Looking around the web to see if I could find what I recalled reading of the Hitler Youth chants, I found this translation, quoted from Robert Conot's "Justice at Nuremberg"
We are the rollicking Hitler Youth,
We have no need of Christian truth
No evil old priest these ties can sever
We're Hitler's children now and ever.
As I said, change a few words...
It was from another source that I'm remembering something like that, if I come across it I will post it. The fact is that the Nazis planned on destroying the Christian Churches as one of their first acts and they began dismantling independent churches, replacing them with their phony state church which, increasingly, replaced Christian ideas and symbols with Nazi ideas and symbols. It was easier for them to do with the German protestant churches which had domestic leadership that could be pushed aside and disposed of, to be replaced by Nazi flunkies and stooges. But the complicated history of the pseudo-protestant Reich Church, the troubled Confessing Church and the sometimes quite heroic protestant resistance to the Nazis, including martyrdom and terms in concentration camps, would take books to sort out.
They had a somewhat harder time with the Catholic church and, to the point of yesterdays main post, Catholic youth organizations. The leadership of the Catholic Church were in the Vatican so there had to be a show of cooperation with the pope, though that wasn't a major hurdle for them. The clear plan was to first make it mandatory for all children to join the Hitler Youth, banning all independent children's organizations except protestant and Catholic ones, then to destroy and incorporate the protestant organizations and, despite the pathetic concordat they made with the pope, to ban Hitler Youth from belonging to Catholic youth organizations, effectively making members of Catholic youth organizations criminals.
The Nazis had a pragmatic program of eventual destruction of Christianity by replacing it with a Nazi saturated pantomime and, no doubt, a totally dereligionized thing that reminds me a bit of Auguste Comte's rather nutty, if quite more innocuous, "Religion of Humanity". Some scholars seem to think that the resistance of Christians accelerated the time schedule for that destruction, many in the Nazi hierarchy not bothering with some of the political window dressing they had practiced in the earlier years of their power grab.
It was probably in their plans for the next generation that the Nazis program of destroying religion was, actually, most explicitly expressed. And in that the parallels with the hopes of the neo-atheists couldn't be more striking. Hitler gloated to the adults who opposed him that he already had their children.
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