The Big Lie Of Christianity Being The Inspiration of Nazism Is Not Going To Stand In The Coming Decades

I would have thought it was obvious why I posted the account of the Polish Catholic farm couple and their children who were sacrificed in their attempt to save Jews from the Nazis without posting an explanation.   The accusation was made attributing the Holocaust to Christianity.   Well, while everything about Christianity is in opposition to what the Nazis did it is entirely consistent with what the Polish Christians who risked and in many cases lost their lives and even the lives of their children in an attempt to shield Jews from the Nazis who were killing them.  Since the accusation is made by an atheist who constantly makes such accusations, attributing actions which are identified as evil and not to be done in the Christian scriptures, which, by the way INCLUDED THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES, it is entirely fair and proper to note that there is nothing in atheism, materialism, or even science that identifies those actions as evil and not to be done.

Any people who profess Christianity who did what is forbidden by the books which their religion identifies as inspired if not actually the word of God were certainly not acting from their professed religion, a far more rational accusation was that they were adopting the amorality of atheism as the framing of their actions.  But the accusation which was made isn't made from an honest or rational framing, it is made to denigrate Christianity, not to understand the Holocaust and its motives.

I have noticed, perhaps in response to that accusation, one popularized by the atheist, materialist and scientist Steven "bad religion" Weinberg and his associates in evangelical atheism, there has been an effort to reexamine more closely the motives of the Nazis, which were varied but which, at the top, were quite explicitly anti-Christian.   If the Nazis hadn't lost the war and been brought down it's pretty clear that their plan, which had already evolved from the period when they gained power in 1933, ever more violently, had a tactical plan.   They didn't start murdering people immediately, they began with the destruction of those deemed biologically inferior due to disability, violating their rights, forced sterilization.   Their plans were to go for the easiest targets first and to progressively attack those who were more able to fight back and to do things gradually, including attacking Jews and even the very influential Protestant and Christian churches.   One of their strongest means of doing that was also a gradually building and progressive program of terror, attacks on property, on people which included, quite early, murder to stifle any resistance.   Catholic leaders were targeted in the early Night of the Long Knives along with possible competition even within the Nazi party.  The coming weeks, months and years brought progressively harsher laws first restricting religious activities by the Catholic and real Protestant churches, first to weaken their influence through political, social and youth groups - previously some of the strongest in Europe.  Some have likened the Nazi actions as a form of ghettoization, shutting up the Church and restricting its activities to remove it from the wider society where it couldn't resist the Nazis progressively stronger grip on power and its beginning of putting its programs of war and murder into effect.  As soon as they felt confident enough to do that the Nazis began the wholesale and open murder of people, beginning with those deemed biologically unfit about the same time they began their military conquests.  I don't think the timing of those two events was coincidental.

The gradual approach the Nazis took was necessary, in no small part, because the Christian churches could be counted on to endanger their power in the early months and years if they acted immediately to kill people.  The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, read in all Catholic churches in 1937, as the dangers of doing so were rising, contains an explanation of how the Vatican was taken in by the Nazis four years earlier and notes the progressive nature of the Nazis scheme.

When, in 1933, We consented, Venerable Brethren, to open negotiations for a concordat, which the Reich Government proposed on the basis of a scheme of several years' standing; and when, to your unanimous satisfaction, We concluded the negotiations by a solemn treaty, We were prompted by the desire, as it behooved Us, to secure for Germany the freedom of the Church's beneficent mission and the salvation of the souls in her care, as well as by the sincere wish to render the German people a service essential for its peaceful development and prosperity. Hence, despite many and grave misgivings, We then decided not to withhold Our consent for We wished to spare the Faithful of Germany, as far as it was humanly possible, the trials and difficulties they would have had to face, given the circumstances, had the negotiations fallen through. It was by acts that We wished to make it plain, Christ's interests being Our sole object, that the pacific and maternal hand of the Church would be extended to anyone who did not actually refuse it.

If, then, the tree of peace, which we planted on German soil with the purest intention, has not brought forth the fruit, which in the interest of your people, We had fondly hoped, no one in the world who has eyes to see and ears to hear will be able to lay the blame on the Church and on her Head. The experiences of these last years have fixed responsibilities and laid bare intrigues, which from the outset only aimed at a war of extermination. In the furrows, where We tried to sow the seed of a sincere peace, other men - the "enemy" of Holy Scripture - oversowed the cockle of distrust, unrest, hatred, defamation, of a determined hostility overt or veiled, fed from many sources and wielding many tools, against Christ and His Church. They, and they alone with their accomplices, silent or vociferous, are today responsible, should the storm of religious war, instead of the rainbow of peace, blacken the German skies.

The signs that the Vatican had been duped began to be manifest almost immediately because within weeks of signing the Concordat the Nazis started to destroy Catholic youth organizations by outlawing membership in them.   Propagandizing children was one of the cornerstones of the Nazis plan, one of the quickest means they saw of consolidating power by turning even the children of parents who hated the Nazis into fanatics.

The charge that the Nazis are a product of Christianity is a big lie that has been widely sold in the English speaking world by atheists, I think to some extent it was a harder sell in places where people could read the original source materials in full as opposed to the selectively translated and clipped versions of those that were contained in the things I remember reading about the Nazis in relation to Christianity in the 60s.   Now, as more things have been translated more fully into English and those are increasingly available in easily found form, online, that lie will become harder to tell.  In my experience of research over the past decade, it is not unlike the results of having the complete writings and progressively more of the letters of Charles Darwin, his children, his closest inner circle of colleagues available.  The lie of the eugenics-free Charles Darwin whose natural selection had nothing to do with Nazi eugenics was sold by the same English language academic figures during the same period.

The sins of the Christian churches and many Christians who participated in Nazism, in fascism, in other atrocities must be faced up to and learned from.  The generation who did those things in the 1930s and 40s is almost completely gone, so for us it is a matter of learning from their history and resolving never to allow that to happen again.   That is a religious obligation, it is a moral obligation to do so.  There is nothing within atheism, materialism or science which requires that kind of reflection, there is within Christianity.   Which framing could rationally be believed to be a better means of preventing that happening again, in the future?

Update:  Ah, well, you see, in 1933, when the Vatican entered into the Concordat it was dealing with the newly and LEGALLY elected government of Germany, which, by the way, had been opposed by the Catholic political parties in the election.  That it was a government that came to power with a minority vote is a warning to us all, a warning that, today, going on a century later, has not caused us to see the evil of any government being elected with less than 50% of the voters supporting it and to change laws to prevent the same happening here, is an important issue but not part of my answer.

As far as the Vatican could have known, they faced a legally elected government whose policies were inimical to Christian morality at the very least and a direct danger quite certainly.  The Nazis had said a lot about their intentions in 1933, they had lied about a lot of it and had certainly hidden most of the worst of it.  If they had not they likely would have lost the election and never come to power.

As was said by Pius XI in the encyclical quoted above (an encyclical published in German instead of the usual Latin so as to be entirely understood by the German Catholics to whom it was read) they relied on the information available to them in 1933 and were quickly shown that those hopes were badly wrong.

You can contrast something which had the great support of many of the cultural heroes of the atheist left in the post-war period, the Stalin-Hitler pact - often euphamsized as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact so as to shield Stalin from direct involvement - which was agreed to in August 1939 when there was absolutely no mistaking the intentions of the Nazis.  Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia in March, Kristallnacht had happened nine months before.  Two months later the Nazis began their mass murder program through Gnadentod "mercy death" of the disabled, their trial run for the mass murder programs,  Hitler backdating his order legalizing it to September 1.   There was nothing in the six years separating the Nazis first months in power to the time when Stalin signed his own concordat with Hitler that would have allowed the Communists who supported Stalin to disclaim knowledge of who their hero was doing business with.  Yet, as has been pretty well covered up,  many Communists, many of them cultural heroes to the "new left" of my generation, did a U-turn and suddenly went from being anti-Hitler to being anti-war.   Dalton Trumbo's book Johnny Got His Gun was serialized in the Daily Worker in 1940, something which got the bourgeois-communist, Trumbo fan letters from American Hitler lovers.

If you want to make hay over a group which made love to the Nazis well after it was apparent what they were up to, more than two years after the Vatican repented of their far earlier and foolishly optimistic attempts to avoid what was inevitable with the Nazis, you can look to that group of atheists who suddenly, under orders from Stalin, went all peace and love with the Nazis as they were engaged in military conquest and mass murder.