn like moths to a flame to this thread.

[ek_hornbeck]

It's difficult to pin down what Hitler's religious beliefs were because he made so many contradictory statements, both in public speeches and in private. Again, from what I can tell, he wasn't a practicing or believing Christian, but he did believe in supernatural phenomena and some sort of deity.

But what Hitler "actually" believed is irrelevant (I doubt that the notoriously debauched members of the Saudi royal family believe in puritanical Wahhabi Islam, but that doesn't make Saudi Arabia any less Islamist), what matters to this discussion is his regime's policy towards religion.

The Nazis came to power to a large part because they promised to protect Germany from Communism. This meant protecting banks and businesses from collectivization, and protecting Churches from outright abolition. While Nazi economic policy may have seemed too intrusive (especially during wartime) to business elites, they did not nationalize industries or banks.

Similarly, the Nazis couldn't very well go about shutting down Churches while claiming to be defending them from atheistic Communism. What the Nazis did instead is co-opt both the Lutheran and Catholic Churches in Germany so that their clerics would follow the party line, as well as censoring and bowdlerizing the parts of scripture that contradicted Nazi doctrine (i.e. most of the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew in particular in the New Testament - as the first Gospel is most explicit about Christ's Jewishness, and promoting the celebration of pagan Yuletide alongside Christmas as one and the same). As with the business elites, it was a co-option that the mainline clergy didn't appreciate but could often live with when Communism was seen as the alternative.

[ek_hornbeck]

The reason for “a pox on both their houses” is that both houses routinely use mis/disinformation (in the form of selective, often out of context, quotation) and exactly the same logical fallacies (i.e. “[Some bad person] believed X, therefore Y must be true”) to advance their causes.

[dfwgator]

Hitler knew he couldn’t offend Christians and stay in power, so he occasionally threw them a bone.

He figured within a few generations, that Christianity would be breeded out of Germany, as the old died off, and the youth who knew nothing of life before the Third Reich took hold.

[Wallace T.]

Every code of laws is underpinned by some set of ethical values. In Europe before the 19th Century, it was usually underpinned by one or another variants of Christianity. Our own common law traditions were derived from English common law, which in turn was partially based on Biblical principles. Until the 20th Century, blasphemy, e.g., taking God's name in vain, was a punishable offense in several states. For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church was the monopoly religion in Western and Central Europe. After the Reformation, the Protestant state churches in England, Scotland, northern Germany, and Scandinavia replaced the Catholic Church. The theology changed, but not the legal codes that penalized heresy, except Catholicism was now regarded as heretical. Granted, the churches approved of civil heresy trials, much as the Communist Party in the USSR and its satellites approved of state persecution of dissidents.

Thankfully, the Constitution limits the ability of the Federal and state governments in the suppression of free speech in America. However, that limitation did not prevent the Clinton and Obama administrations to use the IRS and other agencies to harass and try to bankrupt opposition groups. Further back, Communists, anarchists, Nazis, and others were suppressed by Federal and local authorities.

[tired&retired]

I agree with you.

Jesus words were “Forgive them as they know not what they do.”

Those words were not just for those who committed the act of killing Him, but all who harmed Him in any way. Jesus uttered the same words as Steven as he was being stoned at the Sanhedrin as they both knew that any anger at anyone would be a blemish in their souls.

In 1904/1905 Hitler was a post card painter in Vienna and joined the Christian Socialist Movement run by the Mayor. It was an anti-Jew organization as the Jews ran the prostitution and corrupt businesses in Vienna.

In addition, Hitler was a voracious reader and about the same time Sigmund Freud, a Jew who also lived in Vienna wrote a negative book analyzing Leonardo Da Vinci. While there is no documented proof Hitler read it, since they both lived in the same city and Hitler was an artist, he most likely read it, thus furthering his distaste for Jews.

[tired&retired]

Hitler’s religious beliefs were all about worshipping himself as he was a charismatic malignant narcissist.

[Zionist Conspirator]

I agree with you.

Jesus words were “Forgive them as they know not what they do.”

That's not what I said. I said that in Calvinistic Fundamentalism the whole thing was brought about by G-d in order to create a "loophole" for human salvation. J*sus had to be killed in order for chrstianity to work. Why therefore all the screaming about "deicide" for two thousand years?

[tired&retired]

Sorry, I forgot to but a statement in between.

I agree with what you wrote, and then went on to make a few comments of my own unrelated to your comment but related to the thread.

[Zionist Conspirator]

The reason for “a pox on both their houses” is that both houses routinely use mis/disinformation (in the form of selective, often out of context, quotation) and exactly the same logical fallacies (i.e. “[Some bad person] believed X, therefore Y must be true”) to advance their causes.

My guess was that your attitude was because you subscribe to some sort of non-theistically based moral/ethical system. The trouble with that is that is exactly the basic problem with Communism . . . it's a non-theistically based moral/ethical system. All such moral/ethical systems are wrong, whether they are utterly inoffensive or murder a billion people a day.

Sam Francis and Jared Taylor and Revilo P. Oliver or Ben Klassen may have been "anti-Communist," may have opposed Communist policies, or advocated traditionalism. It doesn't matter. Their reasons for believing some things are right and some things are wrong, their very reason for living, is fake.

Anyone who can subscribe to a moral/ethical system can submit to G-d. To adhere to a moral code while refusing to acknowledge G-d is nothing but spite. And it doesn't matter if your name is Sam Francis or Herbert Marcuse.

[Danette]

May 22, 1904: Fifteen-year-old Adolf Hitler is confirmed at Linz Cathedral on this Whit Sunday.35 Sponsored by Emmanuel Lugert, one of Alois’s former customs house colleagues (and pallbearer), Adolf refuses the offer of a watch as a confirmation gift, declaring that he already owns two watches. Lugert instead presents him with a prayer book, as well as a passbook to a savings account with a small balance. Lugert will recall Hitler’s ill-tempered behavior during and after the ceremony, declaring that he had never before or since sponsored such an ungrateful boy.36

Emmanuel Lugert was my relative. Story passed down was that Emmanuel literally dragged Hitler to the church by his ear.