The Nazis - Pseudotheology

Hitler wasted little time in securing control over the Christian churches in Germany: within six months of taking power he began to put the screws to the Protestant churches. This article devotes much column space to the pastors who had no problem with any of Hitler's commands.

"The issue, then, is broader than the Reich. Jews, Protestants and Catholics the world over have seen another scrap of paper torn up in Hitler's repudiation of his pledge on taking office that the Nazi regime would respect the freedom and legal rights of German churches... Hitler modified an order requiring all Protestant pastors on a recent Sunday to display Nazi banners from their church spires.... The Nazis have also suppressed the German branch of International Bible Students' Society, outlawed the Boy Scouts, and, to make their program more effective - given a Nazi cast to the Lord's Prayer."

Catholics and Nazis (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Shortly after Hitler assumed power, he struck a deal with the Catholic Church in Germany allowing their schools to remain open. On May Day, 1937, he nullified the agreement, saying:

"We made a start with the nation's youth. They shall not escape us. We will take them when they are 10 years-old and bring them up in the spirit of the community..."

 

The Churches Resist (Literary Digest, 1933)

Here is one of the earliest reports from Hitler's Germany on the the Nazi hierarchy butting-heads with the Christian churches. As the fascists forced the Catholic and Protestant clergies to coerce, the churches reminded the new government of the autonomy they have always enjoyed (more or less).

 

The Era of Nationalized Religions (The Literary Digest, 1935)

In 1935 the Biennial Congress of the Western Section of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (13,000,000 strong) gathered in Richmond, Virginia in order to discuss their concerns regarding the spread of "nationalized religions" in such nations as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany:

"As for anti-religious communism, said Doctor Charles S. Cleland, 'In our missionary circles this is more to be feared than nationalism. The latter may be, and oftentimes is, a patriotic movement, while the former aims only at destruction. Communism of the type now referred to seeks not only the suppression of Christianity, but of all religions. Its purpose is to make governments entirely secular, and to free the national life from all forms of faith and worship."

 

Nazis Against the Christian Churches (Ken Magazine, 1939)

"As pastor of the little Austrian church, the good father was happy until Nazis swallowed the country, mistreated his Jewish converts and threw many of his colleagues into the dreaded concentration camp of Dachau. Shocked, he attempted to preserve a fragmentary picture of events for posterity - and found himself in Dachau. Similar episodes, which are today common throughout Nazidom, only succeed in stiffening the Catholic fight against Nazism."

 

Catholic Hierarchy Pressured in 1930s Germany (Literary Digest, 1937)

"With every organization in Germany gobbled up, the Evangelical and Roman Catholic churches continue their valiant, tortured struggle against absorption in the totalitarian state."

"Last week Michael Cardinal von Faulhaber (1869 - 1952), Archbishop of Munich, mounted the pulpit of old St. Michael's and basted Nazi violations of the Concordat, the 1933 treaty between the Reich and the Vatican under which Catholics agreed to a ban on the political activities clergy and lay leaders, in exchange for religious liberty in their churches and schools."