Religion in Nazi Germany

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This article gives an overview about religion in Nazi Germany and the Nazis' complex and sometimes contradictary relation with religion. For the role of paganism and the occult in formulating the views of Hitler and the Nazi Party, see the article religious aspects of Nazism.

Contents 1 Nazism and Christianity 2 Protestantism 3 Catholicism 3.1 Bernhard Stempfle 3.2 Church hierarchy 3.3 Christianity and Nazi Anti-Semitism 3.4 Future plans of the Nazi government 4 Other religions 4.1 Jehovah's Witnesses 4.2 Esoteric groups 5 Messianic aspects of Nazism? 5.1 Prayer to Hitler 6 See also 7 External links 8 Notes

[edit] Nazism and Christianity

Hitler and other Nazi leaders clearly made use of both Christian symbolism combined with indigenous Germanic pagan imagery mixed with ancient Roman symbolism and emotion in propaganda for the German public.

Many Nazi leaders subscribed either to a mixture of then modern scientific theories^{[citation needed]}, as Hitler himself did^{[citation needed]}, or to mysticism and occultism, which was especially strong in the SS. Central to both groupings was the belief in Germanic (white Northern-European) racial superiority. The existence of a Ministry of Church Affairs, instituted in 1935 and headed by Hanns Kerrl, was hardly recognized by ideologists such as Alfred Rosenberg or by other political decision-makers.

Despite Germany's long history as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and the birthplace of the Reformation, Christianity was in a decline during the rise of the Nazi Party. Some of the factors leading to this decline were the after effects of World War I which challenged "traditional" European viewpoints.^{[citation needed]}

Nazism claimed to adhere to Positive Christianity which attempted to replace traditional Christian beliefs with those agreeable with Nazism, which many German Christians accepted.^[1] Even in the later years of the Third Reich, many Protestant and Catholic clergy within Germany persisted in believing that Nazism was in its essence in accordance with Christian precepts.^[1] Typically those who persisted were considered a threat to Nazi ideology and marginalized or censored. For example:

Grundmann’s continuous efforts to obtain the permission for a periodical were treated in a dilatory way, and an internal note of the Propaganda Ministry gave the following reasons for this attitude:

The endeavors of this organization and its leading men such as Prof. Grundmann are well meant. But there is no interest either in assimilating (angleichen) Christian teaching in national socialism or in proving that a re-shaped (umgestaltetes) Christianity is not fundamentally Jewish (keine judische Grundhaltung aufweist).

On a specific occasion, even a more negative attitude was revealed. When several persons of the Ministry of Propaganda were invited to a meeting of the Institute in Berlin on January 15, 1942, at which Professors Grundmann and Werdermann were to lecture, a high official of the Ministry noted in pencil on the invitation: ‘If such lectures at present are considered desirable at all, they should be watched.’

^[2] In 1941, Martin Bormann, a close associate of Hitler said publicly "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable"^[3] In 1942 he also declared in a confidential memo to Gauleiters that the Christian Churches 'must absolutely and finally be broken.' Thus it is evident that he believed Nazism, based as it was on a 'scientific' world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity^[4].

When we [National Socialists] speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God. The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest

^[5]

Other members of the Hitler government, including Rosenberg, during the war formulated a thirty-point program for the "National Reich Church" which included:

• The National Reich Church claims exclusive right and control over all Churches.
• The National Church is determined to exterminate foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.
• The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible.
• The National Church will clear away from its alters all Crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of Saints.
• On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf and to the left of the altar a sword.^[6]

[edit] Protestantism

The level of ties between Nazism and the Protestant churches has been a contentious issue for decades. One difficulty is that Protestantism includes a vast number of religious bodies many of whom had little relation to each other. Added to that, Protestantism tends to allow more variation among individual congregations than Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which makes statements about "official positions" of denominations problematic. Still, many Protestant organizations or denominations were solidly opposed to Nazism, and many Protestants including Rev. Martin Niemoller(1892 – 1984) ^[7] were imprisoned. Some even died fighting it. The forms or offshoots of Protestantism that advocated pacificism, anti-nationalism, or racial equality tended to oppose in the strongest terms. Prominent Protestant, or Protestant offshoot, groups known for their efforts against Nazism include the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Confessing Church. Many of their members died in the camps or struggled fiercely against the Nazis.

Yet Lutherans voted for Hitler more than Catholics. Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination;^[8] Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism,^[9] the main aspect being Hitler's citing anti-Semitic pamphlets by Martin Luther and accusations that the Lutheran establishment supported Hitler. The small Methodist population at times was deemed foreign; this stemmed from the fact that Methodism began in England, while it did not develop in Germany until the nineteenth century with Christoph Gottlob Müller and Louis Jacoby. Because of this history they felt the urge to be "more German than the Germans" to avoid suspicion. Methodist Bishop John L. Nelsen toured the U.S. on Hitler's behalf to protect his church, but in private letters indicated that he feared or hated Nazism, and so retired to Switzerland. Methodist Bishop F. H. Otto Melle took a far more collaborationist position that included apparently sincere support for Nazism. He felt that serving the Reich was both a patriotic duty and a means of advancement. To show his gratitude, Hitler made a gift of 10,000 marks in 1939 to a Methodist congregation to purchase an organ.^[10] Outside of Germany, Melle's views were overwhelmingly rejected by most Methodists. The leader of pro-Nazi segment of Baptists was Paul Schmidt. Hitler also led to the unification of Pro-Nazi Protestants in the Protestant Reich Church which was led by Ludwig Müller. The idea of such a "national church" was possible in the history of mainstream German Protestantism, but National Churches devoted primarily to the state were generally forbidden among the Anabaptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and in Catholicism.

During the 1930s Hitler tried to nationalize Germany's churches (German Christian), with restrictions allowing only German membership. Some Protestants resisted by forming the Confessing Church. A common Nazi song replaced the words to the German carol Silent Night with the following lyrics:

Silent night! Holy night!

All is calm, and all is bright

Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight

Watches o’er Germany by day and by night

Always caring for us.

Silent night! Holy night!

All is calm, and all is bright

Adolf Hitler is Germany’s wealth

Brings us greatness, favour and health

Oh give us Germans all power!

After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 which involved elements of the Confessing Church (a Protestant organization), Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. Catholic clergy were also suppressed if they spoke out against the regime.

[edit] Catholicism

[edit] Bernhard Stempfle

A certain priest called Father Bernhard Stempfle is credited with having helped editing Mein Kampf during his imprisoned days in the state prison at Landsberg am Lech together with Hitler.^{[citation needed]} However, in 1934, after the Night of the Long Knives Stempfle was found dead in a wood near Munich, with his heart pierced and three bullets through his head. Stempfle is said to have been a member of the Hieronymites, and sources mention that the reason for his assassination was probably secret, private knowledge about Hitler. Allegations that Stempfle was the confessor of Hitler must however be firmly dismissed, as Hitler no longer received any of the sacraments after he had left the Austrian family home many years before the First World War.^[11]

[edit] Church hierarchy

The nature of the Nazi Party's relations with the Catholic Church is also complicated. Before Hitler rose to power, many Catholic priests and leaders vociferously opposed Nazism on the grounds of its incompatibility with Christian morals. Nazi Party membership was forbidden until the takeover and a policy reversal. At his trial Franz von Papen said that until 1936 the Catholic Church hoped for a Christian alignment to the beneficial aspects he said they saw in national socialism. (This statement came after Pope Pius XII ended Von Papen's appointment as Papal chamberlain and ambassador to the Holy See, but before his restoration under Pope John XXIII.) With the Church's strong view against Communism and its cooperation with Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy, some in the Church looked at the Nazi party as an ally at first.

In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemning Nazi ideology, notably the Gleichschaltung policy directed against religious influence upon education, as well as Nazi racism and antisemitism. The encyclical Humani Generis Unitas however was never published. The massive Catholic opposition to the euthanasia programs led them to be quietly ended in August 28, 1941, (according to Spielvogel pp. 257-258) but the German Catholics only at some occasions actively and openly protested Nazi anti-Semitism in any comparable way, except for several bishops and priests like bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster; this might have been due to the restrictions imposed upon the small, remaining Catholic press by the Nazi government after the 1941 debacle about euthanasia.

In Nazi Germany, all known political dissenters were imprisoned, and many German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the parson of the Berlin Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg and seminarian Karl Leisner. Hitler was never directly excommunicated by the Catholic Church and several Catholic bishops in Germany or Austria are recorded as encouraging prayers of support for "The Führer"; this despite the fact the original Reichskonkordat (1933) of Germany with the Holy See proscribed any active political participation by the priesthood.

Criticism also arose in that the Vatican pontificate headed by Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII had remained circumspect about the national-scale race hatred before 1937 (Mit brennender Sorge). In 1937, just before the publishing of the anti-Nazi encyclical, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli in Lourdes, France condemned discrimination against Jews and the alleged neopaganism of the Nazi regime. A statement by Pius XI on 8 September 1938 spoke of the "inadmissibility" of anti-semitism, but Pius XII is criticised by people like John Cornwell for being unspecific. Pius XI may have underestimated the degree that Hitler's ideas influenced the laity in light of hopes the Concordate would preserve Catholic influences amongst them. The evolution of the Vatican's understanding has faced criticism of weakness, slowness, or even culpability. On culpability this is perhaps clearest with regards to the German hierarchy as after the Concordate there was a radical reversal of the former episcopal condemnation of Nazism, according to Daniel Goldhagen and others. It is less certain in other cases. From the other extreme the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Netherlands officially and formally condemned Nazism in 1941 and therefore faced violence and deportation of its priests, along with attacks upon monasteries and Catholic hospitals. Likewise, the Polish Roman Catholic hierarchy was violently attacked by the Nazis and saw many of its clerics sent to concentration camps, a famous example of this being Father Maksymilian Kolbe. Most nations' hierarchy took a mixture of the two positions, oscillating between collaboration and active resistance.

Tangential to the more extreme of collaborationist accusations is the characterisation that Nazism actively based itself on a similar pontifical structure and corps of functionaries. For example the special clothing, ghettoization, and badges demanded of Jews were once common or even began in the Papal States. Also that the Nazis saw themselves as an effective replacement of Catholicism that would co-opt its unity and respect for hierarchy. Hence attempts were made to unite other religions, as in the earlier example of the Protestant Reich Church.

In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in the German Reich, many of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the Allgemeine SS under Himmler. However, on July 30, 1941 the Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Monastery Sacking) was put to an end by a decree of Hitler, who feared the increasing protests by the Catholic part of German population might result in passive rebellions and thereby harm the Nazi war effort at the eastern front.^[12]

The Christian Churches were amongst the first victims of Nazi war crimes in the rise to power of the Nazis, and detailed plans were made to eliminate them after power was secured.^[13]

[edit] Christianity and Nazi Anti-Semitism

According to American historian Lucy Dawidowicz, Anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity. The line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther, the author of On the Jews and Their Lies, to Hitler is "easy to draw." In her The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, she contends that Luther and Hitler were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews. Dawidowicz writes that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass, which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus. Although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism and the liberal revolution of 1848, Christian Anti-Semitism she writes is a foundation that was laid by the Roman Catholic Church and "upon which Luther built."^[14] Dawidowicz' allegations and positions are criticized and not accepted by most historians however. For example, in "Studying the Jew" Alan Steinweis notes that, "Old-fashioned antisemitism, Hitler argued, was insufficient, and would lead only to pogroms, which contribute little to a permanent solution. This is why, Hitler maintained, it was important to promote 'an antisemitism of reason,' one that acknowledged the racial basis of Jewry."^[15] Interviews with Nazis by other historians show that the Nazis thought that their views were rooted in biology, not historical prejudices. For example, "S. became a missionary for this biomedical vision... As for anti-Semitic attitudes and actions, he insisted that “the racial question... [and] resentment of the Jewish race... had nothing to do with medieval anti-Semitism...” That is, it was all a matter of scientific biology and of community."^[16]>

[edit] Future plans of the Nazi government

Historian Heinz Hürten (professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Eichstaett) argued that the Nazi party had plans for the Roman Catholic Church, according to which the Church was supposed to "eat from the hands of the government." The sequence of these plans, he states, follow this sequence: an abolition of the priestly celibacy and a nationalisation of all church property, the dissolution of monastic orders and religious congregations, and the influence of the Catholic Church upon education. Hutzen states that Hitler proposed to reduce vocations to the priesthood by forbidding seminaries from receiving applicants before their 25th birthdays, and thus had hoped that these men would marry beforehand, during the time (18 - 25 years) in which they were obliged to work in military or labour service. Also, along with this process, the Church's sacraments would be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", the non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life.^[17]

There existed some considerable differences among officials within the Nazi Party on the question of Christianity. Goebbels, is purported to have feared the creation of a third front of Catholics against their regime in Germany itself. In his diary, Goebbels wrote about the "traitors of the Black International who again stabbed our glorious government in the back by their criticism", by which Hutzen states meant the indirectly or actively resisting Catholic clergymen (who wore black cassocks).^[18]

[edit] Other religions

[edit] Jehovah's Witnesses

Main article: Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany

Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.

[edit] Esoteric groups

In the 1930 there already existed an esoteric scene in Germany and Austria. The organisations of this spectrum were suppressed, but, unlike Freemasonry in Nazi Germany, not persecuted. The only secure case in which an occultist might have been sent to a concentration camp for his beliefs is that of Friedrich Bernhard Marby. Ernst Wachler a völkisch-esoteric author and a member of the 'old' Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft died in a concentration camp, but this was because his mother had been Jewish.

Also, some Nazi leaders had an interest in esotericism. Rudolf Hess had an interest in Anthroposophy. Heinrich Himmler showed a strong interest in esoteric matters, too, although as Steigmann–Gall points out, Hitler and many of his key associates sometimes still attended Christian services of the nazified Reich Church.

The esoteric Thule Society lent support to the German Workers' Party, which was eventually transformed into the Nazi Party in 1920. Dietrich Eckart, a member of Thule,^{[citation needed]} actually coached Hitler on his public speaking skills, and while Hitler has not been shown to have been a member of Thule, he received support from the group. Hitler later on dedicated Mein Kampf to Eckart. The racist-occult doctrines of Ariosophy contributed to the atmosphere of the völkisch movement in the Weimar Republic that eventually led to rise of Nazism.

[edit] Messianic aspects of Nazism?

There has been significant literature on the potential religious aspects of Nazism. Sometimes it is even asked whether Hitler and the Nazi leadership were about to replace Christianity in Germany with a new religion in which Hitler was to be considered as the messiah. The strongest hint in this direction comes from Wilfried Daim, who, in his book on the connection between Lanz von Liebenfels and Hitler, has brought a reprint of a document on a session on "the unconditional abolishment of all religious commitments (Religionsbekenntnisse) after the final victory (Endsieg) ... with a simultaneous proclamation of Adolf Hitler as the new messiah."^[19] This session report was preserved in a private collection and could, very likely, be fake, although Daim holds towards the authenticity of the document.^[19] Connected to this is the question if Hitler personally saw himself as the messiah of the German people; see Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs. Other evidence that Hitler was occasionally compared with Jesus, or revered as a savior sent by God is a prayer recited by orphans at orphanages. It runs as follows:^[20]

[edit] Prayer to Hitler

Führer, mein Führer, von Gott mir gegeben, beschütz und erhalte noch lange mein Leben

Du hast Deutschland errettet aus tiefster Not, Dir verdank ich mein tägliches Brot

Führer, mein Führer, mein Glaube, mein Licht

Führer mein Führer, verlasse mich nicht

This translates roughly as:

Leader, my Leader, given to me by God, protect me and sustain my life for a long time

you have rescued Germany out of deepest misery, to you I owe my daily bread

Leader, my Leader, my belief, my light

Leader my Leader, do not abandon me

[edit] See also

• Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs
• Clerical fascism
• Neofascism and religion
• Positive Christianity

[edit] External links

• A review of Richard Steigmann-Gall's book on Nazism, Hitler, and Christianity.

[edit] Notes