title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: As part of various renovations made in 1991 to improve the stadium's suitability as a baseball venue, 12,000 seats were eliminated, most of them in distant portions of the outfield, and home plate was moved closer to the stands.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On September 8 of that year, support beams snapped and caused a concrete slab to fall onto an exterior walkway. No one was injured, but the Expos had to move their final 13 home games of that season to the opponents' cities. The Expos hinted that the 1992 season was at risk unless the stadium was certified safe. In early November, engineers found the stadium was structurally sound. However, it took longer to certify the roof as safe because it had been badly ripped in a June windstorm. For the 1992 season, it was decided to keep the roof closed at all times. The Kevlar roof was removed in May 1998, making the stadium open-air for the 1998 season. Later in 1998, a $26 million non-retractable opaque blue roof was installed.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 1999, a portion of the roof collapsed on January 18, dumping ice and snow on workers that were setting up for the annual Montreal Auto Show. The auto show and a boat show the following month were canceled, and the auto show left the venue for good (since then, the Montreal Auto Show has usually been held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal). Repaired once again, the roof was modified to better withstand winter conditions: the OIB installed a network of pipes to circulate heated water under the roof to allow for snow melting. Despite these corrective measures, the stadium floor remained closed from December to March.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Birdair, the fabric provider and designer of the roof, was later sued for the roof failure. The installer of the roof, Danny's Construction, having suffered tremendous cost overruns along with its subcontractor Montacier, due to changes in the plans and specifications and delays, was terminated during the construction, and Birdair completed the project. Danny's Construction sued Birdair in 1999. In February 2010, after a lengthy trial, the Quebec Superior Court awarded a judgement in favour of Danny's Construction and dismissed Birdair's countersuit.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium's condition suffered considerably in the early 21st century. During the Expos' final years in Montreal, it was coated with grime, and much of the concrete was chipped, stained, and soiled.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 2009, the stadium received approval to remain open in the winter, provided weather conditions are favourable. However, the Olympic Installations Board issued a report stating that the roof was unsafe during heavy rainfall or more than of snow, and that it rips 50 to 60 times a year. The city fire department warned in August 2009 that without corrective measures, including a new roof, it may order the stadium closed. Events cannot be held if more than of snow are predicted 24 hours in advance, such as caused postponement of the Montreal Impact home opener soccer match in March 2014. A contract for a new permanent steel roof was awarded in 2004, with an estimated $300 million price tag. In June 2010, the Olympic Installations Board sought approval from the provincial government for the contract.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In May 2011 a committee was formed to study the future of the stadium and improve the usage of the stadium, pool, and sports centre.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: A slab of concrete measuring approximately fell from the roof of the stadium's underground parking facility on March 4, 2012. There were no injuries. The roof continues to deteriorate, with 7,453 tears as of May 2017,


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: limiting use of the venue in winter to when there are three or fewer centimetres of snow on the roof.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 2015, a new high definition scoreboard was installed, replacing the aging two-panel display dating back to the stadium's renovations in 1992.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In November 2017 the Quebec government approved a new roof, estimated to cost $250 million. The Olympic Installations Board has estimated the cost of demolishing the stadium would be between $500 and $700 million,


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: though this figure is based on a preliminary two-month study and thus has a high margin of error. The new roof was then planned to be removable, allowing the stadium to either be open-air or enclosed, consistent with the intent of the original roof. The option of a removable portion of the roof has since been removed from the scope of the project.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Canadian Football League's Montreal Alouettes became the stadium's first major post-Olympic tenant when they moved their home games there halfway through the 1976 season. Capacity was reduced from its Olympic capacity of 72,000 to 58,500, but leapt to 66,308 when the natural grass was replaced with AstroTurf ahead of the 1977 season. The Alouettes remained there through 1986, the franchise's final season of operations; the team would shut down shortly after the start of the 1987 season. A revived Alouettes franchise returned for the 1996 and 1997 seasons, but then moved to the Percival Molson Stadium in 1998. The Alouettes used Olympic Stadium for select regular season games until 2009, and playoff games until 2012. Due to the increased popularity of the Alouettes and the small capacity of Percival Molson Stadium, the team considered returning to Olympic Stadium on a full-time basis, but instead renovated Percival Molson Stadium to increase its capacity. In addition, the stadium holds the record for the largest Grey Cup attendance, that of the 1977 Grey Cup game, in which the hometown Montreal Alouettes defeated the Edmonton Eskimos, 41-6 before 68,318 spectators; this despite a local transit strike and harsh winter weather conditions.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Olympic Stadium has hosted the Grey Cup a total of six times, most recently in 2008 when the Calgary Stampeders defeated the hometown Alouettes. The stadium holds the record for nine of the ten largest crowds in CFL history, which include five regular-season and four Grey Cup games. A single-game record crowd numbering 69,083 attended a game played on September 6, 1977, between the Alouettes and Toronto Argonauts.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 1991 and 1992, the stadium was the home of the Montreal Machine of the World League of American Football. This included hosting World Bowl '92 on June 6, 1992, in which the Sacramento Surge defeated the Orlando Thunder 21–17 before 43,789.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 1988 (Jets and Browns) and 1990 (Steelers and Patriots), NFL pre-season games were played at Olympic Stadium.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 1977, the stadium replaced Jarry Park Stadium as the home ballpark of the National League's Montreal Expos. As a part of the team's franchise grant, a domed stadium was supposed to be in place for the 1972 baseball season. However, due to the delays in constructing Olympic Stadium, until 1977, the Expos annually sought and received a waiver to remain at Jarry. As late as January 1977, it was thought the Expos would have to play at least part of the 1977 season at Jarry as well. The Parti Québécois' landslide victory in the 1976 provincial elections caused the Expos to break off lease talks. However, an agreement was reached in February, and an official announcement came in March.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Expos regularly played 81 home games every season until 2003, when they played 22 home games in Puerto Rico at Hiram Bithorn Stadium in San Juan. The Expos played 59 home games at Olympic Stadium in each of their final two seasons of 2003 and 2004; the franchise moved south to Washington, D.C. for the 2005 season and became the Washington Nationals.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Olympic Stadium's first baseball game was played on April 15, 1977. In front of 57,592, the Expos lost 7–2 to the Philadelphia Phillies. However, the Expos had to use a hacksaw to cut open the locks because the OIB did not have a master key. The Expos played five home playoff games in 1981; two in the NLDS against the Phillies, and three in the NLCS against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who went on to win the World Series. On October 19, the Expos lost the decisive fifth game, 2–1, to the Dodgers on Rick Monday's ninth-inning home run. In 1982, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game was played at Olympic Stadium in front of 59,057—a stadium record for baseball. On September 29, 2004, the Expos played their last game in Montreal, losing 9–1 to the Florida Marlins before 31,395.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Olympic Stadium proved to be somewhat problematic as a baseball venue. As in all multipurpose stadiums, the lower seating tier was set further back than in baseball-specific parks to accommodate the football field. However, since Canadian football fields are longer and wider than American football fields, Olympic Stadium's lower tier was set back even further than comparable seats at American multipurpose stadiums. The upper deck was one of the highest in the majors; as was the case with most of its multipurpose counterparts, most of the upper-deck seats, particularly those in the outfield, were too far away to be of any use during the regular season.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Expos were not consulted on the stadium's location, design, or construction even though they were slated to be its primary tenants. Nonetheless, for most of their tenure they put considerable effort into making the atmosphere friendlier for baseball. During the 1970s and early 1980s, fans arriving at the stadium from the Metro were greeted by an oom-pah band playing "The Happy Wanderer." Whenever an opposing pitcher tried to hold a runner at first rather than pitch, the sound system would cluck at him like a chicken.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Before the 1991 season, the OIB began a major overhaul on the stadium's baseball configuration. The lower deck in center field was removed to make room for a larger scoreboard with replay capability. That scoreboard was installed ahead of the 1992 season. Also ahead of the 1992 season, the running track was removed, home plate was moved closer to the stands and new seats closer to the field were installed. Several distant sections of permanent seating beyond the outfield fence were closed, replaced with bleacher seats directly behind the fence. The total seating capacity for baseball was reduced from a high of around 60,400 to 46,000.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Expos were very successful in the stadium for a time, with above National League median attendance in 1977 and from 1979 to 1983. The Expos outdrew the New York Mets from 1977 to 1983, and 1994 to 1996, as well as the New York Yankees in 1982 and 1983.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium's playing conditions left much to be desired. For most of the Expos' tenure, the playing surface was an extremely thin AstroTurf carpet, with only equally thin padding between it and the concrete floor. It was so hard on players' knees that visiting teams frequently ran at a nearby park. Longtime Expos trainer Ron McClain begged for a replacement, but the OIB was unwilling to spend the $1 million needed for a new surface. Before the roof finally arrived, players had to contend with huge patches of ice in early April or late September. Additionally, for most of the Expos' tenure, the padding on the fence was so thin that fielders risked severe injury by going after long fly balls. However, the OIB was also unwilling to replace the padding. By the 1990s, several free agents specifically demanded that the Expos be taken out of consideration due to the poor playing conditions.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: By the mid-1990s, owner Claude Brochu concluded that Olympic Stadium was not suitable as a baseball venue, and actively campaigned for a replacement. Brochu sold the team to Jeffrey Loria in 2000, who was equally dissatisfied with Olympic Stadium; he bluntly stated, "We cannot stay here." However, Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard refused to authorize public funding deemed necessary for a replacement, in part because Olympic Stadium still had not been paid for. The poor conditions played a role in the Expos nearly being disbanded in the 2001 Major League Baseball contraction plan, which fell through due to court rulings.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Ten years after the last Expos game at Olympic Stadium, the Toronto Blue Jays played two spring training games at the stadium against the New York Mets on March 28 and 29, 2014, with combined attendance of 96,350. The Jays have continued this practice in subsequent years, against the Cincinnati Reds on April 3 and 4, 2015, with combined attendance of 96,545, the Boston Red Sox on April 1 and 2, 2016, with combined attendance of 106,102, the Pittsburgh Pirates on March 31 and April 1, 2017, combined attendance of 95,382, the St. Louis Cardinals on March 26 and 27, 2018, with combined attendance of 51,151 and the Milwaukee Brewers on March 25 and 26, 2019, with a combined attendance of 46,984. The New York Yankees were scheduled to play there on March 23 and 24, 2020 but the games were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Willie Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates hit the longest home run at Olympic Stadium on May 20, 1978, driving the ball into the second deck in right field for an estimated distance of 535 feet. The yellow seat that marked the location where the ball landed has been removed from the 300 level. The seat is now preserved at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. Stargell also hit a notable home run at the Expos' original Montreal home, Jarry Park, which landed in a swimming pool beyond the right field fence.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On April 4, 1988, the Expos' Opening Day, Darryl Strawberry of the New York Mets hit a ball off a speaker which hangs off a concrete ring at Olympic Stadium, estimated to have traveled 525 feet.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Henry Rodríguez hit a ball on June 15, 1997, that bounced off the concrete ring in right field, caromed up to hit the roof, and came down, hitting a speaker. The distance traveled by this ball is also estimated at 525 feet.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The longest home run hit to left field was Vladimir Guerrero's blast on July 28, 2003, that hit an advertising sign directly below the left field upper deck. The ad was later replaced with a sign reading "VLAD 502".


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Olympic Stadium was the home of the NASL's Montreal Manic soccer team from 1981 to 1983. A 1981 playoff game against the Chicago Sting attracted a crowd of over 58,000. Several games of the 2007 FIFA Under 20 World Cup were played at Olympic Stadium and drew the largest crowds of the tournament, including two sell-outs of 55,800.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Olympic Stadium hosted a CONCACAF Champions League quarter-final game pitting the original Montreal Impact – who played primarily in the adjacent Saputo Stadium – against Club Santos Laguna of the Liga MX (Mexico First Division) on February 25, 2009. This was the first time an international soccer game took place in Montreal during the winter months. The Impact won 2–0 in front of a record crowd of 55,571. The stadium was also home to a friendly match between the Impact and A.C. Milan of the Italian Serie A on June 2, 2010, before 47,861.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On July 25, 2009, Olympic Stadium became the first stadium outside France to host Ligue 1's Trophée des Champions, a super cup played by the winner of Ligue 1 and the Coupe de France. Over 34,000 attended the game. Bordeaux defeated Guingamp, 2–0. The game was held in Montreal to help Ligue 1 break into the growing North America soccer market.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On March 17, 2012, a record crowd of 58,912 packed Olympic Stadium to cheer on the current version of the Montreal Impact for their MLS debut on home soil, in an entertaining 1–1 draw with the Chicago Fire, setting a new attendance record for professional soccer in Quebec. That record was later broken on May 12, 2012, with 60,860 people for a match against the LA Galaxy, also setting a new attendance record for professional soccer in Canada.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On August 24, 2014, the Olympic Stadium hosted the final match of the 2014 FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On April 29, 2015, a record crowd of 61,004 attended the final match of the CONCACAF Champions League between the Montreal Impact and Club América, establishing a new record attendance for professional soccer in Canada.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Olympic Stadium hosted tournament matches for the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup along with other stadiums across Canada. One notable game was the semi-final match-up between the United States and Germany that took place on June 30, 2015, which drew a crowd of 51,176 people. The Americans won 2–0 in front of a largely partisan crowd and then went on to win their record third FIFA Women's World Cup trophy the following Sunday in Vancouver. This stadium was originally one of Canada's three candidate venues for the 2026 FIFA World Cup and is expected to get a retractable roof. However, Montreal withdrew from the host city selection process for the World Cup on July 6, 2021.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Starting in 2018, the Desjardins Group plans to move approximately 1000 of its employees into the Montreal Tower. The company plans to occupy 7 of the 12 floors available in the tower. It is estimated that around $60 million in renovations are required before Desjardins can move in.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In winter 1977, Emerson, Lake and Palmer filmed a performance of their arrangement of the Aaron Copland piece "Fanfare For The Common Man" at the stadium. The group also recorded a concert at the stadium in August of that year and released it as a live album.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Olympic Stadium hosted the 1978 World Junior Speed Skating Championships where they crowned the American siblings Eric and Beth Heiden as junior world champions.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The Catholic Charismatic Renewal Assembly took place in the presence of Father Emiliano Tardif in 1979.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On June 20, 1980, Roberto Durán defeated Sugar Ray Leonard to win the WBC boxing world's welterweight championship at the Olympic Stadium.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On September 11, 1984, Pope John Paul II participated in a youth rally with about 55,000 people in attendance.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On October 30, 2010, a special mass, to commemorate the ascension to sainthood of Brother André, was held at the stadium. Over 30,000 people attended.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: In 2021, the Olympic Stadium was named a mass vaccination site by the Quebec government during the COVID-19 pandemic in Quebec, making it one of the largest mass vaccination sites in the province as a result. Quebec premier François Legault received both of his required vaccine doses as well as his booster dose at the stadium.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: On August 8, 1992, Metallica and Guns N' Roses co-headlined a North American Stadium tour Guns N' Roses/Metallica Stadium Tour with an included stop at Olympic Stadium. Several songs into Metallica's set, frontman and rhythm guitarist James Hetfield was accidentally burned by improper pyrotechnics forcing the band to cut their set short as Hetfield was rushed to the hospital. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, bassist Jason Newsted and drummer Lars Ulrich promised a makeup concert to quell the sold-out crowd of 54,666. The band would later perform two half-priced shows at the Montreal Forum in February 1993. After a two-hour and fifteen minute delay, Guns N' Roses performed a shortened set. Singer Axl Rose later blamed the issues on bad audio and vocal problems. Following the set, an estimated crowd of 2,000 people began rioting within the stadium and surrounding areas, the fans would overturn police cars and set multiple bonfires within the stadium causing an estimated $600,000 in damage to the stadium and surrounding areas. The Expos' schedule was unaffected by the repairs made to the stadium as they had been on a seven-game away stretch.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: Pink Floyd attracted the largest paid crowd to the Olympic Stadium: 78,322 people on July 6, 1977. The second-largest crowd was 73,898 for Emerson, Lake & Palmer on August 26, 1977. The largest crowds for an opera performance were on June 16 and 18, 1988, with 63,000 to watch a production of "Aida".


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: The stadium is directly connected to the Pie-IX metro station on the Green Line of the Montreal Metro. Viau metro station on the Green Line is also nearby.


title: Olympic Stadium (Montreal)

text: As part of the commemorative stamps created for the 1976 Olympics, Canada Post issued a stamp depicting the Olympic Stadium and Velodrome.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: Stop Making Sense is a 1984 American concert film featuring a live performance by the American rock band Talking Heads. Directed by Jonathan Demme, it was shot over the course of three nights at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December 1983, as the group was touring to promote their new album "Speaking in Tongues". The concert serves as a comprehensive retrospective of the band's history to that time, featuring many of their popular songs from their first hit single "Psycho Killer", through to their most recent album. In addition, the group performs one song, "Genius of Love", by the Tom Tom Club, a side project for two members of the band. The film is the first made entirely using digital audio techniques. The band raised the budget of $1.2 million themselves.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The four core members of Talking Heads: lead singer and guitarist David Byrne, drummer Chris Frantz, guitarist and keyboardist Jerry Harrison, and bassist Tina Weymouth, are joined on stage by an extensive supporting band including backing singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, guitarist Alex Weir, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and percussionist Steve Scales.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: "Stop Making Sense" is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest concert films of all time. Leonard Maltin called it "one of the greatest rock movies ever made", Robert Christgau "the finest concert film", and Pauline Kael "close to perfection".


title: Stop Making Sense

text: In 2021, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Stop Making Sense

text: Lead singer David Byrne walks on to a bare stage with a portable cassette tape player and an acoustic guitar. He introduces "Psycho Killer" by saying he wants to play a tape, but in reality a Roland TR-808 drum machine starts playing from the mixing board. The gunshot-like beats cause Byrne to stagger "like Jean-Paul Belmondo in the final minutes of <nowiki>'</nowiki>"Breathless",' a hero succumbing, surprised, to violence that he'd thought he was prepared for."


title: Stop Making Sense

text: With each successive song, Byrne is joined by more members of the band: first by Tina Weymouth for "Heaven" (with Lynn Mabry providing harmony vocals from backstage), second by Chris Frantz for "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel", and third by Jerry Harrison for "Found a Job". Performance equipment is wheeled out and added to the set to accommodate the additional musicians: back-up singers Lynn Mabry and Ednah Holt, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, percussionist Steve Scales, and guitarist Alex Weir. The first song to feature the entire lineup is "Burning Down the House", although the original 1985 RCA/Columbia Home Video release (which featured three additional songs in two performances edited into the film) has the entire band (minus Worrell) performing "Cities" before this song. Byrne leaves the stage at one point to allow the Weymouth–Frantz-led side-band Tom Tom Club to perform their song "Genius of Love". The band also performs two songs from Byrne's soundtrack album "The Catherine Wheel", "What a Day That Was" and (as a bonus song on the home video release) "Big Business".


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The film includes Byrne's "big suit", an absurdly large business suit that he wears for the song "Girlfriend Is Better". The suit was partly inspired by Noh theatre styles, and became an icon not only of the film – as it appears on the movie poster, for instance – but of Byrne himself. Byrne said: "I was in Japan in between tours and I was checking out traditional Japanese theater – Kabuki, Noh, Bunraku – and I was wondering what to wear on our upcoming tour. A fashion designer friend (Jurgen Lehl) said in his typically droll manner, 'Well David, everything is bigger on stage.' He was referring to gestures and all that, but I applied the idea to a businessman's suit." Pauline Kael stated in her review: "When he comes on wearing a boxlike 'big suit' – his body lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh plays, or like Beuys' large suit of felt that hangs off a wall – it's a perfect psychological fit." On the DVD he gives his reasoning behind the suit: "I wanted my head to appear smaller and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger, because music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head."


title: Stop Making Sense

text: <nowiki>*</nowiki>Songs available as extra features on DVD/Blu-ray releases, but not part of the main feature.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The filming of "Stop Making Sense" spanned four live shows at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, December 13–16, 1983. It pioneered the use of 24-track digital sound recording which resulted in a particularly clear soundtrack. Demme has stated that one night of shooting was dedicated almost entirely to wide shots from a distance, to minimize the intrusion of cameras on stage. Demme had considered additional shooting on a soundstage made to recreate the Pantages Theater, but the band declined to do this, as they thought the lack of audience response would have hindered the energy of their performance. Before the shooting of the movie, David Byrne implored the band to wear neutral-coloured clothing so the stage lights would not illuminate anything too distinctive. However, drummer Chris Frantz can still be seen wearing a turquoise-coloured polo shirt.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: Demme also considered including more shots of the audience reacting to the performance, as is traditional in concert films. However, he discovered that filming the audience required additional lighting, which inhibited the audience's energy. This in turn made the band feel insecure and thus led to "the worst Talking Heads performance in the history of the band's career." The only direct audience shots in the film occur at the very end, during "Crosseyed and Painless."


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The film premiered during the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 24, 1984 and entered commercial release in the United States on October 19, 1984.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: When the film was first released on home video, the songs "Cities" and "Big Business"/"I Zimbra" were restored to the performance, thus forming what was dubbed the "special edition" of the film. For the 1999 re-release, these songs were no longer included in sequence with the rest of the footage. It and subsequent video and DVD releases have placed these songs after the film in an unrestored full-frame version.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The film has been released on Blu-ray, widescreen DVD, VHS in both fullscreen and widescreen versions, and at one point Laserdisc (in Japan).


title: Stop Making Sense

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, "Stop Making Sense" as an approval rating of 100%, based on 41 reviews with an average rating of 9/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Jonathan Demme's "Stop Making Sense" captures the energetic, unpredictable live act of peak Talking Heads with colour and visual wit." It won the National Society of Film Critics Award for best non-fiction film in 1984.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The film is widely regarded as one of the finest concert films. Leonard Maltin gave it four out of four, describing it as "brilliantly conceived, shot, edited and performed" and "one of the greatest rock movies ever made." Roger Ebert gave the film a three-and-a-half star rating, writing that "the impression throughout "Stop Making Sense" is of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high...It's a live show with elements of "Metropolis"...But the film's peak moments come through Byrne's simple physical presence. He jogs in place with his sidemen; he runs around the stage; he seems so happy to be alive and making music...He serves as a reminder of how sour and weary and strung-out many rock bands have become." Danny Peary described "Stop Making Sense" as "Riveting...What takes place on stage will make even the most sceptical into Talking Heads converts...[The] performances are invariably exciting, Byrne's lyrics are intriguing. Byrne, his head moving rhythmically as if he had just had shock treatments, is spellbinding – what a talent!...Byrne is known for his belief that music should be performed in an interesting, "visual" manner, and this should make him proud." Robert Christgau noted the "sinuous, almost elegant clarity" of Demme's direction, while writing that the film had pushed the "limits to how great a rock concert movie can be ... as far as they were liable to go." Christgau described it as "the finest concert film" while Pauline Kael of "The New Yorker" described it as "close to perfection".


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The movie version of "Once in a Lifetime" appeared over the opening credits of the 1986 film "Down and Out in Beverly Hills".


title: Stop Making Sense

text: "Stop Making Sense" was parodied in an episode of the comedy series "Documentary Now!" In the second-season episode "Final Transmission," the show sees the New Wave band Test Pattern play its final concert. It includes references to the staging and music styles of Talking Heads, with the band's lead singer (played by Fred Armisen) parodying Byrne. Gizmodo screened the episode to Frantz and Weymouth in a video released online, where they both expressed amusement and shock at the level of detail gone into parodying the film.


title: Stop Making Sense

text: The iconic image of Byrne's big suit has been parodied on multiple occasions, including a spoof by Rich Hall impersonating Byrne and his big suit on an episode of "Saturday Night Live". Byrne himself made light of his massive suit during an appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert", where he appeared in a fake ad for "David Byrne's Giant Suit Emporium" promoting his new clothing store while insisting he did not sell giant suits like the one he wore in "Stop Making Sense". Byrne makes an appearance in the children's musical comedy special "John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch" performing an original song alongside child performer Lexi Perkel. At one point, Byrne and Perkel wear matching pink suits, Perkel's being several sizes too large for her, in reference to "Stop Making Sense".


title: Stop Making Sense

text: In 2021, "Stop Making Sense" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


title: Elliott Tittensor

text: Elliott Tittensor (born 3 November 1989) is an English actor, best known for playing the role of Carl Gallagher in the Channel 4 comedy-drama series "Shameless" (2004–2013).


title: Elliott Tittensor

text: In the first season of Channel 4 series "Shameless", the Tittensor twins shared the role of Carl Gallagher. Elliott continued playing the role of Carl after Luke left the show.


title: Elliott Tittensor

text: He currently stars as Ser Erryk Cargyll in HBO's "House of the Dragon", alongside his twin brother who plays the role of Ser Arryk Cargyll. They have appeared in the following episodes of the show:


title: Elliott Tittensor

text: Elliott Tittensor is the identical twin brother of Luke Tittensor. They are both from Heywood, Greater Manchester and attended Heywood Community High School. He was in a relationship with Kaya Scodelario from late 2009 to early 2014. Their relationship was publicised when Scodelario supported Tittensor after his arrest for an incident where he almost killed someone while driving an uninsured car and causing the victim serious injuries and blindness. Tittensor pleaded guilty to driving without insurance and was successfully sued for damages arising out of his role in the incident.


title: Patel

text: The Patel is an Indian surname or title, predominantly found in the state of Gujarat representing the community of land-owning farmers and later (with the British East India Company) businessmen, agriculturalists and merchants. Traditionally the title is a status name referring to the village chieftains during medieval times, and was later retained as successive generations stemmed out into communities of landowners, including Patidars, Kolis, Kurmis, some Parsis and Muslims. There are roughly 500,000 Patels outside India, including about 150,000 in the United Kingdom and about 150,000 in the United States. Nearly 1 in 10 people of Indian origin in the US is a Patel.


title: Patel

text: The term "patel" derives from the word Patidar, literally "one who holds (owned) pieces of land called "patis", implying a higher economic status than that of the landless, ultimately from Sanskrit "paṭṭakīla", with the ending "-dar" (from Sanskrit "धार"—supporting, containing, holding) denoting ownership.


title: Patel

text: The surname historically originated in the Indian state of Gujarat, where it is amongst the most common of surnames. Today, the name is found across India, as well as in the Indian diaspora.


title: Valerie Perrine

text: Valerie Ritchie Perrine (born September 3, 1943) is an American actress. For her role as Honey Bruce in the 1974 film "Lenny", she won the BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Her other film appearances include "Superman" (1978), "The Electric Horseman" (1979), and "Superman II" (1980).


title: Valerie Perrine

text: Perrine was born in Galveston, Texas, as the daughter of Winifred "Renee" (nee McGinley), a dancer who appeared in "Earl Carroll's Vanities", and Kenneth I. Perrine, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. Kenneth I. Perrine was the grandson of Alfred Perrine of Wallkill, N.Y., a descendant of Staten Island Huguenot Daniel Perrin. The Perrine family dates its ancestry to the French family of Perrin, which intermarried with other Normans dating back to William the Conqueror in 1066. Her mother was Scottish (of Irish descent), from Helensburgh in Dunbartonshire.


title: Valerie Perrine

text: Owing to her father's career, Perrine lived in many locations as the family moved to different posts.


title: Valerie Perrine

text: She played soft-core pornography actress Montana Wildhack in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" (1972). Perrine was photographed nude for a pictorial layout in the May 1972 issue of "Playboy", later appearing on the cover in August 1981. She then became the first actress to appear nude on American television by exposing her breasts during the May 4, 1973, PBS broadcast of Bruce Jay Friedman's "Steambath" on "Hollywood Television Theater." Only a few PBS stations nationwide carried the program. Later in 1973, she appeared in the episode "When the Girls Came Out to Play" of the romantic anthology television series "Love Story" (1973).


title: Valerie Perrine

text: In 1975, Perrine was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Actress (Drama) and won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as comedian Lenny Bruce's wife, stripper Honey Bruce, in Bob Fosse's "Lenny" (1974).


title: Valerie Perrine

text: She portrayed Carlotta Monti, mistress of W.C. Fields, in the biopic "W.C. Fields and Me" (1976). She played Miss Eve Teschmacher, moll of criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, in "Superman" (1978). For this role, she was nominated for the 1979 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress. She reprised her role as Miss Teschmacher in "Superman II" (1980).


title: Valerie Perrine

text: Perrine played Charlotta Steele, ex-wife of a rodeo champion played by Robert Redford, in "The Electric Horseman" (1979). Her career grew uneven after an appearance in "Can't Stop the Music" (1980), for which she was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Actress. This film has since become a cult classic. In 1982, she played the role of Marcy, the wife of a corrupt police officer, in "The Border" with Jack Nicholson. In 1986, she starred in the failed CBS comedy series "Leo & Liz in Beverly Hills" with Harvey Korman.


title: Valerie Perrine

text: In the years since then, Perrine has worked in lower-profile projects, although she did have a small supporting role in the 2000 Mel Gibson film "What Women Want". In 1995, Perrine made a guest appearance on the series "", playing an ex-wife of Richard Belzer's character, Detective John Munch.


title: Valerie Perrine

text: Stacey Souther directed and produced "Valerie", a documentary about Perrine's career and her experience with Parkinson's disease. "Valerie" was screened at the Edmonton Film Festival in 2020.


title: Valerie Perrine

text: Perrine was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2015 and underwent dental surgery in 2017 to restore her teeth after they became damaged due to the medications she had been taking for her illness.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The 66th Academy Awards ceremony, organized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored films released in 1993 and took place on March 21, 1994, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles beginning at 6:00 p.m. PST / 9:00 p.m. EST. During the ceremony, AMPAS presented Academy Awards (commonly referred to as Oscars) in 23 categories. The ceremony, televised in the United States by ABC, was produced by Gil Cates and directed by Jeff Margolis. Actress Whoopi Goldberg hosted the show for the first time. Nearly a month earlier in a ceremony held at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California on February 26, the Academy Awards for Technical Achievement were presented by host Laura Dern.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: "Schindler's List" won seven awards, including Best Picture. Other winners included "Jurassic Park" and "The Piano" with three awards, "Philadelphia" with two, and "The Age of Innocence", "Belle Époque", "Defending Our Lives", "The Fugitive", "", "Mrs. Doubtfire", "Schwarzfahrer", and "The Wrong Trousers" with one. The telecast was watched by more than 46 million viewers in the United States.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The nominees for the 66th Academy Awards were announced on February 9, 1994, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, California, by Academy president Arthur Hiller, and actress Christine Lahti. "Schindler's List" led all nominees with twelve nominations; "The Piano" and "The Remains of the Day" tied for second with eight.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The winners were announced during the awards ceremony on March 21, 1994. Best Director nominee Jane Campion was the second woman to be nominated in that category. Holly Hunter and Emma Thompson's nominations in both lead and supporting acting categories marked the first and so far only occurrence that two performers earned double acting nominations in the same year. Best Supporting Actress winner Anna Paquin, at age 11, became the second youngest winner of a competitive acting Oscar, behind Tatum O'Neal, who won at age 10 for "Paper Moon". 19-year old Leonardo DiCaprio became the seventh-youngest nominee in Best Supporting Actor category for his role as Arnie Grape in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape".


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The following individuals, listed in order of appearance, presented awards or performed musical numbers:


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: Due to the negative reception received from the preceding year's ceremony, actor Billy Crystal announced that after overseeing four consecutive Oscar ceremonies, he would not be hosting the 1994 telecast. In a statement released by his publicist, he stated, "After three Grammys, four Oscars and six "Comic Reliefs", I'm going to take a break from my hosting duties. I always felt honored to host the show and did my best to carry on the tradition of Bob Hope and Johnny Carson. I hope the new host has as good a time as I did." With Crystal absent to host the Oscars, many media outlets wondered whom producer Gil Cates would hire to emcee the program. Film columnist Jack Matthews suggested that actor Tom Hanks, who would eventually win Best Actor for "Philadelphia", should host the show writing that he "has charm, dignity, wit, intelligence and, it's worth mentioning, he's a movie star!" Cates also offered the role to performers Steve Martin, Bette Midler, and Johnny Carson, but they all turned down the opportunity.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: After several days of speculation, Cates announced that he hired Oscar-winning actress and comedian Whoopi Goldberg to host the festivities for the first time. By virtue of her selection, Goldberg became both the first African American to host as well as the first woman to host the telecast solo. In an interview with the "Los Angeles Times", Cates explained the decision to hire her saying, "She is a highly recognizable star who has millions of fans." He also addressed the media's concerns regarding Goldberg's raunchy and outspoken humor stating, "Some people may think she's potentially dangerous, and she says things that come to her mind. It's going to be exciting for me. The main thing is she wants to do it and she's smart. Whatever she says will be appropriate." Goldberg expressed that she was thrilled to be selected to emcee the 1994 ceremony commenting, "To go from watching to winning to hosting in one lifetime is major."


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: As with previous ceremonies he produced, Cates centered the show around a theme. This year, he christened the show with the theme "People Behind the Camera" commenting that "It will be a salute to those unseen men and women who make what we see on the screen, the artist and craftspeople responsible for the magic of the movies." In tandem with the theme, the ceremony's opening number featured a montage produced by Chuck Workman saluting the many individuals such as directors, editors, and composers who are involved in moviemaking. During that segment, singer Bernadette Peters performing a modified version of Stephen Sondheim's song "Putting It Together" from his musical "Sunday in the Park with George". Filmmaker and editor Carol A. Streit assembled another montage featuring a salute to the work of cinematographers and their contributions to film.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: Several other people and elements were also involved with the production of the ceremony. Production designer Roy Christopher designed a new stage for the ceremony which prominently featured five giant Oscar statues each flanked inside metal cones that were illuminated recurrently throughout the show. Film composer and musician Bill Conti served as musical director of the ceremony. Dancer Debbie Allen choreographed a dancer number showcasing the Best Original Score nominees featuring eight prestigious ballet and dance troupes from around the world.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: At the time of the nominations announcement on February 9, the combined gross of the five Best Picture nominees at the US box office was $261 million, with an average of $52.2 million per film. "The Fugitive" was the highest earner among the Best Picture nominees with $179 million in domestic box office receipts. The film was followed by "Schindler's List" ($29.6 million), "The Piano" ($25.7 million), "The Remains of the Day" ($19.5 million), and finally "In the Name of the Father" ($6.5 million).


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: Of the top 50 grossing movies of the year, 36 nominations went to 14 films on the list. Only "The Fugitive" (3rd), "The Firm" (4th), "Sleepless in Seattle" (6th), "In the Line of Fire" (7th), "Dave" (13th), "Philadelphia" (29th), "What's Love Got to Do With It" (38th), and "The Age of Innocence" (49th) were nominated for directing, acting, screenwriting, or Best Picture. The other top 50 box office hits that earned nominations were "Jurassic Park" (1st), "Mrs. Doubtfire" (2nd), "Cliffhanger" (9th), "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (24th), "Addams Family Values" (25th), and "Beethoven's 2nd" (27th).


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The show received a positive reception from most media publications. "The New York Times" film critic Janet Maslin raved that the telecast had "less silliness and less small talk, with more emphasis on cleverly chosen film clips and the bona fide Hollywood magic being celebrated." She also praised host Goldberg saying that she "sustained a tone of levity, which became particularly important as the sweep by "Schindler's List" threatened to bring out great ponderousness in some quarters." "Pittsburgh Post-Gazette" television critic Robert Bianco commended Goldberg's performance writing that "She never acted like she was too smart or to hip for the show she was hosting; she never smirked like there was a joke she alone was cool enough to get." He also extolled producer Cates by commenting, "In place of the extraneous jokes and terrible production numbers, he gave us a theme that worked and a generous selection of clips to back it up." Anne Thompson of "Entertainment Weekly" lauded Goldberg by stating, "Her elegant appearance (at least during the first half), her uncharacteristic restraint (she didn't cuss), and her ability to make it funny (despite the very somber speeches) made the ho-hum telecast worth watching."


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: Some media outlets were more critical of the show. Television critic Howard Rosenberg of the "Los Angeles Times" lamented that Goldberg's humor "wilted in a blessedly brief 3-hour-and-18-minute telecast." He also wrote that compared with Billy Crystal, her hosting skills were "balmy". "Orlando Sentinel" film critic Jay Boyar bemoaned that "this year's Oscarcast was only a little more exciting than a wine snob droning on about his favorite vintages." Harold Schindler of "The Salt Lake City Tribune" remarked that Whoopi's preference for "insider" jokes "left the audience murmuring and most viewers probably scratching their heads." He also added the biggest letdown of the telecast was "Goldberg's seeming ineptness at understanding the moment"


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The American telecast on ABC drew in an average of 46.26 million people over its length, which was a 1% increase from the previous year's ceremony. However, the show drew lower Nielsen ratings compared to the previous ceremony with 31.86% of households watching over a 49.28 share. It also drew a lower 18–49 demographic rating with a 19.73 rating over a 40.53 share among viewers in that demographic.


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: In July 1994, the ceremony presentation received seven nominations at the 46th Primetime Emmys. Two months later, the ceremony won one of those nominations for Outstanding Technical Direction/Camera/Video for a Miniseries or Special (Averill Perry, Jim Ralston, Kenneth R. Shapiro, Bill Pope, Hector Ramirez, Larry Heider, Dave Levisohn, Blair White, Bill Philben, Ralph Alcocer, Larry Stenman, Bud Holland, David Irete, Tom Geren, Dale Carlson, David Plakos, Ted Ashton, Jeff Mydoc, Chuck Pharis, Jean M. Mason).


title: 66th Academy Awards

text: The annual "In Memoriam" tribute was presented by actress Glenn Close. The montage featured an excerpt of the main title of "Terms of Endearment" composed by Michael Gore.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: A census in May 1939, six years into the Nazi era and after the annexation of mostly Catholic Austria and mostly Catholic Czechoslovakia into Germany, indicates that 54% of the population considered itself Protestant, 40% considered itself Catholic, 3.5% self-identified as "Gottgläubig" (lit. "believing in God"), and 1.5% as "atheist". Protestants voted for the Nazi Party and made up its membership


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Smaller religious minorities such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Baháʼí Faith were banned in Germany, while the eradication of Judaism was attempted along with the genocide of its adherents. The Salvation Army and the Seventh-day Adventist Church both disappeared from Germany, while astrologers, healers, fortune tellers, and witchcraft were all banned. Some religious minority groups had a more complicated relationship with the new state, for example the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) withdrew its missionaries from Germany and Czechoslovakia in 1938, but German LDS church branches were permitted to continue to operate throughout the war, however, they were forced to make some changes in their structure and teachings.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Nazi ranks had people of varied religious leanings. They were followers of Christianity, but were frequently at odds with the Pope, who denounced the party by claiming that it had an anti-catholic veneer. They were also antisemitic and considered paganism and other forms of heterodox religious beliefs to be heresy.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Additionally, there was some diversity in the personal views of the Nazi leaders as to the future of religion in Germany. Anti-Church radicals included Hitler's personal secretary Martin Bormann, the propaganist Alfred Rosenberg, and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Some Nazis, such as Hans Kerrl, who served as Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, advocated "Positive Christianity", a uniquely Nazi form of Christianity which rejected Christianity's Jewish origins and the Old Testament, and portrayed "true" Christianity as a fight against Jews, with Jesus depicted as an Aryan.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Nazism wanted to transform the subjective consciousness of the German peopleits attitudes, values and mentalitiesinto a single-minded, obedient "national community". The Nazis believed that they would therefore have to replace class, religious and regional allegiances. Under the "Gleichschaltung" (Nazification) process, Hitler attempted to create a unified Protestant Reich Church from Germany's 28 existing Protestant churches. The plan failed, and was resisted by the Confessing Church. Persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany followed the Nazi takeover. Hitler moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism. Amid harassment of the Church, the Reich concordat treaty with the Vatican was signed in 1933, and promised to respect Church autonomy. Hitler routinely disregarded the Concordat, closing all Catholic institutions whose functions were not strictly religious. Clergy, nuns, and lay leaders were targeted, with thousands of arrests over the ensuing years. The Church accused the regime of "fundamental hostility to Christ and his Church". Historians resist however a simple equation of Nazi opposition to both Judaism and Christianity. Nazism was clearly willing to use the support of Christians who accepted its ideology, and Nazi opposition to both Judaism and Christianity was not fully analogous in the minds of the Nazis. Many historians believed that Hitler and the Nazis intended to eradicate Christianity in Germany after winning victory in the war.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Christianity has ancient roots among Germanic peoples dating to the missionary work of Columbanus and St. Boniface in the 6th–8th centuries. The Reformation, initiated by Martin Luther in 1517, divided the German population between a two-thirds majority of Protestants and a one-third minority of Roman Catholics. The south and west remained mainly Catholic, while north and east became mainly Protestant. The Catholic Church enjoyed a degree of privilege in the Bavarian region, the Rhineland and Westphalia as well as parts in south-west Germany, while in the Protestant north, Catholics suffered some discrimination.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Bismarck's "Kulturkampf" ("Culture Struggle") of 1871–1878 had seen an attempt to assert a Protestant vision of German nationalism over Germany, and fused anticlericalism and suspicion of the Catholic population, whose loyalty was presumed to lie with Austria and France, rather than the new German Empire. The Centre Party had formed in 1870, initially to represent the religious interests of Catholics and Protestants, but was transformed by the "Kulturkampf" into the "political voice of Catholics". Bismarck's "Culture Struggle" failed in its attempt to eliminate Catholic institutions in Germany, or their strong connections outside of Germany, particularly various international missions and Rome.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In the course of the 19th century, both the rise of historical-critical scholarship of the Bible and Jesus by David Strauss, Ernest Renan and others, progress in the natural sciences, especially the field of evolutionary biology by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel and others, and opposition to oppressive socioeconomic circumstances by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others, and a rise in more liberal and progressive churches, resulted in increasing criticism of the traditional churches' dogmas, and moved numerous German citizens into rejecting traditional theological concepts and either following liberal forms of religion or discarded it altogether. By 1859, they had established the ' (literally "Union of Free Religious Communities of Germany"), an association of persons who consider themselves to be religious without adhering to any established and institutionalized church or sacerdotal cult. In 1881 in Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig Büchner established the German Freethinkers League ("Deutscher Freidenkerbund") as the first German organisation for atheists and agnostics. In 1892 the "Freidenker-Gesellschaft" and in 1906 the ' were formed.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In 1933, 5 years prior to the annexation of Austria into Germany, the population of Germany was approximately 67% Protestant and 33% Catholic, while the Jewish population was less than 1%.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Christianity in Germany has, since the Protestant Reformation in 1517, been divided into Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. As a specific outcome of the Reformation in Germany, the large Protestant denominations are organized into "Landeskirchen" (roughly: "State Churches"). The German word for denomination is "Konfession". For the large churches in Germany (Catholic and "Evangelical", i.e. Protestant) the German government collects the church tax, which is then given to these churches. For this reason, membership in the Catholic or the Evangelical Church is officially registered. It is apparent they were politically motivated. For this reason historian Richard Steigmann-Gall argues that "nominal church membership is a very unreliable gauge of actual piety in this context" and determining someone's actual religious convictions should be based on other criteria. It is important to keep this 'official aspect' in mind when turning to such questions as the religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler or these of Joseph Goebbels. Both men had ceased to attend Catholic mass or to go to confession long before 1933, but neither had officially left the Church and neither of them refused to pay their church taxes.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Historians have taken a look at the number of people who left their church in Germany during the 1933–1945 period. There was "no substantial decline in religious practice and church membership between 1933 and 1939". The option to be taken off the church rolls ("Kirchenaustritt") has existed in Germany since 1873, when Otto von Bismarck had introduced it as part of the "Kulturkampf" aimed against Catholicism. For parity this was also made possible for Protestants, and for the next 40 years it was mostly them who took advantage of it. Statistics exist since 1884 for the Protestant churches and since 1917 for the Catholic Church.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: An analysis of this data for the era of the Nazis' rule is available in a paper by Sven Granzow et al., published in a collection edited by Götz Aly. Altogether more Protestants than Catholics left their church, however, overall Protestants and Catholics decided similarly. One has to keep in mind that German Protestants were twice the number of Catholics. The spike in the numbers from 1937 to 1938 is the result of the annexation of Austria in 1938 and other territories. The number of "Kirchenaustritte" reached its "historical high" in 1939 when it peaked at 480,000. Granzow et al. see the numbers not only in relation to the Nazi policy towards the churches, (which changed drastically from 1935 onwards) but also as indicator of the trust in the "Führer" and the Nazi leadership. The decline in the number of people who left the church after 1942 is explained as resulting from a loss of confidence in the future of Nazi Germany. People tended to keep their ties to the church, because they feared an uncertain future.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: According to Evans, those members of the affiliation "gottgläubig" (lit. "believers in god", a non-denominational nazified outlook on god beliefs, often described as predominately based on creationist and deistic views), "were convinced Nazis who had left their Church at the behest of the Party, which had been trying since the mid 1930s to reduce the influence of Christianity in society". Heinrich Himmler was a strong promoter of the "gottgläubig" movement and did not allow atheists into the SS, arguing that their "refusal to acknowledge higher powers" would be a "potential source of indiscipline". The majority of the three million Nazi Party members continued to pay their church taxes and register as either Roman Catholic or Protestants. The Salvation Army, Christian Saints and Seventh Day Adventist Church all disappeared from Germany during the Nazi era.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: "Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS" (or SD) members withdrew from their Christian denominations, changing their religious affiliation to "gottgläubig", while nearly 70% of the officers of the "Schutzstaffel" (SS) did the same.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Nazi ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment whose legitimacy did not spring from the government. It desired the subordination of the church to the state. Although the broader membership of the Nazi Party after 1933 came to include many Catholics and Protestants, aggressive anti-Church radicals like Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, and Heinrich Himmler saw the "Kirchenkampf" campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, saw an "insoluble opposition" between the Christian and Nazi world views. The "Führer" angered the churches by appointing Alfred Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, as official Nazi ideologist in 1934. Heinrich Himmler saw the main task of his SS organization to be that of acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a "Germanic" way of living. Hitler's chosen deputy, Martin Bormann, advised Nazi officials in 1941 that "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Hitler himself possessed radical instincts in relation to the conflict with the Churches in Germany. Though he occasionally spoke of wanting to delay the Church struggle and was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism out of political considerations, his "own inflammatory comments gave his immediate underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat in the Church Struggle, confident that they were 'working towards the Fuhrer, according to Kershaw. In public speeches, he portrayed himself and the Nazi movement as faithful Christians. In 1928 Hitler said in a speech: "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian." But, according to the Goebbels Diaries, Hitler hated Christianity. In an 8 April 1941 entry, Goebbels wrote "He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity." In Bullock's assessment, though raised a Catholic, Hitler "believed neither in God nor in conscience", retained some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but had contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". Bullock wrote: "In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: As a measure in the struggle for power against the influence of the churches ("Kirchenkampf") the Nazis tried to establish a "third denomination" called "Positive Christianity", aiming to replace the established churches to reduce their influence. Historians have suspected this was an attempt to start a cult which worshipped Hitler as the new Messiah. However, in a diary entry of 28 December 1939, Joseph Goebbels wrote that "the Fuhrer passionately rejects any thought of founding a religion. He has no intention of becoming a priest. His sole exclusive role is that of a politician." In Hitler's political relations dealing with religion he readily adopted a strategy "that suited his immediate political purposes."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The Nazi leadership made use of indigenous Germanic pagan imagery and ancient Roman symbolism in their propaganda. However, the use of pagan symbolism worried some Protestants. Many Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler, subscribed either to a mixture of pseudoscientific theories, and also Social Darwinism as well as mysticism and occultism, which was especially strong in the SS. Central to both groupings was the belief in Germanic (white Nordic) racial superiority. The existence of a Ministry of Church Affairs, instituted in 1935 and headed by Hanns Kerrl, was hardly recognized by ideologists such as Alfred Rosenberg or by other political decision-makers. A relative moderate, Kerrl accused dissident churchmen of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of "Race, blood and soil" and gave the following explanation of the Nazi conception of "Positive Christianity," telling a group of submissive clergy in 1937:


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: During the war Alfred Rosenberg formulated a thirty-point program for the National Reich Church, which included:


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: When exploring the Nazi Party's public speeches and writings, Steigmann-Gall notes that they can provide insight into their "untempered" ideas.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Prior to the Reichstag vote for the Enabling Act under which Hitler gained legislative powers with which he went on to permanently dismantle the Weimar Republic, Hitler promised the Reichstag on 23 March 1933, that he would not interfere with the rights of the churches. However, with power secured in Germany, Hitler quickly broke this promise. Various historians have written that the goal of the Nazi "Kirchenkampf" ("Church Struggle") entailed not only ideological struggle, but ultimately the eradication of the Churches. However, leading Nazis varied in the importance they attached to the Church Struggle.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: William Shirer wrote that "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists." During a speech on 27 October 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt revealed evidence of Hitler's plan to abolish all religions in Germany, declaring:


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Your Government has in its possession another document, made in Germany by Hitler's Government... It is a plan to abolish all existing religions –Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike. The property of all churches will be seized by the Reich and its puppets. The cross and all other symbols of religion are to be forbidden. The clergy are to be forever liquidated, silenced under penalty of the concentration camps, where even now so many fearless men are being tortured because they have placed God above Hitler.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: But according to Steigman-Gall, some Nazis, like Dietrich Eckart (died 1923) and Walter Buch, saw Nazism and Christianity as part of the same movement. Aggressive anti-Church radicals like Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann saw the conflict with the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anti-clerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Writing for Yad Vashem, the historian Michael Phayer wrote that by the latter 1930s, church officials knew that the long-term aim of Hitler was the "total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion", but that given the prominence of Christianity in Germany, this was necessarily a long-term goal. According to Bullock, Hitler intended to destroy the influence of the Christian churches in Germany after the war. In his memoirs, Hitler's chief architect Albert Speer recalled that when drafting his plans for the "new Berlin", he consulted Protestant and Catholic authorities, but was "curtly informed" by Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann that churches were not to receive building sites. Kershaw wrote that, in Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of Eastern Europe, he made clear that there would be "no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches".


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Geoffrey Blainey wrote that Hitler and his fascist ally Mussolini were atheists, but that Hitler courted and benefited from fear among German Christians of militant communist atheism. (Other historians have characterised Hitler's mature religious position as a form of deism.) "The aggressive spread of atheism in the Soviet Union alarmed many German Christians", wrote Blainey, and with the Nazis becoming the main opponent of communism in Germany: "[Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible. Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions". Nonetheless, a number of early confidants of Hitler detailed the "Führer" complete lack of religious belief. One close confidant, Otto Strasser, disclosed in his 1940 book, "Hitler and I," that Hitler was a true disbeliever, succinctly stating: "Hitler is an atheist."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: According to Kershaw, following the Nazi takeover, race policy and the church struggle were among the most important ideological spheres: "In both areas, the party had no difficulty in mobilizing its activists, whose radicalism in turn forced the government into legislative action. In fact the party leadership often found itself compelled to respond to pressures from below, stirred up by the Gauleiter playing their own game, or emanating sometimes from radical activists at a local level". As time went on, anti-clericalism and anti-church sentiment among grass roots party activists "simply couldn't be eradicated", wrote Kershaw and they could "draw on the verbal violence of party leaders towards the churches for their encouragement." Unlike some other fascist movements of the era, Nazi ideology was essentially hostile to Christianity and clashed with Christian beliefs in many respects. The Nazis seized hundreds of monasteries in Germany and Austria and removed clergymen and laymen alike. In other cases, religious journals and newspapers were censored or banned. The Nazi regime attempted to shut down the Catholic press, which declined "from 435 periodicals in 1934 to just seven in 1943." From the beginning in 1935, the Gestapo arrested and jailed over 2720 clerics who were interned at Germany's Dachau concentration camp, leading to over 1,000 deaths. Nazism saw the Christian ideals of meekness and conscience as obstacles to the violent instincts required to defeat other races. From the mid-1930s anti-Christian elements within the Nazi Party became more prominent; however, they were restrained by Hitler because of the negative press their actions were receiving, and by 1934 the Nazi Party pretended a neutral position in regard to the Protestant Churches.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Alfred Rosenberg, an "outspoken pagan", held among offices the title of "the Fuehrer's Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party". In his "Myth of the Twentieth Century" (1930), Rosenberg wrote that the main enemies of the Germans were the "Russian Tartars" and "Semites" – with "Semites" including Christians, especially the Catholic Church: Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, was among the most aggressive anti-Church Nazi radicals. Goebbels led the Nazi persecution of the German clergy and, as the war progressed, on the "Church Question", he wrote "after the war it has to be generally solved... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a heroic-German world view". Martin Bormann became Hitler's private secretary and de facto "deputy" "führer" from 1941. He was a leading advocate of the "Kirchenkampf", a project which Hitler for the most part wished to keep until after the war. Bormann was a rigid guardian of Nazi orthodoxy and saw Christianity and Nazism as "incompatible". He said publicly in 1941 that "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable". In a confidential message to the Gauleiter on 9 June 1941, Martin Bormann, had declared that "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable." He also declared that the Churches' influence in the leadership of the people "must absolutely and finally be broken." Bormann believed Nazism was based on a "scientific" world-view, and was completely incompatible with Christianity. Bormann stated:


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: When we National Socialists speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God. The assertion that this universal force can trouble itself about the destiny of each individual being, every smallest earthly bacillus, can be influenced by so-called prayers or other surprising things, depends upon a requisite dose of naivety or else upon shameless professional self-interest.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Instead of focusing on religious differentiation, Hitler maintained that it was important to promote "an antisemitism of reason", one that acknowledged the racial basis of Jewry. Interviews with Nazis by other historians show that the Nazis thought that their views were rooted in biology, not in historical prejudices. For example, "S. became a missionary for this biomedical vision... As for anti-Semitic attitudes and actions, he insisted that "the racial question... [and] resentment of the Jewish race... had nothing to do with medieval anti-Semitism...That is, it was all a matter of scientific biology and of community."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In his book about the history of Christianity, Geoffrey Blainey wrote that "Christianity could not escape some indirect blame for the terrible Holocaust. The Jews and Christians had been rivals and sometimes enemies for a long period of history. Furthermore, it was traditional for Christians to blame Jewish leaders for the crucifixion of Christ...", but, Blainey noted, "At the same time, Christians showed devotion and respect. They were conscious of their debt to the Jews. Jesus and all the disciples and all the authors of his Gospels were of the Jewish race. Christians viewed the Old Testament, the holy book of the synagogues as equally a holy book for them...".


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Laurence Rees noted that "emphasis on Christianity" was absent from the vision expressed by Hitler in "Mein Kampf" and his "bleak and violent vision" and visceral hatred of the Jews had been influenced by quite different sources: the notion of life as struggle he drew from Social Darwinism, the notion of the superiority of the "Aryan race" he drew from Arthur de Gobineau's "The Inequality of the Human Races"; and from Alfred Rosenberg he took the idea of a link between Judaism and Bolshevism. Hitler espoused a ruthless policy of "negative eugenic selection", believing that world history consisted of a struggle for survival between races, in which the Jews plotted to undermine the Germans, and inferior groups like Slavs and defective individuals in the German gene pool, threatened the Aryan "master race". Richard J. Evans wrote that his views on these subjects have often been called "social Darwinist", but that there is little agreement among historians as to what this term may mean. According to Evans, Hitler "used his own version of the language of social Darwinism as a central element in the discursive practice of extermination...", and the language of Social Darwinism, in its Nazi variant, helped to remove all restraint from the directors of the "terroristic and exterminatory" policies of the regime, by "persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science and nature".


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: As the Nazi Party began its takeover of power in Germany in 1933 the struggling, but still nominally functioning Weimar government, led by its President, Paul von Hindenburg, and represented by his appointed Vice-Chancellor, Franz von Papen, initiated talks with the Holy See concerning the establishment of a concordat. The talks lasted three and half months while Hitler consolidated his hold on power. This attempt achieved the signing of the "Reichskonkordat" on 20 July 1933, which protected the freedom of the Catholic Church and restricted priests and bishops from political activity.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Like the idea of the "Reichskonkordat", the notion of a Protestant Reich Church, which would unify the Protestant Churches, also had been considered previously. Hitler had discussed the matter as early as 1927 with Ludwig Müller, who was at that time the military chaplain of Königsberg.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Christianity remained the dominant religion in Germany through the Nazi period, and its influence over Germans displeased the Nazi hierarchy. Evans wrote that Hitler believed that in the long run Nazism and religion would not be able to coexist, and stressed repeatedly that it was a secular ideology, founded on modern science. According to Evans: "Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition." Germany could not tolerate the intervention of foreign influences such as the Pope, and "Priests, he said, were 'black bugs,' abortions in black cassocks.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: During Hitler's dictatorship, more than 6,000 clergymen, on the charge of treasonable activity, were imprisoned or executed. The same measures were taken in the occupied territories; in French Lorraine, the Nazis forbade religious youth movements, parish meetings, and scout meetings. Church assets were taken, Church schools were closed, and teachers in religious institutes were dismissed. The Episcopal seminary was closed, and the SA and SS desecrated churches and religious statues and pictures. Three hundred clergy were expelled from the Lorraine region; monks and nuns were deported or forced to renounce their vows.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The Catholic Church was particularly suppressed in Poland: between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. In the annexed territory of "Reichsgau Wartheland" it was even more harsh: churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. Eighty per cent of the Catholic clergy and five bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs. Religious persecution was not confined to Poland: in Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 countries were killed.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: A number of historians maintain that the Nazis had a general covert plan, which some argue existed before the Nazis' rose to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich. To what extent a plan to subordinate the churches and limit their role in the country's life existed before the Nazi rise to power, and exactly who among the Nazi leadership supported such a move remains contested. However, a minority of historians maintain, against consensus, that no such plan existed. Summarizing a 1945 Office of Strategic Services report, "The New York Times" columnist Joe Sharkey, stated that the Nazis had a plan to "subvert and destroy German Christianity," which was to be accomplished through control and subversion of the churches and to be completed after the war. However, the report stated this goal was limited to a "sector of the National Socialist party," namely Alfred Rosenberg and Baldur von Schirach. Historian Roger Griffin maintains: "There is no doubt that in the long run Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Himmler intended to eradicate Christianity just as ruthlessly as any other rival ideology, even if in the short term they had to be content to make compromises with it." In his study "The Holy Reich", the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall comes to the opposite conclusion, "Totally absent, besides Hitler's vague ranting, is any firm evidence that Hitler or the Nazis were going to 'destroy' or 'eliminate' the churches once the war was over." Regarding his wider thesis that, "leading Nazis in fact considered themselves Christian" or at least understood their movement "within a Christian frame of reference", Steigmann-Gall admits he "argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Although there are high-profile cases of individual Lutherans and Catholics who died in prison or in concentration camps, the largest number of Christians who died would have been Jewish Christians or "mischlinge" who were sent to death camps for their race rather than their religion. Kahane (1999) cites an estimate that there were approximately 200,000 Christians of Jewish descent in Nazi Germany. Among the Gentile Christians 11,300 Jehovah's Witnesses were placed in camps, and about 1,490 died, of whom 270 were executed as conscientious objectors. Dachau had a special "priest block." Of the 2,720 priests (among them 2,579 Catholic) held in Dachau, 1,034 did not survive the camp. The majority of these priests were Polish (1,780), of whom 868 died in Dachau.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The attitude of the Nazi Party towards the Catholic Church ranged from tolerance to near-total renunciation and outright aggression. Bullock wrote that Hitler had some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". Many Nazis were anti-clerical in both private and public life. The Nazi Party had decidedly pagan elements. One position is that the Church and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic Weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Adolf Hitler himself has been described as a "spiritualist" by Laqueur; but he has been described by Bullock as a "rationalist" and a "materialist" with no appreciation for the spiritual side of humanity; and a simple "atheist" by Blainey. His fascist comrade Benito Mussolini was an atheist. Both were anticlerical, but they understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs against Catholicism prematurely. Such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, was put off while they dealt with other enemies.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The nature of the Nazi Party's relationship with the Catholic Church was also complicated. In early 1931, the German bishops issued an edict excommunicating all leaders of the Nazi Party and banning all Catholics from membership. The ban was conditionally modified in 1933 when State law mandated that all trade union workers and civil servants must be members of the Nazi Party. In July 1933 a Concord "Reichskonkordat" was signed with the Vatican which prevented the Church in Germany from engaging in political activities; however, the Vatican continued to speak out on issues of faith and morals and it opposed Nazi philosophy.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical "Mit brennender Sorge" condemning Nazi ideology, notably the "Gleichschaltung" policy directed against religious influences upon education, as well as Nazi racism and antisemitism. His death prevented the issuing of a planned encyclical "Humani generis unitas", but the similar "Summi Pontificatus" was the first encyclical released by his successor (Pius XII), in October 1939. This encyclical strongly condemned both racism and totalitarianism, without the anti-Judaism present in the draft presented to Pope Pius XI for "Humani generis unitas". The massive Catholic opposition to the Nazi euthanasia programs led them to be quieted on 28 August 1941. Catholics, on occasion, actively and openly protested against Nazi antisemitism through several bishops and priests such as Bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In Nazi Germany, political dissenters were imprisoned, and some German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the pastor of Berlin's Catholic Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg and the seminarian Karl Leisner.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Criticism arose based on the charge that the Vatican headed by Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII had remained circumspect about the national-scale race hatred before 1937 ("Mit brennender Sorge"). In 1937, just before the publishing of the anti-Nazi encyclical, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli in Lourdes, France condemned discrimination against Jews and the neopaganism of the Nazi régime. A statement by Pius XI on 8 September 1938 spoke of the "inadmissibility" of antisemitism, but Pius XII is criticised by people like John Cornwell for being unspecific.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in the German Reich, many of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the "Allgemeine SS" under Himmler. However, on 30 July 1941 the "Aktion Klostersturm" (Operation Monastery Storm) was put to an end by a decree from Hitler, who feared that the increasing protests by the Catholic segment of the German population might result in passive rebellions and thereby harm the Nazi war effort on the eastern front.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Historian Heinz Hürten (professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Eichstaett) noted that the Nazi Party had plans for the Roman Catholic Church, according to which the Church was supposed to "eat from the hands of the government." Hürten states the sequence of these plans: an abolition of the priestly celibacy and a nationalisation of all Church property, the dissolution of monastic religious institutes, and an end to the influence of the Catholic Church upon education. Hürten states that Hitler proposed to reduce vocations to the priesthood by forbidding seminaries from receiving applicants before their 25th birthdays, and thus he had hoped that these men would marry beforehand, during the time (18–25 years) in which they were obliged to work in military or labour service. Also, along with this process, the Church's sacraments would be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", the non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: There existed some considerable differences among officials within the Nazi Party on the question of Christianity. Goebbels is purported to have feared the creation of a third front of Catholics against their regime in Germany itself. In his diary, Goebbels wrote about the "traitors of the Black International who again stabbed our glorious government in the back by their criticism", by which Hürten states he meant the indirectly or actively resisting Catholic clergymen (who wore black cassocks).


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: During the First and Second World Wars, German Protestant leaders used the writings of Luther to support the cause of German nationalism. On the 450th anniversary of Luther's birth, which fell only a few months after the Nazi Party began its seizure of power in 1933, celebrations were conducted on a large scale by both the Protestant Churches and the Nazi Party. At a celebration in Königsberg, Erich Koch, at that time the Gauleiter of East Prussia, made a speech in which he, among other things, compared Adolf Hitler to Martin Luther and claimed that the Nazis fought with Luther's spirit. Such a speech might be dismissed as mere propaganda, but, as Steigmann-Gall points out: "Contemporaries regarded Koch as a bona fide Christian who had attained his position [as the elected president of a provincial Church synod] through a genuine commitment to Protestantism and its institutions." Even so, Steigmann-Gall states that the Nazis were not a Christian movement.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The prominent Protestant theologian Karl Barth, of the Swiss Reformed Church, opposed this appropriation of Luther in both the German Empire and Nazi Germany, when he stated in 1939 that the writings of Martin Luther were used by the Nazis to glorify both the State and state absolutism: "The German people suffer under his error of the relationship between the law and the Bible, between secular and spiritual power", in which Luther divided the temporal State from the inward state, focusing instead on spiritual matters, thus limiting the ability of the individual or the church to question the actions of the State, which was seen as a God ordained instrument.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In February 1940, Barth specifically accused German Lutherans of separating biblical teachings from the teachings of the State and thus legitimizing the Nazi state ideology. He was not alone with his view. A few years earlier on 5 October 1933, Pastor Wilhelm Rehm from Reutlingen declared publicly that "Hitler would not have been possible without Martin Luther", though many have also made this same statement about other influences on Hitler's rise to power. Anti-communist historian Paul Johnson has said that "without Lenin, Hitler would not have been possible".


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination. Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism. The German Christians ("Deutsche Christen") were a movement within the Protestant Church of Germany with the aim of changing traditional Christian teachings to align with the ideology of Nazism and its anti-Jewish policies. The "Deutsche Christen" factions were united in the goal of establishing a Nazi Protestantism and abolishing what they considered to be Jewish traditions in Christianity, and some but not all rejected the Old Testament and the teaching of the Apostle Paul. In November 1933, a Protestant mass rally of the "Deutsche Christen", which brought together a record 20,000 people, passed three resolutions:


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The German Christians selected Ludwig Müller (1883–1945) as their candidate for in 1933. In response to Hitler's campaigning, two-thirds of those Protestants who voted elected Ludwig Müller, a neo-pagan candidate, to govern the Protestant Churches. Müller was convinced that he had a divine responsibility to promote Hitler and his ideals, and together with Hitler, he favoured a unified Reichskirche of Protestants and Catholics. This Reichskirche was to be a loose federation in the form of a council, but it would be subordinated to the Nazi regime.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The level of ties between Nazism and the Protestant churches has been a contentious issue for decades. One difficulty is that Protestantism includes a number of religious bodies and many of them had little relation to each other. Added to that, Protestantism tends to allow more variation among individual congregations than Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which makes statements about the official positions of denominations problematic. The German Christians were a minority within the Protestant population, numbering one fourth to one third of the 40 million Protestants in Germany. With Bishop Müller's efforts and Hitler's support, the German Evangelical Church was formed and recognized by the state as a legal entity on 14 July 1933, with the aim of melding the State, the people and the Church into one body. Dissenters were silenced by expulsion or violence.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The support of the German Christian movement within the churches was opposed by many adherents of traditional Christian teachings. Other groups within the Protestant church included members of the "Bekennende Kirche", Confessing Church, which included such prominent members as Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer; both rejected the Nazi efforts to meld "volkisch" principles with traditional Lutheran doctrine. Martin Niemöller organized the "Pfarrernotbund" (Pastors' Emergency League) which was supported by nearly 40 percent of the Evangelical pastors. They were, however, (as of 1932) a minority within the Protestant church bodies in Germany. But in 1933, a number of "Deutsche Christen" left the movement after a November speech by Reinhold Krause urged, among other things, the rejection of the Old Testament as Jewish superstition. So when Ludwig Müller could not deliver on conforming all Christians to Nazism, and after some of the German Christian rallies and more radical ideas generated a backlash, Hitler's condescending attitudes towards Protestants increased and he lost all interest in Protestant church affairs.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The resistance within the churches to Nazi ideology was the longest lasting and most bitter of any German institution. The Nazis weakened the churches' resistance from within but the Nazis had not yet succeeded in taking full control of the churches, which was evidenced by the thousands of clergy who were sent to concentration camps. Rev. Martin Niemöller was imprisoned in 1937, charged with "misuse of the pulpit to vilify the State and the Party and attack the authority of the Government." After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 by members of the military and members of the German Resistance movement, to which Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others in the Confessing Church movement belonged, Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. However, even the "Confessing Church made frequent declarations of loyalty to Hitler". But later many Protestants were solidly opposed to Nazism after the nature of the movement was better understood but a number also maintained until the end of the war the view that Nazism was compatible with the teachings of the church.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The small Methodist population was deemed foreign at times; this stemmed from the fact that Methodism began in England, and did not develop in Germany until the nineteenth century under the leadership of Christoph Gottlob Müller and Louis Jacoby. Because of this history they felt the urge to be "more German than the Germans" in order to avoid coming under suspicion. Methodist Bishop John L. Nelsen toured the U.S. on Hitler's behalf in order to protect his church, but in private letters he indicated that he feared and hated Nazism, and he eventually retired and fled to Switzerland. Methodist Bishop F. H. Otto Melle took a far more collaborationist position that included his apparently sincere support for Nazism. He was also committed to an asylum near the war's end. To show his gratitude to the latter bishop, Hitler made a gift of 10,000 marks in 1939 to a Methodist congregation so it could pay for the purchase of an organ. The money was never used.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: The leader of the pro-Nazi segment of the Baptists was Paul Schmidt. The idea of a "national church" was possible in the history of mainstream German Protestantism, but generally forbidden among the Anabaptists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Catholic Church. The forms or offshoots of Protestantism that advocated pacifism, anti-nationalism, or racial equality tended to oppose the Nazi state in the strongest possible terms. Other Christian groups known for their efforts against Nazism include the Jehovah's Witnesses.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In 1934, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society published a letter entitled "Declaration of Facts". In this personal letter to then Reich Chancellor Hitler, J. F. Rutherford stated that "the Bible Researchers of Germany are fighting for the very same high ethical goals and ideals which also the national government of the German Reich proclaimed respecting the relationship of humans to God, namely: honesty of the created being towards its creator". However, while the Jehovah's Witnesses sought to reassure the Nazi government that their goals were purely religious and non-political and they expressed the hope that the government would allow them to continue their preaching, Hitler still restricted their work in Nazi Germany. After this, Rutherford began denouncing Hitler in articles through his publications, potentially making the plight of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany worse.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: Jehovah's Witnesses or "Bible Researchers" () as they were known in Germany, comprised 25,000 members and they were among those persecuted by the Nazi government. All incarcerated members were identified by a unique purple triangle. Some members of the religious group refused to serve in the German military or give allegiance to the Nazi government, for which 250 were executed. An estimated 10,000 were arrested for various crimes, and 2,000 were sent to Nazi concentration camps, where approximately 1,200 were killed. Unlike Jews and Romani, who were persecuted on the basis of their ethnicity, Jehovah's Witnesses could escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs by signing a document indicating renunciation of their faith, submission to state authority, and support of the German military.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: On 13 October 1933, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess issued a decree stating: "No National Socialist may suffer any detriment on the ground that he does not profess any particular faith or confession or on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all." However, the regime strongly opposed "Godless Communism" and all of Germany's freethinking ("freigeist"), atheist, and largely left-wing organizations were banned the same year.


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In a speech made during the negotiations for the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933, Hitler argued against secular schools, stating: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith." One of the groups closed down by the Nazi regime was the German Freethinkers League. Christians appealed to Hitler to end anti-religious and anti-Church propaganda promulgated by Free Thinkers, and within Hitler's Nazi Party some atheists were quite vocal in their anti-Christian views, especially Martin Bormann. Heinrich Himmler, who himself was fascinated with Germanic paganism, was a strong promoter of the "gottgläubig" movement and he did not allow atheists into the SS, arguing that their "refusal to acknowledge higher powers" would be a "potential source of indiscipline". In the SS, Himmler announced: "We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer. Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS." He also declared: "As National Socialists, we believe in a Godly worldview."


title: Religion in Nazi Germany

text: In the 1930s there already existed an esoteric scene in Germany and Austria. The organisations within this spectrum were suppressed, but, unlike Freemasonry in Nazi Germany, they were not persecuted. The only known case in which an occultist might have been sent to a concentration camp for his beliefs is that of Friedrich Bernhard Marby.