Hitler: As Irish as the Pope

There have recently been attempts to rewrite history to blame Christianity for Hitler and the Nazis; Goldhagen’s Willing Executioners, featured in this spot recently, is one example. Canada’s own John Ralston Saul has made the same claim.

But Hitler was no “Christian.”

Rather, Nazism was a mockery of Christianity: Goebbels put out a “catechism” that read “What is the fist commandment of every National Socialist? Love Germany above all else and your ethnic comrade as yourself.” (The Nazi Conscience, p. 7). It could hardly be clearer from this parody of the New Testament that Nazism was setting itself up as a replacement for Christianity.

Himmler objected to the plans for a new Reichsbank building on the grounds that “the longitudinal and transverse wings had the shape of a Christian cross. This, he maintained, was … a veiled attempt on the part of the Catholic architect … to glorify the Christian religion.” (Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 208). Which, apparently, God forbid. Churches, one Nazi Gauleiter explained to Speer, “were citadels of reaction that stood in the way of our revolution” (p. 429). Another planned to pull down Essen Cathedral.

Albert Speer reports that “amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church.” (Inside the Third Reich, p. 148). “At the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church.” (p. 149). Hitler’s dinner conversation involved “endless tirades on the Catholic Church.” (p. 163).

One thing in particular with which Hitler publicly tasked the Catholic Church was “its toleration of ‘pederasty and child abuse.’” (The Nazi Conscience, p. 255). Has an oddly familiar ring to it, doesn’t it?

The problem is, of course, that the Christian ethic requires Catholicism to forgive. Hitler, like the church’s modern critics, found precisely this intolerable—the forgiveness, the toleration. “You see it’s our misfortune to have the wrong religion…,” Hitler observed.. “Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” (Hitler, quoted by Speer, p. 150).

After all, it was not as if Hitler cared about morality; just about weakness. He equally objected to the church’s “phony social morality,” and its “belief in the sanctity of human life.” Like the postmodernists today, he “denied universal morality” (The Nazi Conscience, p. 254). What was moral was whatever served the best interests of the race and the state.

Like modern New Agers, Hitler was a vegetarian and a fierce opponent of smoking. Like them, he felt that, among other things, “the body was neglected” in Christian tradition (Speer, p. 151). In open challenge to conventional Christian morality, Nazi officials designed recreational facilities for German workers that included bordellos for prostitutes (Speer, p. 211). Goering announced that any Stormtrooper was free to rape any Jewish woman found on the streets after dark—hardly a matter of sexual repressiveness. “Any Jewish girl or woman who is on the streets after dark may be assaulted by any Stormtrooper without fear of punishment” (The Nazi Conscience, p. 39).

It would have gotten worse for the Church had Hitler won his war. He told his intimates, in Speer’s presence, that “Once I have settled my other problems, I’ll have my reckoning with the church. I’ll have it reeling on the ropes” (p. 184). In the Nazi plans for the new postwar Berlin, churches were to be allowed no building sites (Speer, p. 254).

It is the modern critics of the Catholic Church, clearly, who are continuing the Hitlerian tradition.