Raymond Soloman, Rutgers law school dean,
with papers from Nuremberg. (April Saul/
Inquirer)
Posted on 01/11/2002 8:09:59 AM PST by It'salmosttolate
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)
By Edward Colimore
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
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.
I agree with your screen name.
Frankly, the comparisons between fascism and fundamentalist Islam are striking.
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.
Geeee....
And all this time, I thought "Hitler was a Christian." Twisted Cross, don'tcha know.
Bible-believing Christians marked as dangerous in law enforcement training manual
What disturbs McCoy and people like him most is the next sentence:"Some groups include
apocalyptic Christianity in their ideology and believe we are in, or approaching, a period of violence
and social turmoil which will precede the Second Coming of Christ."
Lots of folks obviously missed my thread. A second go round is good.
What is this from?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.