நாசியும் ஏசுவும்
அனானி ஒருவர் வருத்தப்பட்டிருந்தார். நான் ஏசுவை ஹிட்லருடன் காட்டி அவமானம் செய்துவிட்டதாக. எனக்கும் வருத்தமாக போய்விட்டது. எனவே நான் அந்த படத்தை அவரது மன/மத உணர்வுகளுக்கு மதிப்பளித்து எடுத்துவிட்டேன். ஆனால் பெர்லினில் ஒரு சர்ச் இருக்கிறது. ஒரு 70 ஆண்டுகளுக்கும் மேலான இந்த சர்ச் நாசி அமைப்பின் கொள்கை விளக்கமாக அமைந்துள்ளது. இந்த சர்ச்சில் உள்ள மர சிற்பங்கள் அன்றைய நாசி அரசின் மகோன்னதத்தை காட்டும் விதத்தில் அமைக்கப்பட்டிருந்தன. ஹிட்லரின் சிற்பமும் இருந்தது. ஆனால் நாசிகளின் தோல்விக்கு பிறகு அகற்றப்பட்டது. ஆனால் இன்றைக்கும் இந்த சர்ச்சில் ஏசு நாசி ஸ்டார்ம்ட்ரூப்பருடன் இணைந்து அருள் பாலிக்கிறார். 1932 களில் ஜெர்மானிய நாசி கிறிஸ்தவர்கள் நாசி அமைப்பான 'ஸ்டார்ம் ட்ரூப்பர்ஸ் ஃபார் ஜீஸஸ்' (Storm troopers for Jesus) இல் இணைந்திருந்தனர். 'புனிதர்' அடால்ப்பும் சர்ச்சுக்குள். இதோ அந்த சர்ச்சும் அந்த சிற்பமும். Feeling offensive, My dear Anon?
பிறந்த குழந்தைகளுக்கு கிறிஸ்தவ முழுக்கு அளிக்கும் அமைப்பில் ஹிட்லரின் 'திரு'வுருவ சிலை
(கண்ணுக்குள் நூறு விதமாய் இது ஒரு கனவா...மெட்டில் வாசித்துக்கொள்ளவும். சமஸ்கிருத ஸ்லோகங்கள் வரும் இடத்தில் வேண்டுமென்றால் Mea Culpa Mea Culpa Mea Maxima Culpa சொல்லிக்கொள்ளலாம்.)
சர்ச்சுக்குள் நாசி சிலைகள் இது ஒரு அழகா?
ஸ்வஸ்திக்கின் மேலே படர்ந்த சிலுவையின் இருளா?
(கண்ணுக்குள் நூறு விதமாய் இது ஒரு கனவா...மெட்டில் வாசித்துக்கொள்ளவும். சமஸ்கிருத ஸ்லோகங்கள் வரும் இடத்தில் வேண்டுமென்றால் Mea Culpa Mea Culpa Mea Maxima Culpa சொல்லிக்கொள்ளலாம்.)
posted by அரவிந்தன் நீலகண்டன் | 7:53 AM
20 Comments:
அரவிந்தன்,
இது ஒரு ப்ராட்டஸ்டாண்ட் ஆலையம். நீங்கள் குற்றம் சாட்டிய கத்தோலிக்க ஆலையம் அல்ல.
Nazi Protestant Church
In 1932 the Protestant church came under the influence of the Nazi movement called "German Christians" (Bewegung Deutscher Christen, also called "Stormtroopers of Jesus") and lead by the founder, Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder. This movement represented Hitler's "Positive Christianity" views and lawfully encoded into the Nazi "constitution." Hitler tried to force regional Protestant churches to merge into the Protestant Reich Church. (இவரை கத்தோல்லிக்கர் ஆதர்ரித்தார்கள் என்கிறீர்கள்) Protestant churches throughout Germany participated in the movement but Hitler's union of the churches failed because of in-church bickering. Only one visibly apparent church remains in Germany that shows distinctive markings of Positive Christianity, a reminder of how Christianity and Nazism mixed together during the Nazi regime.
பதிவில் இது கத்தோலிக்க திருச்சபை அல்ல என்பதை இணைக்கவும்
மேலும் ப்ராட்டஸ்டண்ட் கோவில்கள் முளைப்பதற்கு பல காரணங்கள் உள்ளன.
:)
The following is the comment I added in Siril's post. You see, Martin Luther was just a poor German. He is just like Hitler.
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You cannot escape by saying Protestants and Catholics are different. There is no difference between the Catholic’s basic doctrine and the Protestant’s. After all they are christians. The man who created it Martin Luther is just a politician. Why did he create so much fuss and divide Christianity into two parts? – because he himself wanted to become the pope.
It very much hurt Martin Luther that he was just a bishop. He tried hard in the beginning to be chosen a pope. Martin Luther tried many times, but he was never chosen. Then he rebelled. That’s why his religion is called Protestantism. It is a protest – the protest of a politician, the protest of a man who wanted to be on the top but could not be. But there is no difference of any significance in their theologies. They both believe in Jesus Christ, they both believe in the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, and they both believe in his resurrection after the crucifixion. The only difference is that Catholics also worship Jesus’ mother, Mary. Martin Luther was against the pope because he could not become the pope. You can see he was not really against the pope; he himself wanted to be the pope. Martin Luther was the same type as Adolf Hitler. He created this schism in Christianity.
So don't just base your argument as one being catholic or protestants. Stand for your Jesus and for your Christianity.
ஐரோப்பாவில் கிறிஸ்துவத்துக்கு மாறவே மாட்டேன் என்று கடைசி வரை இருந்த யூதர்களை கொல்வதே ஹோலோகாஸ்டின் நோக்கம். யூத எதிர்ப்பு உணர்வு என்பதை விட கிறிஸ்துவரல்லாதவர்களுக்கு எதிராக எதிர்ப்புணர்வு என்பதே சால பொருத்தம்.
யூதர்களை அழித்தொழிக்க வாடிகன் எந்த அளவுக்கு ஆதரவு அளித்து அதன் மூலம் தன் கட்டாய மதமாற்றத்தை அரங்கேற்றியது என்பதை இந்த இணைப்பில் பாருங்கள்
இன்றைக்கு அது விழுங்க கஷ்டமாக இருக்கிறது என்பதால் ராட்சிங்கர் நாஜிஸத்தை காட்லெஸ் ஐடியாலஜி என்று முத்திரை குத்தி விலகிக்கொள்ளும் வரலாற்று பொய்யையும் தோல் உறித்திருக்கிறார் இந்த பக்கத்தை உருவாக்கியவர்...
இன்று இந்தியாவில் மதமாற்றம் செய்வதற்கு இப்படியெல்லாம் வேஷம் போடவேண்டி வருகிறது.. ஓரளவுக்கு வலிமை வந்ததும் திரிபுரா நாகாலாந்து இயக்கங்கள் போல இந்துக்களை தேடி கொல்ல வேண்டியதுதான்... அதே நேரத்தில் மறு இடத்தில் மருத்துவம் செய்கிறேன்.. கல்விச்சாலை நடத்துகிறேன் என்று கொல்லைப்புறமெங்கும் எலும்புதுண்டுகளை புதைத்துகொள்ளலாம்..
நல்லவன் அந்தக் கட்டுரையை திரும்ப கொஞ்சம் நிதானமாகப் படிக்கவும். அதில் கத்தோலிக்கம் ஹிட்லர் அரியணை ஏற உதவியதைச் சொல்கிறது, 'போதுமான' எதிர்ப்பு தெரிவிக்காததைத்தான் சொல்கிறது.
இதில் மதமாற்றம் என்ற ஒன்றே இல்லை.
ஜெர்மெனியில் இருந்த அளவுக்கு யூத எதிர்ப்பு வேறு இடங்களில் இல்லாமல் போனதை வைத்தே சொல்லலாம் கத்தோலிக்க கிறீத்துவம் இதை உலகெங்கும் விதைக்கவில்லை என்று.
கத்தோலிக்கத்துக்கு எதிரான இதுபோன்ற வாதம் செல்லுபடியாவது இன்குயிசிஷன்களிலும் சிலுவைப் போர்களிலும். அதற்காக திருச்சபை வருத்தப்பட இயலுமே தவிர இன்றைக்கும் ஏதும் செய்ய இயலாது.
ஹிட்லர் 6லட்சம் யூதர்களைக் கொன்றான் ஆனால் ஜெர்மானிய கிறீத்துவர்கள் 8லட்சத்துக்கும் மேலான யூஉதர்களின் உயிரை தங்கள் உயிரைப் பணையம் வைத்துக் காப்பாற்றியுள்ளார்கள். இதற்காக சிலர் நாஜி ஆதரவாளர்கள் போல நடிக்கவும் செய்தார்கள். Schindler's list படம் பார்த்திருப்பீங்கன்னு நினைக்கிறேன். Directed by Steven Spielberg a Jew.
இப்ப நீங்க நாகலாந்த் பற்றி சொன்னீங்களே இது விவாதிக்கப் படவேண்டிய ஒன்று. இதைப்பற்றிய 'உண்மைகளை' அரவிந்தன் எழுதுவாரானால் அந்த நிகழ்வுகளுக்காக வருத்தப்பட்டு வெட்கப்பட்டு கேட்டுக்கொண்டிருப்பதைத் தவிர வேறொன்றும் என்னால் செய்ய இயலாது.
//ஹிட்லர் 6லட்சம் யூதர்களைக் கொன்றான்//
60 லட்சம் என வாசிக்கவும்.
நன்றி அரவிந்தன்.
றில்,
நான் முழுமையாக படித்துவிட்டுத்தான் அந்த இணையப்பக்கத்தை கொடுத்தேன். "போதுமான எதிர்ப்பை" தெரிவிக்கவில்லை என்று சப்பை கட்டு கட்டுவதை கிழித்து தோரணம் கட்டியிருக்கிறார் அந்த கட்டுரையாளர். முழுமையாக படிக்கவும். அந்த பக்கத்தின் இறுதியில் செர்பியர்கள் கட்டாய மதமாற்றம் செய்யப்பட்டதையும் படத்துடன் போட்டிருக்கிறார். முழுமையாக படித்துப்பாருங்கள். படங்களை எல்லாம் பாருங்கள். மேலும் இந்த கட்டுரைக்கு இன்னும்மூன்று பாகங்கள் இருக்கின்றன. அதன் இணைப்பும் அந்த பக்கத்தின் கீழே இருக்கிறது..
மேலும் கத்தோலிக்க கிறிஸ்துவம் மட்டுமல்ல, எல்லா வகை கிறிஸ்துவமுமே யூத எதிர்ப்புணர்வும், கிறிஸ்துவர்களல்லாத மக்கள் மீது போரையும் அடிப்படையாகக்கொண்டது. இன்னமும் யூத எதிர்ப்புணர்வு இருக்கும் அமெரிக்காவையும் தென்னமெரிக்காவையும் எடுத்துக்கொள்ளலாம்.
யூதர்களும் கிறிஸ்துவர்களும் போரிட்டுக்கொள்ளாமல் வாழ்ந்தது இந்தியாவில்மட்டும்தான். கேரளாவில்..! ஏனெனில் இருவருமே சிறுபான்மையினராக இருந்ததால்
புரட்டஸ்டன்ட் கோவில்களில் பலப்பல நிர்வாகங்கள். பாதிரியார் கல்யாணமும் செய்து கொள்ளலாம். அதனால் ஹிட்லர் கூட பாதிரியார் ஆகலாம். சர்ச் நிர்வாகம் அரசியல் மாதிரி அங்கே ஓட்டெடுப்பில் தான் முடிவு செய்யப் படுகிறது. நிறைய நன்கொடை கொடுத்தால் உங்களுக்குக்ககூட சிலை வைப்பார்கள். குஷ்புவுக்கு கோயில் கட்டிய மாதிரி தான் இதுவும். அதையெல்லாம் கிறிஸ்தவத்தின் உதாரணமாக கொள்வது அபத்தத்தின் உச்சக் கட்டம்.
பழைய நினைவாக இப்போதும் வைத்திருக்கிறார்களாயிருக்கும்.அவளவுதான்.
நல்லவன்//இந்தியாவில் மதமாற்றம் செய்வதற்கு இப்படியெல்லாம் வேஷம் போடவேண்டி வருகிறது.. ஓரளவுக்கு வலிமை வந்ததும் திரிபுரா நாகாலாந்து இயக்கங்கள் போல இந்துக்களை தேடி கொல்ல வேண்டியதுதான்... அதே நேரத்தில் மறு இடத்தில் மருத்துவம் செய்கிறேன்.. கல்விச்சாலை நடத்துகிறேன் என்று கொல்லைப்புறமெங்கும் எலும்புதுண்டுகளை புதைத்துகொள்ளலாம்//
மதவெறி மிருகங்கள் தங்கள் குற்றத்தை மற்றவர் மேல் போடுவதில் சளைப்பதில்லை. இந்து மருத்துவர்கள் தாங்கள் பிரசவம் பார்க்கும் பிற மத பெண்களின் சிசுக்களை கொன்றுவிடச் சொல்லி பயிற்றிவித்த இயக்கங்களில் இருந்து கொண்டு மற்றவர்களைக் குறை சொல்கிறீர்கள். எலும் புத்துண்டுகள் இந்தியாவில் அதிகம் புதைக்கப் பட்டது யாருடைய மத-மடாலயங்களில் என்று பழைய பேப்பர்களைப் புரட்டிப் பார்த்து தெரிந்து கொள்ளுங்கள். அதன்பிறகு மற்றவரை பழிக்கலாம்
கீரன்,
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1930862,000900010009.htm
ஒருவேளை நல்லவன் இதை மனதில் கொண்டு சொல்லியிருக்கலாம். இதுவே ஒரு இந்து மிஷன் ஆஸ்பத்திரியில் நடந்திருந்தால் இந்நேரம் என்ன கூச்சலும் குழப்பமும் ஏற்பட்டிருக்கும்!
அன்பு அரவிந்தன்,
தாங்கள் தந்திருக்கும் லிங்க் காப்பி பேஸ்ட் செய்ய ஏதுவாக இல்லை. பிரச்சினையின் அவலத்தைக் கண்டு அவமானத்தில் ஒளிந்துகொண்டுள்ளது. அவமானத்தால் தலைகுனிந்து நிற்பதற்குப் பதிலாக, சரியான ஒன்றை வெளிப்படையாக செய்துகாட்டும் பண்பை நீங்கள் அந்த லிங்கிற்கும் கொஞ்சம் சொல்லித் தருகிறீர்களா?
dear Muse
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s.an
அரவிந்தன்,
படித்தேன். அருவறுப்பு தொடர்கின்றது. ஆனால் அதிர்ச்சி இல்லை.
இந்தியாவில் இவர்கள் வலிந்து பெரிதாக்கிய விஷயங்களில் பெண்மை எதிர்ப்பு முக்கியமானது. இவர்களால் ஏற்படுத்தப்பட்ட கீழ்மைகளைப் பின்பற்றுபவர்கள் ஹிந்துக்களாக இருந்தால் அவர்கள் செய்வது தவறு என்று கூறுவதும், ஆனால் தங்களுடைய ஓரிறைக் கொள்கைகளால் உருவான ஈனப் பழக்கக் குழந்தைகளை அப்படியே பாதுகாக்க பிஞ்சு குழந்தைகளைக் கொல்லவும் துணியும் கொடியவர்களின் கூடாரங்களை புனிதம் என்ற போர்வையில் இவர்கள் பரப்புவதைக் காண்கையில் குமட்டுகின்றது.
இத்தகைய கொடிய விஷயத்தைப் பற்றி என் டி டி வியோ, ஸி என் என் ஐ பி என்னோ காண்பிப்பார்கள் என்று இரண்டு நாட்களாகக் காத்துக்கொண்டிருந்தேன். நேற்று ஸி என் என்னில் காண்பித்தார்கள். இந்தக் கொடூரத்தை இல்லை. இவர்களுக்குக் கொடூரமாகத் தெரிவதை.
வட இந்தியாவின் சில மாநிலங்களில் கிருத்துவப் பாதிரியார்கள் சிலர் பாப்டிஸம் செய்ததாகப் போலிச் சான்றிதழ்கள் தருகிறார்களாம். சர்ச்சின் பெயருக்கு ஏற்பட்ட அவமானத்தைத் துடைக்க வீறு கொண்டு எழுந்த ஸிஎன்என் ஐபிஎன் இதை ஒரு மிகப் பெரிய பிரச்சினையாகக் காண்பித்தார்கள். ஏதோ ஒரு மலையாளப் பாதிரியிடம் கேள்வி கேட்டபோது அன்பை பரப்பும் மதத்தவரான அவர் கையில் வேப்பிலை எடுக்காத குறையாக இந்தப் பாதிரிகளையெல்லாம் சர்ச்சிலிருந்து விலக்கி வைப்போம் என்று கூறினார்.
எனக்குப் புரியாதவைகளை உங்களிடம் கேட்கிறேன்:
1. ஒன்றும் அறியாத குழந்தைகள் கொல்லப்படுவதைவிட ஒரு மத சடங்கிற்கு போலிச் சான்றிதழ் கொடுப்பது கொடியதாகத் தெரிய காரணம் என்ன?
2. எம்பிபிஎஸ்ஸுக்கும், பிஇக்கும் போலிச் சான்றிதழ் கொடுப்பதற்கான காரணம் தெரியும். போலி டாக்டர்கள் மருத்துவமனை நடத்தி கோடி கோடியாய் சம்பாதிக்க. ஆனால் பாப்டிஸம் என்கின்ற, அர்த்தமில்லாத, கேவலம் வெறும் சடங்காயுள்ள ஒன்றிற்கு, ஒரு வெற்றுச் சடங்கிற்காக மக்கள் போலிச் சான்றிதழ் பெற வேண்டிய அவசியம் என்ன, கட்டாயம் என்ன?
3. இத்தகைய போலிச் சான்றிதழ்கள் வழங்க பரிசுத்த பாதிரிமார்களுக்கு ஏற்பட்ட தேவைதான் என்ன?
4. நொய்டா கொலைகளை வெளிப்படுத்துவதில் ஆர்வம் காட்டிய மீடியாக்கள் ஏன் குழந்தைக்கொலை பொன்ற கொடூரத்தை அமுக்கப் பார்க்கின்றன?
5. தங்களை சமூகப் பொறுப்புள்ள மீடியாவகக் காட்டிக்கொள்ளும் ஸி என் என் - ஐ பின் என் (உதாரணமாக, ராம் ஜெத்மலானியை ஒரு குறிப்பிட்ட கேஸை எடுத்து வாதாடக்கூடாது என்று அந்தச் சேனல் ஒரு இன்டெர்வியூவில் நேரடியாக மிரட்டிய நிகழ்வு) ஏன் இது போன்ற விஷயங்களை மழுங்கடிக்கவும், பின் வேறு பிரச்சினைகளை திசை திருப்பும் உத்தியாக பயன்படுத்துவதும் ஏன்?
6. இந்த சமுதாயத்தை ஏதோ தாங்கள்தான் வந்து சீர்திருத்தப் போவதாக வேலை பார்க்கும் அலுவலகக் கணிணியில் சொல்லுவதை மட்டுமே வேலையாகக் கொண்டுள்ள பல சீசீசீர்திருத்த ப்ளாக்கர்கள் ஏன் வாயையும் மூடிக்கொண்டு தங்களது வழக்கமான டெர்மினலாஜிக்கல் வயிற்றுப்போக்கைத் தொடர்கிறார்கள்?
7. இந்த நிகழ்வின் மதப் பிண்ணணியை விட்டுவிட்டாலும், குறைந்தது இத்தனை இளம் பிஞ்சுகளை அழித்த, அழித்துவருகின்ற நிகழ்வையாவது கண்டிக்கவில்லையே, ஏன்?
8. எப்பொதோ நடந்ததாகச் சொல்லப்படுகின்ற செத்த விஷயங்களின் பேயை விரட்டும் இவர்களுக்கு நடைமுறை வன்முறைகள் கண்ணுக்கு ஏன் தெரியவில்லை? காணமுடியா பேய்களைவிட உண்மை நிலவரங்கள் ஒதுக்கவேண்டியதாக இவர்களை நினைக்க வைத்த காரணங்கள் என்ன?
மனிதம் ஹிந்துத்துவவாதிகளுக்கு மட்டுமான சொத்து என்று நினைக்கிறார்களா?
The 12 commandments of Hitler's bible revealed!
By ANI
Tuesday August 8, 05:22 PM
London, Aug 8 (ANI): Nazi chief Adolf Hitler apparently re-wrote the Bible and changed the ten commandments to suit the Third Reich's need. To be more precise, he even added two more to take them to a total of 12. Titled 'Germans with God', the bible was aimed at boosting the Nazi vision of a thousand year Reich and 100,000 volumes were published.
While new commandments like "Honour your Fuhrer" and "Keep the blood pure and your honour holy" were included, traces of all words which had Jewish origin like Hallelujah and Jehovah, as well as all sentiments of compassion were erased.
Two of the commandments "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" were scrapped altogether.
According to The Mirror, Hitler ordered race theorists to rewrite the Bible so he could harness the power of the religion to augment his Nazi cause.
Thousands of churches received copies in 1941, which were destroyed by faithful Christians.
Only one copy has been found till date and that too in the dusty archives of the church offices in Hamburg. (ANI)
[Taken from http://in.news.yahoo.com/060808/139/66ijc.html]
The Christianity of Hitler revealed in his speeches and proclamations
Compiled by Jim Walker
Originated: 27 Feb. 1997
Additions: 03 Jun. 2006
Through subterfuge and concealment, many of today's Church leaders and faithful Christians have camouflaged the Christianity of Adolf Hitler and have attempted to mark him an atheist, a pagan cult worshipper, or a false Christian. However, from the earliest formation of the Nazi party and throughout the period of conquest and growth, Hitler expressed his Christian support to the German citizenry and soldiers. In the 1920s, Hitler's German Workers' Party (pre Nazi term) adopted a "Programme" with twenty-five points (the Nazi version of a constitution). In point twenty-four, their intent clearly demonstrates, from the very beginning, their stand in favor of a "positive" Christianity:
24. We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.
Hitler's speeches and proclamations, even more clearly, reveal his faith and feelings toward a Christianized Germany. Nazism presents an embarrassment to Christianity and demonstrates the danger of faith. The following words from Hitler show his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and reveals the strength of his Christian feelings:
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My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922
[Note, "brood of vipers" appears in Matt. 3:7 & 12:34. John 2:15 depicts Jesus driving out the money changers (adders) from the temple. The word "adders" also appears in Psalms 140:3]
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Just as the Jew could once incite the mob of Jerusalem against Christ, so today he must succeed in inciting folk who have been duped into madness to attack those who, God's truth! seek to deal with this people in utter honesty and sincerity.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 28 July 1922
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In the Bible we find the text, 'That which is neither hot nor cold will I spew out of my mouth.' This utterance of the great Nazarene has kept its profound validity until the present day.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 10 April 1923
[The Bible quote comes Jesus speaking in Revelation 3:16]
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In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God.... Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 13 April 1923
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There are three words which many use without a thought which for us are no catch-phrases: Love, Faith, and Hope.... We are fanatical in our love for our people....
We have faith in the rights of our people, the rights which have existed time out of mind. We protest against the view that every other nation should have rights - and we have none. We must learn to make our own this blind faith in the rights of our people, in the necessity of devoting ourselves to the service of these rights; we must make our own the faith that gradually victory must be granted us if only we are fanatical enough. And from this love and from this faith there emerges for us the idea of hope. When others doubt and hesitate for the future of Germany - we have no doubts. We have both the hope and the faith that Germany will and must once more become great and mighty.
We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor - the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 01 May 1923
[Love, Faith, and Hope comes from I Corinthians 13:13 NIV]
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People ask: is there someone fit to be our leader? Our task is not to search for that person. Either God will give him to us or he will not come. Our task is to shape the sword that he will need when he comes. Our task it to provide the leader with a nation which is ready for him when he comes! My fellow Germans, awaken! The new day is dawning!
-Adolf Hitler, 04 May 1923
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It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 01 Aug. 1923
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It will at any rate be my supreme task to see to it that in the newly awakened NSDAP, the adherents of both Confessions can live peacefully together side by side in order that they may take their stand in the common fight against the power which is the mortal foe of any true Christianity.
-Adolf Hitler, in an article headed "A New Beginning," 26 Feb. 1925
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A few days ago I was in Eisenach and stood on top of the Wartburg, where a great German once translated the Bible.
-Adolf Hitler, in Schleiz, Thuringia, 18 Jan. 1927
[The great German Hitler speaks about, of course, describes Martin Luther]
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We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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We are determined, as leaders of the nation, to fulfill as a national government the task which has been given to us, swearing fidelity only to God, our conscience, and our Volk.... This the national government will regard its first and foremost duty to restore the unity of spirit and purpose of our Volk. It will preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will take Christianity, as the basis of our collective morality, and the family as the nucleus of our Volk and state, under its firm protection....May God Almighty take our work into his grace, give true form to our will, bless our insight, and endow us with the trust of our Volk.
-Adolf Hitler, on 1 Feb. 1933, addressing the German nation as Chancellor for the first time, Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Aug. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Except the Lord built the house they labour in vain.... The truth of that text was proved if one looks at the house of which the foundations were laid in 1918 and which since then has been in building.... The world will not help, the people must help itself. Its own strength is the source of life. That strength the Almighty has given us to use; that in it and through it we may wage the battle of our life.... The others in the past years have not had the blessing of the Almighty-- of Him Who in the last resort, whatever man may do, holds in His hands the final decision. Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken upon us.... We are all proud that through God's powerful aid we have become once more true Germans.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in March 1933
[Note, "Except the Lord built the house, they labour in vain" comes from Psalms 127:1 ]
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The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.... The National Government regard the two Christian Confessions as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality. They will respect the agreements concluded between them and the federal States. Their rights are not to be infringed.... It will be the Government's care to maintain honest co-operation between Church and State; the struggle against materialistic views and for a real national community is just as much in the interest of the German nation as in that of the welfare of our Christian faith. The Government of the Reich, who regard Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attach the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See and are endeavouring to develop them.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the Reichstag on 23 March 1933
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The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognized the Jews for what they were".... I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.
-Adolf Hitler, 26 April 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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We want honestly to earn the resurrection of our people through our industry, our perseverance, our will. We ask not of the Almighty 'Lord, make us free'!-- we want to be active, to work, to agree together as brothers, to strive in rivalry with one another to bring about the hour when we can come before Him and when we may ask of Him: 'Lord, Thou seest that we have transformed ourselves, the German people is not longer the people of dishonour, of shame, of war within itself, of faintheartedness and little faith: no, Lord, the German people has become strong again in spirit, strong in will, strong in endurance, strong to bear all sacrifices.' 'Lord, we will not let Thee go: bless now our fight for our freedom; the fight we wage for our German people and Fatherland.'
-Adolf Hitler, giving prayer in a speech on May Day 1933
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This is for us a ground for satisfaction, since we desire that the fight in the religious camps should come to an end... all political action in the parties will be forbidden to priests for all time, happy because we know what is wanted by millions who long to see in the priest only the comforter of their souls and not the representative of their political convictions.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to the men of the SA. at Dormund, 9 July 1933 on the day after the signing of the Concordat.
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National Socialism has always affirmed that it is determined to take the Christian Churches under the protection of the State.... The decisive factor which can justify the existence alike of Church and State is the maintenance of men's spiritual and bodily health, for it that health were destroyed it would mean the end of the State and also the end of the Church.... It is my sincere hope that thereby for Germany, too, through free agreement there has been produced a final clarification of spheres in the functions of the State and of one Church.
-Adolf Hitler, on a wireless on 22 July, the evening before the Evangelical Church Election
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The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism [Nazism] is hostile to religion is a lie.
-Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1933, writing to the Nazi Party (quoted from John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope"
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Among the congregations of the Protestant confessions there has arisen in the "German Christians' a movement that is filled with the determination to do justice to the great tasks of the day and has aimed at a union of the Protestant state churches and confessions. If this question is not really on the way towards a solution, in the judgement of history no false or stupid objections will be able to dispute the fact that this service was rendered by the volkisch movement at a time when, unfortunately, just as in the Roman Church, many pastors and superintendents without reason have opposed the national uprising in the most violent, indeed, often fanatical, way.
-Adolf Hitler, in a radio address on 22 July 1933 to the German people after a performance of Wagner's Christian allegory Parsifal in Bayreuth. [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
[This statement clearly refutes modern Christians who claim Hitler as favoring atheism.]
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I believe that Providence would never have allowed us to see the victory of the Movement if it had the intention after all to destroy us at the end.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to old members of the Party at Munich on 8 Nov. 1933
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The German Church and the People are practically the same body. Therefore there could be no issue between Church and State. The Church, as such, has nothing to do with political affairs. On the other hand, the State has nothing to do with the faith or inner organization of the Church. The election of November 12th would be an expression of church constituency, but not as a Church.
-Adolf Hitler, answering C. F. Macfarland about Church & State (in his book, The New Church and the New Germany)
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While we destroyed the Centre Party, we have not only brought thousands of priests back into the Church, but to millions of respectable people we have restored their faith in their religion and in their priests. The union of the Evangelical Church in a single Church for the whole Reich, the Concordat with the Catholic Church, these are but milestones on the road which leads to the establishment of a useful relation and a useful co operation between the Reich and the two Confessions.
-Adolf Hitler, in his New Year Message on 1 Jan. 1934
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Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag on 30 Jan. 1934
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It would have been more to the point, more honest and more Christian, in past decades not to support those who intentionally destroyed healthy life than to rebel against those who have no other wish than to avoid disease. Moreover, a policy of laissez faire in this sphere is not only cruelty to the individual guiltless victims but also to the nation as a whole.... If the Churches were to declare themselves ready to take over the treatment and care of those suffering from hereditary diseases, we should be quite ready to refrain from sterilizing them.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 30 Jan. 1934
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We have experienced a miracle, something unique, something the like of which there has hardly been in the history of the world. God first allowed our people to be victorious for four and a half years, then He abased us, laid upon us a period of shamelessness, but now after a struggle of fourteen years he has permitted us to bring that period to a close. It is a miracle which has been wrought upon the German people.... It shows us that the Almighty has not deserted our people, that He received it into favour at the moment when it rediscovered itself. And that our people shall never again lose itself, that must be our vow so long as we shall live and so long as the Lord gives us the strength to carry on the fight.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to the "Old Guard" of the Party at Munich on 19 March, 1934
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The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavour to protect both the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from interference with their doctrines (Lehren ), and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of to-day.
-Adolf Hitler, on 26 June 1934, to Catholic bishops to assure them that he would take action against the new pagan propaganda
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No, it is not we that have deserted Christianity, it is those who came before us who deserted Christianity. We have only carried through a clear division between politics which have to do with terrestrial things, and religion, which must concern itself with the celestial sphere. There has been no interference with the doctrine (Lehre ) of the Confessions or with their religious freedom (Bekenntnisfreiheit ), nor will there be any such interference. On the contrary the State protects religion, though always on the one condition that religion will not be used as a cover for political ends....
National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity.... For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life... These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles! And I believe that if we should fail to follow these principles then we should to be able to point to our successes, for the result of our political battle is surely not unblest by God.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934
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So far as the Evangelical Confessions are concerned we are determined to put an end to existing divisions, which are concerned only with the forms of organization, and to create a single Evangelical Church for the whole Reich....
And we know that were the great German reformer [Martin Luther] with us to-day he would rejoice to be freed from the necessity of his own time and, like Ulrich von Hutten, his last prayer would be not for the Churches of the separate States: it would be of Germany that he would think and of the Evangelical Church of Germany.
-Adolf Hitler, in his Proclamation at the Parteitag at Nuremberg on 5 Sept. 1934
[Note, Martin Luther provided Germany with the seeds of violent antisemitism. Learn about Martin Luther's dirty little book.
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So we have come together on this day to prove symbolically that we are more than a collection of individuals striving one against another, that none of us is too proud, none of us too high, none is too rich, and none too poor, to stand together before the face of the Lord and of the world in this indissoluble, sworn community. And this united nation, we have need of it.
-Adolf Hitler, in Berlin, 01 May 1935
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What we are we have become not against, but with, the will of Providence. And so long as we are true and honourable and of good courage in fight, so long as we believe in our great work and do not capitulate, we shall continue to enjoy in the future the blessing of Providence.
-Adolf Hitler, at Rosenheim in Bavaria, 11 Aug. 1935
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Only so you can appeal to your God and pray Him to support and bless your courage, your work, your perseverance, your strength, your resolution, and with all these your claim on life.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Frankfurt on 16 March 1936
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In this world him who does not abandon himself the Almighty will not desert. Him who helps himself will the Almighty always also help; He will show him the way by which he can gain his rights, his freedom, and therefore his future.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Hamburg on 20 March 1936
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Providence has caused me to be Catholic, and I know therefore how to handle this Church.
-Adolf Hitler, reportedly to have said in Berlin in 1936 on the enmity of the Catholic Church to National Socialism
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I believe in Providence and I believe Providence to be just. Therefore I believe that Providence always rewards the strong, the industrious, and the upright.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to National Socialist women at the Nuremberg Parteitag of 1936 [11 Sept. 1936]
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I say that they can be solved; there is no problem that cannot be, but faith is necessary. Think of the faith I had to have eighteen years ago, a single man on a lonely path. Yet I have come to leadership of the German people....
Life is hard for many, but it is hardest if you are unhappy and have no faith. Have faith.
Nothing can make me change my own belief.
-Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg, 12 Sept. 1936
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This is probably the first time and this is the first country in which people are being taught to realize that, of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it....
The greatest revolution which National Socialism has brought about is that it has rent asunder the veil which hid from us the knowledge that all human failures and mistakes are due to the conditions of the time and therefore can be remedied, but that there is one error which cannot be remedied once men have made it, namely the failure to recognize the importance of conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and character which are God's gift and God's handiwork. It is not for men to discuss the question of why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize the fact that it punishes those who disregard its work of creation....
As I look back on the great work that has been done during the past four years you will understand quite well that my first feeling is simply one of thankfulness to our Almighty God for having allowed me to bring this work to success. He has blessed our labors and has enabled our people to come through all the obstacles which encompassed them on their way....
Today I must humbly thank Providence, whose grace has enabled me, who was once an unknown soldier in the War, to bring to a successful issue the struggle for the restoration of our honor and rights as a nation.
-Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, 30 Jan. 1937
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So long as they concern themselves with their religious problems the State does not concern itself with them. But so soon as they attempt by any means whatsoever-- by letters, Encyclica, or otherwise-- to arrogate to themselves rights which belong to the State alone we shall force them back into their proper spiritual, pastoral activity.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered in Berlin on the May Day festival, 1937
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We National Socialists, too, have deep in our hearts our own faith. We cannot do otherwise. No man can mould the history of peoples or of the world unless he has upon his will and his capacities the blessing of Providence.
-Adolf Hitler, to Nazi leaders on 2 June 1937, as reported by a correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph"
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I will never allow anyone to divide this people once more into religious camps, each fighting the other....
You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us?
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Regensburg on 6 June 1937
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If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us. In the long run He never leaves decent folk in the lurch. Often He may test them, He may send trials upon them, but in the long run He always lets His sun shine upon them once more and at the end He gives them His blessing.
-Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on 3 Oct. 1937
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This Winter Help Work is also in the deepest sense a Christian work. When I see, as I so often do, poorly clad girls collecting with such infinite patience in order to care for those who are suffering from the cold while they themselves are shivering with cold, then I have the feeling that they are all apostles of a Christianity-- and in truth of a Christianity which can say with greater right than any other: This is the Christianity of an honest confession, for behind it stand not words but deeds.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking of the Winter Help Campaign on 5 Oct. 1937
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Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people to-day goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Coburg on 15 Oct. 1937
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In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgement and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger.... I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty.... If Providence had not guided us I could often never have found these dizzy paths.... Thus it is that we National Socialists, too, have in the depths of our hearts our faith. We cannot do otherwise: no man can fashion world-history or the history of peoples unless upon his purpose and his powers there rests the blessings of this Providence.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Wurzburg on 27 June 1937
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National Socialism is not a cult-movement-- a movement for worship; it is exclusively a 'volkic' political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship.... We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else-- in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will-- not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.... Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.
-Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept. 1938.
[Christians have always accused Hitler of believing in pagan cult mythology. Here he clearly expresses his stand against cults and reinforces his Christian views.]
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Thus one of Europe's most serious crises will be ended, and all of us, not only in Germany but those far beyond our frontiers, will then in this year for the first time really rejoice at the Christmas festival. It should for us all be a true Festival of Peace....
-Adolf Hitler, in Berlin, 05 Oct. 1938
[This statement disputes some who claim that Hitler outlawed Christmas.]
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God helps only those who are prepared and determined to help themselves.
-Adolf Hitler, 06 Nov. 1938, Weimar
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The National Socialist Movement has wrought this miracle. If Almighty God granted success to this work, then the Party was His instrument.
-Adolf Hitler, in his proclamation to the German People on 01 Jan. 1939
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We are indeed perhaps better able than other generations to realize the full meaning of those pious words "What a change by the grace of God".
Amongst the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so called democracies is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion. In answer to that charge I should like to make before the German people the following solemn declaration:
1. No one in Germany has in the past been persecuted because of his religious views (Einstellung), nor will anyone in the future be so persecuted.... The Churches are the greatest landed proprietors after the State... Further, the Church in the National Socialist State is in many ways favoured in regard to taxation, and for gifts, legacies, &c., it enjoys immunity from taxation.
It is therefore, to put mildly-- effrontery when especially foreign politicians make bold to speak of hostility to religion in the Third Reich.... I would allow myself only one question: what contributions during the same period have France, England, or the United States made through the State from the public funds?
3. The National Socialist State has not closed a church, nor has it prevented the holding of a religious service, nor has it ever exercised any influence upon the form of a religious service. It has not exercised any pressure upon the doctrine nor on the profession of faith of any of the Confessions. In the National Socialist State anyone is free to seek his blessedness after his own fashion.... There are ten thousands and ten thousands of priests of all the Christian Confessions who perform their ecclesiastical duties just as well as or probably better than the political agitators without ever coming into conflict with the laws of the State.... This State has only once intervened in the internal regulation of the Churches, that is when I myself in 1933 endeavoured to unite the weak and divided Protestant Churches of the different States into one great and powerful Evangelical Church of the Reich. That attempt failed through the opposition of the bishops of some States; it was therefore abandoned. For it is in the last resort not our task to defend or even to strengthen the Evangelical Church through violence against its own representatives.... But on one point it is well that there should be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German State we shall destroy.
-Adolf Hitler, a speech in the Reichstag on 30 Jan. 1939
[That last sentence sums up Hitler's stand on the priesthood. Rather than standing for atheism, as today's Christians would like, Hitler attacked the priesthood only if they stood in Hitler's political path.]
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If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the "Old Guard" at Munich on 24 Feb. 1939
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Help yourself, then God will also help you!
The German people was created by Providence, not in order to obey a law which suits Englishmen or Frenchmen, but to stand up for its vital right. That is what we are there for!
-Adolf Hitler, at Wilhemshaven, 01 April 1939
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I can give vent to my inmost feelings only in the form of humble thanks to Providence which called upon me and vouchsafed it to me, once an unknown soldier of the Great War, to rise to be the Leader of my people, so dear to me.
Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again. Providence granted that I might fulfill my life's task-to raise my German people out of the depths of defeat and to liberate it from the bonds of the most outrageous dictate of all times....
I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery.
-Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, 28 April 1939
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As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right, and beg Him that we and all other nations may find the right way, so that not only the German people but all Europe may once more be granted the blessing of peace.
-Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, 06 Oct. 1939
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[I] never lost my belief, in the midst of setbacks which were not spared me during my period of struggle. Providence has had the last word and brought me success.
-Adolf Hitler, speech of 23 Nov. 1939
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It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.
-Adolf Hitler, 10 Dec. 1940, in Berlin
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The conception of the new Movement, whose fundamentals can be expressed in a single sentence: "The Lord helps those who help themselves," opposed this. That is not only a very pious phrase, but a very just one. For one cannot assume that God exists to help people who are too cowardly and too lazy to help themselves and think that God exists only to make up for the weakness of mankind. He does not exist for that purpose. He has always, at all times, blessed only those who were prepared to fight their own battles....
Providence has not led us along these amazing paths in vain. On the day that the party was founded I recalled that our nation once gained immense victories. Then it became ungrateful, disunited, sinned against itself. Thereupon it was punished by Providence. We deserved our defeat. If a nation forgets itself as completely as the German nation did at that time, if it thinks that it can shake off all honor and all good faith, Providence can do nothing but teach it a hard and bitter lesson. But even at that time we were convinced that once our nation found itself again, once it again became industrious and honorable, once each individual German stood up for his nation first and not for himself, once he placed the interests of the community above his own personal interests, once the whole nation again pursued a great ideal, once it was prepared to stake everything for this ideal, the hour would come when the Lord would declare our trials at an end.
If fate should once more call us to the battlefield, the blessing of Providence will be with those who have merited it by years of hard work. When I compare myself and my opponents in other countries in the light of history, I do not fear the verdict on our respective mentalities. Who are these egoists? Each one of them merely defends the interests of his class. Behind them all stands either the Jew or their own moneybags. They are all nothing but money-grubbers, living on the profits of this war. No blessing can come of that. I oppose these people merely as the 0 champion of my country. I am convinced that our struggle will in the future be blessed by Providence, as it has been blessed up to now.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 24 Feb. 1941
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But he who dares to use the word "God" for such devilish activity blasphemes against Providence and, according to our belief, he cannot end except in destruction.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking about Jews and international "warmongers," on 04 May 1941, before the Reichstag
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I did not want this struggle. Since January, 1933, when Providence entrusted me with the leadership of the German Reich, I had an aim before my eyes which was essentially incorporated in the program of our National Socialist party. I have never been disloyal to this aim and have never abandoned my program....
Only when the entire German people become a single community of sacrifice can we expect and hope that Almighty God will help us. The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself.
The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.
-Adolf Hitler, in a broadcast from Berlin, 03 Oct.1941
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If the Providence has so willed that the German people cannot be spared this fight, then I can only be grateful that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle which, for the next 500 or 1,000 years, will be described as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole world. The German people and their soldiers are working and fighting today, not only for the present, but for the coming, nay the most distant, generations. A historical revision on a unique scale has been imposed on us by the Creator....
The next incursion against this homestead of European culture was carried out from the distant East. A terrible stream of barbarous, uncultured hordes sallied forth from the interior of Asia deep into the hearts of the European Continent, burning, looting, murdering-a true scourge of the Lord....
From the time when the Movement I consisted of seven men, until we took over power in January 1933, the path was so miraculous that only Providence itself with its blessing could have made this possible....
Our enemies must not deceive themselves-in the 2,000 years of German history known to us, our people have never been more united than today. The Lord of the Universe has treated us so well in the past years that we bow in gratitude to a providence which has allowed us to be members of such a great nation. We thank Him that we also can be entered with honor into the ever-lasting book of German history!
-Adolf Hitler, on 11 Dec.1941 before the Reichstag
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My fame, if Providence preserves my life, will consist in ... works of peace, which I still intend to create. But I think that if Providence has already disposed that I can do what must be done according to the inscrutable will of the Providence, then I can at least just ask Providence to entrust to me the burden of this war, to load it on me. I will beat it! I will shrink from no responsibility; in every hour which ... I will take this burden upon me. I will bear every responsibility, just as I have always borne them."....
Thus the home-front need not be warned, and the prayer of this priest of the devil, the wish that Europe may be punished with Bolshevism, will not be fulfilled, but rather that the prayer may be fulfilled: "Lord God, give us the strength that we may retain our liberty for our children and our children's children, not only for ourselves but also for the other peoples of Europe, for this is a war which we all wage, this time, not for our German people alone, it is a war for all of Europe and with it, in the long run, for all of mankind."
-Adolf Hitler, 30 Jan. 1942, in Berlin (note the prayer at the end of the speech.)
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May therefore God give us the strength to continue to do our duty and with this prayer we bow in homage before our dead heroes, before those whom they have left behind in bereavement, and before all the other victims of this war.
-Adolf Hitler, in prayer at the end of a radio address on 15 March 1942.
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I, for my part, acknowledge another precept which says that man must deal the final blow to those whose downfall is destined by God.
-Adolf Hitler, in an address to the Reichstag, 06 April 1942
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In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that "General Winter," that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people....
You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.
-Adolf Hitler, 30 Sept. 1942, in Berlin
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And today I stand by this same view. Fate, or Providence, will give the victory to those who most deserve it....
And when now, after 10 years, I again survey this period, I can say that upon no people has Providence ever bestowed more successes than upon us. The miracles we have achieved in the last three years in the face of a whole world of enemies are unique in history, especially the crises we very naturally often had in these years.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 08 Nov. 1942
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The bomb which was planted by Colonel von Stauffenberg exploded two meters to my right. It seriously injured a number of my colleagues who are very dear to me; one has died. I myself am completely unhurt apart from a few minor skin abrasions, bruises and burns. I interpret this as confirmation that Providence wishes me to continue my life's mission as I have in the past.
Few people can begin to imagine the fate which would have overtaken Germany had the assassination attempt succeeded. I myself thank Providence and my Creator not for preserving me - my life consists only of worry and work for my People - I thank him only for allowing me to continue to bear this burden of worry, and to carry on my work to the best of my ability.
Once again I take this opportunity, my old comrades in arms, to greet you, joyful that I have once again been spared a fate which, while it held no terror for me personally, would have had terrible consequences for the German People. I interpret this as a sign from Providence that I must continue my work, and therefore I shall continue it.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking about the attempt to kill him, in a radio broadcast on 20 July 1944
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God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work....
Only He can relieve me of this duty Who called me to it. It was in the hand of Providence to snuff me out by the bomb that exploded only one and a half meters from me on July 20, and thus to terminate my life's work. That the Almighty protected me on that day I consider a renewed affirmation of the task entrusted to me....
Therefore, it is all the more necessary on this twelfth anniversary of the rise to power to strengthen the heart more than ever before and to steel ourselves in the holy determination to wield the sword, no-matter where and under what circumstances, until final victory crowns our efforts....
In the years to come I shall continue on this road, uncompromisingly safeguarding my people's interests, oblivious to all misery and danger, and filled with the holy conviction that God the Almighty will not abandon him who, during all his life, had no desire but to save his people from a fate it had never deserved, neither by virtue of its number nor by way of its importance....
In vowing ourselves to one another, we are entitled to stand before the Almighty and ask Him for His grace and His blessing. No people can do more than that everybody who can fight, fights, and that everybody who can work, works, and that they all sacrifice in common, filled with but one thought: to safeguard freedom and national honor and thus the future of life.
-Adolf Hitler, in a radio address, 30 Jan. 1945
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Providence shows no mercy to weak nations, but recognizes the right of existence-only of sound and strong nations....
This Jewish bolshevist annihilation of nations and its western European and American procurers can be met only in one way: by using every ounce of strength with the extreme fanaticism and stubborn steadfastness that merciful God gives to men in hard times for the defense of their own lives....
We have suffered so much that it only steels us to fanatical resolve to hate Our enemies a thousand times more and to regard them for what they are destroyers of an eternal culture and annihilators of humanity. Out of this bate a holy will is born to oppose these destroyers of our existence with all the strength that God has given us and to crush them in the end. During its 2,000-year history our people has survived so many terrible times that we have no doubt that we will also master our present plight.
-Adolf Hitler, in a recorded radio address, 24 Feb. 1945
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SOURCES:
Baynes, Norman H. Ed. "The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939," Vol. 1 of 2, Oxford University Press, 1942
Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," Viking, 1999
Steigmann-Gall, Richard "The Holy Reich: Nazi conception of Christianity, 1919-1945," Cambridge University Press, 2003
Online:
Adolf Hitler Speeches from www.adolfhitler.ws/
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Note, some nefarious web site operators, like those from "jews-for-allah," for example, have copied this web page without permission and removed all references to NoBeliefs.com and its compiler. Needless to say, this kind of practice reflects the very questionable nature of their morals and belief system. NoBeliefs.com does not condone or authorize these web sites in any manner. Nor does NoBeliefs.com condone or authorize this material for use on other religious, racist, or Neo-Nazi web sites. On the other hand, those who ask permission and include a citation or link to NoBeliefs as the originator of this compilation, have full welcome to use it.
Hitler compared to God/Jesus/Christians
by Jim Walker
Originated: 20 May 1998
Additions made: 29 Nov. 2005
Indented quotes in green
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Introduction
The history of Adolf Hitler reported by Christian authors usually attempt to show him as un-Christian or avoid discussions of his religion altogether. This should not surprise anyone considering that publishing in a Christianized country tends to protect itself from any stigma of wrongdoing and could very well hurt book sales, not to mention damage the reputation of its authors. Even many Jewish authors must take care not to offend the religious sensibilities of their audiences.
Unfortunately most books about Hitler, from a religious viewpoint, come as bowdlerized accounts containing flagrant inaccuracies. There occur many versions, some of which view Hitler with combinations of occultism, atheism, anti-religion, anti-Christian, etc. Some authors blend the anti-clerical views of Martin Bormann or the mystical beliefs of Rosenberg with Hitler in an attempt to rewrite history. Almost all the sources for Hitler's alleged apostasy come from Bormann's edited version of Hitler's Table Talk (for a closer examination, see "Hitler's table talk and other extraneous sources"). But Hitler was not Bormann or Rosenberg and they were not him. Hitler abscised himself from the views of Bormann and Rosenberg and demanded support for his view of "positive" Christianity as was written into the Nazi party program. If you examine the historical record with raw honesty, you will find that these counter-Christian claims about Hitler simply do not hold up.
Fortunately, I am neither a Christian, Jew, or of any religious persuasion. Neither do I have a reputation or sales to protect. Although I am certainly not the first to point out Hitler's Christianity, from my non-religious point of view, I can present a look at Hitler's belief-system without a religious bias to get in the way. If the following offends anyone, then I can, on reasoned grounds, declare that it can only come from the facts themselves and not from any feeling I may have against Christianity. In fact, although I see great dangers of beliefs, especially those of violent belief-systems such as Christianity, I have no ill feelings toward Christians themselves, anymore than I do drug addicts, even though I may abash the dangers of drugs. So from this viewpoint, I aim to expose Hitler's Christianity in the expectation to open the door somewhat to the light of examination, not only for Christians to see (if they can) but to anyone who has a concern for the mechanism of belief and the dangers it can produce.
My main aim intends to educate without resorting to ad homenims or dishonesty. Indeed, it will take certain courage and honesty for any Christian to read this without feeling offended. However, I admire anyone who attempts to read this, and hope that they will do further research, check the sources, and reserve judgment.
My information comes not from my beliefs or my interpretation of his beliefs. The information comes directly from the very words of Hitler himself, from his private notes, conversations, writings, speeches and the people who knew him. I will show that he clearly reveals his Christianity, not only from his paraphrasing of the Bible, but from his confession as a Christian, his triune god-like actions and how his faith parallels the belief of many Christians today.
I have clippped some of the Hitler quotes for brevity. For a fuller quote, go to the page on Mein Kampf quotes (click here) or to Hitler's speeches (click here).
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Hitler, the Christian
Hitler not only got brought up as a Roman Catholic Christian, but he expressed his Christian views into adulthood, including his period as Chancellor of the German Third Reich. One only need read Mein Kampf to see the extent of his Biblical beliefs. The German populace knew well about Hitler's book and it became a best-seller second only to the Bible. Furthermore, Hitler expressed his Christian feelings even more intensely in his speeches and proclamations throughout his power reign.
Although some might counter that Hitler's admission to Christianity, by itself, does not make one a Christian, how else can an individual convey to another his religion except from their own confession? One of the tenants of Christian belief, indeed the definition of a Christian, comes from the Pauline epistiles in regards to faith in Jesus:Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.
-Galatians 2:16
To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.
-Romans 3:26-28
Paul, by declaring faith in Jesus over law, effectively separated Christianity from Judaism. It came from these Pauline declarations that first defined Christianity. Belief in Jesus serves as the only requirement for membership into the Christian community. Christianity does not require adhering to Old Testament laws or membership to any Church or abstaining from evil deeds. One need only have faith in Jesus for its justification, period.
Although Hitler did not attend church regularly and later criticized the Church for their rejection of his reformation of a unified German Church, at no time did Hitler criticize God or Jesus. He always maintained an honor and belief in Jesus. This alone put him as a Christian believer. But Hitler went beyond just belief in Jesus; he devoted his entire political life to deeds aimed at creating a race of people in the pure image of God.
Some claim that Hitler lied when promoting religion, for political reasons (without citing a shred of evidence), but nothing in the historical record indicates this, nor would there appear any reason for him to do so. Even if he lied in Mein Kampf, why would he continue to consider himself a Christian after he held absolute German power? Why spend so much valuable resources to rid Germany of Jews if not from some profound justification? Hate of Jews alone cannot explain it. The hate must stem from some source and the historical record shows that anti-Judaism had long lived in the minds of Christians ever since Paul separated his community of believers from the law and people of Judaism.
Just as revealingly, not only did Hitler present his religious beliefs in his speeches, but his own private notes reveal the influence of the Bible, long before he came into power. In one of his notes, he describes the Bible as the monumental history of mankind and used the old testament race laws as the foundation for his views against the Jews, which later turned into the Nazi Nuremberg race laws [Maser, p.282]
Many Christians have attempted to destroy Hitler's claimed Christianity by pointing out that his actions did not appear Christian-like (whatever that means). Therefore, so the hypothesis goes, no "true" Christian would cause "evil" deeds. But again, the Bible does not define Christianity in terms of deeds regardless of how good or evil they seem. Yet it came through his very deeds that Hitler confessed his work for the Lord:Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
-Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hitler's work of the Lord only agrees with Biblical scripture:And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.
-Colossians 3:17
Hitler not only believed in Jesus (which alone made him a Christian) but his work against the Jews came straight from Christian theological reasoning just as had many Christian saints of the past. His Christian expressions of "Lord God," "Living Christ," and "Lord and Savior" indicates his acknowledgement of Jesus as God and his acceptance of a resurrected Christ (for what else can "Living" and "Savior" mean except from a resurrected state?). Hitler also believed in the supernatural concept of life after death. In Mein Kampf he wrote, "a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form."
Another indication of Hitler's beliefs about religion comes from his private library of numerous books. Although most of Hitler's books came as gifts from writers and publishers, those where he penciled and underlined sections reveal, not only the books that he read, but also those that he commented on and had an interest in. Timothy W. Ryback, who examined Hitler's books, found more than 130 books devoted to spirituality and religion including the teachings of Jesus Christ. Some of the titles included, Sunday Meditations; On Prayer; A Primer for Religious Questions, Large and Small; Large Truths About Mankind, the World and God; a German translation of E. Stanley Jones's 1931 best seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work on the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935 under the title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and Pronouncements of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original Form and With the Jewish Influences. Ryback also found a leather-bound tome -- with WORTE CHRISTI, or "Words of Christ," embossed in gold on the cover -- According to Ryback, it "was well worn, the silky, supple leather peeling upward in gentle curls along the edges. Human hands had obviously spent a lot of time with this book.... I scanned the book for marginalia that might suggest a close study of the text. A white-silk bookmark, preserved in its original perfection between pages 22 and 23 (only the portion exposed to the air had deteriorated), lay across a description of the Last Supper as related by Saint John. A series of pages that followed contained only a single aphorism each: 'Believe in God' (page 31), 'Have no fear, just believe' (page 52), 'If you believe, anything is possible' (page 53), and so on, all the way to page 95, which offers the solemn wisdom 'Many are called but few are chosen.'" [Ryback]
After reading Hitler's book and his speeches, one cannot help but realize that Hitler believed in fate and the guiding hand of Providence. Like many powerful religious people, he thought of himself as a sort of messiah, chosen by God. In 1943, while the war still raged on, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) commissioned the psychoanalyst, Walter Langer, to develop a "psychological profile" of Adolf Hitler. Langer looked at all the, then, available material about Hitler, including Mein Kampf, his speeches, and interviews with former Hitler associates. Langer concluded:
A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.
Langer hypothesized the most likely scenario if Hitler faced defeat where, in a "prescient moment," Hitler's belief in divine protection would compel him to fight to the bitter end, "drag[ging] a world with us -- a world in flames," and ultimately, he would take his own life. [Ryback]
Fortunately Hitler did not drag us with him in a world of flames but Langer pegged Hitler's profile.
Puzzling as it may seem, some Christians want to see a suicidal Hitler as "evidence" for his alleged apostasy because, according to Catholic doctrine, the act of suicide results in "mortal sin." But these same accusers don't seem to realize that Hitler's suicide occurred well after his preemptive war and the Jewish holocaust. Ironically by using the mortal-sin argument, they have placed Hitler into Christianity as a pre-Christian, the very Christianized Hitler that did the damage in the first place! Of course none of this matters because, according to Christian beliefs (Protestant or Catholic), regardless of how sinful one lives, sin alone cannot excuse a person from Christianity, even though it may keep you from Heaven (whatever that means).
Unfortunately, either through ignorance, subterfuge or sheer self-deceit, modern Christians will adhere to anything to escape a religious Hitler. Christians love to point out that Hitler imprisoned priests and nuns, some of them dying in concentration camps; therefore he must have had anti-Christian feelings, so the reasoning goes. But the Nazis imprisoned people of many faiths, including a few Nazis who stood in Hitler's way. But the Nazis condemned these people for their political views against the NSDAP government, never for their Christian religious beliefs.
Although Hitler may have deluded and blinded himself by belief, he appeared brutally honest in his fanaticism and beliefs. Nowhere do we find him denouncing Jesus; nothing in the record shows him expressing hatred toward Christians for their beliefs; not at anytime does he destroy Christian churches or attempt to eliminate the Christian religion. Even though Hitler had political problems with the hierarchy of the churches, he spent inordinate amount of time attempting to unite the Churches into one German Reich Church and spoke for establishing what he called real Christianity. His reach for uniting Christianity brought conflict within the denominations and created political divisions. It came from this that Hitler sometimes spoke against Christianity as a power structure, but never against Christianity as a belief system. (Note that many prominent Christians, throughout history, had spoken against their own religions, or other competing Christian religions). Although the historical record does show that, along with Jews and gypsies, a number of Christians did die in extermination camps, these death sentences resulted from their political views against Nazism, not because of their religion, faith in God, or because Hitler hated Christians. His religious reasoning for killing people aimed at Jews, not Christians and this included Jews who converted to Christianity.
If imprisoning or killing Christians constituted a condition for determining anti-Christianity, then we would have to consider virtually all governments or leaders of society who called for death sentences against Christians, as anti-Christian as well. Note that the majority of criminals in U.S. prisons, as well as those we execute, live and die as Christians. Does that make our prosecutors anti Christian? Should we consider George W. Bush anti-Christian just because his Texas agenda for the death penalty put many Christian criminals to death? Of course not, and neither can one use this reasoning as an argument against Hitler's Christianity. If, indeed, Hitler imprisoned priests or Christians for religious reasons, then where does this evidence exist? What proclamation or religious belief does Hitler cite to justify this hearsay belief?
Hitler makes his position clearly known about priests violating state concerns when he said:
So long as they concern themselves with their religious problems the State does not concern itself with them. But so soon as they attempt by any means whatsoever-- by letters, Encyclica, or otherwise-- to arrogate to themselves rights which belong to the State alone we shall force them back into their proper spiritual, pastoral activity.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered in Berlin on the May Day festival, 1937 [Baynes]
Hitler fully realized that his political enemies were making accusations against him and although he didn't have to, he explicitly makes his position known about his feelings for religion:
Amongst the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so called democracies is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion. In answer to that charge I should like to make before the German people the following solemn declaration:
1. No one in Germany has in the past been persecuted because of his religious views (Einstellung), nor will anyone in the future be so persecuted....
The Churches are the greatest landed proprietors after the State... Further, the Church in the National Socialist State is in many ways favoured in regard to taxation, and for gifts, legacies, &c., it enjoys immunity from taxation.
It is therefore, to put mildly-- effrontery when especially foreign politicians make bold to speak of hostility to religion in the Third Reich....
I would allow myself only one question: what contributions during the same period have France, England, or the United States made through the State from the public funds?
3. The National Socialist State has not closed a church, nor has it prevented the holding of a religious service, nor has it ever exercised any influence upon the form of a religious service. It has not exercised any pressure upon the doctrine nor on the profession of faith of any of the Confessions. In the National Socialist State anyone is free to seek his blessedness after his own fashion....
There are ten thousands and ten thousands of priests of all the Christian Confessions who perform their ecclesiastical duties just as well as or probably better than the political agitators without ever coming into conflict with the laws of the State....
This State has only once intervened in the internal regulation of the Churches, that is when I myself in 1933 endeavoured to unite the weak and divided Protestant Churches of the different States into one great and powerful Evangelical Church of the Reich. That attempt failed through the opposition of the bishops of some States; it was therefore abandoned. For it is in the last resort not our task to defend or even to strengthen the Evangelical Church through violence against its own representatives....
But on one point it is well that there should be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German State we shall destroy.
-Adolf Hitler, a speech in the Reichstag on 30 Jan. 1939 [Baynes]
Hitler emphasized that he attached the greatest importance to cooperation with the Catholic church and spoke of himself as a Catholic:
I am absolutely convinced of the great power and the deep significance of the Christian religion, and consequently will not permit any other founders of religion (Religionsstifter). Therefore I have turned against Ludendoriff and separated myself from him; therefore I reject Rosenberg's book. That book is written by a Protestant. It is not a party book. It is not written by him as a member of the party. The Protestants can settle matters with him.
My desire is that no confessional conflict arise. I must act correctly to both confessions. I will not tolerate a Kulturkampf.... I stand by my word. I will protect the rights and freedom of the church and will not permit them to be touched. You need have no apprehensions concerning the freedom of the church.
-Hitler [quoted from Helmreich, p.241]
As for schools, it was a matter of utmost importance to the Catholic hierarchy, and agreed to by the Reich Concordat between the Nazis and the Vatican. Hitler went on in this chilling observation:
Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. from our point of view as representatives of the state, we need believing people. A dark cloud threatens from Poland. We have need of soldiers, believing solders. Believing solders are the most valuable ones. They give their all. Therefore we will maintain the confessional schools in order to train believing people through the schools, but this depends upon having truly believing teachers, not by chance Marxists who do not stand fully by their religious faith, as teachers.
-Hitler, [quoted from Helmreich, p.241]
Notice how Hitler spoke of the schools in the way Right Wing Christians do today in their attempt to take control of public and private schools.
Although there did occur secret anti-Church actions carried out (mostly by Bormann and Roesnburg), such as requiring the resignations of the priests from the party, but when Hitler found out about this, Hitler ruled that forced resignations and expulsions of the clergy from the party should stop. Hitler himself ordered his chief associates, Göring and Goebbels to retain their church membership as did he too remain a member until his death.
Although Hitler officially held Catholic status, his actual religious views resembled that of Protestantism. He rejected many of the political Catholic teachings and moved toward a Protestant view of Christianity. After all, Germany gave birth to Protestantism which reflected a more Aryan view compatible to Hitler's "positive" view of Christianity. Hitler had confessed to Albert Speer, "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England." [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich] This Protestant view, no doubt, gave fuel to the modern (and ignorant) idea that Hitler opposed Christianity. Of course Catholics had, up to that time, always opposed Protestantism as a form of True Christianity, but they never accused Hitler of Christian apostasy. Today, however, the Catholic propaganda uses Hitler's favoritism toward Protestantism as a bases to make him look anti-Christian (while never mentioning his Protestant views) when in reality Hitler opposed political Catholicism when it conflicted with the Nazi state.
If you doubt the sincerity of non-Christians to make claims about Hitler's belief in God, or from Hitler himself, then on whose authority could you possibly derive the evidence? I submit that the majority of believing German Christians believed wholeheartedly in Hitler's sincerity toward God. If one cannot take the word from fellow believers, the what does that say about Christian beliefs? Moreover, Catholic and Protestant leaders felt convinced of Hitler's belief. As an example, the Catholic Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich visited Hitler at his mountain retreat at Obersalzburg in November 1936. Faulhaber observed:
Without doubt the chancellor lives in faith in God. He recognizes Christianity as the foundation of Western culture.
-Cardinal Faulhaber [quoted from Helmreich, p.279]
And if you think that the Church hierarchy did not feel convinced of Hitler's belief in God and Christianity, then why oh why would Pope Pius XII in 1939 instruct Cardinal Bertram to send a birthday message to Hitler: "warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany" which was added, "fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars."? These greetings became a tradition and were sent every April 20th.
If you cannot take the word of Hitler's own words in his claim of Christianity, or contemporary Christian believers, or bishops, or cardinals or Popes, then what other Christian authority could you possibly turn to?
The rest of the following text aims to show that, not only did Hitler's actions compare with the actions of the alleged Jesus, but that his deeds appeared similar to God-like actions in the Bible. Indeed Hitler's beliefs and deeds resemble the actions of many acknowledged prominent Christians of the past and present. The comparisons to God and Jesus come from the Bible and the comparison to past Christian deeds, comes from the history of Christians themselves.
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Comparing Hitler to the Biblical God
Except the Lord build the house, they labour in main that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
-Psalms 127:1
Hitler had familiarity with this verse and saw God as his aid to his German Reich when he said:
Except the Lord built the house they labour in vain.... The truth of that text was proved if one looks at the house of which the foundations were laid in 1918 and which since then has been in building.... The world will not help, the people must help itself. Its own strength is the source of life. That strength the Almighty has given us to use; that in it and through it we may wage the battle of our life.... The others in the past years have not had the blessing of the Almighty-- of Him Who in the last resort, whatever man may do, holds in His hands the final decision. Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken upon us.... We are all proud that through God's powerful aid we have become once more true Germans.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in March 1933 [Baynes]
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And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...
-Genesis 1:26
Hitler took this Biblical belief to heart; he held justification for a superior race on the foundation of his belief that man should fit God's image:
A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Genesis Chapter 3 speaks of the expulsion from paradise and Hitler takes notice of this:
...the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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With a belief in the dilution of the races, Hitler prophesied that if no one did anything about the purification of the races, the image of God would decrease:
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Hitler's Biblical beliefs shows clearly where he got the notion for offensive action:
...the world has no reason for fighting in our defense, and as a matter of principle God does not make cowardly nations free...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Of course we well know that Hitler wanted to get rid of the Jews but how many Christians realize that his main justification aimed to protect the image of the Lord?
Certainly we don't have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.
And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.
-Exodus 12:29-30
Although no archeological evidence exists for the Biblical slaughter of first-borns, Hitler actions compare with the Lord's atrocities reported in the Bible. Through eugenics, Hitler killed tens of thousands of children whom he felt did not deserve to live. Not only did first-borns get exterminated, but mid and later-borns as well.
Note that German eugenics did not originate with Hitler. Rather the idea of eugenics as a moral necessity began in the 1920s by theologians who advocated eugenics legislation. Moreover, many German Protestants felt comfortable with the racialist precepts that underlay Nazi eugenicism. This fit in with their belief of physical abnormality as an index of sin, a sign of moral and social degeneration. The Austrian born Hitler simply incorporated the idea that existed within Austrian-German Christians for years. Fully half of all victims of the Nazi's euthanasia action came from church institutions. [Steigmann-Gall]
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The LORD is a man of war. . .
-Exodus 15:3
Hitler, also a man of war, caused World War II by himself.
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And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain.
-Deuteronomy 2:34
Hitler took cities as well as countries. Although he did not destroy all the people of every city, his actions resulted in death to many men, women and children.
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Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
-I Samuel 15:3
Hitler attempted to utterly destroy the Jews and all that they had and had millions of men, women, and infants executed. As for animals, Hitler had far more compassion than the Biblical God; he felt kindness for animals.
(Note: In no sense do I mean that Hitler fulfilled any prophesy, mind you, but rather that Hitler's actions remained consistent with the actions of the alleged God described in the Bible.)
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Let burning coals fall upon them: let them be cast into the fire; into deep pits, that they rise not up again.
-Psalm 140:10
Through Hitler's orders, millions of people (them) got burned in incinerators and cast into pits.
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I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
-Isaiah 45:7
Hitler created peace when it suited him and created death and destruction when it fit his needs, which by Christian standards means "evil." Hitler did all these things in similar God-like actions reported in the Bible.
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Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.
-Joel 3:9-10
Hitler appealed to the German populace, building up their military might, and prepared them them for war:
Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Nuremberg Race Laws
It should also enlighten one to realize that the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, signed by Hitler, and according to Julius Streicher, got based on the Old Testament laws forbidding marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
These race laws forbade marriages between Jews and subjects of the state of Germany and that Marriages between Jews and Germans became invalid. Even extramarital intercourse between Jews and German citizens, or related blood got deemed illegal. These laws began the elimination of Jews from Germany which later escalated into a holocaust.
During the trials against Nazi war criminals, Julius Streicher admitted that he influenced the racial laws and said the following:
I have written such articles again and again; and in my articles I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves-- the law of Moses, which says, 'If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women.' And that, Gentlemen, is of tremendous importance in judging the Nuremberg Laws.. These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these laws. When after centuries, the Jewish lawgiver Ezra demonstrated that notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved. That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished.
-Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)
If anyone doubts the Biblical laws against marriage, one need only read: Genesis 28:1, 6; Deuteronomy 7:1-3; Leviticus 20: 2, 26; Ezra 9:1-2, 12; Nehemiah 13: 23-30.
A few of the Ezra verses that Streicher refers to, read as follows:
Now when these things were done, the princes came to me, saying, The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations, even the Cannaanites, the Hitites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites.
For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands: yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this trespass. (Ezra 9:1,:2)
And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have forsaken they commandments. Which thou hast commanded by thy servants the prophets, saying, The land, unto which ye go to possess it, is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands with their abominations, which have filled it from one end to another with their uncleanness. Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons, neither take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek their peace or their wealth for ever: that ye may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever. (Ezra 9:10-12)
We know that the Bible influenced Hitler's views on race laws because Hitler says so in his own private notes. In one of these notes, Hitler included his religious views of race laws under the outline of The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind. (see the transcript by clicking here).
Given this frightening information, it should come to no surprise why Christians and even Jews, for fear of condemning their own religion, had not mentioned this embarrassing revelation in their defense against Nazism.
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Comparing Hitler to the Biblical Jesus
Hitler with Whip My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
--Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 12 April 1922
Hitler not only believed he did the Lords work, but he thought of himself as a sort of saviour of Germany, and emulated Jesus of the New Testament. His friend Dietrich Eckart told of overhearing Hitler showing off to a lady by denouncing Berlin in extravagant terms: ". . . the luxury, the perversion, the iniquity, the wanton display and the Jewish materialism disgusted me so thoroughly that I was almost beside myself. I nearly imagined myself to be Jesus Christ when he came to his Father's Temple and found the money changers." Eckart described Hitler as "brandishing his whip and exclaimed that it was his mission to descend upon the capital like a Christ and scourge the corrupt." [Toland p. 143]
(See John 2:14-15 where Jesus drove out the moneychangers with a "scourge of small cords" [a whip]).
The following examples show further how Hitler compared with Jesus of the Bible.
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Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
-Jesus in Matthew 10:34
Who can deny that Hitler also did not send peace on earth? Through the sword of his speeches and commands, he created the most destructive war in human history to this date.
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Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:
-Jesus in Luke 12:51
Hitler not only divided countries on earth, but divided Jewish families, many times setting family members against each other.
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If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
-Jesus in John 18:36 [NRSV]
Of course Hitler lived in this world and, indeed, his followers fought for him against the Jews.
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On the 4th of June, 1922, as Hitler entered Stadelheim prison for inciting a riot, he compared himself with Jesus when he told his followers:
Two thosand years ago the mob of Jerusalem dragged a man to execution in just this way. [Toland, p.115]
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Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?
-Matthew 23:33
Hitler took Jesus to heart when he said:
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 [Baynes]
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And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet.
For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.
-Jesus in Mark 13:7-8
Although Hitler did not take it to such Biblical extremes, He certainly did not appear troubled by war. He considered war a necessity (needs be) to save Germany for his future Reich.
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But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.
-Jesus in Luke 19:27
Anyone not conforming to political desires of Hitler would either get executed or imprisoned.
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And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.
-Jesus in Revelation 2:23
Hitler killed the children of other faiths (her children), especially of the Jewish religion during the 20th century holocaust.
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Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.
-Revelation 20:6
Many of Hitler's followers thought that his "Third Reich" would last a thousand years, and in the autumn of 1941, at Wolfsschanze, Hitler said:
I am Fuhrer of a Reich that will last for a thousand years to come. No power can shake the German Reich now. Divine Providence has willed it that I carry the fulfillment of a Germanic task.
In an interview with Richard Breiting, Hitler said:
We judge by the spiritual energy which a people is capable of putting forth, which will enable it in ten years to recapture what it has lost in a thousand years of warfare. I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual-- I would almost say divine-- creation.
Adolf Hilter, June 1931, [Calic]
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For Jesus himself testified , that a prophet hath no honour in his own country.
-John 4:44
And Hitler wrote:
...that is why the prophet seldom has any honor in his own country.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what they right hand doeth.
-Jesus in Matthew 6:3
And Hitler:
First, therefore, he goes about making up to the people for his previous sins against them. He begins his career as the 'benefactor' of mankind. Since his new benevolence has a practical foundation, that the left hand should not know what the right hand giveth; no, whether he likes it or not, he must reconcile himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he feels the sufferings of the masses and all the sacrifices that he himself is making to combat them.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Ye know that after two days is the feast of the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified.
-Matthew 26:2
In the last days of the war, Hitler realized that the end would come. Many of his generals betrayed him and he committed suicide.
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Comparing Hitler to Christians
Although many Christians may want to deny it, there simply occurs no way to honestly avoid the destructive actions by Christians throughout the history of Christianity. Not only did many prominent Christians perform or condone atrocities, but the established Christian denominations supported wars, inquisitions, and exterminations of other faiths and even heretical sects of their own religion. Adolph Hitler simply acted as one of many along a long line of Christians who used his beliefs as a foundation for his actions.
Hitler grew up in the anti-Semitic Austrian/German Catholic culture of his time. A priest baptized him. He got educated in a Catholic monastery under the schooling of Padre Bernhard Groner. On the way to the monastery, Hitler had to pass by a stone arch which had a carved monastery's coat of arms which included a swastika (which some speculate gave him the inspiration for the Nazi cross). He attended the choir. He attended religious services and festivals. An abbot became his idol and he hoped to join the Church as a priest. As a child he used to wear a kitchen apron pretending himself a priest giving sermons. In 1904 Hitler got confirmed at the Linz Cathedral. [Toland] As he grew older, other Christians influenced him, Catholic and Protestant alike. He always paid his church taxes on time. He remained a member in good standing of the Church of Rome until his death. And in 1941 Hitler said:
"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."
Although Hitler had a strong Catholic childhood, he slowly became more Protestant-like as he grew older. He read evangelist literature and he greatly admired Martin Luther (a Jew hater). Many of his actions fulfilled what Luther desired in his book "On the Jews and their lies" (1543). It appears clear from Hitler's own writings that his anti-Semitism came directly from the community of Christians:
I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
And we know that were the great German reformer [Martin Luther] with us to-day he would rejoice to be freed from the necessity of his own time and, like Ulrich von Hutten, his last prayer would be not for the Churches of the separate States: it would be of Germany that he would think and of the Evangelical Church of Germany.
-Adolf Hitler, in his Proclamation at the Parteitag at Nuremberg on 5 Sept. 1934 [Baynes]
Throughout the history of Christianity, priests and religious leaders have excommunicated those who desecrated the image of the Lord. Hitler appears just like a medieval priest when he wrote:
Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Note how the following reads like many Religious Right sermons of today:
Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth... Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Many Religious Right rail against liberals and far right groups such as the KKK use Jews and liberalism as a sword for their holy cause. Notice how Hitler appears like a Christian extremist here:
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Just as many preachers today speak against the unfaithful, Hitler fought against atheism and felt convinced that people require faith:
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933 [Baynes]
Most Christians rail against occultism and mystical thinking. So did Hitler:
We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. . .
-Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept. 1938 [Baynes]
Hitler even defines Christianity in his own terms, just as many Christians do today in opposing communism, atheism, degeneracy and crime in what he calls "real" Christianity:
National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity....
For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life... These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934 [Baynes]
Politically, Hitler acted from a dictatorial stance to enforce what he called "positive Christianity." The original twenty-five point party program, a Constitution of the Nazi party, included a demand for liberty "for all religious denominations in the State" and that it stood for "positive Christianity." Hitler insisted and declared the twenty-five points as unalterable [Toland p. 218] (in spite of the anti-Catholic feelings of Martin Bormann). Hitler got his way.
Hitler stressed the importance of a strong, well-organized Evangelical church which would work in close cooperation with the state. He conceived of creating one large united Protestant church to stand parallel to the Catholic Church. And to the Catholics, Hitler wanted their freedom of spiritual and educational power, as long as they did not come in conflict with the political will of the government. Thus, the Nazis and the Vatican worked for an agreement, conducted by Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII). On July 20, 1933, the Nazis and the Vatican singed the Reich Concordat, establishing the freedom and power of the Catholic Church in Germany.
If anyone has doubts as to the support of the German Churches for Hitler, one need only to examine the respects paid to him during his birthday by Church leaders throughout Germany and the Vatican. For example, Pope Pius XII initiated the celebration of Hitler every April 20, whereby Hitler received a message stating: "warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany with "fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars."
Hitler once celebrated Christmas in a speech which asserted his Christian feelings: "Christ," he said, "was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews." Hitler thought of himself prescribed by Providence when he said, "The work of Christ started but could not finish, I-- Adolf Hitler-- will conclude." [Toland p.222]
[Note that the Mischling regulation saved Jesus from being Jewish, who by Hitler's argument, being the son of God, had but two Jewish grandparents; neither did he practice the Jewish religion (as he saw it), nor did he marry a Jew.]
Like military leaders of the past and present, Hitler thought of God as on his side. On January 1, 1932, Hitler told a Munich audience that God was on his side in the battle for a better world. [Toland p.260]
According to Toland, "The born and bred Catholic Hitler rebuilt his SS on Jesuit principles by assiduously copying "the service statutes and spiritual exercises presented by Ignatius Loyola." [Toland p. 760]
When the Law Against Overcrowding of German Schools reduced the number of Jews in higher institutions, Hitler defended his action by reminding the priests that the Church had banished Jews into ghettos and forbidden Christians to work with them. Hitler only did more effectively what the Church of Rome had attempted to do for many centuries. [Toland p. 311] Note the Church of Rome not only condoned Hitler but blessed him as well! Pope Pius XII subscribed to the same principles as Hitler and proved by a concordat signed between the Vatican and Hitler. The Vatican felt so appreciative of the recognition as a full partner that it asked God to bless the Reich. There followed an order for German bishops to swear allegiance to the National Socialist (Nazi) regime. The oath went as follows: "In the performance of my spiritual office and in my solicitude for the welfare and the interest of the German Reich, I will endeavor to avoid all detrimental acts which might endanger it."
Hitler campaigned to convince the German people to back his withdrawal from the League of Nations. The Church gave enthusiastic support. Every bishop approved as well as did Cardinal Faulhaber. [Toland p. 320]
During Hitler's re-education program, deification of Hitler showed itself though a required invocation recited by the children of Cologne:
Fuhrer, my Fuhrer, bequeathed to me by the Lord,
Protect and preserve me as long as I live!
Thou hast rescued Germany from deepest distress,
I thank thee today for my daily bread.
Abide thou long with me, forsake me not,
Fuhrer, my Fuhrer, my faith and my light!
Heil, my Fuhrer! [Toland p. 404]
When Hitler survived a bomb assassination attempt, instead of feeling depressed, he felt ecstasy, repeating over and over, "Think of it. Nothing happened to me. Just think of it. . ." He thought of himself as fated by Providence. On July 20, 1944, he remarked that it "only confirmed the conviction that Almighty God has called me to lead the German people-- not to final defeat but to victory." [Toland p. 799]
His mistress and later, his wife, Eva Braun, who decided to commit suicide with Hitler came from the product of a convent and had faith in God. In many of her letters she appealed to God and prayed for Hitler. [Toland p. 236, 377]
Note, I could have given examples of Hitler's more conventionally thought of Christian actions which include sacrifice and giving to others, but the intent here aims to show that Christian theology and expression goes far beyond just the kinder and gentler kind. For example, in Hitler's Winter Help program he spoke of the spirit of Christian giving:
If positive Christianity means... the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry... then it is we ware are the more positive Christian. For in these spheres the people's community of National Socialist Germany has accomplished prodigious work.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking to an assembly of Alte Kampfer in Munich, 26 Feb. 1939, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
But as we now know, Hitler expressed the worst elements of Christian expression along with the good but it goes to the worst that needs addressing.
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Humanitarian acts alone cannot cannot support Christian identity
If any Christian for one moment attempts to support Christianity through example from humane actions by Christians, then I submit that the same reasoning could apply toward a support of Nazism as well.
Virtually any Christian who argues against Nazism but supports Christianity usually trots out examples of humanitarian acts by unselfish Christians who opposed Hitler and saved Jews from extermination. But, sadly, there exists only meager examples to choose from. The unfortunate truth reveals that most Catholic and Protestant institutions as well as mainstream Christians in Germany, not only supported Hitler but held antisemitic beliefs as well. In fact, of the few who opposed Nazism, the majority of them opposed it not for humanitarian or religious reasons but for political and power control reasons. In any case, I submit that it appears just as dishonest to support Christianity through its few examples of humanitarism than to support Nazism from its few examples.
For example, people well know that Oskar Schindler spent a fortune to save twelve hundred Jews from the Auschwitz gas chambers. John Rabe in the 1930s saved many Chinese from slaughter from Japanese soldiers in the rape of Nanking even though Germany aligned itself with Japan more than it did with China. Schindler held membership in the Nazi party and Rabe acted as the leader of the Nazi Party in Nanking China [Chang].
If we take the very few Christians who saved lives as examples for the support the Christian faith, then should we not also take humanitarian acts by a few Nazis as support for Nazism? Why not? In fact, there live many Neo-Nazis today who wish to bring back the ideas of Hitler's idealism. Many of them declare that the Jewish holocaust either never occurred or that the Jews concocted the math to make it appear more atrocious than it "really" happened.
Of course, appealing to transient acts of kindness by itself cannot support Christianity or Nazism. Most Christians see clearly the problems with Nazism, but unfortunately they use similar mental barriers to shield themselves from the problems of Christian belief.
Moreover, one's humanitarian or inhuman actions have little to do with the historical definition of Christianity. As stated above, Paul established Christianity by faith alone. And from the earliest 1st century priests, faith alone served as the bases for defining one's Christianity. As an example, Clement wrote, "We are justified not by our own works, but by faith."
Through the operation of His will. And we, too, being called by His will in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding, or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory for ever and ever.
-Clement (The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, Chap. XXXII)
At best, one's works can only show the parallel and consistency to one's faith, and in this, Hitler showed a pattern of actions in agreement with his faith and with the horrific works of past faithful Christians.
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Violence does not exclude one from Christianity (doctrine of sin)
Christians who try to deny Hitler's Christianity tend to argue with a fallacious syllogism that goes something like:
Christians don't do bad things
Hitler did bad things,
Therefore he was not a Christian
If Hitler had never condemned the Jews, Christians today would most likely not question Hitler's Christianity. If Hitler had not started World War II, Christians would have no reason not to include him into their faith. And if Hitler had been a successful politician, Christians would loudly proclaim him as an example of a great Christian leader.
Of course virtually all Christians (and everyone else), do some bad things in their life. Although most Christians, indeed, do not adhere to violence and many do not view themsleves as political, non-violence or abstaining from political action by itself does not make one a Christian. One can also argue that most Nazis thought of themselves as peace loving and most did not kill Jews, but non-violence never excluded one from the Nazi party, nor does it supply any fuel for supporting Nazism. Similarly, neither can one defend Christianity on the grounds of non-violence, nor can one deny a person's Christianhood simply because that person did bad things.
Most soldiers never go into battle but that does not make them any less a soldier. And one must apply the same logic to leaders who opt for war, including those who create holocausts. Hitler and the Nazis may have acted uniquely in their destruction, but they acted according to their beliefs, just as the majority of believers do today.
Interestingly, most German Christians supported Hitler before and during the war. They felt empathy for him and loved him, sometimes, in messiah-like fashion. (There even exist news reels showing Hitler giving a laying-on-of-hands, Jesus-like, to his admiring German audience.) Although the German citizens may not have desired to kill their enemies themselves, they felt perfectly willing to support others to do the killing for Germany.
Even in the United States today, most Christians support a strong military and (as has been shown in the Gulf wars) will willingly condone the killing of others through "legal" war. Religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Billy Graham, et al, preach the need to defend the Christian faith through war if necessary, and will even condone the "unfortunate but sometimes necessary" deaths of innocents.
Clearly, violence, nor non-violence cannot determine a Christian from a non-Christian. Many freethinkers and atheists, for example, live peacefully, but that does not make them, in any sense, a Christian or even Christian-like.
Moreover, the Christian use of the doctrine of sin prevents any meaningful argument against ousting one's claimed Christianhood, regardless of how atrocious the crime. According to Christian interpretation, ever since Adam's fall, all humans live in a 'state of corruption.' Thus all people, including all Christians commit sin. No one in Christian theology makes the claim that Christians subsist in levels of degrees of Christianity depending on how sinless or sinful one lives. Any person, regardless of how much misery he or she has caused in the world, can achieve Christianhood along with an alleged redemption right up to the last second of his or her death. Belief alone determines one's Christianity, not how one acts. However odd it may seem, any conscious human who has the neurological makeup that maps into a belief in God & Jesus, determines his ownership into this belief system.
Clearly, the common denominator for any Christian comes from a self identification to Christianity through belief and faith, and this alone can only come from personal confession. Only from the use of religious language, spoken or written with an apparent honesty, can anyone determine the identity of its believers. Hitler stated his position in clear words with an honesty that never contradicted his actions or his faith; his personal beliefs through his own words identified himself as a Christian.
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What other group?
How strange that people who believe in a non-Christian Hitler never see the elephant standing in the room. Something must have caused Hitler's antisemitism and I submit an interesting question to ask: From what other group, religion, or ideology could Hitler have inherited his antisemitism? Of course Christianity provides the only answer.
In fact the very survival of Christian theology depended on distancing itself from Judaism. The history of Christian beliefs reveals an abundant practice of Jewish hatred throughout its long history of evolution. The ill feelings toward Jews lives in the very scriptural words that all Christians depend on: the New Testament. One cannot blame atheism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Communism, or any other group. Only Islam comes in at a distanced second place, but since Germany and Hitler had little relations with Islam, Islam could hardly have influenced the vicious attacks against the Jews as had Christianity in Germany. And you cannot blame Jewish hatred on social Darwinism or theories of racial discrimination because in the end, they lead right back to its Christian origins which existed long before Darwin or even modern science. Nor can one blame German antisemitism on the Nazis because Jewish hatred, again, existed long before the Nazis came into power.
Christianity stands alone as the only source from which Hitler, the Nazis and, indeed, the general population of Germany could have possibly cultivated a deep seated hatred for Jews. Both Catholicism and Protestantism contributed to the centuries of ill feelings for the Jewish people in general. Christians taught antisemitism in their schools. They taught it in their churches. They preached against the Jews in their sermons. And since Hitler and his Nazis incorporated this ugly silent tenet of Christian faith into their ideology, one cannot deny that this Christian belief lived in the very heart and minds of Hitler and the Nazis. When the Nazis acted against the Jews they acted through Christianity itself. And although the Nazis elevated the horror, it nevertheless stemmed from the very core of Christianity itself . Thus Nazi antisemitism and Christian antisemitism describe the very same thing.
Even if you continue to persuade yourself of the apostasy of Hitler, his words and ill-deeds against the Jews describe one inheritance, its most horrific legacy, which makes him, at the very least, a part of this religion, and that which screams the ownership of his criminal acts: Christianity.
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Conclusion
We must not forget that Hitler's own contemporaries, the highest Protestant and Catholic leaders (including Popes and Bishops) thought of Hitler as a Christian. How can one sit here, decades from his history, and judge against Hitler's Christianity, when his own fellow Christians thought of him as a Christian?
We must also not forget that Hitler ruled the most devoutly Christian country in the world, a country that spawned Protestantism while still embracing Catholicism, a country where its Christian citizens and soldiers exterminated political enemies, gypsies, homosexuals, atheists, and six million Jews.
Not only did Hitler's atrocities remain consistent with God and Jesus' actions in the Bible, but his intransigent attitude parallels many of the fanatical beliefs of Right-wing conservatives of today. Hitler even used his faith in the same way as many mainstream American Christians. It appears clear from the history of Christianity that Hitler brought nothing new to Christianity, albeit he brought its violent nature to new heights.
Like the Biblical God, Hitler created war and destruction.
Similar to the Biblical laws against marrying outside one's group, the Nazi race laws outlawed Jews from marrying Aryan Germans as outlined in Hitler's private notes. Julius Streicher confessed that the race laws got based on Old Testament laws.
Like the Biblical Jesus, Hitler did not live for peace. He created many divisions among the people.
Like many Christians in the past and today, Hitler aimed to protect the image of the Lord.
Like Christian leaders of the past, Hitler wished to unite the churches. He fought for his beliefs using the Lord as his justification. He created intolerance, divisions, and hatred as have Christians of the past.
Hitler lived as a confessed Christian. His parents raised him as a Catholic and he spoke and prayed as a Christian. He believed that the Bible represented the history of mankind. Nothing in his rhetoric spoke against Christian faith. Although he did have a few Christian enemies, they posed a political danger, not a religious threat.
Hitler allowed the destruction of Jewish synagogues and Temples. But if for one moment you still harbor the thought that Hitler acted against Christ belief, then ask yourself why he never ordered the destruction of Catholic or Protestant churches? Why did he not prevent his Nazis from worshiping in Christian churches, but instead encouraged it? And why did he spend so much time in trying to strengthen and unite the Christian denominations into one Christian Reich Church?
Even acknowledging Hitler's most atrocious acts as sinful cannot exclude him from Christianity. Tenets of Christian belief allege that all people sin and only redemtion through faith in Jesus Christ can absolve them.
A Christian, therefore, can never use sin alone, regardless of how horrible or atrocious, as an argument against Hitler. Clearly, Hitler's own words reveal his Christian faith, and Christians must, by their own tenant and upheld by their Bible, not to judge others.
Under all possible conditions then, Hitler lived and acted as a Christian and anyone who does not think so can only redefine Christianity from their own ignorance and denial.
For those who have begun to acknowledge Hitler's Christianity, they might also see that Christianity itself does not create the root problem but rather that the foundations of any faith (reliance on hope and ignorance) creates a defense mechanism that must act to protect itself at all cost, including the slaughter of innocents if necessary. It can come just as well from any belief-set such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, communism, or from any of the Christian denominations. A fanatical believer who gains political control of destructive weapons cannot help but use these instruments to favor his religious and political inclinations. A belief-system that contains violent scripts such as Bibles, Korans or manifestos, can easily create similar intolerances that occurred in Germany in the 1930s. Hitler's faith, his Christian actions, the majority of Christian churches who supported him, his followers who believed in him, and the very Bible with its appeal to superstition, provides important examples of how beliefs can create dangers to society.
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References (click on a book title highlighted in blue if you want it):
Baynes, Norman H., ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, Oxford University Press, 1942
Chang, Iris "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," Basic Books, 1997
Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," Viking, 1999
Calic, Edouard, ed., "Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews," The John Day Co., 1971
Helmreich, Ernst Christian "The German Churches Under Hitler," Wayne State University Press, 1979
Hitler, Adolf "Mein Kampf," translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971
Goldhagen, Daniel Johah , "Hitler's Willing Executioners," Alfred A. Knoph, NY, 1996
Maser, Werner, (translated by Arnold Pomerans) "Hitler's Letters and Notes," Harper & Row, 1974
Ryback, Timothy W., "Hitler's Forgotten Library: The Man, His Books, and His Search for God"
Shirer, William L. "The Rise and Fall of the Thired Reich," Simon and Schuster, NY, 1960
Steigmann-Gall, Richard "The Holy Reich: Nazi conception of Christianity, 1919-1945," Cambridge University Press, 2003
Toldand, John , "Adolf Hitler," Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1976
For a few selected quotes from the above material, see:
Hitler's religious beliefs and fanaticism
The Christianity of Hitler revealed in his speeches and proclamations
Religion and The Holocaust: Was Hitler a Christian:
http://ffrf.org/fttoday/1997/march97/holocaust.html
Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 -- 1 October 1946, Published at Nuremberg, Germany, 1947, Vol. 12
Quotes from Hitler's Henchmen and Nazi Sympathizers
compiled by Jim Walker
Originated: 24 Oct. 1999
Additions: 29 Jan. 2006
Back to Hitler index
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The following provides a few quotes from Hitler's henchmen and Nazi sympathizers and how Christianity molded and influenced their beliefs. Most of Hitler's henchmen, along with the vast majority of German citizens, were brought up Christian, and thought themselves as such. Remember that Germany gave birth to Protestantism and held a large but minority of Catholics. The fact that so many Nazis practiced the Christian faith should not surprise anyone, especially considering that Germany, at the time before and during Hitler's rise, represented the most Christianized country in the word. And except for a very few who rejected orthodox Christianity (like Bormann and Rosenberg), the majority used their influence (whether through belief or political action) to support both Catholicism and Protestantism views for the 'positive" Christianity of the new Nazi party platform.
Nor can one attempt to use the tired and false ploy of trying to put the Nazi expression of Christianity into a 'political only' framework to appeal to the masses. These Nazis fully believed in their religion no less than do conservative Christian politicians of the United States. After solid research into the minds of the Nazis, from the book, The Holy Reich, Richard Steigmann-Gall put it well: Indeed, none of the Nazis who proclaimed a positive attitude toward Christianity in public revealed themselves as anti-Christian in private. Therefore the insistence that the Nazis practiced "sheer opportunism" or placed a "tactical restraint" on their supposed hatred for Christianity "which had been imposed during the years of struggle to achieve power" cannot be sustained.
Each section below lists the person alphabetically by last name. Each quote includes the citation for the convenience of copying and pasting.
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Quotes from Nazi Henchmen
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Helmut Bruckner
Bruckner served as the Gauletier of Silesia. According to Richard Steigmann-Gall's research, "Bruckner sent Gregor Strasser an internal "Special Circular" he had issued to his Gau [region] officials on the party's official church-political stance. Its contents became common knowledge once a copy came into the hands of the Kirchenrat and the papers Tagliche Rundschau and Christliche Welt. As a confidential document, however, it provides a glimpse into the Nazi's feelings about the institution of the Protestant Church" [Steigmann-Gall]:We struggle for a union of the small Protestant state churches into a strong Protestant Reich Church.... We are acting not as a party, but as Protestant Christians who only follow a call to faith from God, which we here in our Volk movement. As true members of our church we have a legitimate claim to have appropriate consideration given to the greatness and inner strength of National Socialism in church life and the church administration.
-Helmut Brucker, "Richtlinien fur Kirchenfragen," Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (10 Nov. 1932: Breslau), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Walter Buch
Buch served as Head of the Nazi Party court and Martin Bormann's father-in-law. Otto Wagener, Hitler's confidant in the Kampfzeit, named Buch as one of the only three men who "were prepared and in a position to tell Hitler their own views when they contradicted his." According to Richard Steigmann's research, Buch, a Lutheran, held his faith in high esteem and "maintained he was guided in his social thought by Martin Luther."
When Point 24 of our program says the party stands for a positive Christianity, here above all is the cornerstone of our thinking. Christ preached struggle as did no other. His life was struggle for his beliefs, for which he went to his death. From everyone he demanded a decision between yes and no.
-Walter Buch "Geist und Kampf" (speech): Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (probably given between 1930 and 1932), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Public need before private greed.... So important and meaningful is this phrase that Jesus Christ placed it in the center of his religious teaching. However, since Christ was not a politician, since his Reich was not of this world, he put the calling into other words. He taught: love your neighbors as yourself! National Socialism is therefore nothing new, nothing that a person after much consideration would not come upon as the solution to the economic plight of the Germans.
-Walter Buch Der Aufmasch, Blatter der deutschen Jugend 2 (January 1931), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Note, Point 24 refers to a section of the NSDAP party platform (the Nazi Constitution, so to speak) where it proclaims "positive Christianity" as one of its tenants.
Never more than in the last ten years has the truth behind Luther's words been more evident: "The family is the source of everyone's blessings and misforture."
-Walter Buch In a speech from 1932, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The idea of eternal life, of which the Jew knows nothing, is just as characteristic of our Germanic forefathers as it was of Christ.
-Walter Buch Der Aufmarsch, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
When Luther turned his attention to the Jews, after he completed his translation of the Bible, he left behind "on the Jews and their Lies" for posterity.
-Walter Buch [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.... From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds.
-Walter Buch "Geist und Kampf" (speech), Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Luther's eloquent words,"the intellect is the Devil's whore," confirm my belief that the human spirit of the greatest magnitude is too small to alter the laws of life. And the highest law of life is struggle.... Nothing comes from "yes, but [Zwar-Aber].
-Walter Buch written to a friend in 1929, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Rudolf Buttmann
An early member of the Nazi Party, Buttmann became a cacus leader of the Nazi Party in the Bavarian Landtag (whose other members included Schemm and Streicher), and later head of the Cultural Division of the Reich Interior Ministry. [Steigmann-Gall]
One has opportunity enough to see how our party governs in Thuringia, where party members Dr. Frick has reintroduced Christian morning prayer in school.... Not through us is religion in danger, but rather through the conditions we know of in Russia, and which they now boast of in Berlin. First we shall sweep clean the recesses of filth of the city - the cinemas and theaters - with an iron broom.
-Rudolf Buttmann,Volkischer Beobachter, 13 Dec. 1930, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Our worldview is not directed against Cathoicism or Protestantism, not against Christianity, but rather based on Christianity and against cultural bolshevism, against the false liberalism of the Enlightenment, and against materialism.
-Rudolf Buttmann,Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Jan. 1931, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Dietrich Eckart
Eckart served as one of the early key members of the National-Socialist German Workers Party and an early friend of Hitler. He also invented the term "Drittes Reich" ("Third Reich"). Eckart also coined the phrase, "Jewish materialist spirit within us and without us," used in Point 24 of the Nazi Party platform, an expression that implied a religious element in the Nazi typology. Hitler felt so indebted to Eckart he ended Mein Kampf with a tribute to him.
Christ stands never otherwise than erect, never otherwise than upright... eyes flashing in the midst of the creeping Jewish rabble... and the words fall like lashes of the whip: 'Your father is the devil' (John 8:44)
-Dietrich Eckart Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zweigesprache zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich, 1924) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
This war was a religious war, finally one sees that clearly. A war between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, Christ and Antichrist.
-Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Wonders never cease; from the deluge is born a new world, while the Pharisees whine about their miserable pennies! The Liberation of humanity from the curse of gold stands before us! But for that our colllapse, but for that our Golhotha!
-Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
[The] Jewish conception of God is of no interest to us Germans! We seek God nowhere but in ourselves. For us the soul is divine, of which the Jew, on the other hand, knows nothing. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Luke 17:21), thus God also, who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven. We feel our soul is immortal, eternal from the beginning, and therefore we refuse to be told that we are created from nothingness.
-Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The New Testament broke away from the Old /as you once released yourself from the world/ And as you are freed from your past delustions/ so did Jesus Christ reject his Jewishness.
-Dietrich Eckart Quoted in Rosenberg, Eckart [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Hans Frank
Frank acted as lawyer and senior official for the Nazi party and legal advisor for Hitler. He also served a tenure as Governor-General of occupied Poland for which he was convicted during the Nuremberg trials for his role in perpetrating the Jewish holocaust and found guilty of complicity in the murder of millions of Poles and Polish Jews. A former Protestant (his father was a Protestant and his mother a Catholic), he converted to Roman Catholicism after his arrest where he felt relieved at the prospect of atoning for his evil deeds. [The belief that one can be saved for any atrocious act demonstrates the moral flaw of Christian doctrine.]
Hitler is lonely, So is God. Hitler is like God.
-Reichminister Hans Frank (FL Schuman, "Hitler and the Nazi Dictatorship," London 1936
We are under the great obligation of recognizing as a holy work of our Volk's spirit the laws signed by Adolf Hitler's name. Hitler has received his authority from God. Therefore he is champion, sent by God, of German Right in the world.
-Hans Frank, Frankfurt-am-Main, 30 October 1935 (Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West)
I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.
-Hans Frank, in his last statement before execution (Hans Frank from Wikipedia online encyclopedia)
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Wilhelm Frick
Frick served as the NSDAP caucus leader in the Reichstag and one of only three Nazis in the original Hitler Cabinet. He was responsible for drafting many of the laws that set up the Nazi regime. Hitler appointed him as Reich Interior Minister, making him the most important "state Nazi" immediately after the Seizure of Power (Machtergreifung). Frick, a member of the Protestant Church, had jurisdiction over the affairs of the Protestant Church until the creation of the Reich Church Ministry in 1935. [Steigmann-Gall]
The party stands for positive Christianity. The National Socialist state is absolutely ready to work with the Christian churches, but the solidarity of the churches to the Volk must be a matter of course; that means that the churches must feel bound to the Volk and may never come into opposition to the National Socialist leadership of the state.
-Wilhelm Frick, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 June 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Joseph Goebbels
Goebbles served as Hitler's Propaganda Minister (Propagandaministerium). The pious Catholic parents of Joseph Goebbels raised him and his two brothers in that faith. He spoke of Hitler as "either Christ or St. John." "Hitler, I love you!" he wrote in his diary.I converse with Christ. I believed I had overcome him, but I have only overcome his idoltrous priests and false servants. Christ is harsh and relentless.
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
I take the Bible, and all evening long I read the simplest and greatest sermon that has ever been given to mankind: The Sermon on the Mount! 'Blessed are they who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'!
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Christ is the genius of love, as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate. The Jew is a non-race among the races of the earth.... Christ is the first great enemy of the Jews.... that is why Judaism had to get rid of him. For he was shaking the very foundations of its future international power. The Jew is the lie personified. When he crucified Christ, he crucified everlasting truth for the first time in history.
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The idea of sacrifice first gained visible shape in Christ. Sacrifice is intrinsic to socialism.... The Jew, however, does not understand this at all. His socialism consists of sacrificing others for himself. This is what Marxism is like in practice.... The struggle we are now waging today until victory or the bitter end, is in its deepest sense, a struggle between Christ and Marx. Christ: the principle of love. Marx: the principle of hate.
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Christ cannot have been a Jew. I do not need to prove this with science or scholarship. It is so!
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
A Jew is for me an object of disgust. I feel like vomiting when I see one. Christ could not possibly have been a Jew. It is not necessary to prove that scientifically-- it is a fact.
-Joseph Goebbels, in his attempt to win the eternal gratitude of Hitler, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
When today a clique accuses us of having anti-Christian opinions, I believe that the first Christian, Christ himself, would discover more of his teaching in our actions than in this theological hair-splitting.
-Joseph Goebbels, Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin, 2 March 1934: Hamburg, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
When we call for the unification of the Protestant Church, we do so because we do not see how, in a time when the whole Reich is unifying itself, twenty-eight Landeskirchen can persist.... In the interpretation of the Gospel one may hold the command of God higher than human commands. In the interpretation of political realities, we consider ourselves to be God's instrument.
-Joseph Goebbels, Hannover Kurier, 29 March 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
A verbal confession cannot suffice; we require an active confession. Christianity to us is no empty form, but rather a continual action.
-Joseph Goebbels, in a speech from 1935, Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Aug. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We have a feeling that Germany has been transformed into a great house of God, including all classes, professions and creeds, where the Führer as our mediator stood before the throne of the Almighty.
-Joseph Goebbels, in a broadcast, 19 April 1936
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Hermann Göring
An early member of the Nazi party and one of its principle leaders, Goring founded the Gestapo and served as the Reichsluftfahrtminister of the Luftwaffe.
We have told the churches that we stand for positive Christianity. Through the zeal of our faith, the strength of our faith, we have once again shown what faith means, we have once again taken the Volk, which believed in nothing, back to faith.
-Hermann Göring in a 1935 speech, Positives Christentum, 3 Nov. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
In the same speech, Göring attacked paganists:
Naturally there are always people at work who represent a type of provocateur, who have come to us because they imagine National Socialism to be something other than it is, who have all kinds of fantastic and confused plans, who misunderstand National Socialist racial thought and overstate their declaration to blood and soil [Blut und Boden], and who in their romantic dreams are surrounded by Wotan and Thor and the like. Such exaggerations can harm our movement, since they make the movement look ridiculous, and ridiculousness [Lacherlichkeit] is always something most harmful. When I hear that a "Germanic wedding' is to be celebrated, I have to ask: my God, what do you understand to be a Germanic wedding? What do you understand to be National Socialism?
-Hermann Göring in a 1935 speech, Positives Christentum, 3 Nov. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
That same year, Göring married his second wife, Emmy, in a Lutheran service officiated by Reich Bishop Müller with Hitler as "Best Man." Later, he would also give his daughter Edda a Lutheran baptism. [Steigmann-Gall] To see a photo of the wedding, click here.
God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he [Hitler] was sent to us by God to save Germany.
-Hermann Göring (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
How shall I give expression, O my Führer, to what is in our hearts? How shall I find words to express your deeds? Has there ever been a mortal as beloved as you, my Führer? Was there ever belief as strong as the belief in your mission. You were sent us by God for Germany!
-Hermann Göring (Reden und Aufsatze, Munich, 1938)
Although he himself [Hitler] was a Catholic, he wished the Protestant Church to have a stronger position in Germany, since Germany was two-thirds Protestant.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
The Führer wanted to achieve the unification of the Protestant Evangelical Churches by appointing a Reich Bishop, so that there would be a high Protestant church dignitary as well as a high Catholic church dignitary.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
With the Catholic Church the Führer ordered a concordat to be concluded by Herr Von Papen. Shortly before that agreement was concluded by Herr Von Papen I visited the Pope myself. I had numerous connections with the higher Catholic clergy because of my Catholic mother, and thus-- I am myself a Protestant-- I had a view of both camps.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
I myself am not what you might call a churchgoer, but I have gone now and then, and have always considered I belonged to the Church and have always had those functions over which the Church presides-- marriage, christening, burial, et cetera-- carried out in my house by the Church.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
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Rudolf Hess
Hess edited Hitler's book Mein Kampf and served as Hitler's deputy. He emerged as a prominent figure in Nazi Germany. You take an oath to a man whom you know follows the laws of providence, which he obeys independently of the influence of earthly powers, who leads the German people rightly, and who will guide Germany's fate. Through your oath you bind yourselves to a man who--that is our faith--was sent to us by higher powers. Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your mind. You will find him through he strength of your hearts!
-Rudolf Hess, in his speech, "The Oath to Adolf Hitler," 1934
We believe that the Führer is fulfilling a divine mission to German destiny! This belief is beyond challenge.
-Rudolf Hess, speech, 20 June 1934 (Reden, Munich. 1938, p. 25)
With all our powers we will endeavour to be worthy of the Führer thou, O Lord, has sent us!
-Rudolf Hess, address to political leaders, Munich , 21 April 1938 (Rolf Tell, Sound and Führer)
No matter what human beings do I shall some day stand before the judgement seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know he will judge me innocent.
-Rudolf Hess, in a statement to the Nuremberg Tribunal, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
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Hans Hinkel
Hinkel gained influential positions in Goebbels' Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) and Propaganda Ministry, where he became head of both the Jewish section and the film department. [Richard Steigmann-Gall]
Through his acts and his spiritual attitude he began the fight which we still wage today; with Luther the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun.
-Hans Hinkel, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
To continue and complete his Protestantism, nationalism must make the picture of Luther, of a German fighter, live as an example above the barriers of confession for all German blood comrades.
-Hans Hinkel, Der Tag, 17 Feb. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Heinrich Himmler
One of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, Himmler served as the commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and controlled the Gestapo. He grew up as a devout Catholic and attended mass regularly. Eventually he moved away from Catholicism toward Aryan occultist beliefs, but he, nevertheless, never lost his belief in God and he thought of Jesus as an Aryan. I swear before God this holy oath, that I shall give absolute confidence to the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people.
-Heinrich Himmler, reminding his hearers about the oath taken by all SS men as well as by the military forces (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
In ideological training I forbid every attack against Christ as a person, since such attacks or insults that Christ was a Jew are unworthy of us and certainly untrue historically.
-Heinrich Himmler, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, 28 June 1937: Berlin, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
You Einsatztruppen (task forces) are called upon to fulfill a repulsive duty. But you are soldiers who have to carry out every order unconditionally. You have a responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that is happening. I myself hate this bloody business and I have been moved to the depths of my soul. But I am obeying the highest law by doing my duty. Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats-- against vermin.
-Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to the SS guards, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
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Rudolf Hoess
Hoess served as a senior Nazi official, member of the SS and Waffen-SS (with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer) and commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he held responsibility for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
In his Nuremberg cell, Rudolf Hoess told psychologist G.M. Gilbert how he got brought up in a rigorous Catholic tradition:My father was really a bigot. He was very strict and fanatical. I learned that my father took a religious oath at the time of the birth of my younger sister, dedicating me to God and the priesthood, and after that leading a Joseph married life [celibacy]. He directed my entire youthful education toward the goal of making me a priest. I had to pray and go to church endlessly, do penance over the slightest misdeed-- praying as punishment for any little unkindness to my sister, or something like that.
-Rudolf Hoess (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
When asked if his father ever beat him, Hoess replied that he was only punished by prayer:The thing that made me so stubborn and probably made me later on cut off from people was his way of making me feel that I had wronged him personally, and that, since I was spiritually a minor, he was responsible to God for my sins.
-Rudolf Hoess (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
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Joachim Hossenfelder
Hossenfelder, a student of theology after WWI became a Protestant country pastor in Sillies. In 1929 he joined the Nazi Party, and in 1933 became the head of the German Christian Movement in Berlin which attempted to combine Christianity and Nazism to reflect Hitler's view of "Positive Christianity." Hossenfelder liked to call the movement, "The Storm Troops of Jesus Christ."
To become warriors for God and fatherland was the task the war had set for us.
-Joachim Hossenfelder (facinghistorycampus.org)
God had brought [the German] Volk into being and he had done so through Hitler, Volk was race and God wants race.
-Joachim Hossenfelder (facinghistorycampus.org)
Christian faith is a heroic, manly thing. God speaks in blood and Volk a more powerful language than He does in the idea of humanity.
-Joachim Hossenfelder (Protestant Churches)
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Hanns Kerrl
Born into a Protestant family in Fallersleben, Kerrl joined the NSDAP in 1923. He served as Prussian Justice Minister and later, Reich Church Minister. He also established a central "Reich Church Committee." [Steigmann-Gall] Kerrl tried to mediate between the divisions amongst the churches and stressed the religious aspect of the Nazi "positive" Christianity ideology.
The Führer wants to protect positive Christianity; this must be maintained. It is necessary, therefore, to seize upon the power of the Christian confessions which affirm the state and National Socialism, and to maintain church life.
-Hanns Kerrl, Dokumente zur Kirchenpolitik, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Kerrl strongly opposed Alfred Rosenberg's paganist and anticlerical attempts. At the end of 1939, Rosenberg sought to elevate his position from a purely party office to a more imposing state office so that he could have more control over religious issues. [Steigmann-Gall] In a meeting in 1940 to resolve the issue of Rosenberg's appointment, Kerrl noted that:
The Third Reich needs Christianity and the churches because it has nothing to replace the Christian religion and Christian morality.... His appointment will result in marked unrest among the Volk, which is precisely what we must avoid during the war under all circumstances.
Many Nazis opposed Rosenberg's post, including Hitler. In fact Hitler cited Kerrl's argument as the most compelling for canceling Rosenberg's new post. [Steigmann-Gall]
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Erich Koch
Koch served as Gauleiter of East Prussia and later Reich Commissioner for Ukraine. He also functioned as President of the East Prussian Protestant Church Synod when the Third Reich began. He founded his own regional variation of the German Chrisitans (Deutsche Christen) party. We commit ourselves, and we demand this commitment not only from the elected representatives of the church, but above all from all Protestant men and women, to service in our communities! We want to serve: through tireless recruitment to our worship; through chivalrous intervention for the poor and needy, through defence of our faith;... through true Evangelical witness in public.
-Erich Koch, as quoted in Scholder, Churches, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Only we can enter into Luther's spirit.... Human cults do not set us free from all sin, but faith alone. With us the church shall become a serving member of the state.... There is a deep sense that our celebration is not attended by superficiality, but rather by thanks to a man who saved German cultural values.
-Erich Koch, Konigsberg-Hartungsche Zeitung, 20 Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Wilhelm Kube
Kube began his postwar political life as General Secretary of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP). Through the DNVP he moved into the NSDAP in 1928 and served as Gauteiter of Brandenburg (later "Kurmark"). More importantly to this subject, he cofounded the German Christians (Deutsche Christen, or DC), a party within the Protestant Church that originally went by the name Protestant National Socialists. It came from Hitler's suggestion that "German Christians" served as a better name for the party. Kube wanted to "gain control of the churches" and to "bring the churches in hand." [Steigmann-Gall]
Kube had a long link with Protestantism as he had an active life in a parish community council in Berlin after the First World War and had become a member of the synod of the Diocese of Berlin. His role in founding the German Christian movement came from his conviction that Nazism represented the true interests of German Protestantism rather than from a cynical posturing for the sake of winning votes. [Steigmann-Gall]Precisely because we affirm it, because we are convinced that Christianity and Germanhood have come together in so infinitely many respects that they cannot be separated.... We have confidence in the German state, that its politics are not opposed to Christian interests and Christian sensibilities, but rather that it will look after these interests in all circumstances.
-Wilhelm Kube, cofounder of the German Christians party (Deutsche Christen, or DC), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Joachim Ribbentrop
A fanatical Nazi and anti-semite, Ribbentrop became Hitler's favourite foreign policy advisor and served as Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945.May God save Germany!
-Joachim Ribbentrop, his last words before his hanging, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
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Bernhard Rust
Rust joined the NSDAP in 1922 and Hitler appointed him as Minister of Science, Art, and Education for Prussia. Later he served as Minister of Education in Nazi Germany.In the 150-year Wars of Religion we were, as a Reich and Volk, almost destroyed. Today we stand in a bitter struggle for existence against Bolshevism. I appeal to the Christian churches of both confessions to join with us against this enemy in defense of their living values of belief and morality.
-Bernhard Rust, Volkischer Beobachter, 9 Feb. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
If anyone can lay claim to God's help, then it is Hitler, for without God's benevolent fatherly hand, without his blessing, the nation would not be where it stands today. It is an unbelievable miracle that God has bestowed on our people.
-Bernhard Rust, in a speech to a mass meeting of German Chrisitans on June 29, 1933 [Helmreich]
Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance.... I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp [Schrot und Korn].
-Bernhard Rust, Volkischer Beobachter, 25 Aug. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We have not fought to build a paganistic temple, but to unite the German Volk for all eternity. We do not build temples against the Christian church, we do not want Valhalla as a substitute for a Christian heaven.
-Bernhard Rust, Das Evangelische Deutschland, 1 July 1934, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Neither the Reformation nor the Counter-Reformation fully conquered all of Germany, nor did either create a Christian state religion. The National Socialist program commits itself to positive Christianity. However, the German Volk, split into two religions, cannot express one confession to Christian dogma, but only to practical Christianity. The two confessions can find each other in Christian ethics, whereas in dogma the Volk breaks in two.
-Bernhard Rust, Deutsche Allgmeine Zeitung, 23 March 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
What Christianity achieves is not dogma, it does not seek the outward ecclesiastical form, but rather ethical principles.... There is not religion and no philosophy that equals it in its moral content; no philosophical ethics is better able to diffuse the tension between this life and the hereafter, from which Christianity and its ethic were born.
-Bernhard Rust, Reichsbote, 31 March 1935: in Bundesarchiv Potsdam, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Hans Schemm
Schemm served as the Head of the National Socialist Teachers' League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, or NSLB). After 1933 he became Bavarian Minister of Education and Culture. Throughout the Reich, Germans particularly knew Schemm for his slogan, "Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland!" He designed his speeches, famous in Bavaria, to cast Nazism as a religious revival. Police reports stated, Schemm spoke "like a pastor" and often ended his deliveries with the Lutheran hymn "A Mighty Fortress is our God."We are no theologians, no representatives of the teaching profession in this sense, put forth no theology. But we claim one thing for ourselves: that we place the great fundamental idea of Christianity in the enter of our ideology [Ideenwelt]- the hero and sufferer Christ himself stands in the center.
-Hans Schemm, Walter Kunneth, Werner Wilm, and Hans Schemm, Was haben wir als evangelische Christen zum Rufe des Nationalsozialismus zu sagen? (Dresden, 1931), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Each confession in honor, but the common holy bond, which is tied together through both confessions, must always be emphasized on account of the German and Christian community. We all say a Lord's Prayer, we all have a Savior, we all have a Christmas celebration. The banner above both confessions is: Christianity.
-Hans Schemm, Walter Kunneth, Werner Wilm, and Hans Schemm, Was haben wir als evangelische Christen zum Rufe des Nationalsozialismus zu sagen? (Dresden, 1931), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We all say a Lord's Prayer, we all have a Savior, we all have a Christmas celebration. The banner above both confessions is: Christianity.
-Hans Schemm, Kunneth et al., Rufe des Nationalsozialismus, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The Protestant League stands very close to the NSDAP. It is consciously German and, through moral and religious power, wants to contribute to the building up of the German people.
-Hans Schemm, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, (6 March 1931: Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Note, In his original letter to Schemm, Wilhelm Fahrenhorst, head of the Protestant League, indicated that he had spoken with Göring on the NSDAP's connection to Protestantism. Source: Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (20 Dec. 1930), cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich
The Protestant League stands very close to the NSDAP. It is consciously German and, through moral and religious power, wants to contribute to the building up of the German people.... [It has] the same line as the NSDAP against the Center as [representatives of] political, ultramontane Catholicism.
-Hans Schemm, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, (6 March 1931: Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
It is henceforth the goal of the Education Ministry that every child in Bavarian schools shall be made familiar with the principles of the Christian and national state.... Religious instruction is nothing other than service to the soul of children. Faith in god and the personality of the teacher must be expressed in a realistic instruction filled with religious sincerity.
-Hans Schemm, Dokumente zur Kirchenpolitik, 27 June 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Note, Schemm reiterated these points in a document written in late June 1933, when the NSDAP no longer needed to court the political favor of the Reichstag's Christian parties. [Steigmann-Gall]
So long as the Bible was available to us only in a foreign language, so long as it was only spoken to us in Latin, we could only grasp it as things are grasped through the iron gloves of a knight: he is aware of the shape and weight , but can only feel iron. When Luther made the Bible accessible to Germans in the glorious German language, it was as if we had cast off the iron glove and with the flesh and blood of our German hand were finally able to grasp our unique character.... The older and more experienced he became, the less he could understand one particular type of person: this was the Jew. His engagement against the decomposing Jewish spirit is clearly evident not only from his writing against the Jews; his life too was idealistically, philosophically antisemitic. Now we Germans of today have the duty to recognize and acknowledge this.
-Hans Schemm, "Luther und das Deutschtum," Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (19 Nov. 1933: Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Our confession to God is a confession of a doctrine of totality.... To give ultimate significance to the totalities of race, resistance and personality there is added the supreme totalitarian slogan of our Volk: "Religion and God." God is the greatest totality and extends over all else.
-Hans Schemm, (Gertrud Kahl-Furthmann (ed.), Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk (Bayreuth, 1935), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
What went for Luther goes for us as well: only through the mirror of our blood and our race are we able to see God as he must be seen.
-Hans Schemm, (Gertrud Kahl-Furthmann (ed.), Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk (Bayreuth, 1935), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We wish for nothing as ardently as a powerful Protestant Church which stands on the foundations prepared by the great Reformer martin Luther.... It is not possible for a church to stand apart or against the Volk. Rather the church must stand in service to the Volk. The great Nazarene did not stand apart in a quiet corner.
-Hans Schemm, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Baldur Benedikt von Schirach
A prominent Nazi official, Schirach served as the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Imperial Governor") of Vienna.
Like many German Christians (especially Protestants), Schirach believed that Christianity and the churches did not describe the same thing. (It goes much to this reason why many American Christians who do not understand the religious conflicts in Germany, see Nazis as against Christianity, not realizing that they attacked the political aims of the churches, not Christianity itself or Jesus. This especially held more for the Protestants because many Protestants in Germany saw Catholicism as an encroachment against their faith. They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken paganist.... I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity, but I declare just as solemnly that I will put down every attempt to introduce confessional matters into our Hitler Youth.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, in a December1933 speech in Braunschweig, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
If today he descended from Heaven, the great warrior who struck the moneychangers/ You would once again shout 'crucify!'/ And nail him to the cross that he himself carried/ But he would gently laugh at your hatred/ 'The truth remains even when your bearers are passed/ Faith remains, because I give my life...'/ And the fighter of all the world towers on the cross.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Evangelium im Dritten Reich, 1 July 1934: in Bundesarchiv Potsdam, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
In no manner does the HJ restrict the religious activities of its members. Neither in their visits to Sunday services, nor in their contribution to other church festivities, will Catholic Hitler youths be restricted by the leadership of the HJ.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Baldur von Schirach, Die Hitler-Jugend: Idee und Gestalt (Berlin, 1934), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
I hold the view that religious meetings and events in special religious youth gatherings do not contradict the HJ's totalizing claims. Every effort that aims at a deepening and intensification of religious feeling must not only be welcomed, but also led, by any youth leadership with a sense of responsibility. I believe that through the agreement with the Reich Bishop of the Protestant Chuch, the Hitler Youth has indicated that it is ready to grant the necessary space for religious education.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Schirach, Hitler-jugend, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We all believe in an almighty God. We are all, even the youngest among us, witnesses to the wonderful transformation that the Volk has experienced through His help, the transformation from impotence and destruction to strength and harmony. The Hitler Youth wants nothing less than to secure this strength and harmony for all time.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Markische Volkszeitung, 3 June 1935, Bundesarchiv Potsdam, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Ludwig Siebert
Siebert served as the Governor-General of Bavaria. Hitler had also made him the official responsible for the restoration of all the German castles in the Reich. Siebert presided over the inauguration of Hans Meiser as Bavarian State Bishop in June 1933. On that occasion Siebert expressed his desire to work with Meiser:
church and state must discuss and promote the same questions.... 1) The awakening of a sense of sacrifice; 2) The creation of the new social ethic; 3) Leading our youth to Volk and God, to Fatherland and Christianity.
-Ludwig Siebert, June 1933, Dokumente zur Kirchenpolitik, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher, the ninth child of a Roman Catholic primary school teacher, also became a school teacher in Nuremberg. He published, edited, and wrote for the German newspaper Der Stürmer and served as a prominent Nazi prior to and during World War II.
After Hitler's release from prison in December 1924, Streicher hailed Hitler's return to politics as a "gift of God," a judgement the Fuehrer never forgot.
Streicher held an enthusiam about allegations that the Jews murdered non-Jews in order to obtain blood for the feast of Passover. He charged that Jews hated Christianity and mankind in general. Streicher went to grotesque lengths in his attacks on Jews claiming the discovery that "Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan."If the danger of the reproduction of that curse of God in the Jewish blood is finally to come to an end, then there is only one way-- the extermination of that people whose father is the devil...
-Julius Streicher paraphrasing John 8:44 as his justification for extermination (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)
Only the Jews, he shouted, had remained victorious after the dreadful days of World War I. These were the people, he charged, of whom Christ said, "Its father is the devil."
-Julius Streicher [See John 8:44, for Christ's accusation of father the devil], (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Germans must fight Jews, that organized body of world criminals against whom Christ, the greatest anti-Semite of all time, had fought.
-Julius Streicher (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
[We] relentlessly fight the shady mixing of religion and Jewish party politics, and fight to keep religion pure, as did the Lord when he threw the hagglers and usurers out of the Temple.
-Julius Streicher "Kulturkampf!" (Flugblatt): IfZ MA 740 (10 March 1924: Munich), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
During the Nuremberg trials, Streicher was asked about his participation in the Nuremberg Race laws of 1935. He responded:Yes, I believe I had a part in it insofar as for years I have written that any further mixture of German blood with Jewish blood must be avoided. I have written such articles again and again; and in my articles I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves-- the law of Moses, which says, "If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women." And that, Gentlemen, is of tremendous importance in judging the Nuremberg Laws.. These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these laws. When after centuries, the Jewish lawgiver Ezra demonstrated that notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved. That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished.
-Julius Streicher, (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)
[Note, although Streicher had a part in the race laws, Hitler outlined his religious justification for the race laws in his private notes before he came into power. To see a translation from one of Hitler's notes, click here.]
When asked if there were any other anti-Semitic publications, other than Der Stürmer, published in Germany, Streicher replied:
Anti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries. A book I had, written by Dr. Martin Luther, was, for instance, confiscated. Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants' dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. In this book The Jews and Their Lies, Dr. Martin Luther writes that the Jews are a serpent's brood and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them...
-Julius Streicher, (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)'''
[For Luther's book, On the Jews and their lies, click here.]
Now it goes to God!
-Julius Streicher, as he mounted the gallows platform to his death, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Purim Fest, 1946.
-Julius Streicher, his last words before his hanging, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Note: Purim describes a Jewish holiday, celebrated in the spring to commemorate the hanging of Haman, biblical oppressor of the Jews.
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Nazis who opposed Orthodox Christianity
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Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann stood as one of the few top Nazis who rejected the organized Church (he was not, however, an atheist as many falsely claim, and certainly not a occultist). At Hitler's round table, Bormann noted that the Fuehrer did not want to pursue a campaign against the churches. Only in secret did Bormann hold a grudge against the churches. He carefully avoided the rouse of suspicion of the Fuehrer. If he could not destroy the churches, he could at least demand that his subordinates pay little attention to them.
In perhaps the most misquoted statment by American Christians, incorrectly atributed to Hitler: The Christian religion and National Socialist doctrines are not compatible.
-Martin Bormann, in a letter to Alfred Rosenberg, (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 1)
[Bormann here goes against Hitler and Nazi doctrine where the Nazi party program explicitly supports "positive Christianity."]
When Martin Bormann came out with a confinential anti-Christian tract, Hitler objected. According to Steigmann-Gall, "Almost immediately after it was released, Hitler suppressed it, ordering Bormann to retract his statements and recover all the copies he had sent out." The pro-Christian Goebbels, also disagreed with Bormann's anticlerical activity, along with many other Nazis. Not only was Bormann's decree on the relation of Christianity and National Socialism done in secret, but at no time was there an official Nazi law that tried to destroy Christianity.
Bormann serves at the main reason why many think that Hitler opposed religion. In Bormann's edited transcripts of Hitler's Table Talk, he gives the appearance that Hitler opposed the Christian religion. For an examination of Hitler's Table Talk, see
'Hitler's table talk and other extraneous sources."
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Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg stands as the major reason why so many American Christians think Nazism represented Nordic pagan beliefs instead of Nazi Christianity. Hitler chose Rosenberg to create a 'religion of the Blood' knowing that any form of propaganda could prove useful. However, Hitler also attempted to establish a Reich Christian Church for the future of Germany. Hitler, himself, did not believe in pagan cults.
Rosenberg charged that the true picture of Jesus had been distorted by fanatics like Matthew, by materialistic rabbis like Paul, by African jurists like Tertullian, and the mongrel half-breeds like St. Augustine. The real Christ, wrote Rosenberg, was an Amorite Nordic, aggressive, courageous, "a man of true Nordic character," a revolutionary who opposed the Jewish and Roman systems with sword in hand, bringing not peace but war (see Matthew 10:34-37).
Rosenberg later went on to say that he favored a "positive Christianity," which would purify the Nordic race, re-establish the old pagan virtues, and substitute the fiery spirit of the hero for the crucifixion.
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Quotes from Nazi Sympathizers and Churchmen
(The uncited quotes below come from John Laffin's, "Hitler Warned Us," from the chapter, "Hitler as God")
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Now he stands before us, he whom the voices of our poets and sages have summoned, the liberator of the German genius. He has removed the blindfolds from our eyes and, through all political, economic, social and confessional covers, has enabled us to see and love again the one essential thing: our unity of blood, our German self, the homo Germanus.
-Karl Adam, the world-renowned theologian speaking about Hitler, [Lewy]
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Jews can help themselves.
-Cardinal Bertram to Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) referring to the Nazi attacks on the Jews. (quoted from John Cornewll's "Hitler's Pope")
Each April 20, Cardinal Bertram of Berlin was to send "warmest congratulations to the Führer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany" and added with "fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars."
-Cardinal Bertram (quoted from John Cornewll's "Hitler's Pope")
The Church is not to be pushed back into the sacristy, but it is expected to accomplish through its own intellectual and spiritual resources what the state seeks to do for the recovery of the nation by way of the political power at its command. To do such Catholic work, no new invitation is necessary for us.
-Cardinal Bertram, to a conference of clergy at Beuthen, [Lewy]
The significance of this ringing of bells, follows from the greatness of the event, which provides the occasion for this proclamation, and from the intention which the Catholic Church always combines with the peal of bells. We take a most earnest and warm interest in all decisive events affecting people and fatherland, and our prayers for state and authorities (1 Tim. 2:2), calling for God's blessing for Church and people, ascend unceasingly to the sky. In the same spirit the reverend clergy will urge the faithful to regard the ringing of bells on this special occasion as an exhortation for such prayer.
-Cardinal Bertram, praising the annexation of Austria in 1938, where all the church bells in Germany and Austria rang, celebrating the event, [Lewy]
The great deed of safeguarding international peace moves the German episcopate, acting in the name of the Catholics of all the German dioceses, respectfully to tender congratulations and thanks and to order a festive peal of bells on Sunday.
-Cardinal Bertram, in a 1938 telegram of appreciation to Hitler, in the name of the Cardinals of Germany, for the peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia, [Lewy]
A review of the incomparably great successes and events of recent years and the gravity of this war which has come over us gives me, as chairman of the Fuldaer Bishops' Conference, special reason, in the name of the bishops of all the dioceses in Germany, to convey to you on your birthday the warmest felicitations. This occurs in conjunction with the ardent prayers offered at the altar on the 20th of April that the Catholics are sending to Heaven for the German people, army and Fatherland, for the state and Führer. This is being done in deep consciousness of the national and religious duty of loyalty to the present state and its rulers, in the full sense of the Divine commandment that the Saviour Himself and the Apostles have handed down. [We] protest against the suspicion, nourished by anti-Church circles and secretly disseminated by them, that our declaration of loyalty is not fully dependable.... I beg to be allowed to call to remembrance that our aims do not stand in any contradiction to the programme of the National Socialist party and that they find a clear echo in your own policy statement of 23.03.1933 and commitment of 28.04.1933. ...with the most reverend obedience, Cardinal Adolf Bertram, Archbishop of Breslau.
-Cardinal Bertram, congratulating Hitler on his fifty-first birthday in April, 1940, cited from Johann Neumann's "1945: The German churches before and afterwards"
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The Creator had certainly imposed illness upon the destiny of mankind.... the most severe forms of idiocy and the totally grotesque disintegration of the personality had nothing to do with the countenance of God.... we should not maintain these travesties of human form through an exaggerated, and therefore false, type of compassion; rather we should return them to the Creator.
-Rudolf Boeckh, Chief doctor of the Lutheran Neuendettelsau Asylum in Central Franconia, in a 1937 address to the local NSDAP Ortsgruppe, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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[W]e German Catholics have not been surpassed by anyone in readiness to make sacrifices, love of our country and fidelity to the fatherland.... And in the struggle for the freedom of our fatherland after the war, a staunchly catholic man, Leo Schlageter, became the shining example of love of the fatherland unto death.
-Bishop Buchberger of Regensburg in 1935, [Lewy]
[Note, Leo Schlageter was a Nazi and a Martyr for National Socialism. To see photos of his memorial, click here.]
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I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism
-Frank Buchman, William A. H. Birnie, "Hitler or Any Fascist Leader Controlled By God Could Cure All Ills of World, Buchman Believes," New York World Telegram August 26, 1936.
Its aim is a new social order under the dictatorship of the spirit of God...
-Frank Buchman, Inside Buchmanism; an independent inquiry into the Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament, Geoffrey Williamson, 1954
... Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.
-Frank Buchman, Hitler and Buchman, Reinhold Niebuhr, The Christian Century, Oct. 7, 1936
(Note, Buchman was an American Lutheran evangelist who supported Hitler and a favored a fascist-dictatorship-theocracy)
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The National Socialists, as the strongest party of the right, have shown both a firm, positive relationship to Christianity.... We may expect that they will remain true to their principles in the new Reichstag.
-Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and one of the most conservative members of the Confessing Church. Quoted in Nowak, Kirche, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We have learned from Martin Luther that the church cannot get in the way of state power when it does what it is called to do. Not even when [the state] becomes hard and ruthless.... When the state carries out its office against those who destroy the foundations of state order, above all against those who destroy honor with vituperative and cruel words that scorn faith and vilify death for the Fatherland, then [the state] is ruling in God's name!
-Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and one of the most conservative members of the Confessing Church. Gunther van Norden, Der deutsche Protestantismus im Jahr der nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Gutersloh, 19790, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The way has been shown to us by the Führer.
-Dean Eckert, sermon at Tegel, North Berlin, 10 February 1935 (Rolf Tell, Sound and Führer)
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Luther is truly not only the founder of a Christian confession; much more, his ideas had a fruitful impact on all Christianity in Germany.
-Wilhelm Fahrenhorst, (Head of the Protestant League and a planner of Luther's day [Luthertag]), [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat, expressed its confidence in the new German [Nazi] government.
-Cardinal Faulhaber, Carroll, James, "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews,"Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001
What the old parliaments and parties did not accomplish in 60 years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieve in six months. For Germany's prestige in East and West and before the whole world this handshake with the Papacy, the greatest moral power in the history of the world, is a feat of immeasurable blessing.... May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.
-Cardinal Faulhaber, in a handwritten letter of congratulations to Hitler about the Concordat between Germany and the Vatican, [Lewy]
A lunatic abroad has had an attack of madness-- does this justify wholesale suspicion of the German Catholics? You all are witnesses for the fact that on all Sundays and holidays at the main service we pray in all churches for the Führer as we have promised in the Concordat. And now one can read in big headlines of the papers at the street corners, "They pray for Hitler's death!" We feel offended on account of this questioning of our loyalty to the state. We will today give an answer, a Christian answer: Catholic men, we will now pray together a paternoster for the life of the Führer. This is our answer.
-Cardinal Faulhaber, responding to a Swiss Catholic (no less) who asked to pray for Hitler's death in 1936, [Lewy]
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One wants everything avoided that could make the relationship between Church and State more difficult. One appreciates the movement particularly because of its fight against Bolshevism and immorality.
-Prelate, Ernst Föhr, relaying information about the visit of Papen and Göring to the Vatican, [Lewy]
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The Führer of the Third Reich has freed the German man from his external humiliation and from the inner weakness caused by Marxism and has returned him to the ancestral Germanic values of honor, loyalty and courage...."
-Archbishop Gröber, from his Handbuch, [Lewy]
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Not only as a party member but also as a Protestant woman I sand in the most thoughtful respectful and most faithful obedience in our work behind our Führer.
-Agnes von Grone, leader of the Women's Bureau of the German Protestant Church, quoted in Phayer, Women, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Through some miracle Hitler and Lundendorff were saved. The driving force [behind their suppression] was the Jesuits, who in reality govern Munich. Their aim is a creation of a purely Catholic state (Bavaria-Austria) under a "Catholic" dynasty. The Protestant north cannot assent to this.
-Pastor Hock, an ex-monk in a speech in Bavaria, 26 Feb. 1924, in reference to the putsch, Eisenbahnuberwachungsstelle Hof, "Versammlungsbericht." The report adds that "Heil Hitler!" and Heil Ludendorff!" could be heard from the audience during the speech. [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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You can see from this that we bishops, of our own free will and without compulsion, have fulfilled our national duty. I know that this declaration will be followed by a successful collaboration. With the most respectful regards and Heil Hitler!
-Cardinal Innitzer, in a letter to Gauleiter, Fritz Bürke, cited from Johann Neumann's "1945: The German churches before and afterwards"
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For today's birthday sincere good wishes and assurance of unflinching co-operation in the great enterprise of creating a Germany internally united, enjoying social peace and externally free.
-Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, in a telegram from Rome to Hitler on his 44th birthday (and published in the press), [Lewy]
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We joyously profess or allegiance to the German Volksgemeinschaft and feel ourselves linked to it in good as well as in bad times... In this staunchly Christian spirit we also now participate wholeheartedly in the great struggle of our people for the protection of their life and importance in the world. With admiration we look upon our army, which in courageous fighting under extraordinary leadership has achieved and continues to achieve unparalleled success. We thank God for his support. Especially as Christians we are determined to rally all our strength so that the final victory will be secured for our fatherland. Especially as believing Christians, inspired by God's love, we faithfully stand behind our Führer who with firm hands guides the fortunes of our people.
-Bishop Kaller of Ermland, in a pastoral letter in January 1941, [Lewy]
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Adolf Hitler gave us back our faith. He showed us the true meaning of religion. He came to take us from the faith of our fathers? No, he has come to renew for us the faith of our fathers and to make us new and better things. Just as Christ made his twelve disciples into a band faithful to the martyr's death whose faith shook the Roman Empire, so now we witness the same spectacle again: Adolf Hitler is the true Holy Ghost.
-Hans Kerrl, addressing SA leaders, Brunswick, 19 November 1935
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Our Christian duty towards this movement [Nazism] is to protect and preserve it, so that it not be silted up by naturalism, nor , caught by the age old enemy of Germanhood, wither to the roots under the alien sun of Rome.
-Hermann Kremers, Rhineland pastor, Hermann Kremers, Nationalsozialismus und Protestantismus (Berlin, 1931), Foreword, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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That which a thousand years of German history could not accomplish, which Bismarck could not attain, has been realized by God through the strength of our leader, Adolf Hitler... When it comes to the question of governing, we need only one power - the authority of Adolf Hitler and his advisers.
-Dr. Reinhold Krause, in a speech in Berlin Sports Palace, 13 Nov. 1933 (cited in The National Socialist Stand on Christianity)
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Everything is located in God's grace. This knowledge, which our Volk has forgotten in the last years, must be reawakened in them.... We expect that our German women will view their work, their service to the German Volk, as a calling, as a command from God, as our Führer, Adolf Hitler time and again stresses how he views his office and his task as God's calling.
-Gottfried Krummacher, a member of the provincial synod of the Protestant Church and the Rhineland leader of the DC. Hamburger Nachtrichten, Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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God says as Hitler does: I do not need your assent for my own sake. I need no support. I am firmly in the saddle. God does not need your assent for His own sake, does he? He never needed it from all eternity. God says, as Hitler does: Give me your Aye. He does not need it, but we are lost without this Aye, just as everybody in the German lands is lost if he does not give Hitler his Aye.
-Johann Lohmann (Hitlerworte als Gleichisse fur Gotterworte, Bamberg, 1934, pp. 18, 19)
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If a priest should heap scorn on or ridicule the concepts of blood, soil, race, he would thereby not only risk political attacks and legal prosecution, but also offend theologically and against his Church. For what is expressed in these words belongs to the especially valuable natural possessions which God has given us and which even represent the natural foundation for the supernatural possession. For that we are Christians and Catholics we certainly owe primarily to the fact that through God's providence we were born into our family environment and our fatherland and our race. [The right rank order of these values is to be clarified]... and one must help the people to incorporate all these concepts, which are presented to them with such great enthusiasm, into their religious Weltanschauung.
-Vicar General Miltenberger of Wurzburg in 1937, issued to the clergy of his diocese, [Lewy]
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[We see in you] not only the authority appointed from above, but the leader who has accomplished though political power what Adolf Kolping, our founder and leader, tried to achieve by way of an intellectual transformation, namely the overcoming of liberalism and socialism.
-Johannes Nattermann, General secretary of the Catholic Journeymens's Association (Katholischer Gesellenverein) writing about Hitler, [Lewy]
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The Nazis did not have to discover or create Luther as a German national reformer - he was already there, rifle at the ready.
-Heiko Oberman, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Our Frauenschaft flag carries the same colors as the Swastika flag, with our flag black stands out, solemn and worthy. On top shine forth the Christian cross in the color of purity, constantly warning us: "You women and mothers, be real Christians; protect Christianity in your family, rear your children to love the savior."
-Lili Otto, one of the leaders of the National Socialist Women's organization (NSF), in 1933
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To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership.... During the many years we spent in Germany, We did all in Our power to establish harmonious relations between Church and State. Now that the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increased Our opportunities, how much more ardently do We pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God's help, to fruition!
-Eugenio Pacelli, March 1939 (later to become Pope Pius XII), [cited from Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII]
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At no time does the Lord God require of us charitable conciliation with the Jew, the mortal enemy of the Aryan character. Christ himself called the Jews "the sons of the Devil, a brood of snakes," and drove the dealers and moneychangers from the house of God with a whip.
-Hildegard Passow, one of the leaders of the NSF, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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The German bishops at their recent meeting at Fulda have state in clear language the ideas and goals we have in common with the National Socialist movement. They have thereby worked out the positive foundation for our participation in the wold of the new state.
-Professor Hans Peters, a prominent Center party politician, speaking about the joint pastorial agreement by the Fulda Bishops in 1933. [Lewy]
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Hitler has taken up the mighty struggle against gold. "Gold determines economic worth," says Americanism. "Man and his labor determine economic worth," declares National Socialism. According to the will of the Creator, gold has no value in itself.... Through the sins of the world economy, gold has received intrinsic value. Man and his work have been made worthless. The Hitler Movement is a large-scale protest against this world injustice. It wants to throw gold off its throne and give back man and his work their value.
-Pastor Herbert Plesch, pastor of Wolfsberg, "Um Hitler," Aufwarts: Christliches Tageblatt, 5 November 1932, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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In this serious hour when our German people must undergo the trials of a test of fire in a struggle for its natural and God given right to live... I turn to you soldiers who stand ready at the front and who bear the great and honorable responsibility of guarding and defending with the sword of the life of the German nation.... Each of you knows what is at stake for our people in these stormy days; and, in whatever is asked of you, each sees before him the shining example of a true warrior, our Führer and Supreme Commander, the first and most valiant soldier of the Greater German Reich, who is even now with you at the battlefront.
-Franz Josef Rarkowski, the Army Bishop, at the outbreak of war in September 1939, [Lewy]
The German people, who for one year now have been fighting against their detractors, have an untroubled conscience and know which nations before God and history are burdened with the responsibility for this gigantic struggle that is raging now. They also know who has wickedly provoked this war. They know that they themselves are fighting a just war, born of the necessity of national self-defense, out of the impossibility of solving peacefully a heavy and burdensome question of justice involving the very existence of the state and of correcting by other means a burning injustice inflicted upon us. They begrudged us our place in the sun and sought to destroy us forever. They sought to make us into helots, and therefore there is no question in our minds on which side right and, with it, God's help is to be found.... Other people, arrayed against us, also pray to God and implore victory. God is indeed in the same manner the father of all people, but he is not, at one and the same, the advocate of justice and injustice, of honesty and falsehood.
-Franz Josef Rarkowski, the Army Bishop, at the first anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities in Poland, [Lewy]
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Many members of the Protestant Church live with their complete thought and feeling in the National Socialist movement.... The National Socialist movement passionately affirms social thought and brotherhood. Therefore it stands for a concern which is also one for the Protestant Church.... The Protestant Church must, for the sake of its calling, here and thankfully greet the great intent coming out of the National Socialist movement.
-Heinrich Rendtorff, (Lutheran Bishop [Landesbischof] of Mecklenburg,) Mecklengurgische Zeitung, 24 April 1931, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The Protestant communities of Mecklenburg should now in this hour that their state church in its faith says a joyful and strong yes to German Volkstum... to the German nation... to the German Reich.
-Heinrich Rendtorff, (Lutheran Bishop [Landesbischof] of Mecklenburg,), As quoted in Scholder, Churches, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The Protestant communities of Mecklenburg should know in this hour that their state church in its faith says a joyful and strong yes to German Volkstum... to the German nation... to the German Reich.
-Heinrich Rendtorff, as quoted in Scholder, Churches, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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There can be no doubt that Cardinal Pacelli approves of a policy of sincere co-operation by the Catholics within the framework of the Christian Weltanschauung in order to benefit and lead the National Socialist movement. From the mouths of other prominent Cardinals, too, I have heard utterances which pointed completely in the same direction.
-Baron von Ritter, Bavarian ambassador at the Vatican, (Note, Cardinal Pacelli would later become Pope), [Lewy]
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He who serves our Führer, Adolf Hitler, serves Germany and he who serves Germany, serves God.
-Baldur von Schirach (speech to Hitler Youth, 25 July 1936)
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For National Socialism there can be no division of religious and volkisch interests.
-Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Head of the national Socialist Women's Organization (NSF), Kaiser, "Frauenwerk," [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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In a certain sense National Socialism is religion, for it does not require its partisans to be convinced of the rightness of its teachings but to believe in it.
-Professor Paul Schnabel, Halle University, Mitteldeutsche National Zeitung, 4 July 1935
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Oath to the Führer
We stand as walls about you
With loyalty and patience.
No sacrifice is so great or hard,
We are in your debt.
We silently fight the holy war,
Which your word sanctifies for us.
We know but one thing: Victory,
And Germany's eternity.
We know that your work succeeds,
Because God is in your heart.
Peace will follow your victory,
Peace for all the world.
-Gerhard Schumann, German poet
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Your loyalty on January 13 is the newest and most shining proof that the Catholics Church and German nationality are not opposites, as today it is often maintained. No--Catholicism inspires its followers with love and fidelity also to the earthly fatherland that manifests itself in joyful readiness to make sacrifices at all times.
-Bishop Ludwig Sebastian, in a pastoral letter to his diocesans in the Saar, 1935, [Lewy]
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Look at a marching troop of German youths and realize what God has made them for. They are warriors by nature and their calling is to rule.
-Walter Stapel, The War Against the West, Bibl 1, 30, p. 609, London 1938
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What we all have longed and striven for has become reality: we have one Reich and one leader [ein Reich und einen führer] and this leader we follow faithfully and conscientiously... For us this is not a question of personality. We know that he who stands at the head is given us by God as our leader.
-Vicar General Steinmann, to a meeting of thousands of Catholic youth, [Lewy]
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One must recognize that the National Socialist movement has with great sacrifice broken a terror. Where would the millions of young people be if this movement had not existed? It has welded together classes which had been estranged from one another. I believe that especially our consciously Protestant people who stand in the National Socialist camp will particularly welcome this welding. The church can also welcome the struggle against undermining influences in our cultural life.
-Theophile Wurm, "Frage einer kirchlichen Stellungnahme zu den gegenwartigen politischen Verhaltnissen und Bestrebungen": Bundesarchiv Potsdam, (2-3 March 1933:Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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From Newspapers, Periodicals and Letters
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The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere.
-Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit monthly publication, cited in John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope"
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"Christ's Spirit - SA Spirit!": We interpret in the Gospel not a word, but the spirit. We see in the seed, in the model of our Savior not only that he does good and shuns evil, but also that he struggles.... Jesus was not locked up in a church, waiting for the throng.
-Der S.A. Mann, Volkisher Beobachter supplement, 18 Jan. 1930, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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"Under the Cross,": To us Christianity is not an empty phrase, but a glowing life. It lives through us and in us.... Thus is the strength of the nation gathered under the sign of the cross. When the red beast threatens us, or the well-behaved philistine [sittsame Spieber]... sneers at us, we look up to the Cross and receive the doctrine of struggle.
--Der S.A. Mann, 11 Dec. 1930, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
[Note this comes from a publication from the SA (Storm Section {Sturm Abteilung}, also called stormtroopers), Hitler's own private army.]
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The German Volk are united not only in loyalty and love for the Fatherland, but also once more in the old German beliefs of Luther [Lutherglauben]; a new epoch of strong, conscious religious life has dawned in Germany.
-"Luther weist den Weg," Chemnitzer Tageblatt, 1 Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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Adolf Hitler to thee alone we are bound. In this hour we would renew our solemn vow; in this world we believe in Adolf Hitler alone. We believe that National Socialism is the sole faith to make our People blessed. We believe that there is Lord God in heaven, who has made us, who leads us, who guides us and who visibly blesses us. And we believe that this Lord God has sent us Adolf Hitler, that Germany might be established for all eternity.
-Schulungsbrief, April 1937. Bibl. 1, 35, p. 222 Nathaniel Micklem, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church, OUP 1939
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[T]he person of Hitler has become the symbol of the faith of the German nation in its existence and future.
-from an article in Stimmen der Zeit, a Jesuit monthly publication, [Lewy]
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The German State School is a confessional school only in the sense [that it confesses] the German state and the Volksgemeinschaft in the spirit of positive Christianity. The liberation of the German State school from the shackles of the Concordat is to be effected as soon as possible.
-from the National Socialist Parents' League (Nationalsozialistische Elternbund, or NSEB) manifesto, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
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The value and meaning of authority attain particular importance especially in our Holy, Catholic Church and have led to that complete determination and victorious strength of resistance which even our enemies admire. We Catholics, therefore, do not find it at all difficult to appreciate the new, strong stress on authority in the German state.
-part of the joint pastoral letter from the Fulda Bishops' conference of May 30-June 1, 1933, [Lewy]
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Reich und Kirche [Church and State] is a series that has the purpose of serving the building of the Third Reich by uniting the forces of the National Socialist state and Catholic Christianity. The series is motivated by the conviction that no basic conflict exists between the natural renaissance of our people to be witnessed today and the supernatural life of the Church. In fact, the restoration of the political order calls for its completion through the resources of religion. To awaken and deepen the understanding for this undertaking is perhaps the biggest spiritual task of contemporary German Catholicism, and its best contribution to the success of that great work of German renewal to which the Führer has summoned us.... Being entirely German and entirely Catholic, the series will examine and promote the relations and encounter between Catholicism and National Socialism and it will point the way toward the kind of fruitful co-operation that is outlined in the Reichskonkordat.
-Announcing the aims of Lortz and Schmaus' new series of books, Reich and Kirche, published with ecclesiastical permission, [Lewy]
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[While thanking God] we did not forget to thank the man who has preserved the peace for us and yet at the same time has achieved the freedom of our German brothers in Bohemia. Together with the German cardinals, the entire Catholic community in the Greater German Reich thanks the Führer for the act of peace...
-from the diocesan Sunday paper of Munich praising Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, [Lewy]
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This we want to do herewith and ask that the following request, which is also stated in the declaration, will be received with favour:
Namely that a commission from our midst is given the chance to person ally explain the true situation either to Mr. Reichskanzler himself or to the minister of internal affairs. Alternatively, we ask Mr. Reichskanzler to appoint a commission of men who do not have any religious prejudice against us - men who do not have professional religious interests but are solely interested to comply to the just principles as they were set up by the Reichskanzler himself - to investigate our situation impartially. The principles mentioned, refer to paragraph 24 of the program of the National Socialistic German Party of Workers, which reads:
"We demand the freedom of all religious denominations within the state, as far as they do not endanger the state itself or violate the moral values of the German race.
The party as such represents the viewpoint of positive Christianity without being attached to any particular denomination. It fights against the Jewish-materialistic spirit inside and outside of us and is convinced that any recovery of the German people can only take place from the inside out."
We are fully convinced that, once we have been judged impartially, based firstly upon God's word and secondly upon the above mentioned paragraphs, the national government of Germany will find no reason to prevent us from our church services and missionary activities.
We are looking forward to your kind approval, which we hope to receive soon, and want to assure our highest respect to you, honorable Mr. Reichskanzler.
Yours faithfully
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society Magdeburg
-Translation of part of a letter of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, German Branch, Wachtturmstraasse 1-19, Magdeburg/Germany, sent to Hitler (Reichskanzler)
(Click here to see a copy of the original German version).
[Note, the Watchtower represents the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses. Although many JWs were sent to concentration camps (for political, not religious reasons), their leaders sympathized with Hitler's positive Christianity movement.]
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Sources (click on a blue highlighted book title if you want to obtain it):
Carroll, James, "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews,"Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001
Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," Viking, 1999
Helmreich, Ernst Christian, "The German Churches Under Hitler," Wayne State University Press, 1979
Laffin, John "Hitler Warned Us: The Nazis' Master Plan for a Master Race," Brasseys Inc., 1995
Lewy, Guenter, "The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany," Da Capo Press, 1964
Neumann, Johann, "1945: The German churches before and afterwards", 1995
Snyder, Louis L., "Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990
Steigmann-Gall, Richard "The Holy Reich: Nazi conception of Christianity, 1919-1945," Cambridge University Press, 2003
Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 -- 1 October 1946, Published at Nuremberg, Germany, 1947
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Note, some nefarious web site operators, like those from "jews-for-allah," for example, have copied this web page without permission and removed all references to NoBeliefs.com and its compiler. Needless to say, this kind of practice reflects the very questionable nature of their morals and belief system. NoBeliefs.com does not condone or authorize these web sites in any manner. Nor does NoBeliefs.com condone or authorize this material for use on other religious, racist, or Neo-Nazi web sites. On the other hand, those who ask permission and include a citation or link to NoBeliefs as the originator of this compilation, have full welcome to use it.
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Hitler's Bible--Monumental History of Mankind
by Jim Walker
originated: 08 May 2001
additions: 03 June 2006
This article presents the actual note page from which Hitler uses the Bible as the monumental history of mankind for which we can give thanks to Werner Maser for bringing it first to publication in his book, "Hitler's Letters and Notes."
Hitler wrote these private notes while in his 30s and they predate his political career. Although Hitler wrote his first political antisemitic letter to Adolf Gemlich on September 16, 1919, these notes show the Biblical influence on the young Hitler in regards to his views on race laws at around the same time. Hitler's 1919 letter without his notes to provide context has led many scholars to incorrectly conclude that Hitler's antisemitism started from a purely secular mind-set. The Biblical references, especially in regards to the race laws mentioned in these notes, clearly shows that Hitler had a religious reason for his Jewish hatred and his views on race laws which later turned into the Nuremberg laws.
Remarkably Maser (and all other historians) never explains Hitler's view on race laws in regards to these notes and how they parallel the Nuremberg laws, nor do they explain such items included within the outline such as "Lord Disraeli," and "Eternal course of History," all of which bears some importance if we wish to understand the foundational beliefs of Hitler. For this reason, I've presented the entire outline from that note page with its English translation so that readers can study it themselves.
The outline comes from Werner Maser's book, "Hitler's Letters and Notes," translated by Arnold Pomerans, (Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974):
This outline comes from one of Hitler's notebook pages, written in his own script.
Unfortunately I could not get a good enough scan to read his German script, but I present it here so you can see how he structured his outline.
[From page 282 of Maser's book]
(The text below shows the English translation)
The following shows the English translation of Hitler's outline with roughly the same structure as above. [This translation appears on page 283 of Maser's book.]
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1. Introduction 1. The Bible [3 illegible lines {ed.}]
2. The Aryan
3. His Works
4. The Jew
5. His Work
1. The Bible -- Monumental History of Mankind-- 2. Viewpoints--
Idealism-- Materialism
Nothing without cause-- History is made by men-- 2 human types--
Workers and drones-- Builders and destroyers-----Children of God and Men
confused and muddled-- (Lord Disraeli) Basic Race Law--
1st consequence. Purification of the Bible-- what of its spirit remains?
2nd consequence. Critical examination of the remainder-
. . . . . . . . . greater clarification
First people's history (based on) the race law--
Eternal course of History--
Nature's course from half-knowledge via instinct to clear
understanding of its laws
[three lines crossed out]
I Unconscious [crossed out] Consequences
Blind following of nature ------
Conscious [crossed out] obedience to its laws
Half knowledge equivalent to human arrogance--
Stupidity but also weakness or cruelty
Arrogance------
'Man is Lord of Nature'
'He subdues Nature'
He is free
Weakness of the half-baked
Nature is quite unbending, which means: Victory of the
stronger whose strength or will gives him a greater claim to victory
Privilege through strength the basis of all Nature
The prerequisite of the world's existence.
the man of genius in tune with nature does not try to test this law
which also informs his own ideas about the world
but performs all his actions in accordance with it.
The 'educated man', i.e., the man who as been spoon-fed with
knowledge substitutes the idea of humanity and hence
becomes 'cruel' in the end.
Nature is never cruel
Cruelty is-- delight in
pointless suffering
Useless during the struggle--
Racial purity the highest law.
Miscegenation with inferior types means lowering the level of the whole [last word illegible]
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Interestingly, Hitler's introduction immediately starts with the Bible and then follows with The Aryan, His Works (presumably the Aryan works), The Jew, and His Work (presumably the Jew's work).
Then comes the 1st item of his outline, The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind, with the "Children of God and Men", "Basic Race law," "First people's history (based on) the race law" and "Eternal course of History," all under the subset of The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind. This bears importance because it shows Hitler here connecting his racial thoughts directly with the Bible which he apparently thought of as not only the actual history of mankind but a Monumental one at that. He sees humans as two types, "Children of God and Men." There's no question that Hitler thought of Aryans as separate and superior to Jews, as he so often expressed. The obvious interpretation here means that The Aryans represented the children of God (the Builders) and the Jews as the children of Men (destroyers).
Then we have the curious mention of "confused and muddled- (Lord Disraeli) Basic Race Law." Who did Hitler refer to as Lord Disraeli? Undoubtedly he means Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), First Earl of Beaconsfield , member of the House of Commons who later became prime minister and who authored several books. Disraeli's parents were Jewish but he himself converted to Christianity.
I think if would appear odd that Hitler would have mentioned Disraeli at all if at some level he did not agree with him. He did not write that Disraeli was wrong but only "confused and muddled." To understand why he might have mentioned him here requires an understanding of Disraeli.
Like Hitler, Disraeli thought of the Jews as a race. He thought that Jews could be found at the head of every secret society and that they accumulated wealth in spite of cultural pressures against it. Disraeli thought of his religion as "true Christianity" and wished that the Jews would convert. (for example, see Disraeli's 1852 book, on the Political Biography of Lord George Bentick). But at the same time, Disraeli also supported Judiasm and fought against anti-Semitism. Disraeli's father had anonymously written a book titled "The Genus of Judiasm" that glorified Judaism. It should come to no surprise that Disraeli would follow some of his father's footsteps.
Moreover Disraeli thought of Jesus as a Jew as he stated clearly: "...there is one fact which none can contest. Christians may continue to persecute Jews and Jews still persist in disbelieving Christians, but who can deny that Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Son of the Most High God, is the eternal glory of the Jewish race?"
In a 1942 speech, Hitler reinforces Disraeli's (and Hitler's) belief about the race "problem":
The British Jew, Lord Disraeli, once said that the race problem is the key to the history of the world. We National Socialists have become great in this knowledge. By devoting our attention to the existence of the race problem, we have found the solution for many problems which would have otherwise have seemed incomprehensible . . .
--Hitler in an address to the Reichstag, 6 April 1942 (source: www.adolfhitler.ws)
Hitler in his notes, probably refers to Disraeli as "confused and muddled" against his own beliefs. Hitler also thought of Jews as a race rather than a religious group but he certainly did not think of Jesus as a Jew. Hitler believed in an Aryan Jesus as he expressed several times later in his life. To understand this particular German kind of reasoning, the idea of a mischling prevented Jesus from the Jewish fate. According to Hitler's mischling theory, Jesus, fathered from a non-Jew God, and who never married, excused Jesus from Jewishness (when you deal with beliefs in the supernatural you can justify anything. The mischling theory has just as much validity as the most liberal minded Christian interpretation, which gives just one reason why beliefs, especially religious beliefs can prove so dangerous).
As for purification of the Bible and its remaining spirit, one can only guess what Hitler means here. Perhaps he means purification of the Bible from Jewish origins.
Then comes an amazing and revealing statement: "First people's history (based on) the race law--".
Here we have Hitler connecting race law based on the First people's history, which of course, falls under the heading of the outline as The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind!
To understand how the Bible refers to race law, as the Nazis saw it, requires reading of the Nuremberg laws and Biblical references to the Old Testament that can lead to such beliefs. The Nazi, Julius Streicher, explained during his trial that the race laws got based on Old Testament laws:
"I have written such articles again and again; and in my articles I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves-- the law of Moses, which says, "If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women." And that, Gentlemen, is of tremendous importance in judging the Nuremberg Laws.. These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these laws. When after centuries, the Jewish lawgiver Ezra demonstrated that notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved. That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished."
--Julius Streicher (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)
(The Nuremberg race laws outlawed Jews from marrying Aryan Germans, just as the Bible outlawed against marrying outside one's group.)
Although Julius Streicher influenced the race laws, Hitler's outline clearly shows that he predates all other Nazis in this regard.
Hitler's mention of "Eternal course of History" shows his view of a religious concept (eternity) connecting to the course of History as a development from "half-knowledge via instinct" to a "clear understanding of its laws." Since "laws" falls under the heading of The Bible-- Monumental History of Mankind, what other laws could he mean here except from the laws he sees deriving from the Bible?
When Hitler writes "Man is Lord of Nature," and "Privilege through strength the basis of all Nature," he explains this clearly in Mein Kampf when he wrote against modern pacifists: "Man's role is to overcome Nature" [Vol. 1, Ch. 11]
Hitler concludes with "Racial purity" as the "highest law" which, of course Hitler attempted to enforce after he won his political fight for power. He sees miscegenation (the interbreeding of races) with "inferior" types as lowering the level as a whole. We now know that Hitler viewed any other people than "the children of God" as inferior which, in his mind, would include Jews, blacks, gypsies, homosexuals, and atheists.
Also revealing from Hitler's notes (not shown here) comes his last will and testament "My Testament" (presented in Maser's book) where he tells what should happen upon his death. In it he orders that his letters of "a personal and private nature either to be destroyed or to be handed over to my sister Paula..." This shows that he did not intend his private writings for the general public or for propaganda purposes. These notes represent the actual and private thoughts of Hitler.
Many have attempted to dismiss Hitler's speeches or public announcements where he mentions religion, as a ploy to gain political support. But this hypothesis never gets met with evidence, and they leave us only with their opinions and beliefs. Hitler's private notes tell us otherwise because they agree with his later public pronouncements and give them an authentic mirror to his thoughts presented in his private notes.
Of course Hitler wrote many other notes and letters, but this particular outline based on the Bible represents, perhaps, the most revealing of his private thoughts in regards to his religious beliefs at a time before he came into power.
I do not aim here to present a thorough look at these notes, but only to highlight a few important aspects. It might bear some importance for future scholars to examine Hitler's private letters and notes in depth to shed more light as to why Hitler acted as he did. But clearly his private notes show the influence of the Bible on his racial views against the Jews.
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Sources:
Disraeli, Benjamin, "Lord George Bentick: A Political Biography," Archibald, Constable & Co. Ltd., London 1905 (see http://www.gwb.com.au/2000/myers/100300.htm)
Maser, Werner, (translated by Arnold Pomerans) "Hitler's Letters and Notes," Harper & Row, 1974
Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12
Books already brought out the truths (ofcourse, none will be available in India):
The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521823714/freethinkers
Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust
http://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-Churches-Holocaust-Robert-Ericksen/dp/0800629310/ref=pd_sim_b_1/002-7479887-8206446
Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich
http://www.amazon.com/Twisted-Cross-German-Christian-Movement/dp/0807845604/ref=pd_sim_b_2/002-7479887-8206446
The Nazi Conscience
http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Conscience-Claudia-Koonz/dp/0674018427/ref=pd_sim_b_3/002-7479887-8206446
Theologians Under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch
http://www.amazon.com/Theologians-Under-Hitler-Gerhard-Althaus/dp/0300038895/ref=pd_sim_b_4/002-7479887-8206446
The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany
http://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Church-Nazi-Germany/dp/0306809311/ref=pd_sim_b_5/002-7479887-8206446
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII
http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Pope-Secret-History-Pius/dp/0140296271/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/002-7479887-8206446
Hitler Myths
Originated: 29 May 2005
The following provides a brief explanation for some of the most common misconceptions about Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately in today's 'Faith-based' culture, rarely do people look closely at the reasons or evidence of Hitler's belief, many times confusing the beliefs of other prominent Nazis for Hitler's views.
Myth 1: Hitler was not a Christian
The entire section on Hitler's Christianity provides ample evidence for his brand of Christianity. The evidence itself destroys any opinions or beliefs about Hitler's alleged apostasy.
The evidence shows that:
Hitler was born and baptized into Catholicism
His Jewish antisemitism came from his Christian background.
His early personal notes shows his interest in religion and Biblical views.
He believed that the Bible represented the history of mankind.
His Nazi party platform (their version of a constitution) included a section on Positive Christianity, and he never removed it.
He confessed his Christianity.
He tried to establish a united Reich German Church.
Hitler allowed the destruction of Jewish synagogues and temples, but not Christian churches.
He encouraged Nazis to worship in Christian churches.
He spoke of his Christian beliefs in his speeches and proclamations.
His contemporaries, friends, Protestant ministers and Catholics priests, including the Vatican, thought of Hitler as a Christian.
The Catholic Church never excommunicated Hitler. He died a Catholic.
To ignore the evidence of Hitler's Christianity demonstrates how power of belief can obscure the facts.
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Myth 2: Hitler pretended his Christianity only for political purposes
This one represents one of the most persistent constructions about Hitler's Christianity. Revealingly, proponents of this myth never provide evidence for this hypothesis. If he, indeed, pretended himself as a Christian, then on what evidential material does it stand on? If Hitler acted as a pretend Christian, then were does he disown his belief in Christ? Does he write in his private notes that he used religion only for political purposes? Did any of his close associates or friends think so? Where?
Of course Hitler did try to use political force to control Christianity and he tried to establish a unified Reich Christian Church, but this only supports his stand on his view of "positive Christianity" as described in the Nazi party platform (their version of a constitution). And yes, he criticized the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy, but so what? So do Popes and Protestant leaders. Martin Luther himself strongly condemned the Catholic religion and thought of it as the work of the Devil.
I suspect that those who propagate this myth rely on mainly one source: the dubious reliability of Hitler's table talk (a second-hand source that allegedly records the words of Hitler). The table-talk got edited by the anti-Catholic Martin Bormann (Hitler's secretary) and describes political views against the hierarchy of orthodox Christianity (just as Bormann would have liked) but even here, Hitler never speaks against Jesus Christ, but rather in favor of him. (See Hitler's table talk and other extraneous sources).
What obliterates this theory comes from the fact that Hitler continued to express his "positive" Christian views, well after his rise to power. If, indeed, he needed Christianity only for political purposes, then why-oh-why does he continue with the charade after he has established himself as absolute dictator?
But just for the sake of argument, lets pretend that Hitler really did pretend his Christianity; that his sole aim went to politically winning over German Christians so that he could gain their confidence. How in the world does that improve your argument in protecting Christianity from Hitler? If that proved the case, then who should get the blame, Hitler or the gullible Christian German citizens who believed him? And what does that say for the integrity of Christianity if the most Christianized country in the world could not distinguish a member of their own belief system? Think about it. If the most pious Christians and clergymen could not tell if Hitler practiced false or "real" Christianity, then how in the world could anyone tell? I submit that the only way to tell comes from the very words from those who make the claim. Indeed, this constitutes the very flaw of any religion because there never has existed a testable way to determine the truthfulness of a belief in the supernatural. And if you cannot tell by the words of your fellow Christians, then anyone with minimal acting talent can deceive anyone, including monks, bishops, or popes. In fact, monks, bishops and popes themselves, could fall prey to falsehood. I submit to you that a false Christian and a real Christian makes absolutely no difference. Why? Because if I have it right (and I think I do) then Christianity never represented reality, thus an honest believing Christian and a dishonest believing Christian fall on equal turf: they both have it wrong, and they both practice falsehoods!
The only evidence we have, or could ever have, about people who call themselves Christian comes from the very confession of those making the claim. And since Hitler makes his claim to Christianity abundantly and clearly, we can only rely on his claim, regardless of whether he actually believed in Christ or not. False Christianity has as just much validity as any claim to Christianity, even if you could prove dishonesty.
But regardless of how you view a person's claim to their religion, to say Hitler used Christianity only for political forces has absolutely no historical basis to back it up. To simply rely on belief or opinion says absolutely nothing about historical fact.
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Myth 3: Hitler got his ideas of Aryan superiority and Jewish hatred from Darwinian evolution
Hitler showed no knowledge of Darwinian evolution or natural selection. Nowhere in Mein Kampf does he mention Darwin, natural-selection or even the word "evolution" (in the context of natural selection).
As for Aryan superiority and his Jewish hatred, Hitler clearly describes in Mein Kampf how he slowly began to change his mind about the Jews from the influence of the anti-Semitic movement of the Christian Social Party. His views with regard to anti-Semitism he said, "succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all." (read volume 1, chapter 2). Nowhere does he explain his anti-Jewish beliefs in Darwinian terms.
In his private notes, where he describes the Bible as a "Monumental History of Mankind," Hitler outlines his views of the Aryan and the Jew, all in the context of Bible reasoning, never in the context of Darwinian natural selection.
Moreover, Hitler viewed progeny, not in regards to evolution but in terms of blood lines (a Biblical view). He peppered his writings and speeches with "blood" words. Examples in Mein Kampf include:
"One blood demands one Reich."
"Bavarian by blood, technically Austrian, lived my parents..."
...the German in Austria had really been of the best blood..."
"...the weakness of leadership will not cause a hibernation of the state, but an awakening of all the individual instincts which are present in the blood..."
Clearly, Hitler had no scientific sophistication or an understanding of Darwin's theory of evolution and his "blood-line" explanation of human "progress" reveals a Biblical view, not a Darwinian view. He did, however, at times express ideas, not from Darwin, but rather from Herbert Spencer's concept of Social Darwinism, which has little to do with natural selection and served as an adjunct to his already established religious views. Spencer's Social Darwinism tried to connect Darwin's biological theory with the field of social relations. The result of Social Darwinism resulted in many eugenics programs that began in America and adopted by the Nazis. [Note that Darwin never expressed the idea that natural selection could extend from biological systems to social systems.]
Hitler best sums up his belief of Aryan superiority and his stand against the Jews with his declaration in Mein Kampf:
"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.."
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Myth 4: Hitler followed Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy
If Hitler followed Nietzschian philosophy or even admired him, then where does he describe him or his philosophy?
Nowhere in Mein Kampf does Hitler even mention Nietzsche, or Nietzchian terms such as superman, or super race. Of course Hitler did think the Aryan's represented a superior race to the Jews, but never in Nietzchian terms.
Note that Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau invented the theory of the superior Aryan race in the 1800s in his book, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. Gobineau believed that racial mixture would bring about the decline of "superior" peoples. Gobineau influenced Richard Wagner (beloved by Hitler), and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (whom Hitler read and met), both of who influenced early National Socialism (and both mentioned in Mein Kampf). Popular in Germany in the 1900s, many Germans accepted Gobineau's ideas and, no doubt, influenced Hitler either directly or indirectly. Moreover, Hitler's "superior" race ideas sound like a combination of Biblical race laws and Gobineau's Aryan race ideas, but not at all like Nietzsche.
Nor does it make sense that the Christian Hitler would admire an atheistic Nietzsche. Hitler loathed atheism. In his writings and speeches, he admonished atheists. For example:
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith.
We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement,
and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
The myth of connecting Hitler with Nietzsche probably derived from the pre-Nazi Thule society which began in the early 1900s. Rudolf von Serbottendorff became the driving force of this order which practiced occultism and Nietzchian philosophy. Many members of the Thule society later became Nazis and did influence Nazi literature. However, Hitler never showed any interest in the Thule cult or in its pagan practices. Anyone who uses such material to justify a Hitler-Nietzsche link simply lacks historical depth (laziness of research) and has no understanding of Hitler.
Let's face it; Hitler showed no philosophical sophistication. If any philosopher had an influence on him, it probably came from Schopenhuer (which he does briefly mention in Mein Kampf). Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, recalled that Hitler carried a copy of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation with him throughout World War I, but Hitler never revealed any appreciation of Friedrich Nietzsche or his philosophy.
அரவிந்தன்,
படித்தேன். அருவறுப்பு தொடர்கின்றது. ஆனால் அதிர்ச்சி இல்லை.
இந்தியாவில் இவர்கள் வலிந்து பெரிதாக்கிய விஷயங்களில் பெண்மை எதிர்ப்பு முக்கியமானது. இவர்களால் ஏற்படுத்தப்பட்ட கீழ்மைகளைப் பின்பற்றுபவர்கள் ஹிந்துக்களாக இருந்தால் அவர்கள் செய்வது தவறு என்று கூறுவதும், ஆனால் தங்களுடைய ஓரிறைக் கொள்கைகளால் உருவான ஈனப் பழக்கக் குழந்தைகளை அப்படியே பாதுகாக்க பிஞ்சு குழந்தைகளைக் கொல்லவும் துணியும் கொடியவர்களின் கூடாரங்களை புனிதம் என்ற போர்வையில் இவர்கள் பரப்புவதைக் காண்கையில் குமட்டுகின்றது.
இத்தகைய கொடிய விஷயத்தைப் பற்றி என் டி டி வியோ, ஸி என் என் ஐ பி என்னோ காண்பிப்பார்கள் என்று இரண்டு நாட்களாகக் காத்துக்கொண்டிருந்தேன். நேற்று ஸி என் என்னில் காண்பித்தார்கள். இந்தக் கொடூரத்தை இல்லை. இவர்களுக்குக் கொடூரமாகத் தெரிவதை.
வட இந்தியாவின் சில மாநிலங்களில் கிருத்துவப் பாதிரியார்கள் சிலர் பாப்டிஸம் செய்ததாகப் போலிச் சான்றிதழ்கள் தருகிறார்களாம். சர்ச்சின் பெயருக்கு ஏற்பட்ட அவமானத்தைத் துடைக்க வீறு கொண்டு எழுந்த ஸிஎன்என் ஐபிஎன் இதை ஒரு மிகப் பெரிய பிரச்சினையாகக் காண்பித்தார்கள். ஏதோ ஒரு மலையாளப் பாதிரியிடம் கேள்வி கேட்டபோது அன்பை பரப்பும் மதத்தவரான அவர் கையில் வேப்பிலை எடுக்காத குறையாக இந்தப் பாதிரிகளையெல்லாம் சர்ச்சிலிருந்து விலக்கி வைப்போம் என்று கூறினார்.
எனக்குப் புரியாதவைகளை உங்களிடம் கேட்கிறேன்:
1. ஒன்றும் அறியாத குழந்தைகள் கொல்லப்படுவதைவிட ஒரு மத சடங்கிற்கு போலிச் சான்றிதழ் கொடுப்பது கொடியதாகத் தெரிய காரணம் என்ன?
2. எம்பிபிஎஸ்ஸுக்கும், பிஇக்கும் போலிச் சான்றிதழ் கொடுப்பதற்கான காரணம் தெரியும். போலி டாக்டர்கள் மருத்துவமனை நடத்தி கோடி கோடியாய் சம்பாதிக்க. ஆனால் பாப்டிஸம் என்கின்ற, அர்த்தமில்லாத, கேவலம் வெறும் சடங்காயுள்ள ஒன்றிற்கு, ஒரு வெற்றுச் சடங்கிற்காக மக்கள் போலிச் சான்றிதழ் பெற வேண்டிய அவசியம் என்ன, கட்டாயம் என்ன?
3. இத்தகைய போலிச் சான்றிதழ்கள் வழங்க பரிசுத்த பாதிரிமார்களுக்கு ஏற்பட்ட தேவைதான் என்ன?
4. நொய்டா கொலைகளை வெளிப்படுத்துவதில் ஆர்வம் காட்டிய மீடியாக்கள் ஏன் குழந்தைக்கொலை பொன்ற கொடூரத்தை அமுக்கப் பார்க்கின்றன?
5. தங்களை சமூகப் பொறுப்புள்ள மீடியாவகக் காட்டிக்கொள்ளும் ஸி என் என் - ஐ பின் என் (உதாரணமாக, ராம் ஜெத்மலானியை ஒரு குறிப்பிட்ட கேஸை எடுத்து வாதாடக்கூடாது என்று அந்தச் சேனல் ஒரு இன்டெர்வியூவில் நேரடியாக மிரட்டிய நிகழ்வு) ஏன் இது போன்ற விஷயங்களை மழுங்கடிக்கவும், பின் வேறு பிரச்சினைகளை திசை திருப்பும் உத்தியாக பயன்படுத்துவதும் ஏன்?
6. இந்த சமுதாயத்தை ஏதோ தாங்கள்தான் வந்து சீர்திருத்தப் போவதாக வேலை பார்க்கும் அலுவலகக் கணிணியில் சொல்லுவதை மட்டுமே வேலையாகக் கொண்டுள்ள பல சீசீசீர்திருத்த ப்ளாக்கர்கள் ஏன் வாயையும் மூடிக்கொண்டு தங்களது வழக்கமான டெர்மினலாஜிக்கல் வயிற்றுப்போக்கைத் தொடர்கிறார்கள்?
7. இந்த நிகழ்வின் மதப் பிண்ணணியை விட்டுவிட்டாலும், குறைந்தது இத்தனை இளம் பிஞ்சுகளை அழித்த, அழித்துவருகின்ற நிகழ்வையாவது கண்டிக்கவில்லையே, ஏன்?
8. எப்பொதோ நடந்ததாகச் சொல்லப்படுகின்ற செத்த விஷயங்களின் பேயை விரட்டும் இவர்களுக்கு நடைமுறை வன்முறைகள் கண்ணுக்கு ஏன் தெரியவில்லை? காணமுடியா பேய்களைவிட உண்மை நிலவரங்கள் ஒதுக்கவேண்டியதாக இவர்களை நினைக்க வைத்த காரணங்கள் என்ன?
மனிதம் ஹிந்துத்துவவாதிகளுக்கு மட்டுமான சொத்து என்று நினைக்கிறார்களா?
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