Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 03 Sep 2015 5:32:44pm
Wikipedia on Nazism and religion:

"The resistance of churches against the Nazis was the longest lasting and most bitter of any German institution."

"Some historians see the Nazi movement and Adolf Hitler as fundamentally hostile to Christianity, though not irreligious."

"After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 which involved Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other elements of the Confessing Church (a Protestant organisation), Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. Catholic clergy were also suppressed if they spoke out against the régime. 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."

"Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anticlerical, they both understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, were put off for a while they dealt with other enemies."

"In 1941, Martin Bormann, a close associate of Hitler said publicly "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable". In 1942 he also declared in a confidential memo to Gauleiters that the Christian Churches 'must absolutely and finally be broken.' Thus it is evident that he believed Nazism, based as it was on a 'scientific' world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity: "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."