Posted on 11/13/2007 9:33:06 AM PST by rhema
Embarrassed at the murderous legacy of atheist Communist regimes in the twentieth century, leading atheists seek to even the score with believers by portraying Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime as theist and specifically Christian. Atheist websites routinely claim that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic, he never publicly renounced his Catholicism, and he wrote in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Atheist writer Sam Harris writes that since “the Holocaust marked the culmination of…two hundred years of Christian fulminating against the Jews,” therefore “knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.”
How persuasive are these claims? Hitler was born Catholic just as Stalin was born into the Russian Orthodox Church and Mao was raised as a Buddhist. These facts prove nothing as many people reject their religious upbringing, as these three men did. From an early age, historian Allan Bullock writes, Hitler “had no time at all for Catholic teaching, regarding it as a religion fit only for slaves and detesting its ethics.”
How then do we account for Hitler’s claim that in carrying out his anti-Semitic program he was an instrument of divine providence? During his ascent to power, Hitler needed the support of the German people—both the Bavarian Catholics and the Prussian Lutherans—and to secure this he occasionally used rhetoric such as “I am doing the Lord’s work.” To claim that this rhetoric makes Hitler a Christian is to confuse political opportunism with personal conviction. Hitler himself says in Mein Kampf that his public statements should be understood as propaganda that bears no relation to the truth but is designed to sway the masses.
The Nazi idea of an Aryan Christ who uses the sword to cleanse the earth of the Jews—what historians call “Aryan Christianity”—was obviously a radical departure from the traditional Christian understanding and was condemned as such by Pope Pius XI at the time. Moreover, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not religious, it was racial. Jews were targeted not because of their religion—indeed many German Jews were completely secular in their way of life—but because of their racial identity. This was an ethnic and not a religious designation. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was secular.
Hitler’s Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer’s private opinions, assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great “scourges” of history, and said of the Germans, “Let’s be the only people who are immunized against this disease.” He promised that “through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity.” In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution.
Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler’s leading advisers like Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany.
In his multi-volume history of the Third Reich, historian Richard Evans writes that “the Nazis regarded the churches as the strongest and toughest reservoirs of ideological opposition to the principles they believed in.” Once Hitler and the Nazis came to power, they launched a ruthless drive to subdue and weaken the Christian churches in Germany. Evans points out that after 1937 the policies of Hitler’s government became increasingly anti-religious.
The Nazis stopped celebrating Christmas, and the Hitler Youth recited a prayer thanking the Fuhrer rather than God for their blessings. Clergy regarded as “troublemakers” were ordered not to preach, hundreds of them were imprisoned, and many were simply murdered. Churches were under constant Gestapo surveillance. The Nazis closed religious schools, forced Christian organizations to disband, dismissed civil servants who were practicing Christians, confiscated church property, and censored religious newspapers. Poor Sam Harris cannot explain how an ideology that Hitler and his associates perceived as a repudiation of Christianity can be portrayed as a “culmination” of Christianity.
If Nazism represented the culmination of anything, it was that of the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century ideology of social Darwinism. As historian Richard Weikart documents, both Hitler and Himmler were admirers of Darwin and often spoke of their role as enacting a “law of nature” that guaranteed the “elimination of the unfit.” Weikart argues that Hitler himself “drew upon a bountiful fund of social Darwinist thought to construct his own racist philosophy” and concludes that while Darwinism is not a “sufficient” intellectual explanation for Nazism, it is a “necessary” one. Without Darwinism, there might not have been Nazism.
The Nazis also drew on the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, adapting his atheist philosophy to their crude purposes. Nietzsche’s vision of the ubermensch and his elevation of a new ethic “beyond good and evil” were avidly embraced by Nazi propagandists. Nietzsche’s “will to power” almost became a Nazi recruitment slogan. I am not for a moment suggesting that Darwin or Nietzsche would have approved of Hitler’s ideas. But Hitler and his henchmen approved of Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas. Harris simply ignores the evidence of the Nazis’ sympathies for Darwin, Nietzsche, and atheism. So what sense can we make of his claim that the leading Nazis were “knowingly or unknowingly” agents of religion? Clearly, it is nonsense.
So in addition to the mountain of corpses that the God-hating regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pot Pot and others have produced, we must add the body count of the God-hating Nazi regime. The Nazis, like the Communists, deliberately targeted the churches and the believers because they wanted to create a new man and a new utopia freed from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality. In an earlier blog, I asked what is atheism’s contribution to civilization? One answer to that question: Genocide.
Ugh, the atheists trying to inanely pin evil on Christianity. Guess what? The Devil was an angel at one point, too.
My other favorite is when they bring up the Inquisition as a comparison to the Muslim unrest going on in the world.
Nothing like going back several hundred years to have to make your point.
I don't have the web site handy---the link is at my office---but the Nuremberg war trials produced extensive documentation about the establishment of the "Nazi church." Hitler needed the Christians to help him kill the Jews, but they were next in line!
I think Hitler was a satan wannabee - doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in God - only that he wished to choose the devil and inflict evil on the world.
Naziism was as bad as communism in their "socialistic" ideals...both inevitably steering for totalitarianism...the 2 just went about it in different ways.
Hitler was no more a Christian than David Koresh or Fred Phelps. They used religion with speech as a tool for their own ends.
Btw, the "Hail Mary" in German doesn't use "heil" - it uses "Gegrüßet seist du." (you are greeted).
With all that said, Hitler was definitely aiming at his own deification (look at all the rotten art where he's a stand-in for various semi-divine Germanic legendary figures). He wanted to get there via a manufactured quasi-Nordic pagan religion of his own creation, not Christianity. He had no use for Christianity in any form, seeing it as a mere derivation of Judaism and a creed for weaklings.
The Nazis never were Christians. They sometimes used the cover of Christianity and other religions in their propaganda but they developed their own Pagan rituals for weddings, births and other important ceremonies. They also exterminated thousands of priests and millions of Christians in concentration camps.
The Nazis used any religion to further their power. For example, the Nazis raised two Muslim Waffen SS Divisions during the war. These were the only true “religious” SS Division the Nazis ever created (and it is safe to say that the Germany was not a Muslim nation). Himmler was fascinated by the thought of Muslims to be fearless soldiers willing to kill for their religion. One of these Muslim Waffen SS divisions (The Hanjer Division) was responsible for the murder of over 90 percent of the Yugoslavian Jewish population.
The Nazis were left-wing socialists. Yes, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left. Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist “exploitation” by capitalists — particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. Their program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. They instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. They encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and they denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics. Yet a popular myth persists that the Nazis themselves were right-wing extremists. This insidious lie biases the entire political landscape, and the time has come to expose it.
2banana
In that respect, Hitler was somewhat under the sway of Alfred Rosenberg, who was anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and an outspoken pagan. Rosenberg had put together a document of the thirty rules of a “National Reich Church,” which was completely anti-Christian (using Mein Kampf as a holy book, for example, and banning the Bible). But Hitler and the Nazis, on their way up and during their consolidation of power and the runup to 1939, had to couch their statements often in Christian rhetoric (such as “Nazism is positive Christianity”). For that, they leaned heavily on H.S. Chamberlain’s book “Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” in which he maintained that Jesus Christ was an Aryan, not a Jew.
}:-)4
Uh oh... not another ‘inconvenient truth’ for the secular leftists.
To be a Christian you must follow Christ. Who can keep a straight face and say that Hitler did this?
Anyone can make a claim as to what they are, but it does not make it so.
Was Hitler a Christian? He was probably baptized as an infant, but the determinant is how a person lives his/her life. By their fruits you will know them.
Hitler a disciple or follower of Christ? I don't think so.
This is a good one:
Hitler’s war on Christ: Joel Miller explores Nazi plan to eradicate the Church
January 12, 2002
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/606793/posts
Good point. Believing in God is not the same thing as being a follower. Intellectual assent is not enough.
Mr. niteowl77
Matthew 7
21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
No mention of him being a Theosophist. He was the ultimate New Ager. He was into people like Alice A. Bailey and Madame Blavatsky. These people were the founders of what has emerged into the modern New Age movement. Do a search on the internet and see what comes up.
He was for all intents and purposes a Satanist.
Mel
Actually they're all derived from the same Old German root meaning "whole."
Certainly. But they mean very different things. I don’t think Hitler was thinking “holy” - I think he was thinking “archaic greeting to pagan overlord.”
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