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You Mean Hitler Wasn?t A Priest?
National Review Online ^ | Dave Shiflett

Posted on 01/21/2002 6:28:01 AM PST by VinnyTex

You Mean Hitler Wasn?t A Priest?
The truth is, in fact, out there.

Dave Shiflett is coauthor of Christianity on Trial .
January 21, 2001 8:40 a.m.

 

shocking story has been revealed: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian after all. Instead, he hoped to destroy Christianity. This news flash comes courtesy of a group of students at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, who have posted papers on a website detailing Hitler's desire to eradicate Christianity. The documents are from the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan and were originally prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, so we can safely assume they are authentic.

To be sure, Hitler's antagonism toward Christianity will not be news to everyone. That its central figure hails from a Jewish family did not set well with him, and its teachings of universal love ran contrary to his violent precepts. Yet one could easily get the impression, these days, that Hitler believed himself to be something of an altar boy on a mission for God.

The Rutgers project's editor, for example, seems to have been taken a bit by surprise. Julie Seltzer Mandel told the Philadelphia Enquirer that "When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews, but here's a different perspective." The Nazis, she says, "wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."

That will unsettle those who have been taught that Hitler was a Christian of some stripe ? and indeed, by some accountings, an enthusiastic Catholic. Bill Clinton, for example, said at the 1999 National Prayer Breakfast that "I do believe that even though Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity, God did not want him to prevail." Meanwhile, at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, a film portrayed Hitler as an overzealous son of Rome. "Enter Adolf Hitler," the narrator intoned, "Austrian born and baptized a Catholic." Hitler's mission: "In defending myself against the Jews," he is quoted as saying, "I am acting for the Lord. The difference between the Church and me is that I am finishing the job."

That film was altered after protests by, among others, conservative Jewish writers. But the same message crops up elsewhere. Soon after the September 11 attacks, a spokeswoman for the Freedom From Religion organization pronounced Hitler a Catholic. In 1999, Maureen Dowd included Hitler as yet another Christian zealot. According to Dowd, "History teaches that when religion is injected into politics ? the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo ? disaster follows."

Hitler was indeed a baptized Catholic, but his rejection of the faith was profound. "My pedagogy is strict," he once explained. "I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication."

That domestication, of course, was in large part due to the influence of Christianity. Hitler was blunter still on other occasions. "It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity," he said in 1933, "because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood." His countrymen would have to choose: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both."

Indeed, he understood all too well that Christianity, in the long run, was his enemy. "Pure Christianity ? the Christianity of the catacombs ? is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into fact. It leads simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics." Switch a few words around and you'd think you were listening to Joseph Stalin. And like Stalin, Hitler believed history was on his side: "Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. Never again. The tale is finished... but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves."

That promise was to come true in a frightful number of cases. Polish Christians felt the full force of the persecution, as historian John Morley reminds us. "In Poland, both Jews and Christians were objects of Nazi oppression and manipulation." The clergy were a chief target: "In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested, and the remainder escaped only by fleeing from their parishes. After a month's imprisonment, no less than 214 of these priests were executed... by the end of 1940 only twenty priests were left in their parishes ? about three percent of the number of parish priests in the pre-war era." The toll of murdered Polish priests would rise into the thousands; their Protestant counterparts (though a much smaller group) fared no better, with many members of the clergy perishing in the camps.

The Rutgers site's presentation is entitled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches," and it notes a deep hatred of Christianity throughout the higher echelons. "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." Their assault was massive: "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."

None of which is to suggest that Christians were uniformly opposed to Hitler, or that some did not actually embrace the Reich. The lesson from Rutgers, however, is that Hitler was no altar boy, acting on behalf of the Christian faith. Indeed, his hope was to be its undertaker ? which was another of his profound miscalcul



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To: Askel5
It's like beating a dead horse.

And do you know what ELSE is like beating a dead horse? Trying to teach anti-Catholic smear artists like Viva and faith_j the truth about the Catholic Church. They don't know because they don't want to know. Why would they want to interrupt a really good hate?

41 posted on 01/21/2002 11:33:49 AM PST by Petronski
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To: Askel5
re 30. How does the church justify politicans, who vote to fund abortion, receiving the sacraments?
43 posted on 01/21/2002 11:38:39 AM PST by breakem
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To: Faith_j
Great Britain had a state religion in 1929. Still has. What's your beef with the lateran treaty?
44 posted on 01/21/2002 11:41:39 AM PST by Romulus
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To: Faith_j
But please don't use your 'reason' (opinion) and call it a source. Its just not a fact.

Your second paragraph of article 8, which we just 'have to' read, doesn't say what you imply. Sorry about that 'facts' thing backfiring on you.

47 posted on 01/21/2002 11:48:20 AM PST by Petronski
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To: Viva La Homeschool; Faith_j; all
You know, it would really help Catholics like myself -who for political purposes regularly have to defend evangalicals like yourselves from charges you are hateful, mindless twits- if you wouldn't so regularly post posts which make you sound like, well, hateful, mindless twits.
48 posted on 01/21/2002 11:50:46 AM PST by AlguyA
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To: Faith_j
I'm against all state religions.

Be sure to ping me to your anti-anglican rant.

50 posted on 01/21/2002 12:03:29 PM PST by Romulus
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To: Askel5
Not that I would want to pit one group against another (heaven forfend!) but if any denomination shares blame for the anti-Semitism of Naziism it isn't Catholicism.

Hitler found quite fertile ground for his anti-Semitic poison in the majority Lutheran culture that was early 20th Century Germany.

51 posted on 01/21/2002 12:08:54 PM PST by Doctor Doom
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To: Faith_j
...I've been told...

If I start believing hearsay, they take away my lawyer card. Please cite which laws you want me to prove no longer exist. And also, please post examples of the language of these banned circulars. They could be anything from kindhearted goodwill to Jack Chick slanders. It would make a difference.

52 posted on 01/21/2002 12:10:13 PM PST by Petronski
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To: Faith_j
That was the point. I listed my sources and she couldn't argue my facts so she graded me down on my english structure. Even though I had just received an A+ for that structure from my English prof???
55 posted on 01/21/2002 12:32:06 PM PST by bray
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To: Faith_j
So you recognise Hislop as rubbish? That's a start.
56 posted on 01/21/2002 12:34:51 PM PST by Romulus
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To: Romulus
Be sure to ping me to your anti-anglican rant.

Lol ... aw, that was almost too easy.

I wonder if she's in favor of "faith-based" partnerships and US "Holy Wars" and our President's use of Scripture (from his "favorite philosopher") to found his decision to use already been killed human lives for federally funded research?

57 posted on 01/21/2002 12:57:21 PM PST by Askel5
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To: breakem; eastsider; campion; romulus
I don't think the Church EVER has justified, per se, a pro-abort's taking the sacraments.

I'm not up on the current movement to petition the Church to make a pro-abort stand (as taken by a public politician) grounds for excommunication so I can't really speak to the arguments they're using.

I do know that such a movement would unfair preclude the "religious" -- such as the radical nuns behind "Network" -- from being excommunicated as they are careful always to avoid the subject of abortion as they seek to influence the political views of ignorant faithful by selectively quoting from legitimate Catholic teaching.

My guess is that such partaking of the sacraments -- if truly in error due to the malformed conscience or ignorance of the Catholic -- is a case of "invincible ignorance". Where the Catholic is purposefully disobeying his conscience and the teaching of the Church both with respect to abortion AND the partaking of sacraments while under a cloud of grave or mortal sin ... I think the act could be described as "unlawful".

This is how a Mass would be treated if the priest took liberties with the liturgy clearly outside the precepts of the sacrifice. The Mass is still valid but is has been celebrated "unlawfully".

I suppose by this reasoning, one leaves room for the operation of the sacrament (affording the necessary graces by which a Catholic in error might right himself) but under a cloud of illicitness that attaches only to the Catholic himself, not the sacrament.

I'll bet one of the other more well-catechized Catholics might know better than I. So, I'm pinging Eastsider, Romulus and Campion for starters.

58 posted on 01/21/2002 1:07:15 PM PST by Askel5
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To: patent
I think the word you were looking for was not "silly", but "sick."

(Can you imagine the look on her face when she comes before the throne?)

59 posted on 01/21/2002 1:13:37 PM PST by Aristophanes
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To: Askel5
Thanx for the response and flagging others. I had read your earlier statement as meaning those who support abortion are excommunicated.
60 posted on 01/21/2002 1:16:17 PM PST by breakem
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