A few years ago I was visiting a family in the former Communist East Germany. It was a large family gathering (50+ people) to welcome a family member back from the states who left 20 years earlier when the wall came down.
There were several aunts in their 90’s who were singing beautiful Christian hymns, and their younger brother who was on a Panzer Tank crew during WWII started tearing up. He said that the hymn they were singing was the same hymn he sang during his induction ceremony into Hitler’s Army.
I never knew that Hitler sold the war as a Christian War until that moment. We talked about it for a while and he explained how Hitler made it easy to hate Jews as they killed Jesus.
That may have been the excuse given to the gullible, but the Nazis hated and killed Jews whether they stayed Jews or became fervent Christians. It wasn't about religion, ultimately.
This ridiculous "deicide" charge of the ancient churches is something I have never understood, as it is completely absent from any form of traditional American Fundamentalist Protestantism that I have ever been familiar with.
First of all, in Calvinist/Fundamentalist theology, the crucifixion was a vicarious eternal damnation visited on J*sus by G-d on behalf of every single human being who would ever live. Why not blame G-d? And besides, without this experience no one could ever go to heaven . . . right? (Not to mention that none of the people at the time had the free will to resit G-d's "redemption" scheme to begin with.)
Second of all, when one brings a goat to the altar as a sacrifice, someone has to slaughter it. If you're going to get mad at the priest for slaughtering the victim, why did you bring a sacrifice in the first place?
Now, this is the chrstianity that was the only kind I was aware existed until relatively late in my life. I thought chrstians and Jews had always been friends. I knew nothing of the "deicide" charge or the atrocities committed in its name. I later came to understand that if the church is going to (chas vechalilah!) "replace" the nation of Israel as G-d's agent in history, then an excuse has to be found. Even though all chrstianities agree that the crucifixion was 100% necessary, it became from the very beginning the stick to hit Jews over the head with so a new group and a new religion could allegedly take over. Essentially, the traditional (as opposed to American Fundamentalist) tradition has replaced `Amaleq as the Accursed Nation with, G-d forbid, Israel.