Post by humphreyclarke on Jul 14, 2008 9:17:09 GMT
Morning all. I am something of an aficionado for literature on the Third Reich. It has therefore given me much amusement to see people trying to reinvent Hitler as a devout catholic. The problem I think stems from a deficiency in people’s Historical education, namely the use and interpretation of primary source material.
If we encounter a primary source material such as a speech we need to consider the following.
1) When did the speech take place?, what was the historical context?
2) Who was the speech directed to?, what was the makeup of the audience?, what effect did this have on the speaker and the language used by the speaker.
3) How does this speech fit into all the other source material we have about the speaker, both primary and secondary
For example, a big growth industry on the internet is Holocaust denial. Statements by Hitler proposing that the Jews be expelled to Madagascar are taken by these loonies to suggest that there was no deliberate plan for the Holocaust. Basically they take his word for it with no source critique whatsoever.
What was Hitler and the Nazi’s attitude towards Christianity and Religion?
Here it is important to distinguish between public/private pronouncements and look at Hitler’s statements and personality to devise his true position. The intent of Hitler and most importantly, the Nazi hierarchy was to divorce Christianity radically from Judaism and to refashion the content of the Christian message. Hitler could claim that he was a Christian and a Catholic because he took a ‘pix a mix’ approach to religion, refashioning it according to his own ideology.
Lets look at Nazism as a whole.
Michael Burleigh – The Third Reich – A New History p 255-256
The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality. It appeared life defying to the life affirming, mobilising entirely unwarranted sentiments and values. Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was seen as a ‘soul malady’. Many Nazis were also viscerally anti-clerical, up to and including resisting the emergence of an anti-clerical caste in their own ranks. It was the substantive values of Christianity that stood in their way, disputing their own total claims and blocking the moral dis-inhibition indisputable to their racial rampage. Paying Christianity a back handed compliment they realised only something remarkably similar would obliterate it, namely ‘a kind of destructive mimesis. The fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the diffuse religious emotionality had its uses.
Whatever Christianity’s ambivalences and antagonisms towards Jews, its core concerns with compassion and humility were anathema to a politics of racial egoism and worship of brutality and strength. These ‘aspects’ of Christianity would have to be expunged. In Nazi eyes Christianity was ‘foreign’ and ‘unnatural’ or what has been described as the Jews ‘posthumous poison’, a notion the Nazis picked up from Nietzsche. Viewed pseudo-historically it was an eastern Mediterranean ‘servant ethic’ imposed on the Germans by force and subterfuge. It was concerned with questions beyond human time, situating human beings uncomfortably between the timeless immensity of god and the lower natural world, whereas Nazism wished to wholly regenerate mankind into the latter. Man would become a sort of unblinking superior predator, tearing his foes to pieces with the unconcern or relenting single-mindedness of a tiger or a shark. A remote god would survey the carnage with sublime indifference.
Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazis thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological great chain of being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons. That is what Hitler meant when he said ‘To the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul…I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued existence in the visible immortality of the nation’ .
We find him being making agreeable noises towards Christianity in the beginning (remember he is trying to refashion it). However, by 1937 the climate had changed dramatically.
Ian Kernshaw – Hitler 1936-1945 Nemesis p40
In early 1937 he was declaring that ‘Christianity was ripe for destruction (untergang)’ and that the churches must yield to the ‘primacy of the state’, railing against any compromise with ‘the most horrible institution imaginable’ ..However he indicated that at some point in the future, Church and State would be separated, the Concordat between the Reich and the Vatican dissolved (to give the regime a free hand) and the entire force of the party turned to ‘the destruction of the clerics’ (pfaffen)
This was no rash outburst, it was the articulation of a concious policy to destroy Christianity. As General Donovon's OSS report to the Nuremburg trials stated following an analysis of Nazi documents.
"Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion,". The report further points to the "systematic nature of the persecution" as "the best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan."
The report goes on to say, "Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich ... and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by travelling party speakers."
Hitler’s personal views on Christianity veer from attempting to refashion and usurp its core themes (e.g presenting Jesus as an Aryan superman, to outright contempt.
“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich,p. 115
“Christianity is concerned with translating the Christain doctrine into facts. It is mere whole hearted Bolshvism, under a tinsel of metaphysics’ Burliegh, Third Reich a new history, p101
Christianity is 'an invention of sick brains'(Dan Dennett would agree), 'a negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to a human being who seriously believes in transubstantiation'
Burliegh, Third Reich a new History p718
The Hossbach memorandum states:
The Fuehrer did not share the view that the Empire was unshakable. Opposition to the Empire was to be found less in the countries conquered than among her competitors. The British Empire and the Roman Empire could not be compared in respect of permanence; the latter was not confronted by any powerful political rival of a serious order after the Punic Wars. It was only the disintegrating effect of Christianity, and the symptoms of age which appear in every country, which caused ancient Rome to succumb to the onslaught of the Germans.
Let us look at a speech frequently cited by the new atheists in an attempt to analyse it, drawing on what we know about his intentions and personality.
’My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. . . I am convinced that I am really a devil and not a Christian if I do not feel compassion and do not wage war, as Christ did two thousand years ago, against those who are steeling and exploiting these poverty-stricken people.’ Speech delivered at Munich, April 12, 1922;
This is a public speech in which Hitler’s intention is to set himself up as a messiah figure and plunge National Socialism into a quasi-religious dimension. The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were masters of mobilising human sentiment, taking the emotions and forms of religion and effectively synthesizing them into a political religion. In other words he is taking a religious motif and co-opting it for his own purposes.
This was a necessary tactic in a country with an overwhelmingly Christian character. Joachim Fest wrote, "Hitler knew, through the constant invocation of the God the Lord (German: Herrgott) or of providence (German: Vorsehung), to make the impression of a godly way of thought. According to Ian Kershaw "He used his "ability to simulate, even to potentially critical Church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity,". Kershaw adds that Hitler by this ability also succeeded in appeasing possible Church resistance to anti-Christian Nazi Party radicals.
Ever the politician he sought to distance himself from the radically irreligious in his party, even though his own views were probably more extreme. They were a mix of materialist biology, a faux-Neitzschean contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values and a visceral anti-clericalism. On his actual religious views, Burleigh writes
Micheal Burleigh – Sacred Causes p100-101
So far we have said little about Hitler’s own God or his credulity towards a very reductionist form of science; who subjects whose tensions clearly taxed his own limited intellectual abilities. He subscribed to the view that science had largely supplanted Christianity without rationalism eradicating the need for belief, or undermining the existence of a creator God, in whom he continued to believe…Hitler’s God was not the Christian God as conventionally understood.
If you look at his speeches you will see a lot of them follow a predictable schematic form. He begins with his odyssey from Braunau to national notoriety and projects this illusion of a prophet from nowhere. He then claims ‘providence’ selected him to become a great leader and vanquish Germany’s war dead. And at this point he introduces the egotistical and sinister Jew. This is all just theatre and doesn’t reflect a serious attempt at theology. It was a major part of his repertoire as a speaker, he saw words as hammer blows ‘opening the gates to a people’s heart’. You will notice that in the process the religious forms are meaningless parodies, for example the concept of feeling compassion and waging war. By the time we get to 1937 it looks as if he believed he had a special relationship with God and providence, and believed everything was moving towards his purpose. If we look to Frankfurt on the 31st of March 1934 Hitler says:
‘I believe that it was also God’s Will that from here a boy was to be sent into the Reich, allowed to mature and elevated to become the nations Fuhrer, thus enabling him to regenerate his homeland into the Reich’
This can’t entirely be seen as rhetoric. Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987)
‘The more he succumbed to the allure of his own Führer cult and came to believe in his own myth, the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility’.
Ultimately, the reason I think Hitler can’t be called a Christian is that he hated Christianity and wanted to exterminate it. That’s usually a bit of a fundamental stumbling block. His private statements are unambiguous in this respect and statements such as ‘Christianity is ripe for destruction’ don’t strike me as particularly devout. It doesn’t look like Michael Burleigh and Ian Kershaw, arguably the two most eminent scholars of the Third Reich think he was a Christian either. Funny that. This is one of those issues that is only really controversial on the internet.
If we encounter a primary source material such as a speech we need to consider the following.
1) When did the speech take place?, what was the historical context?
2) Who was the speech directed to?, what was the makeup of the audience?, what effect did this have on the speaker and the language used by the speaker.
3) How does this speech fit into all the other source material we have about the speaker, both primary and secondary
For example, a big growth industry on the internet is Holocaust denial. Statements by Hitler proposing that the Jews be expelled to Madagascar are taken by these loonies to suggest that there was no deliberate plan for the Holocaust. Basically they take his word for it with no source critique whatsoever.
What was Hitler and the Nazi’s attitude towards Christianity and Religion?
Here it is important to distinguish between public/private pronouncements and look at Hitler’s statements and personality to devise his true position. The intent of Hitler and most importantly, the Nazi hierarchy was to divorce Christianity radically from Judaism and to refashion the content of the Christian message. Hitler could claim that he was a Christian and a Catholic because he took a ‘pix a mix’ approach to religion, refashioning it according to his own ideology.
Lets look at Nazism as a whole.
Michael Burleigh – The Third Reich – A New History p 255-256
The Nazis despised Christianity for its Judaic roots, effeminacy, otherworldliness and universality. It appeared life defying to the life affirming, mobilising entirely unwarranted sentiments and values. Forgiveness was not for resentful haters, nor compassion of much use to people who wanted to stamp the weak into the ground. In a word, Christianity was seen as a ‘soul malady’. Many Nazis were also viscerally anti-clerical, up to and including resisting the emergence of an anti-clerical caste in their own ranks. It was the substantive values of Christianity that stood in their way, disputing their own total claims and blocking the moral dis-inhibition indisputable to their racial rampage. Paying Christianity a back handed compliment they realised only something remarkably similar would obliterate it, namely ‘a kind of destructive mimesis. The fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the diffuse religious emotionality had its uses.
Whatever Christianity’s ambivalences and antagonisms towards Jews, its core concerns with compassion and humility were anathema to a politics of racial egoism and worship of brutality and strength. These ‘aspects’ of Christianity would have to be expunged. In Nazi eyes Christianity was ‘foreign’ and ‘unnatural’ or what has been described as the Jews ‘posthumous poison’, a notion the Nazis picked up from Nietzsche. Viewed pseudo-historically it was an eastern Mediterranean ‘servant ethic’ imposed on the Germans by force and subterfuge. It was concerned with questions beyond human time, situating human beings uncomfortably between the timeless immensity of god and the lower natural world, whereas Nazism wished to wholly regenerate mankind into the latter. Man would become a sort of unblinking superior predator, tearing his foes to pieces with the unconcern or relenting single-mindedness of a tiger or a shark. A remote god would survey the carnage with sublime indifference.
Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazis thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological great chain of being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons. That is what Hitler meant when he said ‘To the Christian doctrine of the infinite significance of the individual human soul…I oppose with icy clarity the saving doctrine of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual human being, and of his continued existence in the visible immortality of the nation’ .
We find him being making agreeable noises towards Christianity in the beginning (remember he is trying to refashion it). However, by 1937 the climate had changed dramatically.
Ian Kernshaw – Hitler 1936-1945 Nemesis p40
In early 1937 he was declaring that ‘Christianity was ripe for destruction (untergang)’ and that the churches must yield to the ‘primacy of the state’, railing against any compromise with ‘the most horrible institution imaginable’ ..However he indicated that at some point in the future, Church and State would be separated, the Concordat between the Reich and the Vatican dissolved (to give the regime a free hand) and the entire force of the party turned to ‘the destruction of the clerics’ (pfaffen)
This was no rash outburst, it was the articulation of a concious policy to destroy Christianity. As General Donovon's OSS report to the Nuremburg trials stated following an analysis of Nazi documents.
"Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion,". The report further points to the "systematic nature of the persecution" as "the best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan."
The report goes on to say, "Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich ... and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by travelling party speakers."
Hitler’s personal views on Christianity veer from attempting to refashion and usurp its core themes (e.g presenting Jesus as an Aryan superman, to outright contempt.
“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?” Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich,p. 115
“Christianity is concerned with translating the Christain doctrine into facts. It is mere whole hearted Bolshvism, under a tinsel of metaphysics’ Burliegh, Third Reich a new history, p101
Christianity is 'an invention of sick brains'(Dan Dennett would agree), 'a negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to a human being who seriously believes in transubstantiation'
Burliegh, Third Reich a new History p718
The Hossbach memorandum states:
The Fuehrer did not share the view that the Empire was unshakable. Opposition to the Empire was to be found less in the countries conquered than among her competitors. The British Empire and the Roman Empire could not be compared in respect of permanence; the latter was not confronted by any powerful political rival of a serious order after the Punic Wars. It was only the disintegrating effect of Christianity, and the symptoms of age which appear in every country, which caused ancient Rome to succumb to the onslaught of the Germans.
Let us look at a speech frequently cited by the new atheists in an attempt to analyse it, drawing on what we know about his intentions and personality.
’My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. . . I am convinced that I am really a devil and not a Christian if I do not feel compassion and do not wage war, as Christ did two thousand years ago, against those who are steeling and exploiting these poverty-stricken people.’ Speech delivered at Munich, April 12, 1922;
This is a public speech in which Hitler’s intention is to set himself up as a messiah figure and plunge National Socialism into a quasi-religious dimension. The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were masters of mobilising human sentiment, taking the emotions and forms of religion and effectively synthesizing them into a political religion. In other words he is taking a religious motif and co-opting it for his own purposes.
This was a necessary tactic in a country with an overwhelmingly Christian character. Joachim Fest wrote, "Hitler knew, through the constant invocation of the God the Lord (German: Herrgott) or of providence (German: Vorsehung), to make the impression of a godly way of thought. According to Ian Kershaw "He used his "ability to simulate, even to potentially critical Church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity,". Kershaw adds that Hitler by this ability also succeeded in appeasing possible Church resistance to anti-Christian Nazi Party radicals.
Ever the politician he sought to distance himself from the radically irreligious in his party, even though his own views were probably more extreme. They were a mix of materialist biology, a faux-Neitzschean contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values and a visceral anti-clericalism. On his actual religious views, Burleigh writes
Micheal Burleigh – Sacred Causes p100-101
So far we have said little about Hitler’s own God or his credulity towards a very reductionist form of science; who subjects whose tensions clearly taxed his own limited intellectual abilities. He subscribed to the view that science had largely supplanted Christianity without rationalism eradicating the need for belief, or undermining the existence of a creator God, in whom he continued to believe…Hitler’s God was not the Christian God as conventionally understood.
If you look at his speeches you will see a lot of them follow a predictable schematic form. He begins with his odyssey from Braunau to national notoriety and projects this illusion of a prophet from nowhere. He then claims ‘providence’ selected him to become a great leader and vanquish Germany’s war dead. And at this point he introduces the egotistical and sinister Jew. This is all just theatre and doesn’t reflect a serious attempt at theology. It was a major part of his repertoire as a speaker, he saw words as hammer blows ‘opening the gates to a people’s heart’. You will notice that in the process the religious forms are meaningless parodies, for example the concept of feeling compassion and waging war. By the time we get to 1937 it looks as if he believed he had a special relationship with God and providence, and believed everything was moving towards his purpose. If we look to Frankfurt on the 31st of March 1934 Hitler says:
‘I believe that it was also God’s Will that from here a boy was to be sent into the Reich, allowed to mature and elevated to become the nations Fuhrer, thus enabling him to regenerate his homeland into the Reich’
This can’t entirely be seen as rhetoric. Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987)
‘The more he succumbed to the allure of his own Führer cult and came to believe in his own myth, the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility’.
Ultimately, the reason I think Hitler can’t be called a Christian is that he hated Christianity and wanted to exterminate it. That’s usually a bit of a fundamental stumbling block. His private statements are unambiguous in this respect and statements such as ‘Christianity is ripe for destruction’ don’t strike me as particularly devout. It doesn’t look like Michael Burleigh and Ian Kershaw, arguably the two most eminent scholars of the Third Reich think he was a Christian either. Funny that. This is one of those issues that is only really controversial on the internet.
