Posted on 01/10/2002 9:53:22 AM PST by marshmallow
A Rutgers journal will put rare Nuremberg documents online. A plan to rout the church and install a Reich faith is shown.
Take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith - in Germany's Third Reich.
More than a half-century ago, confidential U.S. government reports on the Nazi plans were prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and will be available online for free starting tomorrow - some of them for the first time.
These rare documents - in their original form, some with handwritten scrawls across them - are part of an online legal journal published by students of the Rutgers University School of Law at Camden.
"When people think about the Holocaust, they think about the crimes against Jews, but here's a different perspective," said Julie Seltzer Mandel, a third-year law student who is editor of the Nuremberg Project for the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion.
"A lot of people will say, 'I didn't realize that they were trying to convert Christians to a Nazi philosophy.' . . . They wanted to eliminate the Jews altogether, but they were also looking to eliminate Christianity."
Mandel said the journal would post new Nuremberg documents about every six months, along with commentary from scholars across the world, on its Web site at www.lawandreligion.com.
The material is part of the archives of Gen. William J. Donovan, who served as special assistant to the U.S. chief of counsel during the International Military Tribunal after World War II. The trials were convened to hold accountable those responsible for war crimes.
The first installment - a 120-page report titled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches" - was prepared by the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.
"Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said an OSS report in July 1945. "The best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan is to be found in the systematic nature of the persecution itself.
"Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich . . . and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers."
A second online journal posting - to be added in about six months - will spotlight a secret OSS document, "Miscellaneous Memoranda on War Criminals," about the efforts of various countries to bring Nazis to justice.
A third installment - to be included in the journal in a year - focuses on translated, confidential Nazi documents. A message sent during the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom of November 1938 is titled "Measures To Be Taken Against Jews Tonight." Authorities were given specific instructions: "Jewish shops and homes may be destroyed, but not looted. . . . Foreigners, even if Jewish, will not be molested."
Mandel, whose 80-year-old grandmother is a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, said that allowing the public access to such documentation is "phenomenal."
"Some of the papers will answer questions that scholars have been asking for years," said Mandel, 29, of Berlin Borough, Camden County. "What did we know? When did we know it?"
The documents are part of the collection of the Cornell University School of Law library, which has about 150 bound volumes of Nuremberg trial transcripts and materials. They are housed at the school and are being cataloged.
"Gen. Donovan kept extensive, detailed records of Nazi atrocities," said Mandel, who taught at Triton High School in Runnemede and at Shawnee High School in Medford, where she led a course on "Literature of the Holocaust."
She and other journal editors - Daniel Bahk, Christopher Elliott, Ross Enders and Jessica Platt - examined hundreds of documents at Cornell before choosing those to be posted on the journal site. "The project could not be published in a conventional journal without losing the international accessibility that it demands," said Rayman Solomon, dean of the School of Law. "This student initiative will make a significant contribution to legal history scholarship while being of great interest and importance to the general public, especially at this time in our history."
Greg Baxter, marketing editor of the journal and a third-year Rutgers law student, said the online project was "definitely pertinent in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack" and Bush administration plans to hold a military tribunal to try the accused.
"The Nuremberg trials provide a framework for today's trials," said Baxter, 24, of Winslow, Camden County.
That the press throughout the country would begin a propaganda campaign simultaneously was nothing unusual. Newspapers and other organs got directives from Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda more or less every day. A lot of those directives have survived. I wonder if the directives for the anti-Christian campaign survive.
Interesting, however, that the Nazi Party organs should have taken up the same campaigns at the same time as the press. That suggests to me that this was all done on Hitler's orders. I wonder if anything survives indicating that he gave such orders.
By the way, the article doesn't make it clear whether these documents were already published in the voluminous documentary publications of the Nuremberg Trials, or whether they are only published now. Anybody know?
Old news yes, but not very well known or publicized. You can scan entire textbooks and not find it, spend semesters listening to history lectures in colleges, watch hours of History/Discovery/Learning and never hear it. On the internet, even an offhand mention that Nazis were anti-Christian will get you thousands of bytes of prepared text dumps attempting to prove the Nazis were Christian offshoots.
All the same trip.
(The Reich was ahead of its time in many respects ... where the "spirit of" Vatican II is concerned.)
I read an account of a mother in Germany in the thirties who was very concerned because all the children seemed to be drifting away from their parents. They didn't listen to their parents anymore. Their sons were getting mouthy with their fathers. Their daughters were getting pregnant out of wedlock. The schools seemed to be teaching things that were tearing the family apart. Hitler had control of the schools. Much like the NEA today. Is it any wonder that Bill and Hillary thought so highly of Hitler's tactics that they personally gave copies of 'Mein Kamphf' to staff members?
What would the world do if they couldn't draw the same old line between Christianity and Nazism or Facism in general?
And, as encouraged by the UN. By the looks of today's touchy-feely, emotional needs and self-esteem oriented ministries, as well as the variety show/theatre style services, the plan to destroy christianity is on the march, under a different banner. The Willow Creek/Saddleback heresies are leading the way on the evangelical side; built on Robert Schuller's concept "SELF ESTEEM: The new Reformation", his 1982 book, which declared, "Classical theology has erred in its insistence that theology be 'God-centered,' not 'man-centered'." (p64) (God centered christianity is in error!!?) Nothing but humanism masquerading as christianity. But Carl Rogers masquerading as Jesus doesn't make him the Christ.
There is quite a lot of material around dealing with the belief system(s) of the Nazis. Some of it is rather odd. Take this one, for example, from a chapter titled: Genocide - an Act of Black Magic, in a book by Nigel Pennick:
...yet Himmler gave his genocide programme priority even over the survival of Germany itself. Genocide was the magical act whereby the history of the world would forever be transformed, even if Germany did not survive. The elimination of the Jews, and with them their culture and religion, would leave a vacuum for the ascendance of the demonic powers controlled by or controlling the Third Reich. Himmler felt himself a participant in a psychic armageddon. Fortunately he was on the losing side.
I won't vouch for Mr. Pennick's correctness or anything, but that is one of the views out there. And Hitler was, if anything, even more squirrely than Himmler. For more on the Nazi's plan to take over the church, go look at Alfred Rosenberg/Hitler.
You beat me to it. The biggest threat to Christianity today is from people pretending to be Christians.
Wild Bill Donovan was a great American, by the way. Is his archive on-line and does anybody have a link?
The Nazis aim was not the extirpation of religion per se, but the destruction of both Judaism and Christianity, and their replacement by a new state cult.
That new religion combined elements of neo-paganism and occultism with the idolatrous worship of "German-ness" in general and the person of Adolf Hitler in particular.
Both, JFK and Hitler were 'Patsies'.
Christians, through principal, making decision not to use governemnt power to impact religious expression (Founding fathers)
Two irreconciliable philosophies - so why do the Repubs try to appease the demorats? Why don't people see a spirit of antichrist when it is spitting in the face? What people call "the jude-christian" ethos is the enemy of all democrats, communists, muslims, socialists, atheists, etc etc - Every group on the inside of the "tolerance" movement is AGAINST and INTOLERANT of the "judeo-christian" ethos. Why don't people smell the spirit of anti-christ in the tolerance movement? Yes they are anti-american - but only the juedo-christian part - Dr Laura did a great piece yesterday on how the tolerance crowd is not really for tolerance but against america - the truth is they are anti - judeo/christian - ie ANTICHRIST
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