Posted on 11/25/2015 5:27:20 PM PST by Kaslin
Whatever one thinks about the controversy over Syrian refugees and ISIS, Whoopi Goldberg's recent comments on national television trying to convince us that Christian refugees are just as scary as Muslims disseminates an idea that circulates widely on the internet, i.e., that Hitler was a Christian. She stated, "There have been a lot of horrifying there have been a lot of monster Christians. Hitler was a Christian." When her interlocutors balked at this, she then defended her position by saying, "He didn't like the Catholics, remember? So he thought of himself as a Christian person." Goldberg apparently doesn't understand that Catholicism is a branch of Christianity, or that Hitler despite his opposition to Catholicism was officially a Catholic.
If Goldberg were the only one confused about Hitler's relationship to Christianity, we could ignore it. However, she was expressing a view that circulates widely, especially in atheist circles. Leading atheist intellectuals, such as Richard Dawkins, have insisted that Hitler was a sincere Christian. Their evidence? He said so himself in some of his speeches in the 1920s. In one famous quote circulating on dozens of atheist websites, Hitler stated (on April 12, 1922), "My Christian feeling directs me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. As a Christian I do not have the duty to allow the wool to be pulled over my eyes, but I have the duty to be a fighter for the truth and for what is right. As a Christian I also have a duty toward my own people (Volk)."
Strangely, those trumpeting this quotation as proof that Hitler was indeed a Christian display the attitude: Hitler said it, I believe it, and that settles it. Never does it seem to cross their minds that Hitler might be gasp lying for political advantage. They are as convinced of Hitler's veracity as the naïve British Prime Minister Chamberlain was when he arrived back from the Munich Conference waving a sheet of paper with Hitler's signature on it and proclaiming: "It is peace for our time." In short, they gullibly swallow Hitler's propaganda (and they blithely ignore a plethora of Hitler's anti-Christian remarks).
Fortunately, my forthcoming book, Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third Reich (2016) will definitively lay to rest the canard that Hitler was a Christian. By examining in painstaking detail Hitler's writings, speeches, private conversations, and the testimony of his colleagues, I demonstrate that Hitler’s worldview was far more anti-Christian than Christian. For one thing, there is powerful evidence that Hitler purposely lied about his religious convictions. For instance, when Hitler was in Landsberg Prison, his right-hand man, Rudolf Hess, wrote in a confidential letter that Hitler told him that, as painful as it was for him, "for reasons of political expediency he [Hitler] had to play the hypocrite toward his church."
Secondly, Hitler often made anti-Christian remarks to his private entourage, and even occasionally slipped in some anti-Christian comments in his public writings and speeches. Hitler not only abhorred the Old Testament of the Christian Bible as Jewish, but he rejected most of the New Testament, especially the epistles of Paul, whom he considered a sneaky Jewish rabbi who smuggled Jewish ideas into Christianity. To be sure, Hitler did esteem Jesus highly, because he thought Jesus was an Aryan antisemitic fighter fathered by a Roman solider (thus not the Son of God born of a virgin). His favorite Bible story, as he told it, was when Jesus wielded a whip to drive those money-grubbing Jews out of the temple. Hitler clearly did not believe in Jesus's resurrection, claiming that Jesus's life ended in failure, since he was martyred by the Jews.
Almost from the beginning of his political career to the end, Hitler portrayed Christianity as a tool of the Jews that supplanted the Greco-Roman culture that he loved. He continually complained that Christianity was still imbued with a Jewish spirit. He remonstrated against Christian morality, especially its exaltation of humility and compassion for the sick and weak.
On the other hand, Hitler held in the highest esteem anti-Christian philosophers, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Hitler even donated his own personal funds to the Nietzsche Archive to promote the ideas of this God-is-dead philosopher. Hitler also expressed admiration for the religious views of Frederick the Great, who was a patron of such Enlightenment luminaries as the deist Voltaire and the atheist La Mettrie.
In sum, Hitler remained officially a Catholic throughout his life, and he esteemed Jesus highly. However, he denied that Jesus was God and ridiculed Christian doctrines, rejected the Christian holy book, and hated Christian moral standards. In one diatribe in 1941 he stated, "Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine."
does anyone give a sh— what Whoopi goldburg thinks?
Hitler murdered at the concentration and extermination camps as many Christians as he killed Jews.
THE FORGOTTEN VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST. The persecution of Catholics.
Without belittling the unspeakable horrors suffered by Jews, we should not ignore the fact that millions of Catholics were also victims of the Holocaust, as were gypsies, homosexuals, and in much less scale, Orthodox and Protestants. Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe and was the only country where there was a mandatory death penalty for those hiding Jews. Many, who were caught sheltering Jews, were killed in a gruesome manner, such as being publicly burned as a warning to others.
Although not every Catholic was a victim of the Nazis, it is certain that all the Jews were victims of Hitler’s hatred. Hitler’s “Final Solution†was targeted to the total extermination of the Jewish race-an abhorrent and unforgivable crime against humanity.
According to historian William J. O’Malley, S.J., “to the genocide of six millions Jews we have to add nine to ten millions Slavic victims (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs) who were eliminated-not in war, not as saboteurs, not as guerrillas, but sorely because they were Slavic.†The Nazi’s genocide, based on race, should also include half a million gypsies who, just as the Slavs, were executed because they were not member of the superior race, the Aryans. The Nazis in Poland alone murdered more than 3 million Catholics together with over 3 million Jews. (13)
About 2,800 clergymen were interned between 1940 and 1945, at Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Among them, 2,579 were Catholic clergymen, 109 Protestants, 30 orthodox and two Moslem clergymen. The Catholics came from 38 nations; 1,780 were Polish, 447 German and Austrian, 109 Czech and Slovaks, 50 Yugoslavs, 156 French, 63 Dutch. The auxiliary Polish Bishop of Wladislava died of typhus while imprisoned at Dachau. At least 1034 died in the camp, some victims of medical experimentation by the infamous Dr. Rascher. In 1940, 800 priests died in Buchenwald, 1,200 in 1942 and 3,000 in 1943. And that was just in Buchenwald.
As O’Malley, pointed out, “That figure, surprising as it might be, does not include the clergy or nuns who were shot, beheaded or tortured to death in squares and alleys and jails all over Europe…In France, in February 1944, the Gestapo had arrested 162 priests, of whom 123 were shot or decapitated before ever reaching any camp. According to the International Tribunal at Nuremburg, 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen and 300 at Sachsenhausen, and there were hundreds of other camps in the network. Nor does the total figure of 2,771 take into consideration that one-quarter to one-third of those shipped to any camps often arrived dead.†(14)
Polish Cardinal Stephan Wyszynski, in his prison memoirs, notes that he was the only member of his ordination class who escaped the concentration camps; seven died in Dachau; of the six who survived the concentrations camps, several soon died as the result of torture and medical experimentation. It is estimated that the Nazis imprisoned half of the Polish clergy.
Hitler was a race pagan, and was going to hang the Pope at the end of the war.
There was nothing Christian about him.
This comes about from the frustration of the left that reality and the market deems the Muslim countries are horrible places to live, and that Christian nations of the Earth are far more desirable by all peoples. So the left constantly tries to find similarities that leave the Christian West and everyone else equally guilty in perpetuated horrors, even if they have to invent them.
This is one of those times.
WTF does “officially Catholic mean”? He was born into it, and left it, there is nothing “official” about it.
Hitler even said that he wished Germany was Islamic, since Islam was a better religion for soldiers than “weak” Christianity.
If Hitler knew he could have gotten away with putting Christians in the ovens along with the Jews, he would have done it.
OH YEAH!
Hitler was exactly like Jesus.
Hitler was a powerholic. As suggested, the church, to which he had earlier declared affiliation, was a huge disappointment to his obsession. The thing to retort to Whoopi would be “yeah, about as Christian as you.”
Sick woman. If she did not want to get pregnant, why didn’t she take precautions?
She was a drug infested prostitute
Whoopie Goldberg's name is Karin (Carin) Johnson.
Sorry, I just can’t take a “Whoopi” seriously; but that’s just me.
Yep — if the author did “painstaking” research, he missed much of what has already been covered about Hitler’s beliefs. Metaxas does a good job with Bonhoeffer — covers Hitler’s rewriting of Bible passages and hymns to exclude “undesired” references.
His book is on my wish list.
Lot of detail - you will enjoy the intricate life details the author weaves together. Elite family from the “old guard”, extremely well educated, caught in the rise of the SS and Nazi regime. I enjoyed the book, daunting read, but worthy intellectually and spiritualy. I found myself asking what would I do in his situation?
Well now, that little tidbit of information puts a whole new coat of paint on things for me.
Nice story but totally misses the real point/issue - even if it could be proved that Hitler was a Christian, could it be said that those who did the dirty deeds, under his reign, did them for Christianity? Did they bad together as Christians or not?<p.All crap like this story does (no offense to you for it) is to obfuscate the real truth - the only Christian Army to wreak havoc on anyone was during the Crusades and it was an act of self-defense against the Muslims.
Hitler was born and baptised into Christianity, but he repudiated that and rejected Christianity as some kind of “Jewish conspiracy” to weaken the Germanic Aryan nation — he wanted to bring back the pre-Christian German beliefs
His fruits yes, but he also gave up Christianity to replace it with an “Aryan Jesus”
I don’t think you can say it was Christian reasoning that stopped Hitler — it was power brokers. FDR and Churchill were told about Hitler’s death camps by Polish anti-german fighters, but didn’t care to do much about it
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