The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis
dharma
by Gregory S. Paul
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The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 4.
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“You know what happens when atheists take over—remember Nazi Germany?”
Many Christians point to Nazism, alongside Stalinism, to illustrate the
perils of atheism in power.1 At the other extreme, some authors paint the
Vatican as Hitler’s eager ally. Meanwhile, the Nazis are generally portrayed
as using terror to bend a modern civilization to their agenda; yet we
recognize that Hitler was initially popular. Amid these contradictions,
where is the truth?
A growing body of scholarly research, some based on careful analysis
of Nazi records, is clarifying this complex history.2 It reveals a
convoluted pattern of religious and moral failure in which atheism and the
nonreligious played little role, except as victims of the Nazis and their
allies. In contrast, Christianity had the capacity to stop Nazism before it
came to power, and to reduce or moderate its practices afterwards, but
repeatedly failed to do so because the principal churches were complicit
with—indeed, in the pay of—the Nazis.
Most German Christians supported the Reich; many continued to do so in
the face of mounting evidence that the dictatorship was depraved and
murderously cruel. Elsewhere in Europe the story was often the same. Only
with Christianity’s forbearance and frequent cooperation could fascistic
movements gain majority support in Christian nations. European fascism was
the fruit of a Christian culture. Millions of Christians actively supported
these notorious regimes. Thousands participated in their atrocities.
What, in God’s name, were they thinking?
Before we can consider the Nazis, we need to examine the historical
and cultural religious context that would give rise to them.
Christian Foundations
Early Christian sects promoted loyalty to authoritarian rulers so long
they were not intolerably anti-Christian or, worse, atheistic. Christian
anti-Semitism sprang from one of the church’s first efforts to forge an
accommodation with power. Reinterpreting the Gospels to shift blame for the
Crucifixion from the Romans to the Jews (the “Christ killer” story) courted
favor with Rome, an early example of Christian complicity for political
purposes. Added energy came from Christians’ anger over most Jews’ refusal
to convert.3
Christian anti-Semitism was only intermittently violent, but when
violence occurred it was devastating. The first outright extermination of
Jews occurred in 414 c.e. It would have innumerable successors, the worst
nearly genocidal in scope. At standard rates of population growth, Diaspora
Jewry should now number in the hundreds of millions. That there are only an
estimated 13 million Jews in the world4 is largely the result of Christian
violence and forced conversion.5
Anti-Semitic practices pioneered by Catholics included the forced
wearing of yellow identification, ghettoization, confiscation of Jews’
property, and bans on intermarriage with Christians. European Protestantism
bore the fierce impress of Martin Luther, whose 1543 tract On the Jews and
Their Lies was a principal inspiration for Mein Kampf.6 In addition to his
anti-Semitism, Luther was also a fervent authoritarian. Against the Robbing
and Murdering Peasants, his vituperative commentary on a contemporary
rebellion, contributed to the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Christians and
helped to lay the groundwork for an increasingly severe Germo-Christian
autocracy.7
With the Enlightenment, deistic and secular thinkers seeded Western
culture with Greco-Roman notions of democracy and free expression. The
feudal aristocracies and the churches counterattacked, couching their
reactionary defense of privilege in self-consciously biblical language. This
controversy would shape centuries of European history. As late as 1870, the
Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed a reactionary program at the first Vatican
Council. Convened by the ultraconservative Pope Pius IX (reigned 1846–1878),
Vatican I stridently condemned modernism, democracy, capitalism, usury, and
Marxism.8 Anti-Semitism was also part of the mix; well into the twentieth
century, mainstream Catholic publications set an intolerant tone that later
Nazi propaganda would imitate. Anti-Semitism remained conspicuous in
mainstream Catholic literature even after Pope Pius XI (reigned 1922–1939)
officially condemned it.
Protestantism, too, was largely hostile toward modernism and democracy
during this period (with a few exceptions in northern Europe). Because Jews
were seen as materialists who promoted and benefited from Enlightenment
modernism, most Protestant denominations remained anti-Semitic.
With the nineteenth century came a European movement that viewed
Judaism as a racial curse. Attracting both Protestant and Catholic
dissidents within Germanic populations, Aryan Christianity differed from
traditional Christianity in denying both that Christ was a Jew and that
Christianity had grown out of Judaism.9 Adherents viewed Christ as a divine
Aryan warrior who brought the sword to cleanse the earth of Jews.10 Aryans
were held to be the only true humans, specially created by God through Adam
and Eve; all other peoples were soulless subhumans, descended from apes or
created by Satan with no hope of salvation.11 Most non-Aryans were
considered suitable for subservient roles including slavery, but not the
Jews. Spiritless yet clever and devious, Jews were seen as a satanic disease
to be quarantined or eliminated.
During the same years neopagan and occult movements gained adherents
and incubated their own form of Aryanism. Unlike Aryan Christians, neopagan
Aryans acknowledged that Christ was a Jew—and for that reason rejected
Christianity. They believed themselves descended from demigods whose
divinity had degraded through centuries of interbreeding with lesser races.
The Norse gods and even the Atlantis myth sometimes decorated Aryan
mythology.
Attempting to deny that Nazi anti-Semitism had a Christian component,
Christian apologists exaggerate the influence of Aryan neopaganism.
Actually, neopaganism never had a large following.
German Aryanism, whether Christian or pagan, became known as
“Volkism.” Volkism prophesied the emergence of a great God-chosen Aryan who
would lead the people (Volk) to their grand destiny through the conquest of
Lebensraum (living space). A common motto was “God and Volk.” Disregarding
obvious theological contradictions, growing numbers of German nationalists
managed to work Aryanism into their Protestant or Catholic confessions, much
as contemporary adherents of Voudoun or Santería blend the occult with their
Christian beliefs. Darwinian theory sometimes entered Volkism as a belief in
the divinely intended survival of the fittest peoples. Democracy had no
place, but Nietzschean philosophy had some influence—a point Christian
apologists make much of. Yet Nietzsche’s influence was modest, as Volkists
found his skepticism toward religion unacceptable.12
Though traceable to the ancient world, atheism first emerged as a
major social movement in the mid-1800s.13 It would be associated with both
pro- and antidemocratic worldviews. Strongly influenced by science, atheists
tended to view all humans as descended in common from apes. There was no
inherent anti-Semitic tradition. Some atheists accepted then-popular
pseudoscientific racist views that the races exhibited varying levels of
intellect due to differing genetic heritages. Some went further, embracing
various forms of eugenics as a means of improving the human condition. But
neither of these positions was uniquely or characteristically atheistic.
“Scientific” racism is actually better understood as a tool by which
Christians could perpetuate their own cultural prejudices—it was no accident
that the races deemed inferior by Western Christian societies and “science”
were the same!
When we seek precursors of Nazi anti-Semitism and authoritarianism, it
is among European Christians, not among the atheists, that we must search.
Following World War I, the religious situation in Europe was complex.
Scientific findings about the age of the Earth, Darwin’s theory of
evolution, and biblical criticism had fueled the first major expansion of
nontheism at Christianity’s expense among ordinary Europeans. The churches’
support for the catastrophic Great War further fueled public disaffection,
as did (in Germany) the flight of the Kaiser, in whom both Protestant and
Catholic clergy had vested heavily.14 But religion was not everywhere in
retreat: postwar Germany experienced a Christian spiritual renaissance
outside the traditional churches.15 Religious freedom was unprecedented, but
the established churches enjoyed widespread state support and controlled
their own education systems. They were far more influential than today.
Roughly two-thirds of Germans were Protestant, almost all of the rest
Catholic. The pagan minority claimed at most 5 percent. Explicit nontheism
was limited to an intellectual elite and to committed socialists. Just 1.5
percent of Germans identified themselves as unbelievers in a 1939 census,
which means either that very few Nazis and National Socialist German Worker’
s Party supporters were atheists, or that atheists feared to identify
themselves to the pro-theistic regime.
Most religious Germans detested the impiety, secularism, and
hedonistic decadence that they associated with such modernist ideas as
democracy and free speech. If they feared democracy, they were terrified by
Communism, to the point of being willing to accept extreme countermethods.
Thus it was a largely Christian, deeply racist, often antidemocratic,
and in many respects dangerously primitive Western culture into which Nazism
would arise. It was a theistic powder keg ready to explode.
Nazi Leaders, Theism, and Family Values
According to standard biographies, the principal Nazi leaders were all
born, baptized, and raised Christian. Most grew up in strict, pious
households where tolerance and democratic values were disparaged. Nazi
leaders of Catholic background included Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler,
Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels.
Hitler did well in monastery school. He sang in the choir, found High
Mass and other ceremonies intoxicating, and idolized priests. Impressed by
their power, he at one time considered entering the priesthood.
Rudolf Hoess, who as commandant at Auschwitz-Birkinau pioneered the
use of the Zyklon-B gas that killed half of all Holocaust victims, had
strict Catholic parents. Hermann Goering had mixed Catholic-Protestant
parentage, while Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Adolf
Eichmann had Protestant backgrounds. Not one of the top Nazi leaders was
raised in a liberal or atheistic family—no doubt, the parents of any of them
would have found such views scandalous. Traditionalists would never think to
deprive their offspring of the faith-based moral foundations that they would
need to grow into ethical adults.
So much for the Nazi leaders’ religious backgrounds. Assessing their
religious views as adults is more difficult. On ancillary issues such as
religion, Party doctrine was a deliberate tangle of contradictions.16 For
Hitler consistency mattered less than having a statement at hand for any
situation that might arise. History records many things that Hitler wrote or
said about religion, but they too are sometimes contradictory. Many were
crafted for a particular audience or moment and have limited value for
illuminating Hitler’s true opinion; in any case, neither Hitler nor any
other key Nazi leader was a trained theologian with carefully thought-out
views.
Accuracy of transcription is another concern. Hitler’s public speeches
were recorded reliably, but were often propagandistic. His private
statements seem more likely to reflect his actual views, but their
reliability varies widely.17 The passages Christian apologists cite most
often to prove Hitler’s atheism are of questionable accuracy. Apologists
often brandish them without noting historians’ reservations. Hitler’s
personal library has been partly preserved, and a good deal is known about
his reading habits, another possible window onto Hitler’s beliefs.18 Also
important, and often ignored by apologists, are statements made by religious
figures of the time, who generally—at least for public consumption—viewed
Hitler as a Christian and a Catholic in good standing. Meanwhile, the silent
testimony of photographs is irrefutable, much as apologists struggle to
evade this damning visual evidence.
Despite these difficulties, enough is known to build a reasonable
picture of what Hitler and other top Nazis believed.
Hitler was a Christian, but his Christ was no Jew. In his youth he
dabbled with occult thinking but never became a devotee. As a young man he
grew increasingly bohemian and stopped attending church. Initially no more
anti-Semitic than the norm, in the years before the Great War he fell under
the anti-Semitic influence of the Volkish Christian Social Party and other
Aryan movements. After Germany’s stunning defeat and the ruinous terms of
peace, Hitler became a full-blown Aryanist and anti-Semite. He grew obsessed
with racial issues, which he unfailingly embedded in a religious context.
Apologists often suggest that Hitler did not hold a traditional belief
in God because he believed that he was God. True, Hitler thought himself God
’s chosen leader for the Aryan race. But he never claimed to be divine, and
never presented himself in that manner to his followers. Members of the
Wehrmacht swore this loyalty oath: “I swear by God this holy oath to the
Führer of the German Reich and the German people, Adolf Hitler.” For
Schutzstaffel (S.S.) members it was: “I pledge to you, Adolf Hitler, my
obedience unto death, so help me God.”
Hitler repeatedly thanked God or Providence for his survival on the
western front during the Great War, his safe escape from multiple
assassination attempts, his seemingly miraculous rise from homelessness to
influence and power, and his amazing international successes. He never tired
of proclaiming that all of this was beyond the power of any mere mortal.
Later in the war, Hitler portrayed German defeats as part of an epic test:
God would reward his true chosen people with the final victory they deserved
so long as they never gave up the struggle.
Reich iconography, too, reveals that Nazism never cut its ties to
Christianity. The markings of Luftwaffe aircraft comprised just two
swastikas—and six crosses. Likewise the Kreigsmarine (German Navy) flag
combined the symbols. Hitler participated in public prayers and religious
services at which the swastika and the cross were displayed together.
Hitler openly admired Martin Luther, whom he considered a brilliant
reformer.19 Yet he said in several private conversations that he considered
himself a Catholic. He said publicly on several occasions that Christ was
his savior. As late as 1944, planning the last-ditch offensive the world
would know as the Battle of the Bulge, he code-named it “Operation
Christrose.”
Among his Nazi cronies Hitler criticized the established churches
harshly and often. Some of these alleged statements must be treated with
skepticism,20 but clearly he viewed the traditional Christian faiths as weak
and contaminated by Judaism. Still, there is no warrant for the claim that
he became anti-Christian or antireligious after coming to power. No reliably
attributed quote reveals Hitler to be an atheist or in any way sympathetic
to atheism. On the contrary, he often condemned atheism, as he did
Christians who collaborated with such atheistic forces as Bolshevism. He
consistently denied that the state could replace faith and instructed Speer
to include churches in his beloved plans for a rebuilt Berlin. The Nazi-era
constitution explicitly evoked God. Calculating that his victories over
Europe and Bolshevism would make him so popular that people would be willing
to abandon their traditional faiths, Hitler entertained plans to replace
Protestantism and Catholicism with a reformed Christian church that would
include all Aryans while removing foreign (Rome-based) influence. German
Protestants had already rejected a more modest effort along these lines, as
will be seen below. How Germans as a whole would have received this reform
after a Nazi victory is open to question. In any case, Hitler saw himself as
Christianity’s ultimate reformer, not its dedicated enemy.
Hitler was a complex figure, but based on the available evidence we
can conclude our inquiry into his personal religious convictions by
describing him as an Aryan Volkist Christian who had deep Catholic roots,
strongly influenced by Protestantism, touched by strands of neopaganism and
Darwinism, and minimally influenced by the occult. Though Hitler
pontificated about God and religion at great length, he considered politics
more important than religion as the means to achieve his agenda.
None of the leaders immediately beneath Hitler was a pious traditional
Christian. But there is no compelling evidence that any top Nazi was
nontheistic. Any so accused denied the charge with vehemence.
Reich-Führer Himmler regularly attended Catholic services until he
lurched into an increasingly bizarre Aryanism. He authorized searches for
the Holy Grail and other supposedly powerful Christian and Cathar relics. A
believer in reincarnation, he sent expeditions to Tibet and the American
tropics in search of the original Aryans and even Atlantians. He and
Heydrich modeled the S.S. after the disciplined and secretive Jesuits; it
would not accept atheists as members.21 Goering, least ideological among top
Nazis, sometimes endorsed both Protestant and Catholic traditions. On other
occasions he criticized them. Goebbels turned against Catholicism in favor
of a reformed Aryan faith; both his and Goering’s children were baptized.
Bormann was stridently opposed to contemporary organized Christianity; he
was a leader of the Church Struggle, the inconsistently applied Nazi
campaign to oppose the influence of established churches.22
The Nazis championed traditional family values: their ideology was
conservative, bourgeois, patriarchal, and strongly antifeminist. Discipline
and conformity were emphasized, marriage promoted, abortion and
homosexuality despised.23
Traditionalism also dominated Nazi philosophy, such as it was. Though
science and technology were lauded, the overall thrust opposed the
Enlightenment, modernism, intellectualism, and rationality. It is hard to
imagine how a movement with that agenda could have been friendly toward
atheism, and the Nazis were not. Volkism was inherently hostile toward
atheism: freethinkers clashed frequently with Nazis in the late 1920s and
early 1930s. On taking power, Hitler banned freethought organizations and
launched an “anti-godless” movement. In a 1933 speech he declared: “We have
. . . undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not
merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” This
forthright hostility was far more straightforward than the Nazis’ complex,
often contradictory stance toward traditional Christian faith.
Destroying Democracy: a Political-Religious Collaboration
As detailed by historian Ian Kershaw, Hitler made no secret of his
intent to destroy democracy. Yet he came to power largely legally; in no
sense was he a tyrant imposed upon the German people.
The Nazi takeover climaxed a lengthy, ironic rejection of democracy at
the hands of a majority of German voters. By the early 1930s, ordinary
Germans had lost patience with democracy; growing numbers hoped an
authoritarian strongman would restore order and prosperity and return
Germany to great-power status. Roughly two-thirds of German Christians
repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to overthrow democracy.
Authoritarianism was all but inevitable; at issue was merely who the new
strongman would be.
What made democracy so fragile? Historian Klaus Scholder explains that
Germany lacked a deep democratic tradition, and would have had difficulty in
forming one because German society was so thoroughly divided into opposing
Protestant and Catholic blocs. This division created a climate of
competition, fear and prejudice between the confessions, which burdened all
German domestic and foreign policies with an ideological element of
incalculable weight and extent. This climate erected an almost
insurmountable barrier to the formation of broad democratic center. And it
favored the rise of Hitler, since ultimately both churches courted his
favor—each fearing that the other would complete the Reformation or the
Counter-Reformation through Hitler.24
Carefully plotting his strategy, Hitler purged some of the Volkish
Nazi radicals most belligerent toward the traditional Christian churches. In
this way he lessened the risk of ecclesiastical opposition. At the same
time, he knew that the presence of both Catholics and Protestants among the
Nazi leadership would ease churchmen’s fears that the Party might engage in
sectarianism.
Though it had many Catholic leaders (including Hitler), the Nazi Party
relied heavily on Protestant support. Protestants had given the Party its
principal backing during the years leading up to 1933 at a level
disproportionate to their national majority.25 Evangelical youth was
especially pro-Nazi. It has been estimated that as many as 90 percent of
Protestant university theologians supported the Party. Indeed, the
participation of so many respected Protestants gave a early, comforting air
of legitimacy to the often-thuggish Party. So did the frequent sight of
Sturmabteilung (S.A.) units marching in uniform to church.
As German life between the wars grew more desperate, some Protestant
pastors explicitly defended Nazi murders of “traitors to the Volk” from the
pulpit. Antifascist Protestants found themselves marginalized. The
once-unlikely topic of Volkist-Protestant compatibility became the leading
theological subject of the day.26 This is less surprising when we consider
that Volkism and German Protestantism were both strongly nationalistic;
Lutheranism in particular had German roots.
This mirage of harmony enticed Hitler into a naïve attempt to unite
the German Protestant churches into a single Volkish body under Nazi
control. Launched shortly after the Nazis came to power, this project failed
immediately. The evangelical sects proved as unwilling as ever to get along
with one another, though much of their clergy eventually Nazified.
Catholicism and the Nazi Takeover
Ironically—but, as we shall see, for obvious reasons—Chancellor Hitler
had greater initial success reaching accommodation with Roman Catholic
leaders than with the Protestants. The irony lay in the fact that the
Catholic Zentrum (Center) Party had been principally responsible for denying
majorities to the Nazis in early elections. Although Teutonic in outlook,
German Catholics had close emotional ties to Rome. As a group they were
somewhat less nationalistic than most Protestants. Catholics were
correspondingly more likely than Protestants to view Hitler (incorrectly) as
godless, or as a neo-heathen anti-Christian. Catholic clergy consistently
denounced Nazism, though they often undercut themselves by preaching
traditional anti-Semitism at the same time.
Even so, and despite Catholicism’s minority status, it would be German
Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church that whose actions would at last put
total power within the Nazis’ reach.
Though it was not without antimodernists, the Catholic Zentrum party
had antagonized the Vatican during the 1920s by forming governing coalitions
with the secularized, moderate Left-oriented Social Democrats. This changed
in 1928, when the priest Ludwig Kaas became the first cleric to head the
party. To the dismay of some Catholics, Kaas and other Catholic politicians
participated both actively and passively in destroying democratic rule, and
in particular the Zentrum.
The devoutly Catholic chancellor Franz von Papen, not a fascist but
stoutly right-wing, engineered the key electoral victory that brought Hitler
to power. Disastrously Papen dissolved the Reichstag in 1932, then formed a
Zentrum-Nazi coalition in violation of all previous principles. It was Papen
who in 1933 made Hitler chancellor, Papen stepping down to the vice
chancellorship.
The common claim that Papen acted in the hope that the Nazis could be
controlled and ultimately discredited may be true, partly true, or false;
but without Papen’s reckless aid, Hitler would not have become Germany’s
leader.
The church congratulated Hitler on his assumption of power. German
bishops released a statement that wiped out past criticism of Nazism by
proclaiming the new regime acceptable, then followed doctrine by ordering
the laity to be loyal to this regime just as they had commanded loyalty to
previous regimes. Since Catholics had been instrumental in bringing Hitler
to power and served in his cabinet, the bishops had little choice but to
collaborate.
German Catholics were stunned by the magnitude and suddenness of this
realignment. The rigidly conformist church had flipped from ordering its
flock to oppose the Nazis to commanding cooperation. A minority among German
Catholics was appalled and disheartened. But most “received the statement
with relief—indeed with rejoicing—because it finally also cleared the way
into the Third Reich for Catholic Christians” alongside millions of
Protestants, who joined in exulting that the dream of a
Nazi-Catholic-Protestant nationalist alliance had been achieved.27 The
Catholic vote for the Nazis increased in the last multi-party elections
after Hitler assumed control, doubling in some areas, inspiring a mass
Catholic exodus from the Zentrum to the fascists. After the Reichstag fire,
the Zentrum voted en masse to support the infamous Enabling Act, which would
give the Hitler-Papen cabinet executive and legislative authority
independent of the German Parliament. Zentrum’s bloc vote cemented the
two-thirds majority needed to pass the Act.
Why did the church direct its party to provide the critical swing
vote? It had its agenda, as we shall see below.
Deal Making with the Devil
Even after the Enabling Act, Hitler’s position remained tenuous. The
Nazis needed to deepen majority popular support and cement relations with a
skeptical German military. Hitler needed to ally all Aryans under the
swastika while he undermined and demoralized regime opponents. What would
solidify Hitler’s position? A foreign policy coup: the Concordat of 1933
between Nazi Germany and the Vatican.
The national and international legitimacy Hitler would gain through
this treaty was incalculable. Failure to secure it after intense and openly
promoted effort could have been a crushing humiliation. Hitler put
exceptional effort into the project. He courted the Holy See, emphasizing
his own Christianity, simultaneously striving to intimidate the Vatican with
demonstrations of his swelling power.
Catholic apologists describe the Concordat of 1933 as a necessary move
by a church desperate to protect itself against a violent regime which
forced the accord upon it—passing over the contradiction at the heart of
this argument. Actually, having failed in repeated attempts to negotiate the
ardently desired concordat with a skeptical Weimar democracy, Kaas, Papen,
the future Pius XII (who reigned 1939–1958), the sitting Pius XI, and other
leading Catholics saw their chance to get what they had been seeking from an
agreeable member of the church—that is, Hitler—at an historical moment when
he and fascism in general were regarded as a natural ally by many Catholic
leaders.28 Negotiations were initiated by both sides, modeled on the
mutually advantageous 1929 concordat between Mussolini and the Vatican.
Now Zentrum’s pivotal role in assuring passage of the Enabling Act can
be seen in context. It was part of the tacit Nazi-Vatican deal for a future
concordat.29 The Enabling Act vote hollowed Zentrum, leaving little more
than a shell. Thus, a clergy far more interested in church power than
democratic politics could take control on both sides of the negotiating
table. In a flagrant conflict of interest, the devout Papen helped to
represent the German state. Concordat negotiations were largely held in
Rome, so that Kaas could leave his vanishing party yet more rudderless.
Papen, Kaas, and the future Pius XII worked overtime to finalize a treaty
that would, among other things, put an end to the Zentrum. In negotiating
away the party he led, Kaas eliminated the last political entity that might
have opposed the new Führer.30 Nor did the Vatican protect Germany’s
Catholic party. Contrary to the contention of some, evidence indicates that
the Vatican was pleased to negotiate away all traces of the Zentrum, for
which it had no more use save as a bargaining chip. In this the Holy See
treated Zentrum no differently than it had the Italian Catholic party, which
it negotiated away in the Concordat with Mussolini.
Hitler sought to eliminate Catholic opposition in favor of obligatory
loyalty to his regime. For its part, the church was obsessed with its
educational privileges,31 and especially with securing fresh sources of
income. It would willingly sacrifice political power to protect them. As
both sides worked in haste to produce a treaty that would normally have
required years to complete, Hitler took masterful advantage of Vatican
overeagerness. Filled with “certainty that Rome neither could nor would turn
back, [Hitler] was now able to steer the negotiations almost as he wanted.
The records prove he exploited the situation to the full.”32 Indeed, Hitler
was so confident that he had the Church in his lap that he went ahead and
promulgated his notorious sterilization decree before the Concordat’s final
signing. Hitler’s project for involuntary sterilization of minorities and
the mentally ill was an direct affront to Catholic teaching. But as Hitler
surmised, not even this provocation could deflect the Holy See in its rush
toward the Concordat. Because ordinary Catholics largely supported the
Nazis, the party even felt free to use violence against the remaining
politically active Catholics, frequently disrupting their rallies.
Signed on July 20, 1933, the Concordat was a fait accompli, the
negotiations having been conducted largely in secret. Most German bishops
gave their loyal, though impotent, approval to the pact that would strip
away their power. A few bishops objected, criticizing the Nazi regime’s lack
of morality (but never its lack of democracy).
The Concordat was a classic political kickback scheme. The church
supported the new dictatorship by endorsing the end of democracy and free
speech. In addition it bound its bishops to Hitler’s Reich by means of a
loyalty oath. In exchange the church received enormous tax income and
protection for church privileges. Religious instruction and prayer in school
were reinstated. Criticism of the church was forbidden. Of course, nothing
in the Concordat protected the rights of non-Catholics.
If Catholic officials were disappointed with the Concordat’s terms,
they did not show it, sending messages of congratulation to the dictator. In
Rome, a celebratory mass followed the treaty’s signing by Papen and the
future Pius XII amid great pomp and circumstance. In Germany, the church and
the Berlin government held a joint service of thanksgiving that featured a
mix of Catholic, Reich, and swastika banners and flags. The musical program
mixed hymns with a rousing performance of the repugnant Nazi anthem “Horst
Wessel”—which was set, by the way, to the traditional hymn “How Great Thou
Art.” All of this was projected by loudspeaker to the enthusiastic crowd
outside; as most German Catholics welcomed the Concordat, the thanksgiving
service drew far more than Berlin’s cathedral could hold.
Scholder comments that “anyone who saw things from the Roman
perspective could come to the conclusion that . . . the treaty was . . . an
indescribable success for Catholicism. Even a year before, the Holy See had
only been able to dream of the concessions which the concordat contained. .
. . On the Catholic side the concordat was accordingly described as
‘something very great,’ indeed as nothing short of a ‘masterpiece.’”33
Catholic response was so exuberant that Hitler felt it necessary to defend
himself to Protestant clerics and Nazi radicals who viewed this sudden amity
with Rome as a betrayal.
The practical results of the collaboration were clear enough. Most
Catholics “soon adjusted to the dictatorship”34; indeed they flocked to the
Party. Post-Concordat voting patterns suggest that Catholics, on average,
even outdid Protestants in supporting the regime, further undermining any
efforts by the clergy to challenge Nazi policies. In any case much of the
Catholic clergy was Nazifying. Even the idiosyncratic S.S. welcomed
Catholics, who would ultimately compose a quarter of its membership.
The Concordat’s disastrous consequences cannot be exaggerated. It
bound all devout German Catholics to the state—the clergy through an oath
and income, the laity through the authority of the church. If at any time
the regime chose not to honor the agreement, Catholics had no open legal
right to oppose it or its policies. Opponents of Nazism, Catholic and
non-Catholic, were further discouraged and marginalized because the church
had shown such want of moral fiber and consistency.
Apologists have insisted that the church had no choice but to accept
the Concordat for the modest protections it provided. But those provisions
were never needed. Major Protestant denominations suffered no more than
Catholicism, though the Protestant churches lacked protective agreements and
had snubbed Hitler’s early attempt to unite them. Apologists make much of
Vatican “resistance” to Nazism, but the net effect of Vatican policy toward
Hitler was collaborative.
Indeed, the 1933 Concordat stands as one of the most unethical,
corrupt, duplicitous, and dangerous agreements ever forged between two
authoritarian powers. Perhaps the Catholic strategy was to outlast the Nazi’
s frankly popular tyranny rather than try to bring it down. But the Catholic
Church made no attempt to revoke the Concordat and its loyalty clause during
the Nazi regime. Indeed, the 1933 Concordat is the only diplomatic accord
negotiated with the Nazi regime that remains in force anywhere in the world.
Germany’s Protestant sects were too decentralized to be coopted by a
single document. To this extent Protestants who disputed Nazi policies could
be said to enjoy a more favorable position than Catholics. But opposition
was rare among Protestants too. Hitler cynically courted the major
denominations even as they cynically courted him. Most smaller traditional
Christian sects did little better. For example, Germany’s Mormons and
Seventh-Day Adventists bent over backwards to accommodate National
Socialism.35
Christian Comfort with the Rising Regime
Catholics and Protestants at first embraced the new German order.
Germany was regaining international prestige, the economy improving thanks
to growing overseas support.36 Industrialists like Henry Ford invested
heavily in the new Reich. German Christians also looked to the Nazis for a
revival of “Christian” values to help counter the rise of nontheism. Most
welcomed the Nazis’ elimination of chronic public strife by terrorizing,
imprisoning, and killing the fast-shrinking German Left. The leftists had
long been despised by traditionalists, who composed four fifths of the
population. The state purged a far higher proportion of atheists than
traditional Christians. In newspapers and newsreels the Nazis proudly
publicized their new concentration camps. Reports sanitized the camps’ true
nature, but no one could mistake that they were part of a new police
state—to which most German followers of Jesus raised no objection. The very
high rate of “legal” executions reported in the press also met with mass
indifference or positive approval.
Far from being hapless victims, the great bulk of German Christians
joined, eagerly supported, collaborated with, or accommodated to a greater
or lesser degree, the new tyranny.
Hitler: the Popular Oppressor
Apologists for Christian conduct during the Nazi era imagine that the
regime suppressed dissent ruthlessly, no matter whom—or how many—it needed
to slaughter to achieve its ends. Hitler’s regime is portrayed as
Stalinesque in its response to dissent. This simplistic view reveals a
failure to understand the complicated actuality of a popular terror state.
The keyword is popular: Hitler was Europe’s most popular leader, and his
goal was universal Aryan support. The Party obsessively tracked public
opinion, something never seen in the USSR.37 Before the war, foreign tourism
was encouraged; Hitler knew most Germans would speak well of the Reich to
visitors, in sharp contrast to the USSR, whose leaders prudently feared
interaction between foreigners and a citizenry of dubious loyalty. During
most of the Reich, any unprovoked attempt to liberate Germany would have met
fierce majority resistance.
Though there were assassination attempts, the top Nazis had little to
fear from ordinary Germans.38 Hitler’s personal security was shockingly lax;
Goering regularly drove his open convertible around Berlin.
If the apologists were right, we should expect the Gestapo to have
been a massive organization, relentlessly searching out and crushing
widespread dissent. Analysis of surviving Gestapo records reveals that in
fact it was surprisingly small.39 Germany’s Christian population being
largely satisfied, there was little resistance to suppress. Most cases the
Gestapo handled were initiated by ordinary citizens looking to settle petty
disputes and had no ideological content.
The Führer had been successful in buying off his Aryans with false
egalitarian prosperity, stolen Jewish wealth, and his refusal to put
Deutschland on a full war footing until well into the war. During the early
war years civilians were under much tighter control in submarine-blockaded
England than in Germany. Since nearly all Aryans were Protestant and
Catholic, Hitler had to keep both sects reasonably happy, and he did. After
all, the main focus of Nationalist Socialism was to make the divinely
favored Aryan Volk, both Protestant and Catholic, thrive in order to
transform the German population into a unified machine of domination over
the lesser peoples. Contrary to Catholic apologists, the nominally Catholic
Hitler had not the slightest desire to slaughter masses of the very Aryan
people to whom he belonged, and whom he wanted to elevate to supreme power.
Leaving aside the fact that doing so would have been ideological and racial
suicide, the record makes clear that Hitler’s intention was to reform and
standardize Aryans’ political, social, and ultimately their religious
beliefs, not to purge them or to kill off groups of Aryans. Doing that would
have grossly violated Nazi doctrine, undermined the myth of Aryan
solidarity, grievously weakened the state, and risked religious civil war.
Disloyalty of the Catholic third of the population would have been
disastrous to a modest-sized nation trying to expand its resources in
preparation for epic wars of conquest; it was this fact, not the Concordat,
that would be the main constraint on Nazi actions. For that reason,
apologist claims that thousands or millions of Catholics and Protestants
would have joined the Jews had they protested Nazis policies are false. The
proof is found in the historical record.
Rosenstrasse: the Power of Resistance
Far from exercising absolute power at home, Hitler often discontinued,
modified, or concealed initiatives that threatened his regime’s precious
popular approval. Stout public objection could and repeatedly did alter Nazi
behavior. Flummoxed when the Protestant churches refused to unite, Hitler
deferred his grand effort to reform German Christianity to a dreamlike
utopian future. Later attempts by Nazi authorities to hamper church
activities were often frustrated by sizeable demonstrations.40 When Party
elements stripped Bavarian schools of their crucifixes without Hitler’s
approval, vigorous protests by, among others, the mothers of schoolchildren
quickly brought about their replacement.41 When Hitler denounced Protestant
opposition bishops Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm and ordered their ouster,
public anger boiled over. One protest drew 7,000 demonstrators. Hitler
reversed course and reinstated Meiser and Wurm with fulsome praise. Strong
opposition to the mass killing of the mentally disabled circa 1941 drove it
further underground, saving many lives, even though this program too enjoyed
the Führer’s approval.
This is not to say that protesters courted no danger. Opposition
figures were frequently harassed, sometimes killed. But the top Nazis knew
how limited their power was. When regime officials contemplated forcing the
removal of Muenster’s Catholic bishop, Clemens Galen, Goebbels warned that
the “the population of Muenster could be regarded as lost during the war if
anything were done against the bishop . . . [indeed] the whole of [the
state] of Westphalia.”42 Though Galen suffered harassment, he remained
active throughout the war and held his office.
In occupied countries from Norway to Italy, residents successfully
opposed Nazi racial policies and saved hundreds of thousands of Jews. In
Denmark, political and ecclesiastical leaders forcefully protested Nazi
policies; the whole nation worked under the noses of the Gestapo to save
almost all of Denmark’s Jews. Neither leaders or citizens suffered severe
retaliation. French bishops who opposed Nazi actions against Jews likewise
survived the war.
Most extraordinary and telling is the Rosenstrasse incident.43 Some
30,000 Jews lived openly in Germany as the spouses of Christians. Nine in
ten such marriages remained intact despite ceaseless harassment. Oriented
toward family values as they were, the Nazis could not decide how to handle
these Jews without violating the sanctity of marriage. Early in 1943,
Goebbels, then in charge of Berlin, decided it was time to cleanse the
capital by rounding up these last Jews. Hitler agreed. Some 2,000 Jewish men
from mixed marriages were seized and taken to a large downtown building on
the Rosenstrasse, from which they would be deported to the camps.
For a week their Gentile wives stood in the winter cold, chanting “We
want our husbands back!” Ordinary Germans sometimes joined them. All told,
the protests involved about 6,000 people. They continued in the face of S.S.
and Gestapo threats, even threats to use machine guns. They continued though
British bombers pounded the city by night. But the Nazis dared not fire upon
these defenseless, unorganized Aryan women. Berliners saw the protests
directly. Foreign diplomats spread word of it to the world press. The
British Broadcasting Company broadcast the story back into Germany.
What was the outcome of Nazi Germany’s only mass demonstration to save
Jews? The 2,000 Jewish husbands were released with Hitler’s approval. Two
dozen who had already been sent to Auschwitz were returned. Jewish-Christian
couples continued to live openly and survived the war. They would comprise
the great majority of German Jewish survivors.
Goebbels later commented to an associate that the regime relented “in
order to eliminate the protest from the world, so that others didn’t begin
to do the same.” Sadly, this strategy was successful: during the rest of the
war, no similar action would ever be taken in defense of Jews in general.
Nor does this exhaust the catalogue of successful opposition. When
Goebbels called for mass employment of housewives in war industries, also
early in 1943, refusal was widespread. Again, reprisals were rare, partly
because of the regime’s established emphasis on traditional roles for women.
On a broader scale, Germans who refused to participate in atrocities—even if
they were soldiers, party members, or S.S. men—almost never suffered
retaliation. This was so well known that, after the war, Nazis accused of
war crimes were forbidden to claim fear of retaliation as a defense.
These incidents suggest that the Nazi regime was at root cowardly,
happy to pick on the weak and disorganized but intimidated by public
demonstrations. When it came to the Volk, Nazi leaders preferred propaganda,
education, persuasion, and social pressure to terror. They knew that terror
worked best when its objective was supported by many and opposed by few.
Only toward the end of the war was widespread domestic terror resorted to in
Germany, and it was often ineffective.
Clearly ordinary citizens could oppose and alter state policy, all the
more so if powerful nongovernemental institutions supported them.44 As Sarah
Gordon comments, the “failure of German churches to speak out against racial
persecution is a disgrace . . . because the Nazis feared the propaganda or
political power of the churches, it is almost certain that church leaders
could have spoken out more vehemently against racial persecution.”45
The apologist claim that Germany’s traditional Christians were
impotent in the face of Nazi terror is an exaggeration on a scale that
Goebbels might have appreciated. As the wives of Berlin discovered,
Christians had the power to protect the lives and well-being of others and
the potential to confound Hitler and his minions. Had they wished to, they
need only have applied it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To be continued in the December 2003/January 2004 issue of Free
Inquiry. The complete compilation of excerpts from material linking
Christianity and Nazism are available here:
www.secularhumanism.org/textexcerpts.
Tim Binga, director of the Center for Inquiry Libraries, contributed
additional research in the preparation of this article.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1. Nazism and fascism are considered secular, atheistic, or both, in,
among other sources, David Barrett, George Kurian, and Todd Johnson, eds.,
World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions
in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
2. Seminal studies by mainstream, nonpolemical researchers include
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936:
Hubris (New York: W W Norton, 1998) and Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis (London:
Allen Lane, 2000); Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich vols. 1
and 2 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979 [English version, 1988]); Nathan
Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart: The Rosenstrasse Protest and
Intermarriage in Nazi Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); Beth
Griech-Polelle, Bishop von Galen: German Catholicism and National Socialism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans,
and the “Jewish Question” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Also see John Patrick Michael Murphy, “Hitler Was Not an Atheist,” Free
Inquiry 19, no. 2 (Spring 1999).
3. See James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001) and David Kertzer, The Pope Against the
Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
4. http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html.
5. Viewed in the context of more than 1,500 years of Christian
violence against Jews, the enormity of the Holocaust may as much reflect the
large populations and relatively advanced technologies of the time as it
does the virulence of Nazi anti-Semitism. Other Christian groups might have
done the same thing earlier, had the technical means and a large enough pool
of potential victims been available.
6. Nowadays Islamic anti-Semites reprint Luther’s work.
7. Prior to World War I, many religious Germans viewed dying for the
Fatherland as being on a par with Christian martyrdom; reluctance to die in
battle was considered blasphemous.
8. After Vatican I, the Roman Catholic clergy was required to take an
oath against modernity.
9. Aryan Christianity continues to exist; contemporary U.S. examples
include Christian Identity, Aryan Nation, and other extremist racist sects.
10. In Aryan Christian doctrine, Christ was non-Semitic because he did
not have a Jewish father. His assault on the Temple was taken as evidence of
his anti-Semitism. Christianity’s false association with Judaism was blamed
on St. Paul.
11. Thus the extremist Christian term mud people. Jews’ lack of a soul
was held to explain their supposed lack of interest in spirituality and the
afterlife and their focus on material gain.
12. For example, the Catholic Volkist Dietrich Eckart, later a friend
and mentor to Hitler, wrote in 1917 that “to be an Aryan and to sense
transcendence is one and the same thing,” yet described Nietzsche as the
“crazy despiser of our religious foundations.”
13. Gregory Paul, “The Secular Revolution of the West: It’s Passed
America By—So Far,” Free Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Summer 2002).
14. Ibid.
15. See Scholder vol. 1., p.12.
16. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of
Christianity 1919–1945 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
is the first attempt to detail the religious beliefs of the Nazis.
17. Christian defenders frequently cite Table Talk, which presents
some of Hitler’s most vehement anti-Christian statements. But mainstream
historians find Table Talk unreliable. It consists of private conversations
recorded in the 1940s by two secretaries, one of whom later said that “no
confidence” should be placed in the final volume because the
compiler—Bormann, even by Nazi standards a deceptive opportunist and much
more anti-Christian than Hitler—destroyed the original transcripts. Still,
even as presented in Table Talk, Hitler usually attacks Judeo-Christianity,
not Christ. Hitler lauds Christ as a divine Aryan.
18. Timothy Ryback, “Hitler’s Forgotten Library,” Atlantic Monthly 29,
no. 4 (May 2003), expresses naïve surprise at how interested Hitler was in
reading about religion. Oddly, Ryback’s conclusion, that Hitler saw himself
as God, is contrary to the quote Ryback cites in support of his hypothesis.
19. The regime put an original edition of On the Jews and Their Lies
on display and celebrated Luther’s 450th birthday in 1933 on massive scale.
20. See Steigman-Gall.
21. Neopaganism was far more prevalent in the S.S. than in German
society as a whole; even according to Party statistics, paganism never
claimed more than 5 percent of the general population.
22. See Steigman-Gall.
23. Contrary to common belief, the Nazis never operated state
sex-for-procreation facilities. On the other hand, Nazi “culture” was not
exceptionally prudish; home movies of the era show young women lying topless
on the beach, and kitsch nudity was common in Nazi art.
24. Scholder vol. 1, p. 130.
25. See Scholder vols. 1 and 2, Kershaw pp. 488-90 and 324, and
Gellately p. 14, whose Backing Hitler is a precedent-setting historical
examination based in part on examination of surviving Gestapo records.
Religion was not a primary focus of the study, but what Gellately includes
on this topic is damning. See also Gordon, who gives a balanced account of
church collaboration and resistance.
26. See Scholder vol. 1, pp. 37-51 and 74-87.
27. Ibid., p. 253.
28. Ronald Rychlak, “Goldhagen v. Pius XII,” First Things, June/July
2002, pp. 37–54, offers a typically convoluted example of pro-Vatican spin
when he asserts that the concordat “was a Nazi proposition. The Nazis
accepted terms that the Church had previously proposed to Weimar, but which
Weimar had rejected.”
29. See Scholder vol. 1, p. 241.
30. Ibid., pp. 241-43.
31. A concordat already negotiated with Bavaria gave the church
control of the schools.
32. Scholder vol. 1, p. 386.
33. Ibid., p. 405.
34. Gellately, p. 14.
35. See Christine Elizabeth King, The Nazi State and the New Religions
(New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982).
36. Hitler and his fellow thugs had no idea how to run a modern
economy. The Nazi economic “miracle” was a Potemkin-village scheme kept
going, prior to the takeovers of other nations, by selling off Germany’s
gold reserves and taking out international loans that could never be paid
back.
37. See Gellately.
38. Hitler missed by minutes being killed by a bomb a few months after
invading Poland. Pope Pius XII sent the Führer his “special personal
congratulations.”
39. See Gellately, p. 39.
40. See Griech-Polelle, pp. 36-37.
41. Nazi politics were as peculiar as its theology. Hitler avoided
committing himself on tangential issues to protect his popularity and keep
his options open. This, coupled with Hitler’s harsh survival-of-the-fittest
view of power, fueled chronic, often vicious intraparty battles that
contributed to the chaos of the regime. In “working towards the Führer,”
party functionaries often went beyond what Hitler wanted done, at least in
the short term; the Bavarian crucifix debacle is a good example of this
tendency.
42. Cited in Gellately, Kershaw, p. 429, and Gordon.
43. See Stoltzfus, pp. 209-57.
44. Hitler fared little better in international affairs; even when he
was master of continental Europe, his power had limits. His supposed ally
Franco politely told the vexed Führer to take a hike when he pressed for
Spain to enter the war against the allies. Hitler found himself forced to
negotiate with the Vichy French government he had helped to install over the
same matter, and it too refused to budge.
45. Gordon, p. 261.
dfo...@gl.umbc.edu
> The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis
> by Gregory S. Paul
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
>
> The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 4.
I read several pages, and the article's a joke.
1942 Nazi atheism-adherent Martin Bormann: "National Socialist and
Christian Concepts are Incompatible"
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1167155551.253465.117650%4048g2000cwx.googlegroups.com
the Nazi Robert Ley was an atheism-adherent who worshiped Hitler and
Nature
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1143171898.121370.76730%40e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com
Himmler block quote, in
Hitler's secular religion
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1120837574.592972.268980%40g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
Lifton speaking of Himmler, in
ethics of concentration camp societies
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1143041542.477944.172610%40i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com
2004 Kater
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1126795817.956842.104430%40g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
Himmler, a former chicken farmer..., was ruled by very
strong beliefs regarding the application of breeding
theories to humans-- by way of positive selection for the
"Aryans" and negative selection for their natural enemies,
the Slavs, Gypsies, and Jews.
Multi-Pronged Role of Darwinian Thought in Shoah's Arrival
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/10ac5d963dfa0eba?hl=en&
Edward Simon, probably originally in his Another Side to the Evolution
Problem, Jewish Press, Jan. 7, 1983, 248,
cited in
http://www.thedarwinpapers.com/oldsite/number12/Darwinpapers12HTML.htm#N_1_
I don't claim that Darwin and his theory of evolution
brought on the holocaust; but I cannot deny that the
theory of evolution, and the atheism it engendered, led to
the moral climate that made a holocaust possible....
1939 Goebbels: "The Fuhrer is... completely anti-Christian."
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1145975885.494352.40950%40g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com
Goebbels: "Goering... addressed a sharp letter to Bishops Galen...
and Berning"
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1126795650.014139.97640%40g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
1943 Goebbels & Hitler agree on "the insanity of the Christian
doctrine of redemption"
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1120260213.363834.164990%40f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com
1943 Goebbels: a "process of selection between the strong and the
weak"
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1120450591.444214.186670%40g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
Draft 2 of a chronology of Darwinian thought and the march to the
Final Solution
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1122434358.640904.162640%40z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com
Churches resisted Hitler
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1128561942.412167.145530%40g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
resistance to Hitler
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1146158953.142022.188680%40u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com
theological disputes among German Protestants; Nazi concentration
camps
for Catholics and Protestants
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=dford3-1129228612.176548.107730%40z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com