The Cross vs. the Swastika

I vividly remember a high school conversation with a friend I’d known since we were eight. I’d pointed out that Hitler was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, but my friend absolutely refused to believe it. No matter how much evidence I presented, he kept insisting that Nazi Germany was an extension of Christianity, acting out its age-old vendetta against the Jews. Not that he spoke from any personal study of the subject; he just knew. He’d heard it so many times it’d become an article of faith — one of those things “everyone knows.”

Flash forward 25 years. A few weeks ago my last column (http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000528.html) refuted a number of familiar charges against Christianity, including the Christianity-created-Nazism shibboleth. Even though I only skimmed the subject, I thought the evidence I cited would’ve been hard to ignore; I quoted, for example, Hitler’s fond prediction that he would “destroy Christianity” and replace it with “a [pagan] religion rooted in nature and blood.” But sure enough, I still heard from people who couldn’t buy that.

Well, sometimes myths die hard. But this one took a hit in early January, at the hands of one Julie Seltzer Mandel, a Jewish law student at Rutgers whose grandmother survived internment at Auschwitz.

A couple of years ago Mandel read through 148 bound volumes of papers gathered by the American OSS (the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA) to build the case against Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. Now she and some fellow students are publishing what they found in the journal Law and Religion(www.lawandreligion.com), which Mandel edits. The upshot: a ton of evidence that Hitler sought to wipe out Christianity just as surely as he sought to wipe out the Jews.

The first installment (the papers are being published in stages) includes a 108-page OSS outline, “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” It’s not easy reading, but it’s an enlightening tale of how the Nazis — faced with a country where the overwhelming majority considered themselves Christians — built their power while plotting to undermine and eradicate the churches, and the people’s faith.

Before the Nazis came to power, the churches did hold some views that overlapped with the National Socialists — e.g., they opposed communism and resented the Versailles treaty that ended World War I by placing heavy burdens on defeated Germany. But, the OSS noted, the churches “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.” Thus, “conflict was inevitable.”

From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within partly ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power.

So the Nazis lied to the churches, posing as a group with modest and agreeable goals like the restoration of social discipline in a country that was growing permissive. But as they gained power, they took advantage of the fact that many of the Protestant churches in the largest body (the German Evangelical Church) were government-financed and administered. This, the OSS reported, advanced the Nazi plan “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”

The Roman Catholic Church was another story; its administration came from Rome, not within German borders, and its relationship with the Nazis in the 1920s had been bitter. So Hitler lied again, offering a treaty pledging total freedom for the Catholic church, asking only that the church pledge loyalty to the civil government and emphasize citizens’ patriotic duties — principles which sounded a lot like what the church already promoted. Rome signed the treaty in 1933.

Only later, when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, did his true policy toward both Catholics and Protestants become apparent. By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church, and dissidents like the Lutheran clergyman Martin Niemoller openly denounced state control of Protestant churches. The fiction of peaceful coexistence was rapidly fading: In the words of The New York Times (summarizing OSS conclusions), “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.”

The Nazis still paid enough attention to public perception to paint its church critics as traitors: the church “shall have not martyrs, but criminals,” an official said. But the campaign was increasingly unrestrained. Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading. Protestant churches issued a manifesto opposing Nazi practices, and in response 700 Protestant pastors were arrested. And so it went.

Not that Christians took this lying down; the OSS noted that despite this state terrorism, believers often acted with remarkable courage. The report tells, for example, of how massive public demonstrations protested the arrests of Lutheran pastors, and how individuals like pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (hanged just days before the war ended) and Catholic lay official Josef Mueller joined German military intelligence because that group sought to undermine the Nazis from within.

There is, of course, plenty of room for legitimate criticism of church leaders and laymen alike for getting suckered early on, and for failing to put up enough of a fight later. Yet we should approach such judgments with due humility. As Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett write in their book Christianity on Trial (to repeat a quote used in my last column), “It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do, but it is an expectation that will often be disappointed. . . . it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives.”

At any rate, my point is hardly to defend every action (or inaction) on the part of German churches. In fact, I think their failures bring us valuable lessons, not least about the dangers of government involvement in — and thus power over — any churches.

But the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You can’t be both.”

This is something to bear in mind when some folk on the left trot out their well-worn accusation that conservative Christians are “Nazis” or “fascists.” It’s also relevant to answering the charge made by the likes of liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “History teaches that when religion is injected into politics — the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo — disaster follows.”

But it’s not Christianity that’s injected evil into the world. In fact, the worst massacres in history have been committed by atheists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) and virtual pagans (Hitler). Christians have amassed their share of sins over the past 2,000 years, but the great murderers have been the church’s enemies, especially in the past century. It’s long past time to set the historical record straight.

The complete text of this article is available at http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000541.html

I tried to find the post where you said that all the creationists will have to answer to God for ignoring all this evolutionist "evidence". I couldn't find it. I also couldn't find the one (I think they are the same) where you said that God has nothing to do with evolution. Did someone delete these or did I just miss them?

Okay, maybe the word "silly" was offensive. Sorry. I probably should have said you think the idea that God created the universe is absurd. Isn't it true that you think creationists are ignoring evidence and believing in a theory that has no evidence, and isn't this absurd? I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. Not that the point is to prove that a certain belief is absurd but to help people get at the truth. Because believing in a lie is absurd, so we want to know the truth. And truth is reality. I thought that's what we were debating over and trying to prove.

You stated that you are a theistic evoutionist. We've discussed the evolutionist part and I'm pretty sure I know what the theistic part means. For clarification, do you use it to mean that you believe in a God, or that you believe in THE God of the Bible?

Please reply to just the latter paragraph, okay?

I enjoy debating. I don't really expect you to change your belief in evolution (although I hope you will someday) but this is good practice in being able to defend a worldview. I'm not just talking about me, so don't jump up and say I can't defend a worldview. That's not the point (even if you think I can't!)

Although the swastika was an ancient symbol, one of the reasons that it was chosen and/or maintained by the National Socialist German Workers' Party is because it resembles two "S" letters for "Socialism." Some critics make the absurd argument that during the 25 year existence of the horrid Party no Nazi noticed the "S" shapes nor attached any meaning (nor anyone in the SS Division). They also ignore the fact that the Party leader was an artist. see more graphic examples of the swastika myth debunked with posters from 1933-1945 at http://rexcurry.net/socialism-posters/posters2.html and with pre-1933 National Socialist posters at http://rexcurry.net/socialist-propaganda/posters1.html see the swastika myth debunked with German medals at http://rexcurry.net/socialism/germany.html and http://rexcurry.net/swastikacross.html and with flags & banners at http://rexcurry.net/swastikaflags.html

Three terms sum up popular myths: “Swastika” and “Nazi” and “Roman Salute.” RexCurry.net exposed all three.

The "Roman salute" myth holds that the Nazi salute was from ancient Rome. The myth was refuted by the historic discovery that the salute of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis) came from a national socialist in the USA who used a straight-arm salute as part of the original pledge of allegiance. http://rexcurry.net/pledgesalute.html

The pledge of allegiance was written by a self-proclaimed National Socialist in the USA in 1892 (Francis Bellamy) who promoted "military socialism" and operated the "Nationalist" magazine and spread the straight-arm salute via kids in schools, three decades before the Nazis adopted similar behavior.

RexCurry.net also exposed the “Nazi” myth, that Nazis hate socialists. The word “Nazi” hides the actual name of the horrid party: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The practice is so widespread that most people who use the word “Nazi” are ignorant of what the abbreviation abbreviates and why it ties into the pledge of allegiance and to earlier National Socialists in the USA. http://rexcurry.net/mediacover.html
and http://rexcurry.net/swastikamedia.html
and http://rexcurry.net/swastikaweb.html

Nazis always referred to themselves as "National Socialists" and never as "Nazis" and they always used the word "hakenkreuz" and not "swastika."

The "Swastika myth" is that the symbol of the Nazis was a swastika, and used as their "good luck" sign, or reversed for "evil." The use of the word "swastika" coincides with "Nazi" to hide the symbol's meaning for the horrid Party: Socialism and the socialist Wholecaust (of which the Holocaust was a part): 62 million dead under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; 35 million under the Peoples' Republic of China; 21 million under the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Today, most people would never make the connection between the swastika's "S" shapes and "socialism" because most people do not know that the Nazis were the National Socialist German Workers' Party. http://rexcurry.net/swastikaweb.html

The trio of myths are examples of astounding historical facts that were deliberately shoved down Orwell's "memory hole."

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