Abstract

Not only is Rome the source and centre of Fascism, but it has been the seat of a Pope, who, as we shall show, has been an open ally of the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto axis, he has never denounced the abominable aggressions, murder and cruelties they have inflicted on mankind, and the pleas he is now making for peace and forgiveness are manifestly designed to assist the escape of these criminals, so they may presently launch a fresh assault upon all that is decent in humanity.

H G Wells, Crux Ansata (1943)  Download

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 05 November 2003; Tuesday, 31 July 2007

Nazi Leaders

Petty tyrants such as Richard Nixon, or more successful tyrants such as Hitler, have regarded themselves as exemplary Christians, an estimate their followers had no trouble accepting. Hitler’s religiosity—he was a Catholic until his death—is often glossed over, but it is critical in understanding his motivation.

Anne Nicol Gaylor

Since the second world war, there has been a convention that the Nazis were driven either by atheism or by all sorts of sinister occult fancies. Christians have been desperate to distance themselves from European fascism and Nazism. Yet “every tree is known by his own fruit,” said the Christian God (Lk 6:44), and European fascism was the fruit of Christianity. Christians were Nazis and took part in Nazi atrocities. Nazi practices pioneered by Catholics included the forced wearing of yellow markers, ghettoization, confiscation of Jewish property, and bans on intermarriage with Christians. Martin Luther’s book, On the Jews and Their Lies, deploring Jews and implying they would be better exterminated, inspired many parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in which Hitler praised Luther as a hero of the Germans.

It is impossible to publish Luther’s treatise today… without noting how similar to his proposals were the actions of the National Socialist regime in Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Chief US translator of Luther

The myth of Nazi occultism was brought to public attention in the early 1960s through The Dawn of Magic by L Pauwels and J Bergier, though it was not the first such book. As Wolfgang von Weisl observed in 1933, occultism was popular in the early 30s, but no more popular than crazy cults are today in an age of US Christian fundamentalism. The rise of spiritual fads and religious fundamentalism seem to go together as a litmus test of society’s disintegration into extremism.

Mostly, the Nazi regime was hostile to the occult, and Hitler tried to dissociate Nazism from the occultism associated with some individual Nazi leaders, who enjoyed fads like astrology and Mesmerism. Rudolf Hess parachuted into Britain attempting to end the war in 1941. His failure was a propaganda failure for the Nazis who had to paint Hess as a madman driven to treachery. The evidence they offered was his fancies for such as homeopathy and astrology. They were popular fads then, just as they are for many still, but Hess nevertheless, in his statement to the court in his trial at Nuremberg, said:

I shall some day stand before the judgement seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him. And, I know, he will judge me innocent.

It is no less than any Christian would say! And Hess’s treason was then used to crack down on the occult movement. A decree of 1937 had outlawed the Masons, Theosophists, and so on, but it was not particularly implemented. After Hess’s flight, it was! Hitler described astrologers as “riff raff”, and most Nazi leaders thought of them as superstitions that did no good for the “volk”. Police arrested occultists from spiritualists to astrologers, from faith healers to Anthroposophists, shoving them into work camps, along with Jews and communists, to make them free!

Christians were not generally included in this purge except Christian Scientists. Richard Steigmann-Gall (The Holy Reich—Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, 2003), has vigorously refuted the notion that Nazism was opposed to Christianity. Many Nazis believed their ideology was essentially Christian. Positive Christianity, as antisemitic, antiliberal, and anti-Marxist, immunized volk morality from lower influences. Earlier, Ernst Nolke (The Three Faces of Fascism, 1963) noted that, when Count Yorck von Wartenburg described fascism as including the elimination of the citizen’s “religious and moral obligations towards God”, he suited “Christian and conservative beliefs”. But Nolte thought it “hard to deny” that the churches in most European countries “encouraged fascism to a sometimes very considerable degree”. So, Wartenburg’s was another early attempt to get Christianity off the fascist hook.

Germany before the war was among the most Christian nations in the world, just like the modern US. Two-thirds of the people were Protestant, the rest mainly Catholic, while 1½ percent were unbelievers, in a 1939 census. So, most Nazis must have been Christians like the general population, and few of them could have been atheists. The truth is that Hitler was an Austrian, and Austria, like Italy, was a predominantly Catholic country. He was himself a baptized Roman Catholic, a communicant, an altar boy, was confirmed as a “soldier of Christ”, and considered entering the priesthood. He regarded himself a Catholic, and said that Christ was his saviour. In 1941, he said to General Gerhart Engel:

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

Judging from his “forgotten” library, T Ryback, (Atlantic Monthly 29:4, 2003), expressed ignorant but unwarranted surprise at Hitler’s interest in religion. Contemporaries confirm Hitler as a good Catholic Christian, as do contemporary photographs. He never left the Church, and the Church never excommunicated him, or even condemned him. Hitler biographer, John Toland, explained:

Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome… he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god… extermination could be done without a twinge of conscience… he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god.

Careful apologists like to argue that fascist leaders were not practising Christians. They are careful to add the word “practising” because they know full well that these men were mostly Christians without a doubt. Those immediately beneath Hitler were not devout or traditional Christians, but there is no firm evidence that any top Nazi was against religion. All the Nazi leaders were born, baptized, and raised Christian, mainly in authoritarian, pious households where tolerance and democratic values were not valued. Hitler’s father was a non-believer, but his mother, whom he doted on, was a pious and devout Catholic. Other Catholic Nazis included Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels. The commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, where Zyklon-B gas was first used to kill Jews, had strict Catholic parents. Hermann Goering had mixed Catholic-Protestant parentage, while Rudolf Hess, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Adolf Eichmann had Protestant backgrounds. Martin Borman, rather lower in the early Nazi hierarchy, is the only well known Nazi who was against religion, and he was against it because he thought Naziism was more Christian than Christianity, saying in 1941:

The concepts of National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable… Our National Socialist ideology is far loftier than the concepts of Christianity, which in their essential points have been taken over from Jewry.

No top Nazi leaders had a liberal or atheistic family. Himmler regularly attended Catholic services, but became increasingly obsessed with the Aryans, sending out parties to find Christian and Cathar relics like the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus. Even so, according to the head of the SD, he built the SS on Jesuit lines, especially their methods of psychological imprinting and conditioning. Hitler even called Himmler “my Ignatius Loyola”. Goering, least ideological among top Nazis, sometimes endorsed and sometimes criticized both Protestant and Catholic traditions. Goebbels turned against Catholicism and toward a reformed Aryan faith. Hitler’s appointed ruler of Yugoslavia, A Pavelic, was a Croatian Catholic, who set about murdering Slavs, the Greek Orthodox Serbs. Pope Pius received Pavelic in private audience, thereby approving his regime, and remained silent about its nature.

Mussolini and the Vatican

The religious right like to claim Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler were atheists. Italy was and still is a predominantly Catholic country, and the Italian gangsters of the US Mafia often were publicly meretricious Christians despite their distinctly un-Christ-like behaviour otherwise. It is true that Mussolini began his career showily atheistic. In a debate with a cleric in 1903, Mussolini had boldly declared God to be dead, and as proof took out his watch and gave Him five minutes to strike him dead instead. The five minutes passed with no undue consequences for Mussolini, just terrible ones for the world, thus proving that it was God who was dead!

He was trying to make the most of the rift between Church and state that had festered since reunification. Max Gallo (Mussolini’s Italy) explains to us that Italian fascism grew up in a freshly unified country in which political parties were torn by self-interest and corruption. The reason was that they were cut off from the people, largely because the Vatican, in 1871, forbade the faithful from participating in elections. The Islamic fundamentalist leaders opposed to democracy are following a path well trodden by Christians. Both Mussolini and the Church came to see that they mutually gained by ending the division.

Mussolini knew that the Catholic population of Italy would approve more of fascism if the Church were reconciled with it, and he claimed the credit [†]“The serenity of relations is a tribute to the fascist regime”. B Mussolini, My Autobiography, London, 1928 for settling the rift. In 1921, he declared fascism not anti-clerical but rather was liberal in its political outlook, being against “economic determinism”, a euphemism for socialism, and therefore planted firmly on the political right. Fascism was actually opposed to liberalism of all kinds, and soon Mussolini was citing liberal ideas as the enemy:

The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.

Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights. The essence of fascism, he believed, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people. Of course no state has a brain, so fascism in fact is the rule of the few people, the elite, who run the state.

Religious fundamentalism is religious fascism. Fascism is political fundamentalism. Both favour the in-crowd, and promote enmity to the out-crowd. “If you are not with us, you are against us.” Mussolini tried to do it by wooing the Vatican, to win over the Catholic vote:

The imperial and Latin tradition of Rome is represented today by Capitalism… Italy should provide the Vatican with material help, give it the facilities to build schools, churches, hospitals…

Cited by Max Gallo, Mussolini’s Italy.

Catholics supported the Popular Party. So Mussolini aimed to emulate S Paul in being all things to all men, though to anyone able to think, his stance was clear. With the death of Benedict XV on 22 February, 1922, monsignor Ratti, archbishop of Milan, was elected pope on 6 February. Ratti had willingly blessed the fascist banners at Duoni three months earlier, and Mussolini greeted his election with joy. Ratti had told the writer, Luca Valti:

Mussolini is a remarkable man… The future belongs to him.

Mussolini played vigorously to the new choir! He suggested that the Chamber should pay homage to the dead pope, even though, during WWI, Mussolini had declared him a coward. In a secret meeting with the Papal Secretary of State, Pietro Gasparri, Mussolini promised the pope temporal authority in Rome. Gasparri objected that the Chamber would never vote for such a measure and it was, in any case, illegal being contrary to electoral law. Mussolini replied by promising a Chamber that would comply, and a law that permitted it! Gasparri famously concluded:

If this man came to power, one could do business with him.

The Catholic Church indeed did business with Mussolini after he came to power in 1922, Pius XI preferring to establish good terms with him because a communist revolution was more of a threat to the Church. By then, Mussolini had abandoned his revolutionary atheism.

A Catholic priest, Don Sturzo, ran the Popular Party which he hoped to mould into a mass Catholic political movement—effectively a Christian Democratic party—and he was staunchly anti-fascist. The newly biblicized Mussolini responded by denigrating him as “the anti-pope” and “the instrument of Satan”, and the Popular Party as anti-Christian. Mussolini wanted to make the fascists the mass Catholic party. After the march on Rome, in June 1923, the Popular Party split, a significant faction supporting the fascists. These people plastered the walls of Rome with posters declaring “complete harmony with fascism, which honours the religious and social values that constitute the foundation of any healthy political system”. Several leading Catholics had signed it. Don Sturzo was forced to resign.

Gallo observed that “the church and fascism embarked on an adroit strategy, each seeking to get the most from the other”. At noon 11 February 1929, Cardinal Gasparri and Mussolini signed the Lateran Accords. They:

1. restored the Pope to temporal power in the Vatican City,
2. made Catholicism the sole religion of the Italian state, guaranteeing religious instruction in schools,

   Catholic doctrine is foundation and crown of public education.

   and restoring marriage to the authority of the Church.
3. compensated the Church for losses in the nineteenth century to the tune of 750 million lire in cash and a billion lire in state bonds.

Pius XI described Mussolini as “the man of Providence” who had “given God back to Italy, and Italy back to God”. Anti-fascists judged that the pope had “nailed down the lid on the coffin of Italian freedom”. Pro-fascists hailed “Il Duce” as “a prophet in word and deed” who had “raised the cross of Christ still higher before the world on its rightful throne”. Gallo says “the church took part every day in the life of fascism”. On official occasions, priests, including bishops, were seen raising their arms in the fascist salute.

Yet Mussolini made no bones about the subject position of the church in his scheme of things:

The church is not sovereign in the state. It is not even free… We have not resuscitated the temporal power of the popes. We have locked it up… The state is Catholic but it is fascist. It is fascist above all else, exclusively and essentially.

He also observed that although the Christian religion was born in Palestine, “it became Christian in Rome”. Pope Pius XI did object but not too loudly, for he was well pleased with the Lateran Accords.

In 1931, a Catholic lay society called Catholic Action apparently defied the Pope and challenged the fascists on youth activities. It quickly seems to have been obliged to confine itself to purely religious matters, but continued low level activity in the face of fascist militarization of the youth.

Church leaders were less principled. Fascists must always have a war to distract the attention of the masses[†]Need for War. See how the leaders of the US must always provoke some confrontation, which is then labelled a threat, first Communist Russia, then Islamic terrorists. Neocons call them ’myths’ to humour the ignorant electorate. They are lies to most of us., and Mussolini dreamed of an African empire. He attacked Ethiopia. The Catholic hierarchy approved. Bishops blessed the embarking troops and pulpits resounded to the announcement of the civilizing mission of conquest. Cardinal Schuster of Milan extolled it as comparable with the crusades! He prophesied that the invasion, “at the price of blood, is opening the gates of Ethiopia to the Catholic faith and Roman civilization”.

Another crusade was happening in Spain, when the fascist general Franco took his north African Moslem troops there to overthrow the democratically elected but left wing government. Mussolini helped him, as did Hitler, and Pius XI opined:

The first, the greatest, and now the general peril is certainly communism in all its forms and degrees.

S J Lee, The European Dictatorships, 1918-1945, 1987

Some might think the holding of goods in common practised by the apostles of Christ—and therefore by the poor Galilean himself—was communism in one of its forms or degrees, but apparently not for the Catholic Church, or for modern US Protestants either!

Pius XI was thought to have drawn the line at racism when Mussolini took up Hitler’s anti-Jewism, but he died, so no one can be sure, and Cardinal Pacelli became Pius XII.

The Metamorphosis of Corporal Hitler

In the First World War, Corporal Hitler had single handedly captured some French soldiers hiding in a shell hole by shouting to them that they were surrounded and ought to surrender. They did. For this act of “personal bravery” Hitler was given the Iron Cross First Class. Soon after, Private Henry Tandey, who himself won the VC, had “a wounded and battle weary” Adolf Hitler standing before his Lee Enfield, but, knowing the war was coming to an end, and being a Christian, he spared his life, for which Hitler wearily thanked him and went on his way.

For Hitler, it proved he was protected by God’s Providence for bigger things, and he said as much later. When he met PM Neville Chamberlain, trying to save Europe from war, Hitler had on his wall a picture of the incident in which Tandey had gained his VC painted by Fortunino Matania (1881-1962). In answer to Chamberlain’s comment, Hitler replied:

That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again. Providence saved me…

Hitler always thanked God or His providence for surviving the western front during the Great War, and later his safe escapes from assassination, his miraculous rise from homelessness to power, and his international influence. But soon after the Tandey incident, Hitler was diagnosed with “psychopathic hysteria”—shell shock and psychologically induced blindness. On 14 October, 1918, he was gassed in a British gas attack. He was blinded and could not stand up. Thereafter he never stopped having frightful nightmares in which he awoke utterly terrified and gibbering.

Most of the men who were saved from the poison gas were sent from the field hospital to a local military hospital to recover, but Hitler was blind and judged to be suffering from battle fatique. The fact was that Hitler’s eyes were not so badly damaged as to stop him from seeing. The Germans did not keep hysterical cases in normal military hospitals because it was bad for morale, so he was taken to the Baltic coast of Pomerania, in the town of Pasewalk. In the psychatric hospital, where Hitler was a patient for 29 days, he was treated for his depression and blindness by a psychiatrist, Dr Edmund Forster, aged about 40, who had a commendable record of treating shell shock by using the power of suggestion. He convinced the damaged men that they would get better, as long as they were determined to do it—and many did! The problem with Hitler was that he already seemed eager to get back to the front line and serve with his comrades—he had the will—but remained blind.

Dr Rudolph Binion has explained that the psychiatrist deliberately induced Hitler’s visions to make him recover. Forster spent a few weeks assessing Hitler, getting an inkling of his belief in Providence. Then he told Hitler he was indeed seriously blinded—though he knew he was not—and that his faith in Providence could be proven by the restoration of his vision. Holding candles to Hitler’s eyes in a darkened room while urging him to believe he was a man of destiny, possibly God sent, Forster told him that, if he could see them, then his destiny was assured and the Providence of God proved.

I am a simple doctor. But perhaps you yourself have the rare power, which occurs only occasionally in a thousand years, to work a miracle. Jesus did it. Mohammed. The saints… An ordinary person with such a condition would be blind for life. But for a person of particular strength and will and spiritual energy, there are no limits. You have to have a blind faith in yourself, then you will stop being blind… You know that Germany needs people who have energy and blind self confidence.

The psychiatrist to AH in Ernst Weiss, Eyewitness

Dr David Post, a forensic psychiatrist at the Louisiana state forensics hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, cites this in the Journal of Forensic Science. Weiss was a German doctor and a friend of Forster. Though purporting to be fictional, the initials of the patient, AH, are an unmistakeable clue. With Forster quietly pressing Hitler’s own faith upon him, Hitler eventually responded. He could see something, and by degrees, he saw the whole dimly lit scene. The psychiatrist’s ruse had worked. Forster had made Hitler see again.

Later, Hitler admitted that, while ill, he had had a supernatural vision in which a voice said he must get back his sight for the sake of Germany. “A miracle came to pass.” He took it that his restored sight was proof of his destiny, and grew from an uncertain, willing but unspectacular corporal, a mummy’s boy with no special qualities, into the demagogue we all know about, utterly convinced by Forster’s psychological trickery that God was on his side and he was destined to great things. Forster realised what he had done, in the ensuing years when the Nazis built up their post war power base. In 1933, Hitler took control and Forster was soon picked up by the Gestapo. Though released he was then found dead of a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide. His family denied that he ever had a pistol, and it seems likely to have been a Gestapo assassination.

Thereafter, Hitler, no less than America’s fundamentalists, thought himself guided by providence just as Bush and Blair did. It is a clear warning against a leader’s conviction that God is directly guiding, informing or even intructing him, thus generating the messianic delusion. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the noted British historian, said:

His own firm belief in his messianic mission was perhaps the most important element in the extraordinary power of his personality.

The Last Days of Hitler

He wanted to bring about the eschaton and inaugurate a new world. He spoke of his armies growing from battalions to regiments to divisions then being ready to face “the eternal Last Judgement”. Like any evangelist, he believed in the power of the spoken word, seeing himself as giving the Sermon on the Mount, literally to multitudes of people. He understood the psychology of crowds, and knew it was an error to overestimate communal intelligence.

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small but their capacity for forgetting is enormous.

Mein Kampf

The message had to be simple and memorable, then drummed into the audience, making them feel important, but only in the midst of the crowd, just like Christians in church. In his demagogic speeches to Nazi rallies, he would make stirring vows to heaven amid wild applause and thunderous cheering. Then, after a pause while it all quietened down, he would utter a solemn, “Amen”. Above all, he used the common but always effective method of setting up a sterotyped enemy, monster or danger, threatening everyone—the big lie, no less effective used by demagogic neocons, Bush and Blair today, than it was then.

What is curious is that Hitler projected Jewish myths of the messiah and their being the Chosen people on to the Germans, as the pinnacle of the Aryan race. The Germans were encouraged into the same apocalyptic beliefs about themselves that Jews had had since the Aryan Persians had taught them 2500 years before. The Master Race were the Chosen People God really meant to choose!

Hitler believed in astrology and various cults besides Christianity, and apologists always try to use these oddball ideas to hide his eschatological and messianic ones—his Christianity. The legacy of Christianity is that it promotes oddball and occult ideas from its own emphasis on the supernatural. Rauschning, the governor of Danzig, cited Hitler as saying:

Creation is not yet completed… The ultimate aim is the coming of the Sons of God. All creative forces will be concentrated in a new species…It will be infinitely superior to modern man.

The New Man is living amongst us! He is there! What more do you want? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid in his presence!

While Hitler looked forward to an apocalyptic change in the world, his image of what came after was a return to rigid feudalism—a return to society as it was under the total domination of the Church. Nationalism was a step towards it, but only had a temporary value:

The day will come when even here in Germany what is known as nationalism will practically have ceased to exist. What will takes its place will be a universal society of masters and overlords.

We do not want to do away with inequalities between men but, on the contrary, to increase them, and make them a principle protected by impenetrable barriers. What will the social order of the future be like? Comrades, I will tell you. There will be a class of overlords, and after them the rank and file of party members in hierarchical order, and then the great mass of anonymous followers, servants and workers in perpetuity, and beneath them, again all the conquered foreign races, the modern slaves. And above all these will reign a new and exalted nobility…

A Hitler, cited by Louis Pauwels

Seeing the famous passion play at Oberammergau in 1934, strengthened Hitler’s hatred of the Jews. Jews rightly fear the latest blockbuster movie by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ will arouse the same sort of religious hatred of Jews among some unstable people today. Christianity always has been a dangerous delusion. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, and repeated the sentiment in a Reichstag speech in 1938:

I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.

Even as his Third Reich collapsed about him, Hitler’s ideas just became more and more apocalyptic and messianic. Speer wrote that Hitler tried deliberately to ensure that everything perished with him. The end of his own life would be the end of the world. And Goebbels said, after the defeat of Stalingrad:

Spiritual forces will be crushed. The Hour of Judgement is at hand.

Hitler’s attitude to the Catholic Church was “remarkably positive”, though largely based on Christianity’s intrinsic hatred of the Jews. In the pamphlet Hitler’s Table Talk (US, Hitler’s Secret Conversations), Hitler picked out for particular praise the popes who had fought the “pernicious principle of equality for Jews”. Hitler openly admired Martin Luther for the same reason. Luther hated Jews whom he called ungodly wretches. He had hoped to convert the German Jews to Protestantism just as the German Catholics had hoped to make them Catholics. But the German Jews were happy to remain Jews, and once Luther realized he was getting nowhere, he turned to making openly anti-Semitic speeches, and writing inflamatory anti-Semitic pamphlets. Foremost in them is the responsibility of the Jews for the death of Christ. If his words were to stir up ill-feeling against the Jews, it was their own fault. It was because they were guilty! By their guilt, they invited their punishment:

For such ruthless wrath of God is sufficient evidence, that they [the Jews] had assuredly gone astray. Even a child can comprehend this. For one dare not regard God as so cruel that he would punish his own people so long, so terribly, so unmercifully, and in addition keep silent, comforting them neither with words nor with deeds, and fixing no time limit and no end to it. Who would have faith, hope or love for such a God?

Martin Luther

Er… Christians? Echoing the Spanish Inquisition, he had urged that they should be expelled, or otherwise Jewish houses should be pulled down, and Jews forced to live in stables. They were to be robbed of all their wealth, forced to do hard labour and not allowed to travel. Luther blamed the victim for their oppression. He continues:

They [the Jews] wish that the sword and war, distress and every misfortune may overtake us accursed Goyim. They vent their curses on us openly every Saturday in their synagogues and daily in their homes. They teach, urge and train their children from infancy to remain the bitter virulent and wrathful enemies of the Christians… They have been bloodthirsty bloodhounds and murderers of all Christendom for more than fourteen hundred years in their intentions, and would undoubtedly prefer to be such in their beds… So we are even at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children which they have shed since then (which still shines forth from their eyes and skin). We are at fault in not slaying them.

Martin Luther

Their religious books were to be taken from them, synagogues burned, and rabbis forbidden to teach, or killed, if they did:

The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.

Martin Luther

We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.

Martin Luther

The Nazi anti-Semitic ideologist, Julian Streicher, founder of the anti-Semitic Der Sturmer, urged the extermination of anyone whose father was the devil—the Jews, and then, at Nuremberg, he pleaded he had said nothing about the Jews that Martin Luther had not already said. Though Luther condemned the Catholic Church for its pretensions and corruption, he supported its history of pogroms against the Jews, but Hitler discarded Protestantism as a whole as an “ersatz Lutherism”, containing at its core “the Jewish maggot”. He celebrated Luther’s 450th birthday in 1933 on a massive scale. Hitler was actually like most modern Christians, and perhaps most Christians in general. He had no great admiration for the Christian religion itself, which he considered was embryonic Bolshevism, but he loved the authority and dominion of the Catholic Church. The allegedly atheistic Mussolini was similar in this respect, saying in a speech (1938):

The fascist state lays full claim to an ethical character. It is Catholic, but it is fascist, even above all exclusively fascist.

A report, that same year, of the inaugural mass at the Campo Dux gathering of the Mussolini youth, describes how the party secretary helped the priest at the altar. When the host was raised, fifteen thousand bayonets were simultaneously pointed at the sky. The congregation prayed for the Duce and sang fascist anthems. Here is no distinction between Catholicism and fascism. But, though a Catholic, Mussolini claimed to be anti-Christian! He favoured an authoritarian church but not an impoverished Jewish Christ.

Hitler was also a Catholic, but he too would not have a Jewish Christ. He was apparently Marcionite. Like his colleagues’, his Christ was Aryan. Hitler thought himself God’s chosen leader (Führer) for the Aryan race, and Christianity’s ultimate reformer, not its enemy. He criticized the established churches for professing Jewish origins and not being sufficiently vigorous, as Aryans should be! Yet, Hitler’s Germany established the Church. Christian prayers were mandatory in all schools. Priests often sprinkled soldiers of the Wehrmacht with holy water, and Wehrmacht soldiers wore belt buckles inscribed: “Gott mit uns” (Emmanuel! God with us). Members of the Wehrmacht swore this loyalty oath:

I swear by God this holy oath to the Führer of the German Reich and the German people, Adolf Hitler.

Members of the SS swore:

I pledge to you, Adolf Hitler, my obedience unto death, so help me God.

Hitler boasted in a 1933 speech that he had stamped out atheism:

We have… undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.

Catholic policy on contraception also suited the fascist leaders who were keen on procreating cannon fodder and colonial administrators for their plans to conquer and colonize the world. The fascist leadership demanded “tireless love” for the production of “numerous and brave” offspring.

The Basis of Fascism

The French Christian conservative, Joseph Marie de Maistre had described the French revolution as “satanic”, laying a step for the counter-Enlightenment that fascism represented. He laid another solid step up for fascism by claiming that “man is too wicked to be free”, a judgement that one would have thought any Christian would have left to God, rather than taking it upon himself to make. But Christians generally hold the delusion that God Himself has chosen to speak through them, and so all are liable to claim they are God, or at least his audible prophet. Hitler was the same.

For Mussolini, Fascism was the utter rejection of the French revolution, the explosion of the Enlightenment in to feudal Europe. The Russian revolution, with its Marxist ideology was, Mussolini thought, the child of the Enlightenment, but these were crudely held ideas, hardly formulated as any sort of ideology itself. Hitler had no ideology at all, unless Mein Kampf is flattered with this description.

At no time did National Socialism develop a consistent economic or social theory.

K D Bracher, The German Dictatorship, NY 1970

Hitler’s aim was to act first, and then, when his political projects had been completed, he meant to work out a doctrine. An ideology of fascism was only worked out in the country where the Enlightenment exploded—France. Charles Maurras was its author, and he too was utterly inconsistent. It is typical because fascism is essentially opportunistic. Like a hyena, it feeds on whatever it can find, foraging for dead meat here and there, but equips itself with powerful teeth, and so is able to consume everything it finds. Maurras saw that the French revolution was part of a continual revolution beginning with the Renaissance and stretching into modern times, where it remains active. In Hegelian terms, it came out of a series of dialectics:

• clear exposition against obscurantism
• reason against dogma
• science against revelation
• truth against lies
• technology against traditional methods
• progress against reaction
• tolerance against oppression
• democracy against despotism
• freedom against authority
• spontaneity against suppression
• independence against imperialism.

Depending on an analyst’s or author’s main focus, it has been called many things too:

• the Enlightenment
• Liberalism
• Secularization
• Industrialization
• the Scientific Revolution.

It is summed up in the popular demand for liberty, and so is perhaps best called by the generic name “Liberalism”.

Rousseau said primitive humans had been free—not only subject to no laws but with no conception of law. They behaved naturally. Progress into society has displaced that natural freedom—the institutions of the ancien régime conspired to enslave human life—and the aim of liberalism is individual freedom. The Age of Revolutions in Europe had destroyed the ancien régime, so conservatives had nothing to conserve. They had to campaign for change despite their label. They were no longer conservatives but neo-conservatives, and every Christian neo-conservative from the French revolution until the present day has stood for the restoration of the ancien régime. They want to put the clock back! It was the basis of fascism in the twentieth century and remains it. Leo Strauss, the anti-Enlightenment guru of the crypto-fascist US neoconservatives, was eager to meet Maurras in 1933.

In describing the French revolution as “radical evil” with a “satanic character”, Joseph de Maistre declared that the movement for liberty was directed against God! In pronouncing war as divine, he opposed humanity’s hatred of it to God’s love of it and divine use of it. In declaring human reason as merely “a trembling light”, he rejected human endeavour as the basis of human existence in favour of the benefits of the radiant glow of faith in God and His providence. In praising the executioner as the cement of society, he denied any possibility of a humanitarian state. Man is too wicked to be free because of original sin. Most men are destined to be slaves. That is why authority is needed. It is God sent! The aristocracy and the clergy held to God’s truth, and, in defending it with the Inquisition, they had been right. Authority rattled the manacles and lit the pyres that made great societies great.

That which our miserable country calls superstition, fanaticism, intolerance was a necessry ingredient of French greatness.

J de Maistre

Though it all sounds demented, it is all the pure logic of the Christian neo-conservative. Essential planks of fascism were being carefully set in place ready for the Christian conservative backlash—the fight to the death between Christianity and the Enlightenment—between Christianity and liberalism! De Maistre is the ideological founder of fascism. Another Frenchman, Éduard Drumont, added hatred of Jews to the simmering pot of fascism with his book, La France juive (1886). He wrote in a sentence even more true today:

In our era of universal lies, one must speak the truth.

The trouble is that the truth he thought he had discovered was that the unfathomable malaise of France was the fault of the Jews. He was already playing the scapegoating themes of fascism familiar fifty years later—creative, idealistic, justice-loving Aryans were set against the parasitic, cunning, exploiting Jews. Change the scapegoat to communists then to Moslems and the neo-conservative policies of the next fifty years are also described in essence. A Christian, Drumont supported lowly clergy against the hierarchy of the Church, identifying it with the Jews in its hypocritical practice of usury. He was to be remembered by Action Française as the founder of French National Socialism.

Action Française, the extreme right in France before WWII, and its newspaper shaped the minds of the French generation who collaborated with Nazism. Charles Maurras founded Action Française in June 1899. He was a classicist whose idealistic vision was of a French Hellenic classicism. Maurras was opposed to modernism, with its democratic emphasis on the individual, but his political philosophy were modern, in being intellectual and scientific. In Paris from 1886, he studied Auguste Comte, the French positivist philosopher, accepting his ideas about order, individualism and scientific reasoning, and adding to them the classical values of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy—hierarchy and authority. Maurras shared the authoritarian and hierarchical attitude of the Catholic Church. He was brought up a Catholic and remained one to his death, but could not accept that Chriat was a Jew. He said his view was “sufficiently heathen and Christian to merit the beautiful title of Catholic”. The Church appreciated Maurras in return and used articles from Action Française in sermons, its own propaganda to its flocks.

Maurras bragged, “I entered politics like religion”. He was an elitist like de Maistre and believed:

The souls of men have not all been drawn from the same source. The daughters of potter’s clay will not rise to the ranks of those whom the gods begat in beds of purple.

This elitism is the central distinctive feature of fascism. Maurras was a passionate monarchist and anti-democrat. These fascist ideologues considered that the “satanic” Enlightenment came from the “slaves” at the base of society, degenerates whom Nietzsche thought should be destroyed.

Action Française was effectively the French fascist party and used all of the organized brutal methods of intimidation used by fascism even before Hitler or Mussolini. It encouraged an escalation of marches, demonstrations, rioting, bombing and assassination, but Maurras ensured its survival by restricting it to incitement. Apostles of Maurras and and offshoots of Action Française were happy to turn words of incitement into the action that Action Française itself avoided. Its central support was in the army, the conservative right and the Church—the core of the ancien régime. It was one of the few allies of the “Syllabus”, the Church’s campaign against Modernism, and Pius X (1903-1914) sympathised with Action Française, even saying of Maurras, “I bless his work”. It was cynical opportunism. Pius X signed a decree against Maurras’ party but deferred its implementation claiming it was “worthy of condemnation but not condemned”! The relationship between the Catholic Church and the French fascists was, to say the least, ambiguous. Eventually the decree was applied in 1926:

Catholics are not permitted to adhere to the school of those who place the interests of parties above religion, and make religion the servants of those interests.

It must have been a pronouncement that was purely local in scope or was soon forgotten, having no apparent consequences for Mussolini’s or Hitler’s Catholic supporters. Action Française retorted that it was like a father telling his son to murder his mother. They refused and turned against the father. The Catholic Church had broken with its neo-conservative allies of its own volition, and temporarily, it was not so tainted with fascism. Many leaders of Action Française began their own fascist parties, while Maurras continued in charge of it, as unpredictable as ever, supporting Franco in Spain, but calling German and Italian fascism “the Islam of the north”. Even so, the policies he advocated all supported Hitler’s aims.

When Hitler occupied France, Maurras supported Marshal Philippe Petain as king of France, while Maurras was praised as the “most French Frenchman”. Before long he affirmed that Pius had been the saviour of France, and he was reconciled with the Church. After a lifetime of hating Germans, Maurras welcomed the defeat of France as a vindication of his ideas. The collaborationist Petain’s regime, run by men of Action Française, became the incarnation of the Maurrassian ideal regime—order, hierarchy and authority. From 1940-44, French Jews were denied their civil rights. Xavier Vallat, a Catholic member of Action Française, and the commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy government, implementing Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation, began sending French Jews to Auschwitz.

In the New Statesman, Carmen Callil suggests from the example of Maurras, that “mythologies about culture and intellect” can be deceiving. Thousands of his fellow citizens called Maurras “Le Maitre”, but he “was a child, a dangerous child of his time”. The same might prove true of the modern US Master of intellectual fascism, Leo Strauss whose philosophy is often chillingly similar to Maurras’.

Attempts were made in Britain to seek Christian support for fascism. H G Wells in his booklet, Crux Ansata, written in 1943, highlights the position Christians were openly taking vis-a-vis fascism. A Christian organisation called the United Christian Front (UCF) had been formed and explained itself in a document of that name published in 1938. The United Christian Front sought to rally Christians against bolshevism. Whether you regard bolshevism as a Christian heresy or the evil empire of Satan, those who have most fanatically sought to destroy it have always turned out to be fascists. There is an exclusion principle in totalitarianism. Ultimately, no space is big enough for more than one of them. So it is that US and Jewish neo-cons have locked antlers with their opposite numbers in Islam.

Among UCF luminaries was the leader of the British fascists, called Blackshirts, Oswald Mosley. At the onset of hostilities, Mosley was interned for obvious reasons, but, interestingly, the chairman of the United Christian Front, Captain Archibald Ramsey was interned with him! Another of its leaders, its treasurer, Sir Henry Lunn described Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain, as “a Christian gentleman”. Franco was such a Christian that he set his Moroccan soldiers, mainly Moslems, against the supporters of the properly elected republican parties of Spain, mainly Christians, and turned Spain fascist for a generation.

Also among its members were Pius XII and Charles de Gaulle. When he was in exile in Britian, de Gaulle used the Special Operations Executive (SOE), meant to conduct covert operations behind enemy lines, to have his political opponents assassinated. Naturally, no one was allowed to know this. Some history is secret. Among the aims of the UCF, Wells says, was to “drive every honest teacher of history or science out of our schools”. In its place could be put the dishonest non-history and non-science of the bible to return the world to the dark ages when serfs knew their place.

How Christians Gave Hitler Power

Typically Christian, the Christian majority of the Weimar Republic had never been happy with a secular republic. By the early 1930s, roughly two-thirds of German Christians repeatedly voted for candidates who promised to overthrow democracy. Protestants had given the Nazi party its main backing leading up to 1933, being more likely to vote for right wing parties because they had no right wing party of their own, unlike the Catholics. Evangelical youth was especially pro-Nazi. 90 percent of Protestant university theologians supported the Nazis. Protestant pastors defended Nazi murders of “traitors to the Volk” from the pulpit. Considerable numbers of individual clergymen viewed the growth of fascism with suspicion, that is true, but antifascist Protestants found themselves marginalized, and their reservations did not stop the favourable policies of church institutions themselves. Those who turned to outright criticism of fascism made their last appeals from the death cell. Hitler had a plan to unite the evangelical sects, but, though many pastors Nazified, the plan failed because the evangelists could always find incompatible differences in their Christian beliefs. It showed Hitler did not always get his own way.

The Catholic clergy were at first more opposed to Hitler, but their anti-Semitism supported him despite themselves. Of course, businesses were pro-Nazi, in general, because of their anti-communism, and churches and business had anti-communism and money as common interests. The popes of this period were both Pius. Pius XI, a clever man, was pope from 1922 until 1939. His main activity was in secret negotiations. While apparently co-operating with the socialists with whom he was negotiating in Belgium, he abandoned Italy to Mussolini. He also supported the fascist tyranny of Pilsudski in Poland, while writing erudite encyclicals on moral and political principles. These latter are what apologists now cite at their critics, the underhand “diplomacy” being forgotten. Pius XII, pope from 1939-58, as a priest, Eugenio Pacelli, was an under secretary of state in the Vatican City before being appointed a bishop and the Papal Nuncio to Bavaria in 1917. From then until 1929, he had practice in preparing Papal concordats for Germans, doing so for Bavaria and Prussia, precursors of the Nazi Concordat he negotiated in 1933.

After the War, critics pointed out that the pope had never made any move to protect the Jews persecuted by the Nazis, and had never even spoken out against it. The concern of popes was the Christian heresy of communism, not Jews or Nazis. The American Cardinal Gibbons, returning from the election of Pius XI, was asked by a US reporter what he thought of papal infallibility. He replied, smiling:

Well, he called me Jibbons.

Pius XI, issued encyclicals directed against both Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s—like Mit brennender Sorge, With Deep Anxiety (!937)—but they were mild enough not to attract attention or sour relationships between the dictators and the Catholic Church. Little of the criticism there was was directly against fascist totalitarianism. Most was hidden in more general attacks on “secularism”, and the totalitarianism meant was Bolshevism not fascism. Bolshevism was the totalitarianism that was unequivocally secular, and many of the clergy approved of fascism as a bulwark against communism—in the “historic battle of resistance to Bolshevism”.

Eventually the Catholics put Hitler in power. The devoutly Catholic Chancellor Franz von Papen, not a fascist, but right-wing, brought about Hitler’s electoral victory. Papen dissolved the Reichstag in 1932, forming a coalition between the Nazis and the Catholic Zentrum party that had become anti-democratic under the leadership of the priest, Ludwig Kaas, from 1928. Papen made Hitler Chancellor in 1933, stepping down to the vice-Chancellorship. The Catholic Church congratulated Hitler, and commanded the laity to be loyal to this regime, as it always did. Joseph McCabe points out that the Annual Register impartially notes that the Bavarian Catholics, under orders from their bishops, supported Hitler.

In the last elections of the Weimar Republic, the Catholic vote for the Nazis (NSDAP, National Socialist German Worker’s Party) increased from little to 33%. Catholics claimed 30% of the population but got only 15% of the vote so plenty were voting Nazi. Communists and socialists had 37%. It was enough to make Hitler Chancellor and he immediately called another election, in which he could use his new power to influence the result. In March 1933, the Nazis polled 44% of the vote. The Hitler-Papen cabinet needed a two-thirds parliamentary majority to pass an enabling act to give it authority independent of the German Parliament. The communist and socialist deputies, who had refused the powers Hitler wanted, were liquidated under the Emergency Decree enacted after the Reichstag fire on 28 February, which suspended any personal liberties the Chancellor chose “until further notice”. The Zentrum voted for the act en bloc, in exchange for special conditions for the churches, allowing the necessary majority to be reached. The Zentrum then dissoved itself leaving its Catholic supporters to support the Nazis. Hitler was quite positive on the concessions to the Catholic party. He saw in Christianity, he said in the Reichstag…

…the unshakeable foundation of the moral and ethical life of our people… the most important factors for the maintenance of our society.

What he must have meant, and the Christians must have agreed, was enacted two days later on 23 March 1933. It allowed Hitler to issue laws without consulting the Reichstag! The Weimar Republic was destroyed, and much of western Europe was to follow in the next 12 years.

The Protestants welcomed the Nazi regime too. The leadership of the Protestants had seen Weimar as ungodly and un-German, and Hitler immediately merged the 28 Protestant regional churches under a single head of a new Reich’s Church. The Reich’s Church was soon after given its own ministry of Church Affairs. A new sect called the German Christians also formed, having no trouble in finding scriptural justification for Nazi policies and practices. People called it the “SA of Jesus Christ”, the SA being the “sturmabteilung”, the thuggish brownshirts. Pastor Niemuller tried to organize an opposition, and was jailed for his trouble.

It took the Concordat of 1933, negotiated by Pacelli, between Nazi Germany and the Vatican to secure Hitler’s position. Negotiations were initiated by both sides, modelled on the 1929 concordat between Mussolini and the Vatican. In Italy, Giovanni Gentile had handed over the primary schools to the Catholic Church, and the deed was confirmed in the Lateran treaties. Plainly, the Italian fascists saw no obstacle to their aims in making the schools Catholic, and cannot have had any intention of “de-ecclesiasticization”, to use Nolte’s word. Equally the Catholic Church was happy to ride along with a fascism that treated it favourably.

Vatican policy toward Hitler was to work together in a similar way. Hitler put every effort into the 1933 project, impressing the Holy See with his own Christianity and his growing national and international influence. The church secured freedom of worship, denominational schools and the right to issue pastoral letters. The Church agreed to leave politics to the Nazis. The future Pius XII worked incessantly to finalize a treaty that negotiated away the Catholic Zentrum party in favour of the Nazis.

Pius XII, when we strip him down to reality, showed himself as unreal and ignorant as Hitler. Possibly more so. Both have been incoherent and headlong men, whom chance has made figure-heads for the undisciplined foolisnness of this dying age. The mere fact that a man by accident and misdirection can trail a vast trace of bloodshed and bitter suffering about the world does not make him any the greater or wiser.

H G Wells, Crux Ansata

The Latin Pact and the Reich Concordat illustrated the attitude of the Curia. The Holy See treated Zentrum as it had the Italian Catholic party which it negotiated away in the Concordat with Mussolini. Meanwhile Catholic Nazis set up the Cross and Eagle League and the Working Group of Catholic Germans to link Catholics and Nazis directly. Hitler was so confident that he had the Church in his hands that he promulgated his sterilization decree before the Concordat was even agreed. Forced sterilization of minorities and the mentally ill was nominally against Catholic teaching, but Hitler knew the Holy See was so keen on the Concordat it would not notice. With most German Catholics behind the Nazi party, Hitler was also confident enough to use violence against dissident Catholics, disrupting their rallies.

The church supported the new dictatorship by endorsing the end of democracy and free speech, binding its bishops to Hitler’s Reich by a loyalty oath. Professor Friedrich Heer, God’s First Love, observed that the Catholic press “worked smoothly in the service of the war propaganda machine”. In exchange, the Church gained enormous tax income, instatement of Catholic assemblies in schools, and criticism of the church was forbidden. Rome held a celebratory mass amid great pomp and circumstance. Catholic enthusiasm was so vaunted that Hitler had to defend himself to Protestant clerics and Nazi radicals who viewed this sudden friendship with Rome as a betrayal. Catholics adjusted to the dictatorship, indeed they flocked to the Nazi party.

Catholic apologists have had to fight a long battle over the scandals that have constantly emerged about Pacelli. He has been heavily criticised for his indifference to the Nazi murdering of Jews, and because, after the war, he ordered that Jewish children handed over by their parents to the Church for safeguarding should not be returned if they had been baptised. Needless to say, Catholics claim the documentary source of this information is false.

Hitler, during the war, even wanted to protect Pius XII! General Karl Wolff testified at the Nuremberg trials that Hitler had said, as early as 1943, he wanted to protect the pope from falling into the hands of the allies. If the allies threatened Rome, he would transfer the pope and the Curia into a safer place to stop the allies from securing the pope and the papal archives to use for political advantage. Catholics have recently re-presented the story in Avvenire, a Catholic Italian newspaper, as a Nazi plot in 1944 to kidnap the pope and abolish Christianity!

The Concordat bound all devout German Catholics to the state—the clergy through the oath and income, the laity through the authority of the church—but they had no open legal right to complain if the Nazis welched on the agreement. It offered no protection to Catholics as apologists have claimed, and Protestants, with no such protection, were treated no worse than the Catholics.

Opposition was rare among Protestants too, just as they were identical in outlook in the disgusting centuries of witch hunting that seem to have come closer yet again, and Germany’s Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, equally accommodating, were no better than the Catholics. Professor Robert P Erickson, Theologians Under Hitler says leading Protestants thanked God for Adolf Hitler. They were not extremists but…

…saw themselves and were seen by others as genuine Christians acting upon genuine Christian impulses… each supported Hitler openly, enthusiastically, and with little restraint…

They saw:

God’s hand in the elevation of Hitler to power.

Hitler was:

a gift and miracle of God… We Christians know ourselves bound by God’s will to the promotion of National Socialism.

Nazism was “a call of God”, and agreement with state and Führer was obedience to the law of God. The churches banned non-Aryans from baptism. Only the Confessing Church was opposed to it:

The Confessional Church of Prussia was the only Christian body in the twelve-year history of the Third Reich to protest publicly against the unspeakable outrages inflicted upon the Jews.

Richard Grunberger

Apologists portray a handful of Christians, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, as heroes and martyrs of the “Church Struggle”, as fearless fighters against the Nazis. It was no anti-Nazi struggle, but simply a squabble between different Protestant denominations. The Confessing Church, of which Bonhoeffer was a member, would not criticize Nazi measures taken by the state:

The Confessing Church did not seek to espouse the cause of the Jews as a whole, nor to criticize the secular legislation directed against the German Jews and the Nazi racial philosophy.

Professor John S Conway

For the mainstream Protestant church and even within most of the Confessing Church, the question of church advocacy on behalf of non-Christians Jews did not even arise.

Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler

Niemöller began as a Nazi supporter, and his famous poem, in the version[†]Versions. The different versions arose partly because Niemöller used different versions in different addresses he gave after the War, depending on the audience, and partly because others have done the same in citing it. In the US, in particular, the stanza about the communists was often omitted after the fifties when McCarthyism was rife! Then, a final stanza about Catholics was added, though most Catholics had supported Hitler. favoured by the author before his death shows the dangers of passive acceptance for dubious motives:

They came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

Then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

Then they came for me…
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

This was the order in which the concentration camps were filled by Nazi victims, with Gypsies and homosexuals, also incarcerated in large numbers, omitted all together. Even Bonhoeffer blamed the Jews not the Nazis who were merely carrying out God’s plan!

The church of Christ has never lost sight of the thought that the “chosen people”, who nailed the redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the curse for its action through a long history of suffering.

Note how ministers can claim everything happens according to God’s will:

The decrees of God are that God foreordains whatever comes to pass. Predestination is not a humanly contrived dogma. It is derived from the word of God.

Reverend Richard C Halverson, Chaplain of the US Senate

According to these Christians, God has a plan for everything in the world. If everything is prophesied in the Holy Book, what then happened to human free will? Every individual person is not free at all because God has a plan for every one of them from conception to the afterlife of bliss or perennial torture. It is another contradiction that Christians cannot see or ignore, but, if it is accepted, then the problem of evil is solved—it is God’s plan to have evil in the world, and anything human beings try to do against it is defying God:

I form light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create evil. I Yehouah do all these.

Isaiah 45:7

Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the Yehouah hath not done it?

Amos 3:6

People like Bin Laden, Saddam, Stalin and Hitler must be part of God’s plan. On this Christian theory, God made communist Russia and Nazi Germany to further His plan! These clergy rejoiced that Armageddon was approaching, and Russia would cause it. Soviet Russia was a sign of the coming rapture when the world would end. When Russia fell in 1990, anaother Christian theory was proved wrong, but it did not matter. As usual, they immediately forgot it completely and invented a new theory—Islamic terrorism would inaugurate the End.

The examples of Christians resisting Naziism or helping Jews escape the death camps, cited by apologists as if typical of them consistently opposing fascism, are like the instances they cite of Christians preserving learning through the dark ages. The fact that so few examples are so often repeated shows they were no general phenomenon. The Christians in the dark ages destroyed learning generally, and it was Christian Nazis who were herding Jews into the cattle trucks and the gas chambers. Most Nazis were themselves Christians. That a few dissented from the majority is no commendation of Christianity as a moral movement. Indeed, the communists hated by most Christians had a far more noble record of opposition to the Nazis. Nor is there any indication that most Christians were operating against the wishes or policies of the churches whose membership they comprised. What churches, moved by the suffering of Christ or his pacific principles, publicly condemned Nazi policies? Michael R Marrus says there were so few objections from Christian leaders or churches because they found fascism “congenial”.

The role of women in Nazi thinking matched that of the Christians—submission. In 1934, Hitler said, at a rally in Nuremberg:

Man’s world is the state. The world of women is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children and her house.

D G Williamson, The Third Reich, 1982, cited by S J Lee

Goebbels was even cruder:

The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world… the female prettifies herself for her mate and hatches the eggs for him.

J Noakes and G Pridham, Documents on Nazism, cited by S J Lee

Women were induced to stay at home by a familiar method—bribery—child and “marriage credits”.

German Christians, right wing as ever, welcomed the Nazi terrorizing, imprisoning, and killing of the German Left. The leftists had long been despised by traditionalists, who were a large majority. The Nazis proudly publicized their concentration camps, though in a sanitized way, but no one doubted their true function in the newly founded police state. Yet few Christians raised any objection. Increasing institutional murder reported in the press as they became death camps was met with Christian apathy or approval, but little protest.

And what was the effect of all this on Christianity in Germany? Were Christians outraged at their leaders? Did they leave the Church in droves, either because their Churches were collaborating with Naziism, as they were, or because the Christians were being persecuted by the Nazis, according to the Christian myth? Well, no! In the 1930s when Hitler was grabbing absolute power and preparing for the war, the membership of churches stayed more or less constant, and, in the war itself, when Hitler’s aims and papal and Protestant scheming were evident, the membership of the German churches actually rose! After the war, one of the strongest parties that emerged in the new German democracy was the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Apologists conclude that “Nazi policies failed to break down religious alliances”. It shows how easy it is to be beguiled by Christian liars, since the European fascists made no particular effort to break down Christian alliances, as this apologetic statement implies. Quite the opposite. Naziism was a Christian alliance.

Was it Inevitable?

Hitler was an unusual dictator. He was popular. That is why the war was difficult. Until the last years of the war, the defence of Germany’s Third Reich was well supported. Hitler’s personal security was lax, and Goering regularly drove his open convertible around Berlin. The Gestapo was remarkably small. By satisfying Germany’s Christians, there was little resistance to suppress.

Determined public opposition could and did alter Nazi policy. Stymied when the Protestant churches refused to unite, Hitler abandoned his attempt to reform German Protestant Christianity in the foreseeable future. When Hitler denounced Protestant opposition bishops, Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm, and ordered their removal, public anger boiled over. One protest drew 7,000 demonstrators. Hitler did a U-turn and reinstated Meiser and Wurm. Strong opposition to the mass killing of the mentally disabled c 1941 saved many lives, even though this program too enjoyed the Führer’s approval.

When regime officials contemplated forcing the removal of Munster’s Catholic bishop, Clemens Galen, Goebbels feared the whole of Westphalia could be lost. Galen was harassed but held his office and remained active throughout the war. Germans who refused to participate in atrocities—even if they were soldiers, party members, or SS—almost never suffered retaliation. This was so well known that, after the war, Nazis accused of war crimes were not allowed to claim fear of retaliation as a defence.

In the latter stages of the War, the Curia fell out with Hitler over the Concordat, and then the Vatican suddenly discovered a policy of “neutrality” in politics and remained silent. With the defeat of the Nazis by the USA and the USSR, Catholic writers immediately began to say that only Catholics had refused to submit to Hitlerism in Germany, though they could do little about it. Christian apologists’ claim—that Germany’s traditional Christians were impotent in the face of Nazi terror—is a big lie on a scale that Goebbels would have enjoyed. Christians had the power to confound Hitler and the Nazis had they wanted to. All they had to do was do it. If they were scared to, then they had no faith. Is that Christian?

The Nazi regime could have gotten nowhere if people, and that means Christians, had united against them. Sarah Gordon (Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question”, 1984) comments:

Because the Nazis feared the propaganda or political power of the churches, it is almost certain that church leaders could have spoken out more vehemently against racial persecution.

The Aryan ideology of the Nazis necessitated them having the support of the Christian Aryans. That is why Nazi leaders depended so much on propaganda, education, persuasion, and social pressure rather than brute force. They knew that terror worked best when its objective was supported by many and opposed by few. Terror was a last resort to use mainly against minorities, with the support of the Christian majority, but only towards the end of the regime was state terror widespread in Germany.

The “Peace” soon became clear to Christians to be a new Holy War—the Holy war that the fascists had promised the Christian churches they would win—the war against bolshevism. The USA led this war and the Catholic Church took to whole-hearted support of the cold war. This time the churches were on the winning side and have therefore gained much of the esteem that they had previously lost. That is fine for believers, not known for their critical abilities, but anyone critically reading the record of the Christians in this or any other period can see nothing other than lack of any principle in favour of naked opportunism. History again demonstrates the nature of Christianity. It is all things to all men.

The latest drive to rally “Believers” is an amalgamation of two organisations. Its sole objective, so far as I can find an understandable objective, is to drive every honest teacher of history or science out of our schools. Then our people’s minds can be bunged up with mud thoroughly and finally.

H G Wells, Crux Ansata

Churches always have opposed tolerance and democracy. As Wells has more narrowly said, the teaching of the Christian churches puts Faith before any social or political consideration, and the Christians in any country and under any form of government are essentially an alien conspiracy against the people. The liberals of the twentieth century believed this alien body would, in some mysterious way, repay the toleration so natural to the secular liberal mind. Nothing of the sort! 55% of Americans want a secular state, and only 20% say they want a biblical state, the Christian equivalent of Islamic Sharia law, with the balance being undecided or ready to accept a token acknowledgement of God. 20% fundamentalist is scary enough, and, though they remain in a substantial minority, they are raucous and politically powerful.

Christians have had a disproportionately large share of the media and of broadcasting time. Non-Christian voices have been inaudible by comparison, although most intelligent people do not profess to be Christians. Pat Robertson wants to restrict government to Christians, contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state. The founders of the US constitution did not separate the two on a whim. It was because they had seen how Christianity had caused endless strife over centuries in Europe. Atheists agree, but Christians like Robertson, opposed to every strand of Enlightenment thinking, and ignorant of the role of Christianity in history, want to overturn the constitution. The US was founded by a revolution against the British, since when American leaders, especially Christian ones, have been opposed to all revolutions, and have upheld every odious dictator until Saddam, and he had been supported by the US for 30 years.

Steadily, persistently, US Christians, latterly supported by a network of Leo Strauss’s disciples, have worked to destroy the liberalism which allowed an unreasonable and anachronistic belief to retain disparate political influence contrary to the US constitution. Persecuting relentlessly where it was in the ascendant, and canting about individual liberty of conscience wherever it was faced by social objections, this mental cancer has spread itself back to destroy the health and hope of the modern world.

Though supposedly building on classical Greek philosophy, not patriarchy, the Straussists do not acknowledge that “revelation is a myth”, as one might expect. In Strauss’s view, public morality is grounded in religious beliefs, particularly divine revelation, so to acknowledge it as myth would undermine any beneficial effects religious belief might have for rulers in controlling hoi polloi—the ignorant mass of the people who still believe their pastors. Philosophizing, by its nature, tends to undermine public morality—read, “belief”—so the only people suitable to rule are the “philosophers” who can accept that myth is manure without it making perverts of them. These “philosophers” are perverts already, and that is the real reason. They are elitists—those frankly called in the twentieth century fascists. Fascists are often themselves no longer religious but profess to be because they are fully aware of the power religion has, and aware of how they can use it to control society. And they can do it because religious people are sheep. Nothing is more easily led.

The illegal behaviour of the meretriciously Christian and neocon Bush administration had already started the overthrow of the constitution. The timid liberals in the US had better be warned. They can see what is going on but most remain silent. Bush and Cheney abandoned objective external intelligence for what they called “faith based intelligence” supposedly sent directly by God, but really whatever suited them. Hitler did the same, giving an order ”not to seek out objective truth so far as it may be favourable to others, but unceasingly to serve one’s own truth”. Storm Jameson commented that, if this notion had prevailed, it would have drowned civilisation in ”the grand sea of the living blood”! It was pretty bad as it was, and Bush was shooting in the same direction.

There was an old prophecy found in a bog
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la,
That we shall be ruled by an ass and a dog.
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la,
Lero lero, lilliburlero, lero, lero, bullen a-la.

And now is this prophecy coming to pass,
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la,
For Rumsfeld’s the dog and Bush is the ass.
Lilliburlero, bullen a-la,
Lero lero, lilliburlero, lero, lero, bullen a-la.

Some Sources

Reporting from Free Inquiry Magazine. More at Freethought Today, “Religion And The Holocaust” by Richard E Smith, and The Holocaust by Dr Michael Hakeem, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The Christianity of Hitler is revealed in his speeches and proclamations by Jim Walker at nobeliefs.com, where there are several other useful pages on Hitler’s Christian ideas.

Annex—US Fascism

America under Bush and the Neocons slid into fascism, with terrifying implications. The use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of fascism, but there is also its economic dimension known as corporatism, which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. Corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by some intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. Economic system fascism was widely accepted in the 20s and 30s in the USA, notably by powerful American industrialists. A Fortune cover story on Mussolini, in 1934, praised fascism for disempowering workers, breaking the unions, and transfering huge sums of money to the corporate bosses rather than those who earned it. For this reason, many people, in America besides Europe, saw fascism as the future. On 9 April 1944, The New York Times published an explanation of “What is a fascist?” by Rooseveldt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace:

The really dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power… They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Political scientist, Dr L Britt, comparing the fascist regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet, listed the social and political features common to them (Free Inquiry, 23 2). They are frighteningly familiar:

• Nationalism
  Fascist administrations depend on patriotic themes, like mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, flags everywhere, and flag symbols on clothing and in public places.
• Disdain for Human Rights
  Fascist administrations persuade its citizens that human rights have to be suspended because of security. Then ciitizens acept torture, imprisonment without trial, then political assassinations and summary executions.
• The need for unifying causes
  Fascist administrations encourage hatred of a common enemy to excuse their erosion of democracy. Some scapegoat, a racial, ethnic or religious minority, liberals, communists, socialists, terrorists, and so on, distract from the administration’s own failings.
• The military favoured
  Fascist administrations always allocate an excessive amount of government funding, despite domestic need, and soldiering is romanticized.
• Sexist attitudes
  Fascist administrations are male-dominated. Policy is that men are men and women are women, so homosexuality is criminalized, and women are mothers and breeding machines, so abortion is discouraged.
• Media control
  Fascist administrations control the media directly, or indirectly by regulation, or the same moguls that control the government also control the media. Censorship grows.
• Obsession with security
  Fascist administrations foment fear to control the masses.
• Use of religion
  Fascist administrations use religion to manipulate public opinion and responses. Religious rhetoric and allusions serve to fool the religious body of the people into believing the government is on their side, and so gets their support, though opposed to their interests.
• Corporate power protected
  Fascist administrations act for an industrial and business elite who put the government into power to further their own interests.
• Labor power suppressed
  Fascist administrations control and suppress the labor movement as the main force that can be mobilized against them.
• Intellectuals suppressed
  Fascist administrations are hostile to higher education, and academia because the intelligentsia can see through the administrations trickery and criticize it. Academics and artists are often jailed.
• Oppressive law is multiplied
  Fascist administrations give their police limitless powers of arrest, and remove restrictions on arrest and punishment. Such oppressive measures are sold as needed for security and to control anti-state criminality, meaning opposition.
• Cronyism and corruption
  Fascist administrations are often neopotistic, officials appoint friends and associates to government positions then use adminsitrative power, authority and privileges to keep themselves from accountability. National resources and treasures are often secreted away for personal use and gain by officials.
• Fraudulent elections
  Fascist administrations manipulate any electtions that have to occur. Opponents, if any, are smeared or even assassinated, legislation is used to control voters, and gerymandering of voting districts is common. Media coverage is not fairly distributed. Bent judges favour the regime.

The Rev Davidson Loehr, First Unitarian Church of Austin, in Living Under Fascism, a 2004 online sermon presented by UUA News and Events, warns people about impending fascism. The outcome of fascism’s social and political agendas are:

• The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.
• Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.
• Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.
• More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work
• Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.
• The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)
• More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.
• More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.
• Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.
• Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of any protesting churches, and to characterize them as anti-American.
• Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control.
• Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.
• Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.
• Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. A higher percentage of US citizens are in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.
• In the near future, it will be illegal and dangerous to say any of this. In fascist America, they are un-American. In democratic America, they were patriotic, the critical questions that kept the American democratic spirit alive—the kind of questions our media are supposed to be pressing.

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician—Buzz Windrip—runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host depicted advocates of traditional American democracy—those concerned with individual rights and freedoms—as anti-American. In fact in 1934, the US mega-rich class financed a military coup to remove Roosevelt and set up General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator. Butler refused and split on the plotters exposing the fascist coup. Less than a century later, Bush won over fundamentalist Christians and did it with the Patriots Act! It provides for the complete destruction of US civil rights as an answer to terrorism! This modern US fascism came about through a confluence of three separate but complementary projects:

1. The nouveau-imperialism of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), of September 2000, written by people prominent in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan. To understand the Bush years PNAC needs to be read. The fall of Communism was a call for America to become the military ruler of the world, a new Roman empire, just as Mussolini thought. It spelled out the necessary military build up. Remarkably and scarily, PNAC noted that a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor was needed to let them turn America into a military and militarist country quickly.
2. Katherine Yurica, in The Yurica Report on the internet showed us Christian Dominionism, rule by a Christian elite, was advocated by Pat Robertson and his hand picked “700 Club” in the 1980s. Typically incoherently, they claimed democracy had to be run by Robertson-type Christians, when, of course, it is no longer democracy because those who are not classed as suitable by the Dominionists are not admitted to it. These views are right wing and reactionary in every way, favoring the rich, attacking socially beneficial policies such as public education and welfare, condemning women to be household drudges and the chattels of their husbands, and all progressive science and social science was generally vilified without thought as not being sanctioned by the God of Moses. Moses because these Christians actually cannot stand anyone as wimpish as Christ!
3. The rich right in the US want a state that favors them in every way, and condemns the poor and much of the middle class to slavery as helpless drones with no legal rights worth having, no unions, and no democracy. They want to undo the gains for the weak of the twentieth century, gains they consider were forced on to them by world communism after WWII. They are not interested in religion except as a tool of manipulation. Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie The Corporation they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.

Another way to understand fascism is as a kind of colonization. A simple definition of “colonization” is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. When you are taxed to support a government that uses you as a means to serve the ends of others, you are—ironically—in a state of taxation without representation. It is where the US started, and it is where it is now.

Sixty years ago, Henry Wallace said:

Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must… develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.

Michael C Ruppert has been tireless in his research into America’s slide into fascism. He offers four pieces of advice about what to do now:

1. get out of debt
2. spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information
3. stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted
4. learn how money works and use it like a political weapon—as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us.

Liberals have to outgrow their self-absorbed focus on personal rights to the exclusion of duties to society. Human beings are individuals but are also social animals, and have to resolve a conflict between selfishness and altruism. Selfishness evolved so that creatures try to preserve themselves whatever happens. It is fine for solitary creatures—fine for coyotes, but not for wolves. Wolves and coyotes are scarcely different species and can interbreed, but they do not do so in the wild. Wolves are not solitary but dwell in packs. They and coyotes have differentiated because wolves are social and coyotes are loners. Among primates, gorillas are solitary, living in families, but chimpanzees and humans are social, living in bands. In social groups, selfishness can often be anti-social, but society is necessary for individual wellbeing. No human can thrive individually even if they can manage to survive.

Social animals have to be altruistic, to sacrifice something for society to preserve some evolutionary advantage for the group. The notion of evil is much to do with this psychological and social conflict. The individual against society, the individual as hero, is a constant modern theme, but so too is the opposite theme, the loner, the psycho defying society and undermining it. Which is right? Liberals will have to construct a vision of liberality with better moral and religious allowances for society as a whole.

Those who do not want to live as serfs in a society in which power, possibility and hope is confined to a ruling elite have work to do. Most people are decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Few are evil, though some are. Mostly they mean well, and the way to build mutual respect or even love is through understanding, compassion, and a story that is real, inclusive and empowering for us. It means the recognition of duties to the whole human group, not just an elite group, but alongside the rights of individuals, and ability to attract the minds and hearts of the majority.

With the election of Barack Obama, the new liberal vision must be larger than that of the conservative religious vision that appointed judges, wrote oppressive laws and bent the cultural norms toward hatred and exclusion for the future. Conservatives have spent thirty years studying politics, forming a vision, and learning how to gain control in the political system. It worked. They have had huge successes, although hardly noble ones, and scarcely Christian whatever they call themselves. Liberals can develop a better vision—it is Adelphiasophism—but still have a lot of persuading and campaigning to do. Are liberals willing to do it? Or do they prefer to go down with the ship. Obama cannot do it alone.

From Mike FitzGerald

Mike, I have the following comments on—AskWhy! on Christianity and Fascism—Christianity Revealed

I agree with you that the majority of Nazis were at least Christian in the technical sense of the word. I am not and never have been a Catholic but in fact throughout the Weimar Republic up to and including the last free German election in 1933 the majority of Germans who voted for and joined the Nazi Party were either Protestants or atheists. Very few Catholics voted for the Nazis although the Centre Party should never be forgiven for its weak decision to vote for the Enabling Act in the Reichstag which enabled Hitler to become the dictator of Germany rather than simply its elected Chancellor.

Every religion has its dark side and its monsters. Almost every branch of Christianity has at one time or another persecuted non-Christians; fanatical Wahhabi and Shiite Muslims try to kill or torture non-Muslims into compliance with their own rigid beliefs; the Jews have always had a long and sanguinary record of brutality towards non-Jews whenever they have been in a position to do so; Hinduism, with its caste system, is institutionally racist; Buddhism, especially in its Mahayana variant, represents a conscious attempt to control the masses through mystification and superstition. As for supposedly non-religious ideologies, both Fascism—in which, for the sake of argument, I include National Socialism, though I feel that they are fundamentally different ideologies—and Communism rest on a single fatal fallacy, that their opponents are morally wrong. Nor need we look at the totalitarians. I recently watched a series on television by Richard Dawkins, a well-known atheist and scientist, in which he set out to destroy religion by using arguments ad hominem, by selecting only the most extreme representatives of the religions he was attacking, by at times using the most dishonest arguments and fictitious “facts” to support his tirade. I was irresistibly persuaded, on watching Dawkins and his diatribe, that he would be the first to imprison or execute religious believers if he had the power.

I might add that the actions and even most of the beliefs of the Nazis were opposed in every way to the teachings of Christianity as they are given in the New Testament.

The problem is not religious belief, or indeed any kind of belief, but fanaticism and the belief that only the believer’s own way is right and that dissenters must be punished.

I am actually an authority on the Third Reich and my most recent volume, Adolf Hitler—A Portrait, was published in July 2006 by Spellmount. In August it was named historical biography of the month by the Good Book Guide. I do know what I am talking about, Mike, and believe me, Hitler, Himmler, Hess and many other Nazis were believers in a range of occult and other ideas. That does not mean either that they were the only ideas that guided them, nor that they may not have considered themselves to be good Christians. The fact is, though, that Christianity preaches a God of love and forgiveness, and no one could possibly associate those characteristics with the Third Reich.

A fascinating website—keep up the good work!

Thanks for the praise. I appreciate it, particularly because mainly I get the opposite from hard line Christians. Since you are an expert on these matters, I would be foolish to dissent from what you have to say, and really I think I have no need to. I do not imagine that Naziism was a Christian plot, Catholic or Protestant, but that people of a certain authoritarian disposition were attracted to it whatever their supposed belief system. Since the Catholics had a party of their own, many Catholic votes went to it, but the Centre Party did eventually, by agreement, disband leaving its voters free to support the Nazis.

The real point is that Christianity does not make anyone good, although that is a popular idea. Rather the opposite, Christians are inclined to be right wing authoritarians and therefore disposed to like authoritarian ideologies like Naziism. I have several pages on the psychology of Christianity that argue it, but Christians simply deny it or ignore it.

And no one can deny, least of all me, that all religions have a dark side. My contention is that they are mainly dark, full stop, but the patriarchal ones seem darkest of all. The others you mention do have ameliorating features, and not such a bad history as the patriarchal ones.

“Naziism not equal to Fascism”, well their histories were different so doubtless you are right strictly speaking, but nowadays we take them to be the same because “fascism” really is the word we use for right wing authoriarian regimes.

I think you are unfair on Dawkins. The trouble is, in this world, that we are obliged to respect religion, when history shows that there is nothing in it to respect. History is, of course, a record of social changes, and I do not doubt or deny that individual people can benefit from religion. What I cannot do is equate the terrible consequences of mass delusion with someone feeling personally comforted by it. So, I regard Dawkins as being like myself. He is angry that such lunacy persists, and is even encouraged. I have no reason to think he would be a mass murderer given the chance, but history shows that Christians can be. So, I think your deductions are unfair.

I am probably much angrier about it than Dawkins, who always seems quite calm and polite to me, and I am happy to call someone who is manifestly irrational and self-deluded by some approprate adjective. Perhaps Dawkins is the same, but that is not ad hominem argumentation. The adjective, perhaps considered, and perhaps meant to be, an insult, is based on the evidence directly from the one insulted. In other words, when someone argues foolishly, you are entitled to call him a fool. “Ad hominem” argumentation is calling someone a fool on the basis of no evidence at all, simply to prejudice observers, or voters or whoever the arguer is hoping to persuade, that anything they say is wrong. The same applies to what you say about the extreme representations. Dawkins is not going to argue against religion by giving examples of how wonderful it is, is he? Nor am I. The believers are constantly fed parables about how wonderful it is, and they never get to know about the inquisition, the crusades and so on. To straighten anything that is bent, you have to apply the opposite force from that bending it. But these forces are words, and that is all. Christians and Moslems alike have shown a readiness to murder people who dissent.

What is genuinely objectionable, if true, is that you say that Dawkins was dishonest in using dishonest arguments and fictitious facts. My constant theme on these pages is that it is the religious propagandists who are dishonest and use these methods, and it stems right back to the origins of Christianity. I saw the same program and do not know quite what you mean. You might consider it dishonest to present only one side of an argument, but that is the point of arguing, of debate. He is not obliged to argue for his opponents. They never argue for their critics. Perhaps, as an historian, you feel you should offer balance, and often that is true, but even then, if you discover something that has been overlooked, or especially that has been deliberately distorted by propagandists, even the historian is entitled to be a polemicist. You are then trying to right a wrong or a misconception, so you do not have to defend it.

On your point that the beliefs of the Nazis were opposed to the teachings of the New Testament, you might well be right, although the New Testament does not have a coherent set of teachings in it. What is certain is that the person elevated to the godhead by Christians is shown in the gospels as offering a set of teachings directly from his own lips, yet there is scarcely a Christian anywhere in the world that has ever lived according to them, and there can be few if any today. It is another theme of these pages that Christians are not Christian in that they do not follow the teachings of Christ. That is the importance of them supporting Hitler. They did not see any dichotomy between the two sets of beliefs. It can only mean, at best that Christianity is valueless, and at worst that it is authoritarian and scarcely differs from Naziism in practice. Practice is what we experience not the fairy stories of the gospels.

I agree that fanaticism is the real problem, but liberality discourages extreme views and actions, whereas religions or religious professionals encourage them.

I wish I could share your view that all the evils of the world spring from religion. If it was only so simple! It is also a question of what one means by religion. Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung and Joseph Stalin certainly all claimed to be atheists, and their contributions to mass murder are well known. I have not tended to find the majority of serial killers to be particularly noted for their religiosity either, in fact, in the case of three that I have personally researched (another of my interests is abnormal psychology—you can see the obvious link with Hitler!) they were outspokenly, aggressively and contemptuously atheist. Nor had any of them been brought up in a religious household or exposed to any meaningful degree of influence from Christianity. The facts would seem rather to support my own contention, that it is fanaticism rather than religiosity, that plays the biggest part in the deliberate infliction of suffering on masses of people rather than the individual cruelty practised by lone psychopaths.

I am not sure where you got the idea that I think all the evils of the world spring from religion. It would be an extreme view to hold, and I really do not think Dawkins would hold it either. The point of the argument is that it is an important and rather major source of trouble in the world, and one that could be entirely avoided if people were a tad more rational. I know nothing about the backgrounds of Pol Pot or Mao Tse Tung, but I would find it remarkable if they were brought up as atheists. Stalin was being trained as a priest in a seminary before he got the revolutionary urge, so he was definitely not initially an atheist. Your three serial killers might have been atheists but it is not the impression I have of them in general. They often justify their murders as being directed by God, as in the case of Sutcliffe, so they were having some sort of "spiritual" relationship with the divine, or rather thought they were. None of it is relevant, though, because one can always find exceptions, and the real point is to study the general. The real point about discussions like this is that Christianity does not have any benefits when it comes to modifying human nature. Whatever your religious inclinations, if you get into absolute power, you become a madman. Christianity, and probably any other religion has no bearing on it. But that shows what I said in my last post, that it is valueless, so what is its point when it simply adds to the unnecessary divisions in the world. That is the basis of the argument, though it is true that I go further, and I do so because there is something terribly sinister to me about people who claim to be loving but too often have little in the way of love in them.

I could point out that during the 18th and 19th centuries, it was Christians like John Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Lord Shaftesbury, John Ruskin and others who brought about massive social changes. Most of the atheists of that period were either indifferent to their efforts or else actively hostile to them. I do not believe that a person’s convictions necessarily make him or her more or less lacking in compassion (and in any event, the appalling cruelty inflicted in the name of Social Darwinism during the 20th century, in Germany, Russia, the United States and other countries, was explicitly based on anti-religious principles, which again rather undercuts your basic thesis.

You are talking about a time when Christianity had abandoned its witchhunts and inquisitions and had calmed down into the middle classes at prayer. The main influence on it in making this step was the Enlightenment, not led particularly by Christians, but having a profound effect on the way everyone behaved, Christians included. The people in this century with the time to consider these matters were often country parsons so they did a lot of good, but it is rather like claiming the superiority of the white races because all the great discoveries were made by white people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The white people were in a position to do it, and others were not. The same is true of those Christians. Moreover, clever people like Newton were obliged to be Christians or they could not hold their places in the universities. Even then though, you are being selective about your examples. The British bishops in the house of Lords were noted for their backwardness about social matters and their constant attempts to prevent progressive measres from being passed through the Lords. As I have said, individual Christians can be admirable people, but Christianity as a whole is not, and there is far too much wickedness in Christian history to write it off as aberrations caused by the odd naughty, naughty boy. So you are quite right that convictions do not necessarily make people horrible, but in Christian history they too often have, or, horrible people have used Christianity for their own ends because it is eminently suited to it, and the sheep will never object. As for social Darwinism, if it is true that it was based on antireligious principles, who actually administered them?

I would be the first to admit that throughout human history, adherents of different religions have behaved barbarically. The real question is, is their behaviour the RESULT of their religious beliefs or an accidental accompaniment, more related to their own personal flaws or the dominant cultural INTERPRETATIONS of their time.

A comparison of the different religions would take up more resources than I have available, but it is certainly true that the patriarchal religons have a shocking history, and one that no reasonable person could imagine was inspired by an all powerful and good God. Quite the opposite. If there are gods at all, it is impossible to imagine that the patriarchal god is good. He must therefore be evil. That was the contention of the heretics who were mass murdered in a genocidal killing by the popes. I cannot be too sympathetic with the heretics because they too were Christians, or so they said, and the church had to agree, to have any justification for murdering them as heretics. If they had won in the battle between Catharism and Catholicism, it is a moot point that things would have been any different. Christianity was built on willful ignorance, and still perpetuates it. That cannot be good in my view.

As for Dawkins, in the first place I have read most of his books and seen him on television on numerous occasions, and have noticed his consistent arrogance, intolerance and complete inability—no, refusal—even to consider the opponent’s point of view for a moment. I do think that if you are attacking any idea, you have to be honest and open-minded. Dawkins is neither of those things. He does not, in any meaningful sense of the word, listen to anything other than those things that agree with his own prejudices. I can easily visualise him as one of the doctors in the Nazi camps conducting horrific experiments in the name of science.

You will just have to accept that you do not like him. I do not have the same problems with him, but then I share many of his views, and you do not seem to. Mary Midgley, on the other hand, is supposed to be an atheist, I believe, but she dislikes science more than anything, so spends her time defending Christianity in its war on science. Her father was a professional Christian, so maybe she is still attached to the way she was brought up, and she needs another angle to justify her incoherent position. As I said last time, there is no reason why Dawkins should offer his opponents point of view when his objective is to refute it, but often it has to be done to show just what you are refuting. The traces that remain of much of the theology of the heretics we now only have from their refutations by professional Catholic theologians. You mention their "point of view", but what is it? It is believing that something they imagine manifests itself in reality and makes them right by approving what they think. How can anyone appreciate such a point of view. I cannot. In the UK most people still say they are Christian simply out of habit. They do not have a point of view about it except that everyone was brought up that way. That is so! Religion is largely a cultural and social habit, and any amount of psychological and social research shows it. You will be familiar with it, I imagine.

I also believe that attacking people who believe that the world was created in exactly six days and that the theory of evolution is false is hardly taking a swipe at the representative views of the majority of Christians. I would admit that there are a far higher proportion of cranks on this issue in America than there are in Europe, but even in America they are still a minority. Besides which, Dawkins does not attempt to engage with the idea of God on the scientific or philosophical level very much. Almost all his arguments—one is tempted to use the word diatribes—are directed along moral lines. To argue against Christianity because of Torquemada or other equally unsavoury characters is like arguing that all atheists must be bad because Pol Pot was a mass murderer. I am, not for the first time in my life, reminded of one of my favourite quotes, from the Christian Oliver Cromwell. ’In the bowels of Christ, gentlemen, consider it possible that you may be wrong.’ One can never imagine Dawkins ever considering the possibility that HE might be wrong.

What is the representative view of the majority of Christians? Even Anglicans, doubtless among the most sensible and civilized of Christian sects until it got taken over by the Evangelicals, believe that a man was raised from the dead and that proves he was the son of God, and indeed God too in one of the mysteries of the religion. The cranks in Europe are few because Europe is largely secular these days, even countries like Ireland and Italy now being largely secular, and Poland is probably heading the same way. The cranks in the US are many, and even though they might be a minority, they are a very large, wealthy and influential minority. The recent Baylor survey shows that the majority belief in the US is in an authoritarian God, and 40% of young people believe in him. This authoritarian God has views that are amazingly like those of George Bush and the Republican party. Maybe Bush can crow even though he has lost in the mid-term elections because he knows he and his authoritarian God are in the long term scendency. In the US, religion is a right wing plot.

Now you speak of engaging God on a scientific and philosophical level. Just how can you do that? The whole point of religion, as far as I can see, is to uphold morality, so that is the ground it ought to be secure on. Yet, that is just the ground it is terrible on. If it cannot keep people moral, then what use is it? And at the end, you make the same extreme statement that you began with. Who argues that all Christians are bad, or indeed that all atheists are good? Atheism is not a moral code, it is simply the rational denial of God. Christianity, on the other hand, is supposed to have the moral high ground of the almighty good God of the universe. The evidence is, and you provide some of it, that humanity has the same failings whatever religious views members of it profess. Religion is therefore useless morally, and yet remains socially divisive.

Notes from the Thought Police
From Chris Bonds

Your page on Christianity and Nazism, while interesting, is considerably plagiarized from Gregory S Paul’s article in the magazine Free Inquiry, Vol 23, No 4. While you do provide a link to the magazine’s website <secularhumanism.org>, I don’t believe that is sufficient to acknowledge the source of your words. Out of respect for the author, you should have credited to him those words that are essentially his, and contacted the publisher of Free Inquiry for permission to reprint them. The magazine’s copyright policy is clearly stated on page 4 of the issue in question.

I suggest you get to understand what the words “copyright” and “plagiarism” mean. “Plagiarism” is pretending that the work of someone else is your own. It is not using someone else’s work as a source. “Copyright” is the protection that your own work enjoys in law. It is not a protection for ideas, but actual work, the words your write, the pictures you paint.

The whole point of giving information is so that it can be used. That is what I have done, and I acknowledged the source of it. I used more than one article by different authors from the magazine Free Inquiry—and I acknowledged this source—and I also incorporated addition material. I have used a mixture of sources to argue a case in my own way. There is nothing wrong with that, and if there were, then everyone would have to find out everything for themself before they set pen to paper, or give an authority for almost every point they make. The purpose of the page was to bring my own polemic with Christianity into the mid-twentieth century, so it provided one fragment in an extended argument. This is not an academic paper or a novel but, as stated, it is reporting. Let us not be silly!

I wish to apologize for the comments about plagiarism in my earlier post. I came across your page while using a search engine looking for information relating to the relationship between Christianity and the Nazi regime. I had earlier read the articles in Free Inquiry, and several passages on your page sounded like something I had read before. As a college instructor, I am perhaps hypervigilant on such matters (as you suggest at the end of your response—mea culpa!). If the editors of Free Inquiry do not object, then I certainly have no business objecting.

Having said that, I would nevertheless argue that a series of even a few sentences that are substantially the same (with perhaps a word or two omitted or changed), and in the same order, as those in the source material should be considered quotations, and should appear in quotes, with proper in-text citations. This is the generally acknowledged standard for academic papers, theses, and journal articles in our country, and most likely in yours as well, although I am not certain. I don’t see why web publications should be held to a looser standard. All this aside, let me also add that I support what you are doing in providing a reasoned critique of Christianity.

A man called Tom Flynn from Free Inquiry has written to me saying the item you complained about is not “actionable” on any of the grounds you mentioned, but he seemed annoyed it was not. I have therefore told him I will pull the article in response to your joint complaints and find equivalent material to replace it elsewhere when I get time. Now, those who might have benefited from reading this article will not do, and nor will they get the chance to hyperlink to the originals.

None of this is the sort of reaction I expect from secularists who I, evidently mistakenly, have assumed would be liberal in their views. When dogmatism succeeds you should be clear whose side you are on.

Another Note from the Thought Police
From Tom Flynn

I have the following comments on: AskWhy! on Christianity and the Nazis—Christianity Revealed I am the editor of FREE INQUIRY Magazine. A reader alerted me to a possible copyright violation on your site. On reviewing your article on Christianity and the Nazis, I conclude that you have not plagiarized our article “The Great Scandal” by Gregory J Paul. You followed its outline slavishly, quoted many of the same references Dr Paul cited, and essentially rewrote the article paragraph by paragraph in a breezier style. But you did rewrite, and occasionally introduced new material not included in Dr Paul’s article. While I find your method unfortunate, it surely is not actionable. That said, given that your debt to Dr Paul’s work, I’d certainly appreciate if you could include a more detailed citation of his article—which, by the way, was a two-part article which appeared in our October-November 2003 and December 2003-January 2004 issues. (You don’t seem to have, um, paraphrased Part II yet, I look forward to seeing it.) Most of all, I’d appreciate your spelling the name of our journal correctly—silly Yanks that we are, we spell “Inquiry” with an initial “I”.

It is plain enough to we aliens that America needs no friends. Unelected theocrats sent by God will think they do not, but in secularists it is a surprise.

It is as you said. I saw an article in a Sunday newspaper about the psychiatrist who inadvertantly created Hitler, and followed it up on the net, finding your website, and then using material from some of your articles to add what I thought was a useful page about the Nazi period to my own argument. I had a picky email from Chris Bonds speaking of plagiarism and copyright even though I had cited the source and rewritten most of the material—except quotations which by definition cannot be rewritten while remaining quotations.

I therefore added this to the bottom of the page, beginning with the quotation of Bonds’ email to me and then adding my own comment:  [**Here is reprinted the letter above.**]

You concede, albeit churlishly, that this is not plagiarism and evidently are not satisfied with a link to your index page, where any interested surfer would have found not only the specific articles used, but others too. I did not see the second article because it was not online when I visited your site, and the part I saw was sufficient for my purpose. I apologise for getting the spelling of your magazine wrong—force of habit, don’tcha know, old boy—but the web address was correct and I cannot see that anyone could have been misled.

Precious goods should be tightly locked up in boxes. Since that is your attitude, my reaction is to pull the page, and seek equivalent material elsewhere when I get time. Now, those who might have benefited from reading this article will not do, and nor will they get the chance to hyperlink to the originals. Curiously enough, I got an apology from Bonds in the same mailbox as your peevish acceptance that the piece was not “actionable”, so the whole episode seems a victory for ill-considered petty dogmatism, something one does not naturally associate with secularism.

I am flattered, though, that you think my style is breezy. Yours liberally.

I am happy to publish this correspondence because I have no desire to claim anyone else’s work as my own, but believe authors publish information for use, not censorship by thought policemen. The publication of it ought to satisfy the complaining parties, and so I am leaving the page online. The person who has not complained is Dr Gregory Paul, whose article was particularly the basis of the section entitled How Christians Gave Hitler Power of this report. Since these pages are reportage and not original scholarship, I am not going down the pretentious and unnecessary road of citing the source of every word I use, as Christian “scholars” do in their largely inconsequential and unread theses and papers. Nor, however, do I wish to offend any author who might wish to be acknowledged. I am happy to acknowledge my use of Dr Paul’s work in Free Inquiry, and a simple letter requesting that would have been more effective and gracious than the sanctimonious preaching of supposed secularists acting as Big Brother.

That letter should have come from you, asking permission for use, prior to your posting the material. It all being after the fact, you have no business being surprised that anyone treats you as a brigand…

You seem not to have read the rest of the correspondence. You are the one who is beefing. The acknowledgement I gave on my page to your journal, together with a link to it, would, for most people and purposes, be more than sufficient recognition of indebtedness to a source. Only thought policemen could think otherwise. Since you were evidently offended that I had carelessly not met your grandiose standards, you are the one to have made the request instead of being bombastic, not me. What is your attitude, Obersturmfuhrer, to those who criticize your stuff, if you treat those who commend it by usage and attribution as if they are criminals? Are you a tad neurotic? Must anyone who wishes to use any of the work you publish have to ask explicitly for permission? If so, you are going far beyond normal copyright. Are you certain it is permissible to even read what you publish without an acknowledgement by a Wagnerian choir and a rendering of the 1812 complete with cannons in Times Square? Or would that be too absurd?

Why not concentrate on lancing the religious ogres that presumably you are paid for, instead of finding irrelevant windmills to tilt at. While the USA is being taken over by Straussist fascists and their Christian dupes, you seem to have chosen to join them and growl at your friends instead of exposing the danger in your midst. Grow up before you find yourself encircled by your enemies.

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