The Nazis weren't Christians.

"Hitler called the Apostle Paul "the most dangerous Jew."

Hitler wasn't politically correct. Christianity's emasculators in the Religious Left today would just drop the word, "Jew".

For what it's worth, Dr. Gene Scott has said many times that Hitler was a member of the Catholic Church and was never excommmunicated.

And "Dr. Gene Scott's" credentials to comment on German history are what ... ?

Hitler, by his own admission, stopped practicing Catholicism in his mid-teens, after his father's death. In Tischgespräche, he denies that he's a Christian, and calls himself "a pure heathen". According to Catholic canon law, that constitutes "defecting from the faith by a formal act," and means that he wasn't a Catholic, according to the Church.

As for excommunication, what does excommunicating someone who isn't a communicant accomplish? "Say, by the way, let me take away privileges you don't use anyway." Yeah, that would have made a big impression on Mr. Hitler.

Nevertheless, if he was a Catholic during his period of power, he was automatically excommunicated because of his crimes, specifically those involving violent attacks against priests and religious, and those involving abortion (which the Nazis heavily promoted among Jews and Slavs).

In short, "Dr. Gene Scott" doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

Hitler was baptized in the Catholic Church, but had taken himself out of communion with the church long before becoming a public figure. Excommunication is a measure used against notorious public sinners who want nonetheless to be considered Christians and receive Holy Communion. A notorious public sinner who does not claim to be a Christian and has no interest in receiving the sacrament has excommunicated himself already. You might as well say that the Lutherans should have excommunicated Karl Marx, or the Orthodox Church should have excommunicated Stalin. Or to take a political analogy, that the Republican Party should expel Jeffords.

By the way, I am not a Catholic. As a Protestant I have to say that if the Catholic Church was not always heroic in the Hitler period, it was more impressive than German Protestantism. Pius XI condemned Nazi racism in what must be nearly the only Papal encyclical written in German. Even the German Confessing Church, which resisted the takeover of the Protestant churches by Nazi sympathizers, never made any corporate statement on behalf of the Jews.

A whole bunch of tyrants who killed people for political reasons (Uncle Joe and Chairman Mao leading the pack), with number three being a guy who murdered millions for religious reasons.

What nonsense.

If Hitler murdered people for "religious reasons," why is it that Jews who converted to any other religion were killed the same as any other Jews? And what kind of "religious reason" motivates someone to kill Gypsies? (You'd maybe like to cite a long history of Christian anti-Gypsy-ism?)

If Hitler was murdering Catholic Poles by the millions -- and he and his pals were very clear that Poles were ultimately to be exterminated, and almost as many Poles were killed as Jews -- then what religion motivated him to do that? The religion of "Anti-Polishism"? "The Church Of Ubermenschen Who Hate Polacks"?

Hitler's talk of the "hand of Providence" is not necessarily a borrowing from Christianity. Ever since the Enlightenment, the term "Providence" has been used to invoke a vague religious perspective by those who are not comfortable talking about "God."

I have read that Hitler spoke of having a sort of moment of destiny in the military hospital after WWI when he realized that "Providence" was calling him to rid the world of the Jewish bacilli. I don't think Christians should be in any doubt about who he was really hearing from.

Abslolutely. Hitler and the Nazis saw Jews as a distinct RACE, not religion. They were motivated by racism and their war was against the Jewish and Slav races, which they considered inferior and a possible source of pollution for the "pure" Aryans.

I think some issues have gotten mixed up on this thread. Why Hitler wanted to destroy the Jews, why Germans participated in it and tolerated it, and whether Christianity is innately anti-Semitic are different questions.

1. Hitler's lust to destroy the Jews was not based on religion. What it was based on is really pretty mysterious; there is a black hole at the bottom of the Hitler phenomenon that only the Last Judge is ever going to penetrate. See Ron Rosenbaum's impressive book, Explaining Hitler : The Search for the Origins of His Evil . Though I would probably be considered too "liberal" by some posters here (in my own mainline denomination I'm a raving conservative), I think that the most likely explanation is that he sold his shrivelled soul to Satan. And I mean that pretty literally.

2. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism did not call for the murder of Jews, though it sometimes led to it when mixed with "urban legend" blood libels and crowd hysteria (sometimes manipulated by rulers who wanted to get rid of their creditors). Most Christian teachers believed that the Jews would turn to Christ before the Last Day, so that destroying the Jews would be against God's plan.

3. Nevertheless, the tradition that the Jews having rejected and killed the Messiah, were rejected by God in turn, contributed to mistreatment of Jews in two ways:

(a) It gave the Jews an almost completely negative profile, thus encouraging Christians to dislike and despise them;

(b) It taught Christians that until the Last Times the Jews would suffer under God's constant punishment. It was this latter belief, I think, that made German Christians so passive in the face of genocide: they had been taught to see Jewish suffering as normal and natural.

4. The Christianity of many Protestant Germans in the '30's was pretty attenuated. Widespread inroads of liberal theology and a long history of state domination of the Protestant Churches had made their mark. Just before WWI, the big issue in German Protestantism was whether the Apostles Creed should be eliminated from worship, since "nobody believes that virgin birth and bodily resurrection stuff anymore."

5. To account for German acquiescence and willing collaboration in the destruction of Jews, you have to consider the years of unchallenged anti-Semitic propaganda the Nazis bombarded them with after '33. Exactly the pattern Arafat has followed in the PA: take power by appealing to all sorts of frustrations and fears, then control the media and turn the population into a murdering horde by continuous indoctrination. The churches were a weak and uncertain influence in comparison, by and large.

6. The rejectionist view of Judaism prevalent for a long time in the Christian tradition is now widely seen even by thoroughly traditional Christians to have been contrary to Scripture. Evangelical Christian Zionists are not the only Christians who have rethought this. "Mainliners" in the tradition of the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth have too. The present-day anti-Jewish forces in Christianity are the out-and-out liberals.

7. Hitler saw more clearly than Christians mostly did that Christianity and Judaism are inextricably linked. His racial hatred of Jews spilled over to a hatred of the Jewish blight of Christianity. Christians have reason to be abashed that an enemy of God saw this before we did.

Thanks for the link. I commend to you Ian Kershaw's brilliant two-volume biography. The first volume is titled Hubris. Kershaw doesn't dwell on Hitler's spiritual beliefs, but he does give some extremely insightful views along those lines, as well as narrative concerning situations which reveal much about Hitler's (and the Nazi's) psuedo-religiosoty. The fact of the people's support for Hitler, in spite of their nominal Christianity, is explored in depth.

Kershaw attempts to answer a lot of these types of questions. His conclusions are always compelling and usually spot on.

Thanks for the info!

-The Hajman-

Very good, but I might add the following.

The Nazi's were ruthless dictators. For the German Christians to overtly oppose The Nazis meant certain death. I asked my father in-law who grew up in Germany during the war, why the German people didn't overthrow the Nazis when they realized what the Nazis really were. He said, that when an individual citizen took it upon himself to kill a Nazi in resisitance, the Nazi's would indiscriminantly start killing people in the area, including women and children. Resistance was thereby quickly and efficiently quelled.

Also the intelligentia in Germany had essentially abandoned Christianity in the 19th century. In academia, after, Freud, Darwin, Hegel, and Nietzsche, Christianity was dead. Even seminaries abandoned belief in historical Christianity. Although, the effect of this on Christianity at the time may be hard to determine, undoubtedly it resulted in a weakening of the influence Biblical Christianity had on the culture. If Christainity shares some blame for not fully resisting the Nazi's then surely the atheistic intelligensia also shares in the blame, by weakening Christianity's positive moral influence over the people, without providing an effective alternative, and by paving the way for socialism and its blind faith in the state as the solution to all problems.

Your hatred for God and His Christ are palpable - as is your rebellion against God. The fact that you direct it at Christians is just a front for that.

It is the purpose, however, to stress one point that seldom receives due emphasis. To wit, the Nazi leaders and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan, some quite explicitly. For the rest, the ancient myths celebrated in Wagner became a pillar of their doctrine of Teutonic racial superiority.

But a huge number of the ordinary Nazis, the ones who just went along with the Pogrom, and tossed the Jews into the ovens, were Christians. The ones who planned it all might have been Pagans, but all Christians were not always the good guys in history...

You left out ...Hitler's obsession with Jews as Bolsheviks and Financial puppet masters. I think those obsessions were his real fuel....the rest of the stuff was window dressing. He seemed to have acquired a strong resentment for Jews early on. Plus it's always a plus for a demonic totalitarian to have someone to blame.

The pure Aryan mythology/religion he and his minons pursued did have a fixation on any "subhuman ethnic group"...and wanted to purge them. What I have never really understood is why did the Nazi goons accelerate the genocide at precisely the moment it started to look like they weren't going to prevail. Does trying to hide the evidence explain it? or where they acting on providence for the future in a Quixotic fashion?

Whatever the reason ....pure monsters. Not the first nor the last but they do seem to draw the most attention in our era.

“The Third Reich” means third reign of the Holy Roman Empire."

Perhaps I can help out here. Reich is cognate with the English word "reach", and is generally translated as "realm." Thus Frankreich = "France", Königreich = "kingdom" (literally: "king's reach").

The 1st Reich, to give it the full German title, is das heilige Römische Reich deutscher Nation or "The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation." Both the 2nd and 3rd Reichs are simply called das deutsche Reich, or "the German Realm." The traditions of the Holy Roman Empire were borne by the Habsburg family in Austria-Hungary, which was entirely excluded from the 2nd Reich, and only partially included in the 3rd.

"Funny thing... I'm not an atheist"

You'd have a hard time proving by your posts.