Consider This One Long, Multi-Part Footnote - from The Nazi Master Plan Annex 4: The Persecution of the Christian Churches

After last night's brawl, in which I gave the URL to a pdf of the OSS confidential report, The Nazi Master Plan Annex 4:  The Persecution of the Christian Churches issued as a confidential document on July 6, 1945, I decided over the next several days to type out and post some of it to prove that even with the very partial record available to the highest level of the United States Government in the closing weeks of WWII, it was clear that the Nazi regime was not motivated by any aspect of Christian religion.   Since then so much more in the way of documentation of the anti-Christian character of Nazism has come to light but even what they knew then should have kept that other post-war distortion from gaining the currency it did under the promotion of it by anti-Christian academics, Marxists and Marxist-influenced scholars, and, we now know, the Soviet intelligence operation in Europe and North America. Again, remember that today there is, by many fold, more documentation than was available to the intelligence services at that time.  I will admit that a good part of my motivation was to show the distinct similarity between Hitler's propaganda and Trump's, from whiny appeals to a sense of aggrievement to paranoid insistence on a right to violence and ruthlessness on that basis, even the phony invocation of God, such as the one trump made to the pseudo-Christian "evangelicals" the other day.

Starting from page 4 of the report, 9 of the PDF  (footnotes will be given in scientific style within the text in square brackets). 

3. The Basic National Socialist Attitude Toward Christian Churches

National socialism by its very nature was hostile to Christianity and the Christian Churches.  The purpose of the National Socialist movement was to convert the German people into a homogeneous racial group united in all its energies for prosecution of aggressive warfare.  Innumerable indications of this fact are to be found in the speeches and writing of Hitler and other responsible Nazi leaders.  The following statements by Hitler may be taken as indicative.

"Every truly national idea is in the last resort social, i.e., he who is prepared so completely to adopt the cause of his people that he really knows no higher ideal than the prosperity of this - his own people - he who has so taken to heart the meaning of our great song "Deutscheland, Deutschand uber alles" that nothing in this world stands for him higher than this Germany, people and land, land and people, he is a Socialist!"  (Speech given in Munich, July 28, 1922, translation from Adolf Hitler, My New Order, edited by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, 1941. p. 39)

"Even today we are the least loved people on earth.  A world of foes is ranged against us and the German must still today make up his mind whether he intends to be a free soldier or a white slave.  The only possible conditions under which a German State can develop at all must therefore be:  the unification of all Germans in Europe, education towards a national consciousness, and readiness to place the whole national strength without exception in the service of the nation"  (Speech given in Munich, April 10, 1923, translation from Hitler. ibid, p. 28)

"If cowards cry out:  "But we have no arms!"  that is neither here nor there!  When the whole German people knows one will and one will only - to be free - in that hour we shall have the instrument with which to win our freedom.  It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane:  if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God." (Speech given in Munich August 1. 1923, translation from Hitler, ibid, p. 65)

"The conception of pacifism translated into practice and applied to all spheres must gradually lead to the destruction of the competitive instance, to the destruction of the ambition for outstanding achievement.  I cannot say" in politics we will be pacifists, we reject the idea of the necessity for life to safeguard itself through conflict - but in economics we want to remain keenly competitive.  If I reject the idea of conflict as such, it is of no importance that for the time being that idea is still applied in some single spheres.  In the last resort political decisions are decisive and determine achievement in the single sphere."  (Speech given before the Industry Club at Dusseldorf,  January 27, 1932,  translation from Hitler, ibid, p. 101.)

"There can be no economic life unless behind the economic life there stands the determined political will of the nation ready to strike - and to strike hard."  (same speech, p. 111)

"We National Socialists once come from war, from the experience of war.  Our world ideal developed in war; how, if necessary, it will prove itself." (Speech given at the Sportpalast, Berlin, on October 10, 1939, translation from Hitler, ibid, p. 759)

Although the principled Christian Churches of Germany had long been associated with conservative ways of thought, which meant they tended to agree with the National Socialists in their authoritarianism, in their attacks on Socialism and Communism, and in their campaign against the Versailles Treaty, their doctrinal commitments could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.  Since these were fundamental elements of the National Socialist program, conflict was inevitable. 

Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation by a complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion tailored to fit the needs of National Socialist policy.  This radically anti-Christian position is most significantly presented in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century (one of the great best-sellers of National Socialist Germany and generally regarded, after Hitler's Mein Kampf, as the most authoritative statement of National Socialist ideology),  and in his To the Obscurantists of Our Time (An die Dunkelmanner unserer Zeit).  Since Rosenberg was editor in chief of the chief party newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, the Reich Leader of Ideological Training,  and the possessor of other prominent positions under the National Socialist regime. his ideas were not without official significance.  Thus in a declaration of 5 November 1934. Baldur von Schirach, German Youth Leader declared in Berlin'  "Rosenberg's way is the way of German youth." 1 [Cited in The Persecution of the Catholic Church In The Third Reich, (London, Burns Oates, 1940), p. 83]  So far as this sector of the National Socialist party is concerned, the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement. 

Considerations of expediency made it impossible, however, for the National Socialist government to adopt this radical anti-Christian policy officially.  Thus the policy actually adopted was to reduce the influence of the Christian Churches as far as possible through the use of every available means, without provoking the difficulties of a open war of extermination.  That this was an official policy can be deduced from the following record of measures actually taken for the systematic persecution of Christian churches in German and in German occupied areas.  

You can imagine I'm dying to make commentaries on the text, but I'll hold off on that.  I will point out that I doubt the idiots of the kind you'll find at Simels' home base will have any idea why the author of the document gave those quotes from Hitler in this context, they know so little about it that they'll be totally mystified even as they don't perceive the gradual development over the period the different speeches were made.  As the next section of the document proves, the exact timing of events and statements makes all the difference in the ultimate meaning of things.