Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (13 page)

Many church members wanted to believe that Hitler was on their side, and a few were actually convinced by Hitler’s deception that he supported Christianity:

Even for those within Germany known to be critical of the regime, Hitler could in a face-to-face meeting create a positive impression. He was good at attuning to the sensitivities of his conversation-partner, could be charming, and often appeared reasonable and accommodating. As always, he was a skilled dissembler. On a one-to-one basis, he could pull the wool over the eyes of hardened critics. After a three-hour meeting with him at the Berghof in early November 1936, the influential Catholic Archbishop of Münich-Freising, Cardinal Faulhaber—a man of sharp acumen, who had often courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church—went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious.
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University of British Columbia historian John Conway documented that, despite the many good-will gestures

and compliance made by the Churches in the first twelve months of Nazi rule, a basic antagonism and suspicion continued on the Nazi side, with a determination to forestall any clerical opposition by branding it as “political” and by subjecting it to police supervision or suppression. The slogan used to justify this attitude was that “politics do not belong in the church.”
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The fact that many Christians in Germany then were nominal cultural Christians who were rapidly indoctrinated into the Nazi worldview helps to

explain how the SS troops could perform monstrous acts of cruelty and yet return home for Christmas and attend church and still think of themselves as good Christians. They were not murderers, they were men who were building a race of supermen and helping the inferior people get on with their evolutionary journey.
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In 1933, Hitler gave honour to God in one address to a

distinguished assemblage and pledged his emphatic support to the maintenance of Christianity in Germany. [But the]…inaugural ceremony of the Hitler regime in a Protestant church presented the Fuehrer an unparalleled opportunity to begin a policy of studied duplicity which characterized his government’s attitude toward religion from the start. By perennially injecting affirmations of religion into his speeches, the Nazi Fuehrer was able to pose as the defender of Christianity against “godless Bolshevism,” while behind the scenes craftily planning the utter annihilation of the Christian faith.
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Although Hitler fooled many in the church, he did not hide his strong contempt for Christianity from everyone. For example, when Germany invaded Poland, around 200 executions a day occurred—all without trials—which included the “nobility, clerics, and Jews,” all of whom were eventually to be exterminated.
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Furthermore, since the inception of Nazism those Kershaw called “Nazi fanatics” had openly conducted a “campaign against the church.”
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For example, SS commandant Theodor Eicke put great pressure on SS members to “renounce their religions.”
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The infamous concordant that Hitler signed in 1933 with the Vatican ostensibly designed to guarantee the freedom of the Catholic Church was, in fact, a ruse. Not long after the signatures on the document were dry, the head of the German Catholic Action organization, Dr. Erich Klausner, was murdered by Hitler’s minions and, furthermore, to

discredit the Church, monks were brought to trial on immorality charges. In 1935 the Protestant churches were placed under state control. Protesting ministers and priests were sent to concentration camps. They had become “supervisees” on a par with the Jews and communists. Pope Pius XI, realizing the anti-Christian nature of Nazism, charged Hitler with “the threatening storm clouds of destructive religious wars…which have no other aim than…that of extermination.” But the Nazi shouts of “Kill the Jews” drowned out the warning voice of the Pope and the agonized cries of the tortured in the concentration camps.
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HITLER’S END GOAL

It was not hatred of Christianity that was Hitler’s first central concern, but rather it was the implementation of social Darwinism that was central to Hitler and his regime. He likened Jews to tuberculosis, which could infect a healthy body, and, therefore, the Jewish germ must be destroyed lest it infect others.
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Eradicating “‘Jewish-Bolshevism’ was central, not peripheral, to what had been deliberately designated by Hitler as a ‘war of annihilation.’”
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The Nazi regime’s leaders had sealed their fate with Hitler as a result of the

regime’s genocide and other untold acts of inhumanity…the regime had only its own collective suicide in an inexorably lost war to contemplate. But like a mortally wounded wild beast at bay, it fought with the ferocity and ruthlessness that came from desperation. And its Leader, losing touch ever more with reality, hoping for miracles, kept tilting at windmills—ready in Wagnerian style in the event of ultimate apocalyptic catastrophe, and in line with his undiluted social-Darwinistic beliefs, to take his people down in flames with him if it proved incapable of producing the victory he had demanded.
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Hitler saw Christians and the church as weak, and, as Lutzer noted, he viewed both

Protestants and Catholics with contempt, convinced that all Christians would betray their God when they were forced to choose between the swastika and the Cross: “Do you really believe the masses will be Christian again? Nonsense! Never again. That tale is finished. No one will listen to it again. But we can hasten matters. The parsons will dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable jobs and incomes.”
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Hitler was largely proved correct here. The failure of Christianity was not that it produced the Nazi monster, but that it did very little to stop it. The German churches’ sin was not in inspiring Hitler to commit his many crimes, but in doing very little to stop him—the same sin that the churches are often guilty of in the West today. However, fortunately, some Christians did speak out against the Nazi crimes. That the church was not
totally
silent was testified to by the great physicist Albert Einstein who said about the Confessing Church that as a

lover of freedom, when the (Nazi) revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks…. Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration [for it] because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.
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Jack Fischel, in a review of the literature, concluded that individual Catholic clergy and lay people managed to save about 800,000 Jews.
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As Nazi Germany became more aggressive in implementing its eugenics programmes, “some group protests were organized notably by church leaders…. Sterilizing and killing people considered unfit also aroused opposition, particularly from the churches.”
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Most other institutions did far
less
to oppose Hitler than the Christian churches.
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It is important to stress that in

most of the occupied countries, only the fear of widespread public revolt deterred the Nazis from launching a general onslaught against the whole body of the clergy, particularly against the upper ranks of the hierarchy. The bishops generally escaped imprisonment, but the treatment meted out to a few notable exceptions, especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, was indicative of the probable fate which awaited the [church] hierarchy when Nazi control was finally established.
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Some of the many examples of the onslaught of the Christian clergy Conway cited included:

The Czech Orthodox Bishop Gorazd was executed. Four bishops, Kozal of Wladislavia, Fulman and his suffragan Goral of Lublin, and Picquet of Clermont-Ferrand, were exiled to concentration camps in Germany. The Bishop of Plock, Nowowiejski, and his suffragan, Wetmanski, both died of their sufferings while imprisoned in Poland. The seventy-nine-year-old Bishop of the Polish Evangelical Church, Juliusz Bursche, was sent into exile in Berlin where he was held in solitary confinement until his death several months later. Other leaders of the Churches, some of whom had rashly expressed enthusiasm for Germany’s success, were placed under arrest or isolated from their clergy and parishioners.
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Opposing Hitler carried many risks, but a few brave souls did stand up and resist. During the first few years of his leadership,

Hitler extended his control over every aspect of German life…. Those few institutions that threatened to defy him, such as the Church, were rigorously controlled. “This is the last time a German court is gong to declare someone innocent whom I have declared guilty,” said Hitler, when the Protestant theologian Martin Niemoeller was acquitted of subversion.
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HITLER BEGINS HIS WAR AGAINST CHRISTIANITY

Hitler did not wait until the war ended to begin destroying Christianity. Although the resistance efforts by the clergy were sometimes exaggerated,

after the first few years of Hitler’s rule the Gestapo and the Nazi Party singled out the clergy for heavy doses of repression to guarantee their silence and their parishioners’ obedience. Thousands of clergymen, both Catholic and Protestant, endured house searches, surveillance, Gestapo interrogations, jail and prison terms, fines, and worse.
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Hitler’s killing machine murdered about a total of 6 million Jews, and over 5 million Christians, which was a major focus of Hitler’s war against religion.
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Many of the Christians murdered were Polish clergy and intellectuals, or were part of the resistance movement. This little known fact caused Jewish historian Max Dimont to declare that “the world blinded itself to the murder of Christians” by Nazi Germany.
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In Poland alone, 881 Catholic priests were annihilated.
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In addition, so many priests ended up in concentration camps that, if possible, they were often housed together to avoid converting the other inmates.

Dachau concentration camp held the largest number of Catholic priests—over 2,400—in the Nazi camp system. They came from about 24 nations, and included parish priests and prelates, monks and friars, teachers and missionaries. Over one third of the priests in Dachau alone died.
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Dachau survivor, Father Johannes Lenz, who documented the martyrdom and the physical and mental agony that Dachau inmates experienced, claimed that the Catholic Church was the only steadfast fighter against the Nazis. Christian clergy and lay persons were murdered by the thousands in Dachau, and those who survived were considered “missionaries in Hell.” This conforms to official Nazi writings, which espoused both anti-Semitic and anti-Christian ideas that “had a single purpose. Hitler’s aim was to eradicate all religious organizations within the state and to foster a return to paganism.”
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Hitler was able to act on Catholics with more aggression earlier than other Christians because, especially since 1871, Catholics had already suffered much discrimination in predominately Protestant, specifically Lutheran, Germany—as a minority they were viewed as outsiders.
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The many documents that prove the Nazis plan to “eliminate Christianity and convert its followers to an Aryan philosophy” are now on the online version of
Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion
.
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As institutional religion declined, Nazism was seen by Hitler as its rightful replacement.
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SUMMARY

It is very clear from the historical evidence that Hitler was not only
not
a Christian, even if the term was broadly defined, but was
openly opposed
to the basic Christian faith, teachings and doctrines. He, at times, represented himself as a Christian, especially early in his political career when he was fighting for his place in the political arena. Those who claim he was a Christian often quote certain words to make it appear he was a Christian, but when evaluating the beliefs of a man one must look beyond a few statements made for political gain.

Alan Bullock said it well when he wrote, the “truth is that, in matters of religion at least, Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist. ‘The dogma of Christianity,’ [Hitler] declared in one of his wartime conversations, ‘gets worn away before the advances of science.… Gradually the [Christian] myths crumble.’”
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The church did much to fight Hitler, but did far too little too late.