Date: 25 May 93 16:31:59
From: David Rice
  To: Joe Savelli
Subj: Hitler again?!
____________________________________________________________________________

JS> "I beg to differ with you."

Don't beg. Stand up and debate like a man.

JS> Hitler was not Christian. He pursecuted the church during his
JS> reign and killed church members and leaders in the death camps."

No, Hitler was a devout Christian, believing heart and soul in his
Lord Jesus Christ, and received full backing from the Roman Catholic
Church when he started his Labor Party. He got full backing when he
took over the Nazi party. It was only much later that he started
going after RICH and POLITICALLY POWERFUL cults that he became
"anti-religion."

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior
as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness,
surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for
what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who,
God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read
through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in
His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the
brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against
the Jewish poison.

"Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I
recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was
for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

"As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but
I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice...

"And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we
are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as
a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look
on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at
the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness
and misery.

"When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in
their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I
would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for
them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn
against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and
exploited."

Adolph Hitler, in a speech delivered April 12, 1922
Published in "My New Order"
Quoted in "Freethought Today" April 1990

 * Origin: Rights On! - Religion Free Always! - Titusville_FL_USA (1:374/14)

Date: 25 May 93 16:32:28
From: David Rice
  To: Joe Savelli
Subj: Hitler again?!
____________________________________________________________________________

"Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the
secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This
evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in
Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe;
that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which
Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout religious
group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's staunchest
followers."

"Given their commitment to the method of faith (and their tendency
to imitate the Catholic Church), it is not astonishing that some
Nazis went all the way in this issue. A tendency never given the
status of official ideology yet fairly prominent in the movement
was voiced in a demand made by several of its leading figures
(though Hitler himself regarded it as impractical until the Nazis
won the war): the demand that Nazism itself be turned into a full-
fledge religion. These voices urged a state religion supplanting
the older creeds, with its own symbols, its own rituals, and its
own zealots avid to convert christians into fanatic Hitler-believers,
as, once, ancient missionaries had converted Pagans into fanatic
christians. "Adolf Hitler," exclaimed one such believer (the Nazi
Minister for Church Affairs), "is the true Holy Ghost!" (15)

"The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this development.
To the end, they could not decide whether to retain christianity,
construing Nazism merely as its latest, truest version ("positive
christianity," this wing often called it)--or to concoct a
distinctively Nazi creed out of a hodgepodge of elements drawn from
Pagan Teutonic mythology and romanticist metaphysics. In either case,
however, whether advanced as a form of or a successor to christianity,
what Nazism did unfailingly demand of its followers was the essence of
the religious mentality: an attitude of awed, submissive, faithful
adoration. "We believe on this earth SOLEY (emphasis by writer) in
Adolf Hitler...," intoned Dr. Robert Ley to a reverent audience of
15,000 Hitler Youths. "We believe that God has sent us Adolf
Hitler." (16)

Excerpts from "The Ominous Parallels" by Leonard Peikoff.

(15) Viereck, op. cit., p.289; quoting from Eugene Lyons, "Dictators
into Gods" (American Mercury, March 1939).

16) Ibid.; quoting from the New York Times, February 11, 1937.

But of course, no one was killed in the name of god. (Eyes closed
tight and exclaiming, "Did not!")

 * Origin: Rights On! - Religion Free Always! - Titusville_FL_USA (1:374/14)

Date: 25 May 93 16:32:59
From: David Rice
  To: Joe Savelli
Subj: Hitler again?!
____________________________________________________________________________

Most of the mainstream Christian denominations in Germany
expressed support for Hitler and for his regime at some time
or other.

The Catholic Bishops conference in 1933 "expressed joy that through
the new state Christianity had been promoted, morality improved, and
and the struggle against Bolshevism and godlessness condicted with
energy and success"

In the same year, 1933 "The Catholic Students Union hails the
National Socialist revolution as the greatest spiritual breakthrough
of our time".

In 1934, responding to an enquiry from the Ministry for Church
affairs, the Catholic Seamen's Mission listed the books and papers
they provided to seamen. The list included Hitler's own anti-
semitic Mein Kampf, and the newspaper Volkischer Beobachter.

In 1936, the Bishops of Hannover, Wurtemburg and Bavaria signed
a statement that said in part "We, together with the Reich Church
Committee, stand behind the Fuhrer in the life-struggle of the
German people against Bolshevism. In this struggle, the Church
mobilizes the forces of Christian belief against unbelief."

In 1939, The Bishop of Hannover, Marahans, was one of the signers
of a statement that explained the need for the foundation of an
institute to "dejudaize" the Church. "The foundation of this
institute is based on the conviction that Jewish influence in
all areas of German life, including therefore that of the Church
and religon, must be brought to light and eliminated."

At the outbreak of war, the Protestant bishops signed a statement
which read in part "So at this hour too we join with our nation
in intercession for the Fuhrer and the Reich...."

In November 1941, the Vicar General of the Diocese of Rottenburg
wrote "The fact that so many believing soldiers are among the
lists of the fallen justifies the conclusion that it is above all
those soldiers with true Christian belief who have helped to win
the great victories."

It is also true that many individual Christians and Priests
resisted Hitler. However, the Churches themselves gave their
followers a highly ambiguous and collaborationist message.

 * Origin: Rights On! - Religion Free Always! - Titusville_FL_USA (1:374/14)

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