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Papers Reveal Nazi Aim: End Christianity .
Philadelphia Inquirer ^ | 1/10/02 | Edward Colimore

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.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: christianlist; christianpersecutio; clashofcivilizatio; cornell; donovan; generaldonovan; holocaust; nurembergproject; persecution; rutgers; waronchrist; waronchristianity; wildbill; williamdonovan; williamjdonovan
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To: marshmallow
I'm going to bookmark this for the next one of those knuckleheads who try to claim that the Nazis were all good Christians!
61 posted on 01/10/2002 4:30:23 PM PST by FormerLib
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To: CommiesOut
Bookmark bump! Thanks.
62 posted on 01/10/2002 5:45:35 PM PST by Leisler
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To: marshmallow
From what I was able to glean from this past Christmas season, it seems to me that the Nazis were trying to do it the hard way. Political correctness, the "modern" education system, the media, the left.................even some simple-minded "pastors" and "priests"............are doing a great job attempting to eliminate the concept of real Christianity in this country.

Frankly, I'm more than just a little sick of it.........

63 posted on 01/10/2002 5:52:27 PM PST by RightOnline
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To: The Documentary Lady, Askel5, Free the USA, struwwelpeter,NewAmsterdam, Black Jade,Carry_Okie,jm
Nazi trial documents made public
The Nuremberg Project
64 posted on 01/10/2002 7:16:09 PM PST by CommiesOut
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To: Leisler
The foundation of the Nazis, Communists, Royalty, and modern government ...

At least in origin the English Royalty was not absolutist, constrained by both the Church and the ancient liberties of common law.

"Disputing over the body" is surely a common enough pastime of government, however. Let's not forget the latest and most insidious version of the Lie: persuading the people that they own themselves is perhaps the best means yet to keep them in servitude.

65 posted on 01/10/2002 7:35:37 PM PST by Romulus
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To: The Documentary Lady
Most of them were.

There weren't a whole lot of Polish, Czech, or Belgian Zorastroans ma'am.

L

66 posted on 01/10/2002 7:39:18 PM PST by Lurker
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To: Ward Smythe
Not to mention the World Council of Churches...

World Council of Churches=Atheists in miters.

67 posted on 01/10/2002 7:42:38 PM PST by AndrewSshi
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To: CommiesOut
Tonight entertainment is this Link
Some of these Kahanist think the @#$%&*@#$% Christians are responsible for everything. Kahane= precursor to JDL

See the post By Nazxul on Monday, December 31, 2001 - 05:53 pm:
See the Post-- By NAZXUL on Wednesday, January 02, 2002 - 04:59 pm (particularly the sub-post by Sam El)

68 posted on 01/10/2002 7:43:49 PM PST by jmp702
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To: jmp702
That's why Putin opened the gates to keep these paranoids under some control.
The rest of the world is watching DC.
69 posted on 01/10/2002 8:27:03 PM PST by CommiesOut
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To: marshmallow
bttt
70 posted on 01/10/2002 9:28:03 PM PST by Free Vulcan
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To: Romulus
I made but a short comment. The state also considers the mind and the soul theirs too.
71 posted on 01/11/2002 3:40:51 AM PST by Leisler
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To: Campion
I did not mean to equate Paganism and the Hitler cult with Religion.
72 posted on 01/11/2002 4:52:59 AM PST by ohioman
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To: Leisler
"The foundation of the Nazis, Communists, Royalty, and modern government is built upon is that a person and his body are property of the state."

The statement would have been truer if you simply wrote "the foundation of modern government." Certainly, modern democracies and republics also make the same claim. "Royalty" in the sense of Christian monarchy as it had existed in Europe up through 1918 made absolutely no claim that "a person and his body" (by which I assume you mean spiritual as well as physical ownership) were the property of the state. That is not the Christian view and every monarchy in Europe from 800 AD to 1918 was overtly, unashamedly, and officially Christian, complete with the sacramental investiture of the executive.

73 posted on 01/11/2002 5:43:07 AM PST by Goetz_von_Berlichingen
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To: marshmallow
Excellent Post!
74 posted on 01/11/2002 8:40:19 AM PST by Lent
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To: Goetz_von_Berlichingen
” These people mistakenly take the Nazis' advertising campaign, aimed at traditionally-minded Germans, at face falue. They ignore the actual "product" that was delivered, which includes the persecution of Christian groups and ministers.”

Excellent point.

The most heinous regimes of the 20th century advertised themselves as the opposite of what they actually were. The Communists in Russia during the Revolution promised peace, land and freedom to the Russian peasants. Of course we know what they really delivered. And of course, let’s not forget that Clinton promised the “most ethical administration in history.”

75 posted on 01/11/2002 9:24:55 AM PST by moneyrunner
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To: marshmallow
The Christian-bashers love to say that the Nazis were Christians. Of course this is not true, and one of the reasons the Nazis hated the Jews so much was that they blamed them for "inventing" Christianity. But the Christian-bashers never let the truth stand in their way. They will continue their ridiculous claim, despite even more evidence proving them wrong.
76 posted on 01/11/2002 10:25:21 AM PST by Michael2001
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To: RayChuang88
"Isn't this kind of old news?"

It is, but apparently the Christian-bashers haven't gotten wind of it yet.
77 posted on 01/11/2002 10:26:54 AM PST by Michael2001
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To: Map Kernow
"The irony is, Germany during WW I had a relatively good reputation regarding its treatment of its Jewish citizens."

When I was in college, I found a little booklet published by a Jewish organisation in New York (1916). I have been trying to track it down to cite it on this thread, but have not been able to locate it again. The title is The Plight of the Jews in the Eastern War Zone. It urged America NOT to go to war against Germany because Germany and Austria-Hungary were the Jews' only protectors in Eastern Europe. It would not surprise me in the least to find out that Jews were proportionately better represented in the German Imperial army and government than in any other nation's.

One reason the Nazis never played up the circumstances surrounding Hitler's award of the Iron Cross, First Class, is that the regimental adjutant who submitted the recommendation, was Jewish.

78 posted on 01/11/2002 12:30:30 PM PST by Goetz_von_Berlichingen
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To: Goetz_von_Berlichingen
You may get a kick out of this story too: Avraham Goldfaden, the "father of Yiddish theater," had various problems with Tsarist censors, who one time simply prohibited performances in Yiddish. Goldfaden's solution? He told the censors his next production would be in "German," and the show did go on!
79 posted on 01/11/2002 1:48:00 PM PST by Map Kernow
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To: CommiesOut
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.

Nothing new here. Actually these indoctrination methods were first developed in the Soviet Union. The Holocaust of Christians under the communist rule still waits to be really probed. It is not politically correct to do so at the present time.

80 posted on 01/11/2002 2:25:11 PM PST by malarski
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