Nazism and religion
Encyclopedia
This article gives an overview about religion
in Nazi Germany
and the Nazis' complex and shifting policy towards religion.
"The German census of May 1939 indicates that 54 percent of Germans considered themselves Protestant and 40 percent considered themselves Catholic, with only 3.5 percent claiming to be neo-pagan "believers in God," and 1.5 percent unbelievers. This census came more than six years into the Hitler era.
Christianity in Germany has, since the Protestant Reformation
, been divided into Catholicism and Protestantism. As a specific outcome of the Reformation in Germany, the large Protestant denominations are organized into Landeskirche
n (roughly: Federal Churches). The German word for denomination
is Konfession, however, this translation has been considered misleading, since it might suggest that the context of religion in Germany could be described with the common parabola of the religious marketplace, which is not the case. In Germany, "to this day religion nominally remains a state affair." For the large churches in Germany (Catholic and evangelisch) the German government collects the church tax
, which is then given to the Churches. For this reason, membership in the Catholic or Protestant (evangelische) Church is officially registered. It is important to keep this 'official aspect' in mind when turning to such questions as the religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler
or Joseph Goebbels
. Both men had ceased to attend Catholic mass or to go to Confession
long before 1933, but neither had officially left the Church and neither of them refused to pay his church taxes. For this reason, according to historian Richard Steigmann-Gall
, who admittedly argues against the consensus on the subject of Nazis and Christianity, Hitler and Goebbels can be classified as nominally Catholic; With this in mind, Steigmann-Gall concedes that "nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context."
Historians have taken a look at the numbers of people who left the church in Germany 1933-45. The option to be taken off the church rolls (Kirchenaustritt) has existed in Germany since 1873, when Otto von Bismarck
had introduced it as part of the Kulturkampf
aimed against Catholicism. For parity this was made possible for Protestants, too, and for the next 40 years it was mostly they who took advantage of it. Statistics exist since 1884 for the Protestant churches and since 1917 for the Catholic Church.
An analysis of this data for the time of the Nazi rule is available in a paper by Sven Granzow et al., published in a collection edited by Götz Aly
. Altogether more Protestants than Catholics left their church, however, overall Protestants and Catholics decided similarly. The number of Kirchenaustritte reached its "historical high" in 1939 when it peaked at 480,000. Granzow et al. see the numbers not only in relation to the Nazi policy towards the churches, (which changed drastically from 1935 onwards) but also as indicator of the trust in the Führer and the Nazi leadership. The decline in the number of people who left the church after 1942 is explained as resulting from a loss of confidence in the future of Nazi Germany
. People tended to keep their ties to the church, because they feared an uncertain future.
fascists,' fascism presupposed a post-Christian, post-religious, secular
, and immanent frame of reference." One theory is that religion and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person. Along these lines, Yale
political scientist, Juan Linz
and others have noted that secularization had created a void which could be filled by a total ideology, making totalitarianism possible, and Roger Griffin has characterized fascism as a type of anti-religious political religion
. However Richard L. Rubenstein maintains that the religious dimensions of the holocaust and Nazi fascism were decidedly unique.
in Germany, the Nazi government resumed talks with the Holy See
concerning the establishment of a concordat
. Previously, concordats, regulating the relation between the Catholic Church and the state, had been established in Bavaria
(1924), Prussia
(1929) and Baden
(1932), but talks had failed on a federal level for several reasons. This attempt achieved the signing of the Reichskonkordat
on July 20, 1933.
Like the idea of the Reichskonkordat
, the notion of a Protestant Reich Church
, which would unify the Protestant Churches, also had been considered previously. Hitler had discussed the matter as early as 1927 with Ludwig Müller, who was at that time the military chaplain of Königsberg.
The opposition of many adherents of traditional religions to Nazism is only one side of the issue. Within the Lutheran Churches in Germany, the most prominent members of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church
), Martin Niemöller
and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
, opposed Nazism. They rejected the Nazi efforts to meld volkisch principles with traditional Lutheran doctrine. They were, however, (as of 1932) in the minority within the Protestant church bodies
in Germany, compared to the Deutsche Christen (German Christians
), who supported National Socialism and cooperated with the Nazis. But in 1933, a number of Deutsche Christen left the movement after a November speech by Reinhold Krause that urged, among other things, the rejection of the Bible as Jewish superstition. However, even the "Confessing Church made frequent declarations of loyalty to Hitler".
The resistance of churches against the Nazis was the longest lasting and most bitter of any German institution. The Nazis weakened the churches' resistance from within and a significant number of the clergy, particularly Protestant, supported National Socialism, but the Nazis had not yet succeeded in taking control of the churches, evidenced by the thousands of clergy sent to concentration camps. The Catholic Church was particularly suppressed in Poland: between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. In the annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland it was even more harsh: churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Religious persecution was not confined to Poland: in Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were killed.
A number of historians maintain that the Nazis had a general covert plan, which some argue existed before the Nazis' rose to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich. To what extent a plan to subordinate the churches and limit their role in the country's life existed before the Nazi rise to power, and exactly who among the Nazi leadership supported such a move remains contested." However other historians maintain no such plan existed. Summarizing a 1945 Office of Strategic Services
report, New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey
, stated that the Nazis had a plan to "subvert and destroy German Christianity," which was to be accomplished through control and subversion of the churches and to be completed after the war. However the report stated this goal was limmited to a "sector of the National Socialist party," namely Alfred Rosenberg
and Baldur von Schirach
. Historian Roger Griffin
maintains: "There is no doubt that in the long run Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Himmler intended to eradicate Christianity just as ruthlessly as any other rival ideology, even if in the short term they had to be content to make compromises with it."
around Hitler as the Führer, the "huge congregations, banners, sacred flames, processions, a style of popular and radical preachings, prayers-and-responses, memorials and funeral marches" have been described by historian of Esotericism
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke as "essential props for the cult of race and nation, the mission of Aryan Germany and victory over her enemies." These kinds of religious aspects of Nazism
have led some scholars to consider Nazism, like communism, a kind of political religion.
Hitler's plans, for example, to erect a magnificent new capital at Berlin (Welthauptstadt Germania
), has been described as attempting to build a version of the New Jerusalem. Since Fritz Stern
's classical study The Politics of Cultural Despair, most historians have viewed the relation of Nazism and religion in this way. Some historians see the Nazi movement and Adolf Hitler as fundamentally hostile to Christianity, though not irreligious. In the first chapter of The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, historian John S. Conway
elaborates that Christian Churches in Germany had lost their appeal in the time of the Weimar Republic
, and that Hitler offered "what appeared to be a vital secular faith in place of the discredited creeds of Christianity."
However, since 2003 this view has been challenged. In his study The Holy Reich, the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall
comes to the conclusion that "Christianity, in the final analysis, did not constitute a barrier to Nazism." Furthermore, he comments on the reason why Nazism is quite often seen as the opposite of Christianity:
to support the cause of German nationalism. At the 450th anniversary of Luther's birth, which took place only a few months after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, there were celebrations conducted on a large scale both by the Protestant Churches and the Nazi Party. At a celebration at Königsberg
, Erich Koch
, at that time Gauleiter
of East Prussia, made a speech which, among other things, compared Adolf Hitler
and Martin Luther and claimed that the Nazis fought with Luther's spirit. Such a speech might be dismissed as mere propaganda, but, as Steigmann-Gall points out: "Contemporaries regarded Koch as a bona fide Christian who had attained his position [of the elected president of a provincial Church synod] through a genuine commitment to Protestantism and its institutions."
The prominent Protestant theologian Karl Barth
opposed this appropriation of Luther in the German Empire
and Nazi Germany, when he stated in 1939 that the writings of Martin Luther
were used by the Nazis to glorify the State and state absolutism:"The German people suffer under his error of the relation between law and bible, between secular and spiritual power", in which Luther divided the temporal
State from the inward focusing spiritual, thus limiting the ability of the individual or the church to question the actions of the State, which was seen as a God ordained instrument.
On February 1940, Barth accused German Lutherans specifically of separating Biblical teachings from its teachings of the State and thus legitimizing the Nazi state ideology. He was not alone with his view. A few years earlier on October 5, 1933, Pastor Wilhelm Rehm from Reutlingen declared publicly that "Hitler would not have been possible without Martin Luther", though many have also made this same statement about other influences in Hitler's rise to power. Anti-Communist historian Paul Johnson has said that "without Lenin, Hitler would not have been possible".
. The Deutsche Christen factions were united in the goal of establishing a national socialist Protestantism Deutsche Christen abolished what they considered to be Jewish traditions in Christianity, and some but not all rejected the Old Testament
altogether. They rejected academic theology
as sterile and not populist enough and were often anti-Catholic. On November 1933, A Protestant mass rally of the Deutsche Christen, which brought together a record 20,000 people, passed three resolutions:
A claim exists that Adolf Hitler converted to Protestantism and joined the German Christians, according to the National Secretary Klundt on April 25, 1933, in Königsberg, Eastern Prussia. An official confirmation or denial was not issued by the Chancellor. But Gerhard Engel
, one of Hitler's generals, reported that Hitler had told him: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so" (in an entry in Engel's diary during 1941).
, who was imprisoned in 1937, was charged with "misuse of the pulpit to vilify the State and the Party and attack the authority of the Government." The forms or offshoots of Protestantism that advocated pacificism, anti-nationalism
, or racial equality tended to oppose the Nazi state in the strongest terms. Prominent Protestant, or Protestant offshoot, groups known for their efforts against Nazism include the Jehovah's Witnesses
.
Yet Lutherans voted for Hitler in greater numbers than Catholics. Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination; Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism, 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.
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
.
After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 which involved Martin Niemöller
, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
, and other elements of the Confessing Church
(a Protestant organisation), Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. Catholic clergy were also suppressed if they spoke out against the régime. Dachau had a special "priest block." Of the 2,720 priests (among them 2,579 Catholic) held in Dachau, 1,034 did not survive the camp. The majority of these priests were Polish (1,780), of whom 868 died in Dachau.
Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anticlerical, they both understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampf
s prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, were put off while they dealt with other enemies.
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. After Hitler took over and rose to power, party membership was not forbidden anymore and the Catholic Church actively looked for opportunities to work together with the Nazi government. 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
.)
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. Pius XI's encyclical Humani Generis Unitas
was never published due to him dying before it could be issued, but the similar Summi Pontificatus
was the first encyclical released by his successor (Pius XII), in October 1939. This encyclical strongly condemned both racism and totalitarianism
, without the anti-Judaism
present in Humani Generis Unitas. The massive Catholic opposition to the euthanasia
programs led them to be quietly ended on 28 August 1941, (according to Spielvogel pp. 257–258) in contrast 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
.
In Nazi Germany, all known political dissenters were imprisoned, and some German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the pastor of Berlin's Catholic Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg
and the seminarian Karl Leisner
. 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 neopaganism
of the Nazi régime. 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 Concordat would preserve Catholic influences among 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 Concordat 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, and, the deportation of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, who were hiding in the Catholic institutions, among them the famous Saint Edith Stein
. Likewise, the Polish Roman Catholic hierarchy was violently attacked by the Nazis and saw thousands of its clerics sent to concentration camps or simply killed, 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 abbey
s 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) 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.
symbolism combined with indigenous Germanic pagan
imagery mixed with ancient Roman
symbolism and emotion in propaganda
for the German public and this worried some Protestants.
Many Nazi leaders subscribed either to a mixture of then modern scientific theories (especially Social Darwinism
), as Hitler himself did, 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.
Some Nazis promoted Positive Christianity
which attempted to replace traditional Christian beliefs with those agreeable with Nazism, which many in the German Christians
accepted. 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. Typically those who persisted were considered a threat to Nazi ideology and marginalized or censored. For example:
In 1941, Martin Bormann
, a close associate of Hitler said publicly "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable". 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 Bormann believed Nazism, based as it was on a 'scientific' world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity.
Other members of the Hitler government, including Rosenberg, during the war formulated a thirty-point program for the "National Reich Church" which included:
Some Nazi party leaders viewed Christianity and National Socialism as competing world views. (even though some Christians did not see a conflict)
From the mid 1930s, anti-Christian elements within the Nazi party became more prominent - they were restrained by Hitler. In 1937 all confessing church seminaries and teaching was banned. Dissident Protestants were forbidden to attend universities. During Hitler's dictatorship, more than 6,000 clergymen, on the charge of treasonable activity, were imprisoned or executed. The same measures were taken in the occupied territories, in French Lorraine
, the Nazis forbid religious youth movements, parish meetings, scout meetings, and church assets were taken. Church schools were closed, and teachers in religious orders were dismissed. The episcopal seminary was closed, and the SA and SS desecrated churches, religious statutes and pictures; 300 clergy were expelled from the Lorraine region, monks and nuns were deported or forced to renounce their vows.
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." 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." 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."
, 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 sacrament
s would be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", the non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life.
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 cassock
s).
Sect."
Historians argue whether Hitler was actually a Christian, as Hitler's Table Talk contains a large amount of anti-Christian rhetoric. Most determine that he was not an atheist, but also not an actual Christian. One of the groups closed down by the Nazi regime was the German Freethinkers League
. One of its chairmen was Max Sievers
, a communist who was beheaded by the Nazis in 1944 for treason.
. 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
.
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.
The esoteric Thule Society lent support to the German Workers' Party
, which was eventually transformed into the Nazi Party in 1920. Dietrich Eckart
, a remote associate of the Thule society, 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 the second volume of 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
.
. 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." This session report was preserved in a private collection. Daim holds towards the authenticity of the document. 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 orphan
s at orphanage
s. It runs as follows:
This translates roughly as:
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
in Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and the Nazis' complex and shifting policy towards religion.
"The German census of May 1939 indicates that 54 percent of Germans considered themselves Protestant and 40 percent considered themselves Catholic, with only 3.5 percent claiming to be neo-pagan "believers in God," and 1.5 percent unbelievers. This census came more than six years into the Hitler era.
Organised religion in Germany 1933-1945
| Cath. | Protest. | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1932 | 52 000 | 225 000 | 277 000 |
| 1933 | 34 000 | 57 000 | 91 000 |
| 1934 | 27 000 | 29 000 | 56 000 |
| 1935 | 34 000 | 53 000 | 87 000 |
| 1936 | 46 000 | 98 000 | 144 000 |
| 1937 | 104 000 | 338 000 | 442 000 |
| 1938 | 97 000 | 343 000 | 430 000 |
| 1939 | 95 000 | 395 000 | 480 000 |
| 1940 | 52 000 | 160 000 | 212 000 |
| 1941 | 52 000 | 195 000 | 247 000 |
| 1942 | 37 000 | 105 000 | 142 000 |
| 1943 | 12 000 | 35 000 | 49 000 |
| 1944 | 6 000 | 17 000 | 23 000 |
Christianity in Germany has, since the Protestant Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
, been divided into Catholicism and Protestantism. As a specific outcome of the Reformation in Germany, the large Protestant denominations are organized into Landeskirche
Landeskirche
In Germany and Switzerland, a Landeskirche is the church of a region. They originated as the national churches of the independent states, States of Germany or Cantons of Switzerland , that later unified to form modern Germany or modern Switzerland , respectively.-Origins in the Holy Roman...
n (roughly: Federal Churches). The German word for denomination
Religious denomination
A religious denomination is a subgroup within a religion that operates under a common name, tradition, and identity.The term describes various Christian denominations...
is Konfession, however, this translation has been considered misleading, since it might suggest that the context of religion in Germany could be described with the common parabola of the religious marketplace, which is not the case. In Germany, "to this day religion nominally remains a state affair." For the large churches in Germany (Catholic and evangelisch) the German government collects the church tax
Church tax
A church tax is a tax imposed on members of some religious congregations in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Sweden, some parts of Switzerland and several other countries.- Germany :About 70% of church revenues come from church tax...
, which is then given to the Churches. For this reason, membership in the Catholic or Protestant (evangelische) Church is officially registered. It is important to keep this 'official aspect' in mind when turning to such questions as the religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs
Adolf Hitler's religious views are a matter of dispute. Raised by a skeptic father and a Catholic mother, Adolf Hitler ceased to participate in the Sacraments after childhood. In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches he often made statements which affirmed a belief in Christianity...
or Joseph Goebbels
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...
. Both men had ceased to attend Catholic mass or to go to Confession
Confession
This article is for the religious practice of confessing one's sins.Confession is the acknowledgment of sin or wrongs...
long before 1933, but neither had officially left the Church and neither of them refused to pay his church taxes. For this reason, according to historian Richard Steigmann-Gall
Richard Steigmann-Gall
Richard Steigmann-Gall is Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, and was the Director of the Jewish Studies Program from 2004 to 2010. He received his BA in 1989 and MA in 1992 from the University of Michigan, and his PhD in 1999 from the University of Toronto...
, who admittedly argues against the consensus on the subject of Nazis and Christianity, Hitler and Goebbels can be classified as nominally Catholic; With this in mind, Steigmann-Gall concedes that "nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context."
Historians have taken a look at the numbers of people who left the church in Germany 1933-45. The option to be taken off the church rolls (Kirchenaustritt) has existed in Germany since 1873, when Otto von Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck
Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg , simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian-German statesman whose actions unified Germany, made it a major player in world affairs, and created a balance of power that kept Europe at peace after 1871.As Minister President of...
had introduced it as part of the Kulturkampf
Kulturkampf
The German term refers to German policies in relation to secularity and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. The Kulturkampf did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria...
aimed against Catholicism. For parity this was made possible for Protestants, too, and for the next 40 years it was mostly they who took advantage of it. Statistics exist since 1884 for the Protestant churches and since 1917 for the Catholic Church.
An analysis of this data for the time of the Nazi rule is available in a paper by Sven Granzow et al., published in a collection edited by Götz Aly
Götz Aly
Götz Aly is a German journalist, historian and social scientist.-Biography:After attending the German School of Journalists, Aly studied history and political science in Berlin...
. Altogether more Protestants than Catholics left their church, however, overall Protestants and Catholics decided similarly. The number of Kirchenaustritte reached its "historical high" in 1939 when it peaked at 480,000. Granzow et al. see the numbers not only in relation to the Nazi policy towards the churches, (which changed drastically from 1935 onwards) but also as indicator of the trust in the Führer and the Nazi leadership. The decline in the number of people who left the church after 1942 is explained as resulting from a loss of confidence in the future of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
. People tended to keep their ties to the church, because they feared an uncertain future.
Relation of religion to fascism
Scholar of fascism, Stanley Payne notes that fundamental to fascism was the foundation of a purely materialistic "civic religion" that would "displace preceding structures of belief and relegate supernatural religion to a secondary role, or to none at all", and that "though there were specific examples of religious or would-be 'ChristianChristian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
fascists,' fascism presupposed a post-Christian, post-religious, secular
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...
, and immanent frame of reference." One theory is that religion and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person. Along these lines, Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
political scientist, Juan Linz
Juan Linz
Juan José Linz is a Spanish sociologist and political scientist. He is Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University and an honorary member of the Scientific Council at the Juan March Institute...
and others have noted that secularization had created a void which could be filled by a total ideology, making totalitarianism possible, and Roger Griffin has characterized fascism as a type of anti-religious political religion
Political religion
The theory of political religion concerns governmental ideologies whose cultural and spiritual aspect is so strong that it takes an overwhelming hold of peoples lives that can be only considered as religious...
. However Richard L. Rubenstein maintains that the religious dimensions of the holocaust and Nazi fascism were decidedly unique.
Nazi policy towards the Churches
Soon after their takeover of powerMachtergreifung
Machtergreifung is a German word meaning "seizure of power". It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in the democratic Weimar Republic on 30 January 1933, the day Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, turning it into the Nazi German dictatorship.-Term:The...
in Germany, the Nazi government resumed talks with the Holy See
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
concerning the establishment of a concordat
Concordat
A concordat is an agreement between the Holy See of the Catholic Church and a sovereign state on religious matters. Legally, they are international treaties. They often includes both recognition and privileges for the Catholic Church in a particular country...
. Previously, concordats, regulating the relation between the Catholic Church and the state, had been established in Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
(1924), Prussia
Prussia
Prussia was a German kingdom and historic state originating out of the Duchy of Prussia and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. For centuries, the House of Hohenzollern ruled Prussia, successfully expanding its size by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army. Prussia shaped the history...
(1929) and Baden
Baden
Baden is a historical state on the east bank of the Rhine in the southwest of Germany, now the western part of the Baden-Württemberg of Germany....
(1932), but talks had failed on a federal level for several reasons. This attempt achieved the signing of the Reichskonkordat
Reichskonkordat
The Reichskonkordat is a treaty that was agreed between the Holy See and Nazi government, that guarantees the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany. It was signed on July 20, 1933 by Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on behalf of Pope Pius XI and President...
on July 20, 1933.
Like the idea of the Reichskonkordat
Reichskonkordat
The Reichskonkordat is a treaty that was agreed between the Holy See and Nazi government, that guarantees the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany. It was signed on July 20, 1933 by Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on behalf of Pope Pius XI and President...
, the notion of a Protestant Reich Church
Protestant Reich Church
The Protestant Reich Church, officially German Evangelical Church and colloquially Reichskirche, was formed in 1936 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism...
, which would unify the Protestant Churches, also had been considered previously. Hitler had discussed the matter as early as 1927 with Ludwig Müller, who was at that time the military chaplain of Königsberg.
The opposition of many adherents of traditional religions to Nazism is only one side of the issue. Within the Lutheran Churches in Germany, the most prominent members of the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church
Confessing Church
The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...
), Martin Niemöller
Martin Niemöller
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem "First they came…"....
and Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr. He was a participant in the German resistance movement against Nazism and a founding member of the Confessing Church. He was involved in plans by members of the Abwehr to assassinate Adolf Hitler...
, opposed Nazism. They rejected the Nazi efforts to meld volkisch principles with traditional Lutheran doctrine. They were, however, (as of 1932) in the minority within the Protestant church bodies
Landeskirche
In Germany and Switzerland, a Landeskirche is the church of a region. They originated as the national churches of the independent states, States of Germany or Cantons of Switzerland , that later unified to form modern Germany or modern Switzerland , respectively.-Origins in the Holy Roman...
in Germany, compared to the Deutsche Christen (German Christians
German Christians
The Deutsche Christen were a pressure group and movement within German Protestantism aligned towards the antisemitic and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles...
), who supported National Socialism and cooperated with the Nazis. But in 1933, a number of Deutsche Christen left the movement after a November speech by Reinhold Krause that urged, among other things, the rejection of the Bible as Jewish superstition. However, even the "Confessing Church made frequent declarations of loyalty to Hitler".
The resistance of churches against the Nazis was the longest lasting and most bitter of any German institution. The Nazis weakened the churches' resistance from within and a significant number of the clergy, particularly Protestant, supported National Socialism, but the Nazis had not yet succeeded in taking control of the churches, evidenced by the thousands of clergy sent to concentration camps. The Catholic Church was particularly suppressed in Poland: between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. In the annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland it was even more harsh: churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Religious persecution was not confined to Poland: in Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were killed.
A number of historians maintain that the Nazis had a general covert plan, which some argue existed before the Nazis' rose to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich. To what extent a plan to subordinate the churches and limit their role in the country's life existed before the Nazi rise to power, and exactly who among the Nazi leadership supported such a move remains contested." However other historians maintain no such plan existed. Summarizing a 1945 Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
report, New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey
Joe Sharkey
Joe Sharkey is an American author and columnist for the New York Times. His columns focus mostly on business travel, while his non-fiction books focus on criminality. Sharkey also co-authored a novel. He has been the Assistant National Editor for the Wall Street Journal, the City Editor for the...
, stated that the Nazis had a plan to "subvert and destroy German Christianity," which was to be accomplished through control and subversion of the churches and to be completed after the war. However the report stated this goal was limmited to a "sector of the National Socialist party," namely Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
and Baldur von Schirach
Baldur von Schirach
Baldur Benedikt von Schirach was a Nazi youth leader later convicted of being a war criminal. Schirach was the head of the Hitler-Jugend and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Vienna....
. Historian Roger Griffin
Roger Griffin
Roger D. Griffin is a British academic political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His recent efforts have focused on a definition and examination of fascism...
maintains: "There is no doubt that in the long run Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Himmler intended to eradicate Christianity just as ruthlessly as any other rival ideology, even if in the short term they had to be content to make compromises with it."
Religious aspects of Nazism
Several elements of Nazism were quasi-religious in nature. The cultCult of personality
A cult of personality arises when an individual uses mass media, propaganda, or other methods, to create an idealized and heroic public image, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are usually associated with dictatorships...
around Hitler as the Führer, the "huge congregations, banners, sacred flames, processions, a style of popular and radical preachings, prayers-and-responses, memorials and funeral marches" have been described by historian of Esotericism
Esotericism
Esotericism or Esoterism signifies the holding of esoteric opinions or beliefs, that is, ideas preserved or understood by a small group or those specially initiated, or of rare or unusual interest. The term derives from the Greek , a compound of : "within", thus "pertaining to the more inward",...
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke as "essential props for the cult of race and nation, the mission of Aryan Germany and victory over her enemies." These kinds of religious aspects of Nazism
Religious aspects of Nazism
Historians, political scientists and even philosophers have studied Nazism with a specific focus on its religious or semi-religious aspects.The most prominent discourse here is the debate whether Nazism would constitute a political religion, but there has also been research on the millenarianistic,...
have led some scholars to consider Nazism, like communism, a kind of political religion.
Hitler's plans, for example, to erect a magnificent new capital at Berlin (Welthauptstadt Germania
Welthauptstadt Germania
Welthauptstadt Germania refers to the projected renewal of the German capital Berlin during the Nazi period, part of Adolf Hitler's vision for the future of Germany after the planned victory in World War II...
), has been described as attempting to build a version of the New Jerusalem. Since Fritz Stern
Fritz Stern
Fritz Richard Stern is a German-born American historian of German history, Jewish history, and historiography. He is a University Professor Emeritus and a former provost at New York's Columbia University...
's classical study The Politics of Cultural Despair, most historians have viewed the relation of Nazism and religion in this way. Some historians see the Nazi movement and Adolf Hitler as fundamentally hostile to Christianity, though not irreligious. In the first chapter of The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, historian John S. Conway
John S. Conway
John S. Conway is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of British Columbia. He has specialized in the role of the German churches and the Vatican during the Third Reich, and on Christian-Jewish relations during the 20th century...
elaborates that Christian Churches in Germany had lost their appeal in the time of the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
, and that Hitler offered "what appeared to be a vital secular faith in place of the discredited creeds of Christianity."
However, since 2003 this view has been challenged. In his study The Holy Reich, the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall
Richard Steigmann-Gall
Richard Steigmann-Gall is Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, and was the Director of the Jewish Studies Program from 2004 to 2010. He received his BA in 1989 and MA in 1992 from the University of Michigan, and his PhD in 1999 from the University of Toronto...
comes to the conclusion that "Christianity, in the final analysis, did not constitute a barrier to Nazism." Furthermore, he comments on the reason why Nazism is quite often seen as the opposite of Christianity:
"What we suppose Nazism must surely have been about usually tells us as much about contemporary societies as about the past purportedly under review. The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years. ... Exploring the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation ... Nearly all Western societies retain a sense of Christian identity to this day. ... That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable."
Martin Luther
During the First and Second World War, German leaders used the writings of LutherMartin Luther (resources)
-Wittenberg edition:Nineteen volumes published between 1539-1558. Twelve volumes of German and seven volumes of Latin works.*, 1558, Wittenberg, Thomam Klug-Jena edition:...
to support the cause of German nationalism. At the 450th anniversary of Luther's birth, which took place only a few months after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, there were celebrations conducted on a large scale both by the Protestant Churches and the Nazi Party. At a celebration at Königsberg
Königsberg
Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945 as well as the northernmost and easternmost German city with 286,666 inhabitants . Due to the multicultural society in and around the city, there are several local names for it...
, Erich Koch
Erich Koch
Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazi Party in East Prussia from 1928 until 1945. Between 1941 and 1945 he was the Chief of Civil Administration of Bezirk Bialystok. During this period, he was also the Reichskommissar in Reichskommissariat Ukraine from 1941 until 1943...
, at that time Gauleiter
Gauleiter
A Gauleiter was the party leader of a regional branch of the NSDAP or the head of a Gau or of a Reichsgau.-Creation and Early Usage:...
of East Prussia, made a speech which, among other things, compared Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
and Martin Luther and claimed that the Nazis fought with Luther's spirit. Such a speech might be dismissed as mere propaganda, but, as Steigmann-Gall points out: "Contemporaries regarded Koch as a bona fide Christian who had attained his position [of the elected president of a provincial Church synod] through a genuine commitment to Protestantism and its institutions."
The prominent Protestant theologian Karl Barth
Karl Barth
Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom critics hold to be among the most important Christian thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas...
opposed this appropriation of Luther in the German Empire
German Empire
The German Empire refers to Germany during the "Second Reich" period from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.The German...
and Nazi Germany, when he stated in 1939 that the writings of Martin Luther
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
were used by the Nazis to glorify the State and state absolutism:"The German people suffer under his error of the relation between law and bible, between secular and spiritual power", in which Luther divided the temporal
State (polity)
A state is an organized political community, living under a government. States may be sovereign and may enjoy a monopoly on the legal initiation of force and are not dependent on, or subject to any other power or state. Many states are federated states which participate in a federal union...
State from the inward focusing spiritual, thus limiting the ability of the individual or the church to question the actions of the State, which was seen as a God ordained instrument.
On February 1940, Barth accused German Lutherans specifically of separating Biblical teachings from its teachings of the State and thus legitimizing the Nazi state ideology. He was not alone with his view. A few years earlier on October 5, 1933, Pastor Wilhelm Rehm from Reutlingen declared publicly that "Hitler would not have been possible without Martin Luther", though many have also made this same statement about other influences in Hitler's rise to power. Anti-Communist historian Paul Johnson has said that "without Lenin, Hitler would not have been possible".
German Christians movement
The German Christians (Deutsche Christen) constituted the strongest Protestant movement in Germany after the 1932 Church elections, with the aim of synthesising Christianity with the ideology of National Socialism. There were various groups within the German Evangelical Church including the Deutsche Christen and opposition factions that later split under the name Confessing ChurchConfessing Church
The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...
. The Deutsche Christen factions were united in the goal of establishing a national socialist Protestantism Deutsche Christen abolished what they considered to be Jewish traditions in Christianity, and some but not all rejected the Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
altogether. They rejected academic theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
as sterile and not populist enough and were often anti-Catholic. On November 1933, A Protestant mass rally of the Deutsche Christen, which brought together a record 20,000 people, passed three resolutions:
- Adolf HitlerAdolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
is the completion of the Reformation, - Baptized Jews are to be dismissed from the Church
- The Old TestamentOld TestamentThe Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
is to be excluded from Sacred Scriptures.
A claim exists that Adolf Hitler converted to Protestantism and joined the German Christians, according to the National Secretary Klundt on April 25, 1933, in Königsberg, Eastern Prussia. An official confirmation or denial was not issued by the Chancellor. But Gerhard Engel
Gerhard Engel
Gerhard Michael Engel was a highly decorated Generalleutnant in the Wehrmacht during World War II who commanded several divisions. He was also a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves...
, one of Hitler's generals, reported that Hitler had told him: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so" (in an entry in Engel's diary during 1941).
Ludwig Müller
Ludwig Müller (1883–1945), after his first meeting with Hitler, was convinced that he had a divine responsibility to promote Hitler and his ideals, and together with Hitler, he favoured a unified Reichskirche of Protestants and Catholics. This Reichskirche was to be a loose federation in the form of a council, but subordinated to the National Socialist State. Ludwig Müller headed the German Christians, which increased to about 600,000 members in the mid-1930s and won all Church elections since 1932, after dissenters were silenced by expulsion or violence. However he could not deliver on conforming all Christians to National Socialism, and Hitler's condescending attitudes toward Protestants increased: "Protestant clergy, don’t believe in anything except their well-being and office". However, the personal relation between Reichsbischof Müller and Hitler remained cordial and good to 1945, when both committed suicide. Of lasting value of Bishop Müller's efforts was the recognition of the National Socialist State of "The German Evangelical Church" as a legal entity on July 14, 1933, a law which promised a melting of State, people and Church into one body.General views
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 organisations or denominations were solidly opposed to Nazism after the nature of the movement was better understood. Rev. Martin NiemöllerMartin Niemöller
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem "First they came…"....
, who was imprisoned in 1937, was charged with "misuse of the pulpit to vilify the State and the Party and attack the authority of the Government." The forms or offshoots of Protestantism that advocated pacificism, anti-nationalism
Anti-nationalism
Anti-nationalism denotes the sentiments associated with the opposition to nationalism, arguing that it is undesirable or dangerous. Some anti-nationalists are humanitarians or humanists who pursue an idealist form of world community, and self-identify as world citizens. They reject chauvinism,...
, or racial equality tended to oppose the Nazi state in the strongest terms. Prominent Protestant, or Protestant offshoot, groups known for their efforts against Nazism include the Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The religion reports worldwide membership of over 7 million adherents involved in evangelism, convention attendance of over 12 million, and annual...
.
Yet Lutherans voted for Hitler in greater numbers than Catholics. Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination; Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism, the main aspect being Hitler's citing anti-Semitic pamphlets by Martin Luther
Martin Luther
Martin Luther was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. He strongly disputed the claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money. He confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517...
and accusations that the Lutheran establishment supported Hitler. The small Methodist population at times was deemed foreign; this stemmed from the fact that Methodism
Methodism
Methodism is a movement of Protestant Christianity represented by a number of denominations and organizations, claiming a total of approximately seventy million adherents worldwide. The movement traces its roots to John Wesley's evangelistic revival movement within Anglicanism. His younger brother...
began in England, while it did not develop in Germany until the nineteenth century with Christoph Gottlob Müller
Christoph Gottlob Müller
Christoph Gottlob Müller is generally considered to be the founder of the Wesleyan Church in Germany. He converted himself to Methodism around 1806, after he had fled to England during the Napoleonic wars.-External links:...
and Louis Jacoby. Because of this history they felt the urge to be "more German than the Germans
More German than the Germans
The assimilated Jewish community in Germany, prior to World War II, has been described as "more German than the Germans".Originally, the comment was a "common sneer aimed at people" who had "thrown off the faith of their forefathers and adopted the garb of their Fatherland"...
" 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.
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
Protestant Reich Church
The Protestant Reich Church, officially German Evangelical Church and colloquially Reichskirche, was formed in 1936 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism...
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
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The religion reports worldwide membership of over 7 million adherents involved in evangelism, convention attendance of over 12 million, and annual...
, and in Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
.
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
Confessing Church
The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...
.
After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 which involved Martin Niemöller
Martin Niemöller
Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller was a German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem "First they came…"....
, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and martyr. He was a participant in the German resistance movement against Nazism and a founding member of the Confessing Church. He was involved in plans by members of the Abwehr to assassinate Adolf Hitler...
, and other elements of the Confessing Church
Confessing Church
The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...
(a Protestant organisation), Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. Catholic clergy were also suppressed if they spoke out against the régime. Dachau had a special "priest block." Of the 2,720 priests (among them 2,579 Catholic) held in Dachau, 1,034 did not survive the camp. The majority of these priests were Polish (1,780), of whom 868 died in Dachau.
Catholicism
The attitude of the Nazi party to the Catholic Church ranged from tolerance to outright aggression in service of their covert plan to near total renunciation. Many Nazis were anti-clerical in both private and public life. The Nazi party had decidedly pagan elements. One position is that the Church and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic Weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person.Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anticlerical, they both understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampf
Kulturkampf
The German term refers to German policies in relation to secularity and the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. The Kulturkampf did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria...
s prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, were put off while they dealt with other enemies.
Church hierarchy
The nature of the Nazi Party's relations with the Catholic ChurchRoman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
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. After Hitler took over and rose to power, party membership was not forbidden anymore and the Catholic Church actively looked for opportunities to work together with the Nazi government. At his trial Franz von Papen
Franz von Papen
Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Joseph Hermann Michael Maria von Papen zu Köningen was a German nobleman, Roman Catholic monarchist politician, General Staff officer, and diplomat, who served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and as Vice-Chancellor under Adolf Hitler in 1933–1934...
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
Pope Pius XII
The Venerable Pope Pius XII , born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli , reigned as Pope, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, from 2 March 1939 until his death in 1958....
ended Von Papen's appointment as Papal chamberlain and ambassador to the Holy See
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
, but before his restoration under Pope John XXIII
Pope John XXIII
-Papal election:Following the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, Roncalli was elected Pope, to his great surprise. He had even arrived in the Vatican with a return train ticket to Venice. Many had considered Giovanni Battista Montini, Archbishop of Milan, a possible candidate, but, although archbishop...
.)
In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical
Encyclical
An encyclical was originally a circular letter sent to all the churches of a particular area in the ancient Catholic Church. At that time, the word could be used for a letter sent out by any bishop...
Mit brennender Sorge
Mit Brennender Sorge
Mit brennender Sorge is a Catholic Church encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published on 10 March 1937 . Written in German, not the usual Latin, it was read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches on one of the Church's busiest Sundays,...
condemning Nazi ideology, notably the Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung , meaning "coordination", "making the same", "bringing into line", is a Nazi term for the process by which the Nazi regime successively established a system of totalitarian control and tight coordination over all aspects of society. The historian Richard J...
policy directed against religious influence upon education, as well as Nazi racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and antisemitism. Pius XI's encyclical Humani Generis Unitas
Humani generis unitas
Humani generis unitas was a planned encyclical of Pope Pius XI before his death on February 10, 1939, which condemned antisemitism, racism and the persecution of Jews...
was never published due to him dying before it could be issued, but the similar Summi Pontificatus
Summi Pontificatus
Summi Pontificatus is an encyclical of Pope Pius XII published on October 20, 1939. The encyclical is subtitled "On the Unity of Human Society." It was the first major encyclical of Pius XII so was seen as setting "a tone" for his papacy. It critiques major errors at the time, such as ideologies...
was the first encyclical released by his successor (Pius XII), in October 1939. This encyclical strongly condemned both racism and totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
, without the anti-Judaism
Anti-Judaism
Religious antisemitism is a form of antisemitism, which is the prejudice against, or hostility toward, the Jewish people based on hostility to Judaism and to Jews as a religious group...
present in Humani Generis Unitas. The massive Catholic opposition to the euthanasia
Euthanasia
Euthanasia refers to the practice of intentionally ending a life in order to relieve pain and suffering....
programs led them to be quietly ended on 28 August 1941, (according to Spielvogel pp. 257–258) in contrast 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
Münster
Münster is an independent city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also capital of the local government region Münsterland...
.
In Nazi Germany, all known political dissenters were imprisoned, and some German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the pastor of Berlin's Catholic Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg
Bernhard Lichtenberg
Blessed Bernhard Lichtenberg was a German Roman Catholic priest and theologian, awarded the title righteous among the Nations....
and the seminarian Karl Leisner
Karl Leisner
Blessed Karl Leisner was a Roman Catholic priest interned in the Dachau concentration camp. He died of tuberculosis shortly after being liberated by the Allied forces...
. Several Catholic bishops in Germany or Austria are recorded as encouraging prayers of support for "The Führer"; this despite the fact the original Reichskonkordat
Reichskonkordat
The Reichskonkordat is a treaty that was agreed between the Holy See and Nazi government, that guarantees the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany. It was signed on July 20, 1933 by Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli and Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen on behalf of Pope Pius XI and President...
(1933) of Germany with the Holy See
Holy See
The Holy See is the episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome, in which its Bishop is commonly known as the Pope. It is the preeminent episcopal see of the Catholic Church, forming the central government of the Church. As such, diplomatically, and in other spheres the Holy See acts and...
proscribed any active political participation by the priesthood.
Criticism also arose in that the Vatican pontificate headed by Pope Pius XI
Pope Pius XI
Pope Pius XI , born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti, was Pope from 6 February 1922, and sovereign of Vatican City from its creation as an independent state on 11 February 1929 until his death on 10 February 1939...
and Pope Pius XII
Pope Pius XII
The Venerable Pope Pius XII , born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli , reigned as Pope, head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City State, from 2 March 1939 until his death in 1958....
had remained circumspect about the national-scale race hatred before 1937 (Mit brennender Sorge
Mit Brennender Sorge
Mit brennender Sorge is a Catholic Church encyclical of Pope Pius XI, published on 10 March 1937 . Written in German, not the usual Latin, it was read from the pulpits of all German Catholic churches on one of the Church's busiest Sundays,...
). In 1937, just before the publishing of the anti-Nazi encyclical, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli in Lourdes, France condemned discrimination against Jews and the neopaganism
Neopaganism
Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...
of the Nazi régime. 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
John Cornwell (writer)
John Cornwell is an English journalist and author, and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is best known for various books on the papacy, most notably Hitler's Pope; investigative journalism; memoir; and the public understanding of science and philosophy. More recently he has been concerned...
for being unspecific. Pius XI may have underestimated the degree that Hitler's ideas influenced the laity in light of hopes the Concordat would preserve Catholic influences among 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 Concordat there was a radical reversal of the former episcopal condemnation of Nazism, according to Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Goldhagen
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is an American author and former Associate Professor of Political Science and Social Studies at Harvard University. Goldhagen reached international attention and broad criticism as the author of two controversial books about the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners and...
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, and, the deportation of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, who were hiding in the Catholic institutions, among them the famous Saint Edith Stein
Edith Stein
Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, sometimes also known as Saint Edith Stein , was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and nun, regarded as a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church...
. Likewise, the Polish Roman Catholic hierarchy was violently attacked by the Nazis and saw thousands of its clerics sent to concentration camps or simply killed, 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
Papal States
The Papal State, State of the Church, or Pontifical States were among the major historical states of Italy from roughly the 6th century until the Italian peninsula was unified in 1861 by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia .The Papal States comprised territories under...
. 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
Protestant Reich Church
The Protestant Reich Church, officially German Evangelical Church and colloquially Reichskirche, was formed in 1936 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism...
.
In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries
Monastery
Monastery denotes the building, or complex of buildings, that houses a room reserved for prayer as well as the domestic quarters and workplace of monastics, whether monks or nuns, and whether living in community or alone .Monasteries may vary greatly in size – a small dwelling accommodating only...
and abbey
Abbey
An abbey is a Catholic monastery or convent, under the authority of an Abbot or an Abbess, who serves as the spiritual father or mother of the community.The term can also refer to an establishment which has long ceased to function as an abbey,...
s in the German Reich, many of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the Allgemeine SS
Allgemeine SS
The Allgemeine SS was the most numerous branch of the Schutzstaffel paramilitary forces of Nazi Germany. It was managed by the SS-Hauptamt...
under Himmler. However, on July 30, 1941 the Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Monastery) 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.
Nazi Attitudes towards Christianity
Hitler and other Nazi leaders clearly made use of both ChristianChristian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
symbolism combined with indigenous Germanic pagan
Germanic paganism
Germanic paganism refers to the theology and religious practices of the Germanic peoples of north-western Europe from the Iron Age until their Christianization during the Medieval period...
imagery mixed with ancient Roman
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
symbolism and emotion in propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
for the German public and this worried some Protestants.
Many Nazi leaders subscribed either to a mixture of then modern scientific theories (especially Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
), as Hitler himself did, 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
Hanns Kerrl
Hanns Kerrl was a German Nazi politician. His most prominent position, from July 1935, was that of Reichsminister of Church Affairs...
, was hardly recognized by ideologists such as Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
or by other political decision-makers.
Despite Germany's long history as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire
Holy Roman Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a realm that existed from 962 to 1806 in Central Europe.It was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor. Its character changed during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, when the power of the emperor gradually weakened in favour of the princes...
and the birthplace of the Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
, Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
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.
Some Nazis promoted Positive Christianity
Positive Christianity
Positive Christianity was a slogan of Nazi propaganda adopted at the NSDAP congress 1920 to express a worldview which is Christian, non-confessional, vigorously opposed to the spirit of "Jewish Materialism", and oriented to the principle of voluntary association of those with a common...
which attempted to replace traditional Christian beliefs with those agreeable with Nazism, which many in the German Christians
German Christians
The Deutsche Christen were a pressure group and movement within German Protestantism aligned towards the antisemitic and Führerprinzip ideological principles of Nazism with the goal to align German Protestantism as a whole towards those principles...
accepted. 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. 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.’
In 1941, Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann
Martin Ludwig Bormann was a prominent Nazi official. He became head of the Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler...
, a close associate of Hitler said publicly "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable". 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 Bormann believed Nazism, based as it was on a 'scientific' world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity.
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.
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 BibleBibleThe Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
. - The National Church will clear away from its altars all CrucifixCrucifixA crucifix is an independent image of Jesus on the cross with a representation of Jesus' body, referred to in English as the corpus , as distinct from a cross with no body....
es, Bibles and pictures of SaintSaintA saint is a holy person. In various religions, saints are people who are believed to have exceptional holiness.In Christian usage, "saint" refers to any believer who is "in Christ", and in whom Christ dwells, whether in heaven or in earth...
s. - On the altars there must be nothing but Mein KampfMein KampfMein Kampf is a book written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926...
and to the left of the altar a sword.
Some Nazi party leaders viewed Christianity and National Socialism as competing world views. (even though some Christians did not see a conflict)
From the mid 1930s, anti-Christian elements within the Nazi party became more prominent - they were restrained by Hitler. In 1937 all confessing church seminaries and teaching was banned. Dissident Protestants were forbidden to attend universities. During Hitler's dictatorship, more than 6,000 clergymen, on the charge of treasonable activity, were imprisoned or executed. The same measures were taken in the occupied territories, in French Lorraine
Lorraine (région)
Lorraine is one of the 27 régions of France. The administrative region has two cities of equal importance, Metz and Nancy. Metz is considered to be the official capital since that is where the regional parliament is situated...
, the Nazis forbid religious youth movements, parish meetings, scout meetings, and church assets were taken. Church schools were closed, and teachers in religious orders were dismissed. The episcopal seminary was closed, and the SA and SS desecrated churches, religious statutes and pictures; 300 clergy were expelled from the Lorraine region, monks and nuns were deported or forced to renounce their vows.
Christianity and Nazi Anti-Semitism
According to Jewish American historianHistorian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Dawidowicz
Lucy Schildkret Dawidowicz was an American historian and an author of books on modern Jewish history, in particular books on the Holocaust.-Life:...
, 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
The War Against the Jews
The War Against the Jews is a 1975 book authored by Lucy Dawidowicz. The book researches the Holocaust of the European Jewry during World War II....
, 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
Haman (Bible)
Haman is the main antagonist in the Book of Esther, who, according to Old Testament tradition, was a 5th Century BC noble and vizier of the Persian empire under King Ahasuerus, traditionally identified as Artaxerxes II...
advice to Ahasuerus
Ahasuerus
Ahasuerus is a name used several times in the Hebrew Bible, as well as related legends and Apocrypha. This name is applied in the Hebrew Scriptures to three rulers...
. Although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and the liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
revolution of 1848, Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
Anti-Semitism she writes is a foundation that was laid by the Roman Catholic Church and "upon which Luther built." 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." 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."
Plan for the Roman Catholic Church
Historian Heinz Hürten (professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Eichstaett) noted that the Nazi party had plans for the Roman Catholic ChurchRoman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
, 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
Clerical celibacy
Clerical celibacy is the discipline by which some or all members of the clergy in certain religions are required to be unmarried. Since these religions consider deliberate sexual thoughts, feelings, and behavior outside of marriage to be sinful, clerical celibacy also requires abstension from these...
and a nationalisation of all church property
Property
Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation...
, 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 sacrament
Sacrament
A sacrament is a sacred rite recognized as of particular importance and significance. There are various views on the existence and meaning of such rites.-General definitions and terms:...
s would be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", the non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life.
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 cassock
Cassock
The cassock, an item of clerical clothing, is an ankle-length robe worn by clerics of the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Anglican Church, Lutheran Church and some ministers and ordained officers of Presbyterian and Reformed churches. Ankle-length garment is the meaning of the...
s).
Other religions
In the Appendix of The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, Conway has included a document: "List of sects prohibited by the Gestapo up to December 1938." It mentions the "International Jehovah's Witness" under No.1, but also includes a so-called "Study group for Psychic Research" or even the "BahaiBahá'í Faith
The Bahá'í Faith is a monotheistic religion founded by Bahá'u'lláh in 19th-century Persia, emphasizing the spiritual unity of all humankind. There are an estimated five to six million Bahá'ís around the world in more than 200 countries and territories....
Sect."
Jehovah's Witnesses
Atheists
In Germany during the Nazi era, a 1933 decree stated that "No National Socialist may suffer detriment... on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all". However, the regime strongly opposed "godless communism", and most of Germany's atheist and largely left-wing organizations were banned the same year; some right-wing groups were tolerated by the Nazis until the mid 1930s. In a speech made later in 1933, Hitler claimed to have "undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." Hitler made a speech during negotiations for the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933, where he argued against secular schools.Historians argue whether Hitler was actually a Christian, as Hitler's Table Talk contains a large amount of anti-Christian rhetoric. Most determine that he was not an atheist, but also not an actual Christian. One of the groups closed down by the Nazi regime was the German Freethinkers League
German Freethinkers League
The German Freethinkers League was an organisation founded in 1881 by the materialist philosopher, and physician Ludwig Büchner, to oppose the power of the state churches in Germany. Its aim was to provide a public meeting-ground and forum for materialist and atheist thinkers in Germany.By 1885...
. One of its chairmen was Max Sievers
Max Sievers
Max Sievers was chairman of the German Freethinkers League, writer and active communist.-Politics:...
, a communist who was beheaded by the Nazis in 1944 for treason.
Esoteric groups
In the 1930s there already existed an esoteric scene in Germany and AustriaEsotericism in Germany and Austria
This article gives an overview of esoteric movements in Germany and Austria between 1880 and 1945, presenting Theosophy, Anthroposophy and Ariosophy, among others, against the influences of earlier European esotericism.-Knights Templar and occultism:...
. 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
Friedrich Bernhard Marby
Friedrich Bernhard Marby was a German rune occultist and Germanic revivalist. He is abest known for his revivalism and use of the Armanen runes row. He was imprisoned during the Third Reich, which may have been due to a denunciation by Karl Maria Wiligut...
.
Also, some Nazi leaders had an interest in esotericism. Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess was a prominent Nazi politician who was Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party during the 1930s and early 1940s...
had an interest in Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy, a philosophy founded by Rudolf Steiner, postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development...
. Heinrich Himmler showed a strong interest in esoteric matters.
The esoteric Thule Society lent support to the German Workers' Party
German Workers' Party
The German Workers' Party was the short-lived predecessor of the Nazi Party .-Origins:The DAP was founded in Munich in the hotel "Fürstenfelder Hof" on January 5, 1919 by Anton Drexler, a member of the occultist Thule Society. It developed out of the "Freien Arbeiterausschuss für einen guten...
, which was eventually transformed into the Nazi Party in 1920. Dietrich Eckart
Dietrich Eckart
Dietrich Eckart was a German journalist and politician, together with Adolf Hitler one of the early key members of the Nazi Party and a participant of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.-Biography:...
, a remote associate of the Thule society, actually coached Hitler on his public speaking
Public speaking
Public speaking is the process of speaking to a group of people in a structured, deliberate manner intended to inform, influence, or entertain the listeners...
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 the second volume of Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf
Mein Kampf is a book written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. It combines elements of autobiography with an exposition of Hitler's political ideology. Volume 1 of Mein Kampf was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1926...
to Eckart. The racist-occult doctrines of Ariosophy
Ariosophy
Armanism and Ariosophy are the names of ideological systems of an esoteric nature, pioneered by Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels respectively, in Austria between 1890 and 1930. The term 'Ariosophy', meaning wisdom concerning the Aryans, was first coined by Lanz von Liebenfels in 1915 and...
contributed to the atmosphere of the völkisch movement
Völkisch movement
The volkisch movement is the German interpretation of the populist movement, with a romantic focus on folklore and the "organic"...
in the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
that eventually led to rise of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
.
Messianic aspects of Nazism
There has been significant literature on the potential religious aspects of NazismReligious aspects of Nazism
Historians, political scientists and even philosophers have studied Nazism with a specific focus on its religious or semi-religious aspects.The most prominent discourse here is the debate whether Nazism would constitute a political religion, but there has also been research on the millenarianistic,...
. 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
Wilfried Daim
Wilfried Daim is an Austrian psychologist, psychotherapist, writer and art collector.Between 1940 and 1945 Daim was active in the catholic resistance in Austria...
, who, in his book on the connection between Lanz von Liebenfels
Lanz von Liebenfels
Adolf Josef Lanz aka Jörg Lanz, who called himself Lanz von Liebenfels was an Austrian publicist and journalist...
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." This session report was preserved in a private collection. Daim holds towards the authenticity of the document. Connected to this is the question if Hitler personally saw himself as the messiah of the German people
Messiah complex
A messiah complex is a state of mind in which an individual holds a belief they are, or are destined to become, a savior. The messiah complex does not appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ....
; see Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs
Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs
Adolf Hitler's religious views are a matter of dispute. Raised by a skeptic father and a Catholic mother, Adolf Hitler ceased to participate in the Sacraments after childhood. In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches he often made statements which affirmed a belief in Christianity...
. Other evidence that Hitler was occasionally compared with Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
, or revered as a savior sent by God is a prayer
Prayer
Prayer is a form of religious practice that seeks to activate a volitional rapport to a deity through deliberate practice. Prayer may be either individual or communal and take place in public or in private. It may involve the use of words or song. When language is used, prayer may take the form of...
recited by orphan
Orphan
An orphan is a child permanently bereaved of or abandoned by his or her parents. In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents is called an orphan...
s at orphanage
Orphanage
An orphanage is a residential institution devoted to the care of orphans – children whose parents are deceased or otherwise unable or unwilling to care for them...
s. It runs as follows:
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 GodGodGod is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, 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
See also
- Religion and politics
- Adolf Hitler's religious beliefsAdolf Hitler's religious beliefsAdolf Hitler's religious views are a matter of dispute. Raised by a skeptic father and a Catholic mother, Adolf Hitler ceased to participate in the Sacraments after childhood. In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches he often made statements which affirmed a belief in Christianity...
- KirchenkampfKirchenkampfKirchenkampf is a German term that translates as "struggle of the churches" or "church struggle" in English. The term is sometimes used ambiguously, and may refer to one or more of the following different church struggles:...
- Clerical fascismClerical fascismClerical fascism is an ideological construct that combines the political and economic doctrines of fascism with theology or religious tradition...
- Neofascism and religionNeofascism and religionNeo-fascism and religion refers to debates about the relationships between neo-fascism and various religions.Some scholars, using the term neo-fascism in its narrow sense, consider certain contemporary religious movements and groups to represent forms of clerical or theocratic neofascism, including...
- Positive ChristianityPositive ChristianityPositive Christianity was a slogan of Nazi propaganda adopted at the NSDAP congress 1920 to express a worldview which is Christian, non-confessional, vigorously opposed to the spirit of "Jewish Materialism", and oriented to the principle of voluntary association of those with a common...
- Nazi eugenicsNazi eugenicsNazi eugenics were Nazi Germany's racially-based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of their concerns...
- Christmas in Nazi GermanyChristmas in Nazi GermanyThe Christian festival of Christmas was celebrated in Nazi Germany, although with variations from traditional practice. It was referred to as "Julfest".-Changes during the Nazi era:...
Referred literature
- John S. Conway 1968: The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-45, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
- Sven Granzow, Bettina Müller-Sidibé, Andrea Simml 2006: Gottvertrauen und Führerglaube, in: Götz AlyGötz AlyGötz Aly is a German journalist, historian and social scientist.-Biography:After attending the German School of Journalists, Aly studied history and political science in Berlin...
(ed.): Volkes Stimme. Skepsis und Führervertrauen im Nationalsozialismus, Fischer TB , pp. 38–58.