On gaining power, Hitler, whilst most certainly not sharing Koch's belief, seems to have been concerned most of all about the potential power of the church in Germany – Catholic and Protestant – as an oppositional power-bloc to his ambitions rather than as a spiritual force. For some years Hitler encouraged the placement of clergy who were out and out Nazis in senior positions within the Protestant church in Germany. But by 1937 it was obvious to Hitler that the German Protestant church would never be as acquiescent as he desired, and his rhetoric – in private – grew more overtly anti-Christian. And whilst in public Hilter was still ambiguous about where he stood in his relationship t Christian God , a number of other leading Nazis were outspoken in their dislike of Christianity. Martin Bormann, who would become Hitler's secretary, Alfred Rosenberg, a leading party ideologue, and Heinrich Himmler, would all openly condemn Christianity. Members of Himmler's SS were not allowed to say they did not believe in God, but equally they were not encouraged to say they worshiped a Christian God. The preferred option was for them to proclaime that they were “gottgläubig” or “God believers” - without any need to specify the exact nature of the God they believed in.
As time when on, Hitler's true feelings about Crinstianity became ever more apparent within the Nazi elite. “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity,” wrote Goebbels in his diary on 8 April 1941. “He hates Christianity because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.” That same year, chatting to five of his cronies – including Ribbentrop and Rosenberg – Hitler said, “The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem.” Declaring that “Christianity is an invention of sick brains,' he said that “the concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination.” Instead Hitler said, he dreamt “ of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species.”
However, since Hitler knew that if he openly expressed such anti-religious views his own popularity might suffer, what he did was to mingle two justifications of his authority – a religious one and a scientific one – together. On the one hand Hitler claimed legitimacy from “Providence,” which millions of German Christians could take to be their God, but on the other he also claimed that the fundamental laws of nature supported his beliefs – hence the dual views presented in Triumph of the Will of pseudo-religious iconography and the raw animal power of healthy young Nazis...
Hitler's Charisma: Leading Millions into the Abyss
Laurence Rees
What? You think he told the truth to the German people?
Nazism was, in Hitler's view, applied science, a matter of Survival of the Fittest, something which the most conventional of science had been asserting as having the reliability of science since the 1860s. If you want to get into that again, I've got lots of notes I never used in the previous two go-rounds and it could get really, really unpleasant.
Hitler's Time Table Included Destroying Christianity As Certainly As It Did Judaism
ReplyDeleteI don't want to appear ungrateful, but it might have been nice if Hitler had let the goyim go first.
Yeah, I can imagine that as YOUR idea of niceness.
ReplyDeleteImagine how much nicer it would have been if he had believed it was wrong to kill anyone like it says in those books you loathe so much. Stalin and Mao could have gone down as the undisputed mass murderers of the modern era.