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The Turning: How did Hitler see Christ?

Steigman-Gall: Almost all of the Nazis I investigated esteemed Christ, with only one important exception. Now how did they square the circle by esteeming the king of the Jews? By determining that, all along, Jesus had really been an ‘Aryan.’ It sounds obscene of course, and it is obscene. But people, when they try to understand it, think that this is another idiosyncrasy of Hitler, or his sloppy way of trying to have everything both ways.

Here, too, however, we see that there is a lineage behind the idea that Jesus had in fact been an Aryan. And one of the places that you see this is in 19th century German thought. Two men are most often seen as originating the idea of the Aryan Christ - one is an Englishman, Huston Stewart Chamberlain, famously the son-in-law of Richard Wagner, who lived long enough to see Hitler's rise and who sanctioned Hitler as God-given. And the other was a 19th century Frenchman, Ernest Renan, who came out with a theory that Jesus had not been a Jew at all. Antisemites in the 19th century looked at Jesus and said 'Well, he doesn't care about the law, he doesn't like the Old Testament, he throws the moneychangers and hagglers out of the temple.’ In John 8:44 he says 'Jews, you are the children of the devil',’ this kind of thing. And so there was a particular kind of intellect in the 19th century who began this idea of the Aryan Christ. And Hitler and almost all Nazis continue this lineage of thought.

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Steigman-Gall: Here we have to get back to the theology of the orders of creation which I mentioned earlier. Lutheran scholars began to argue that along with the family and the state, God had made the race, the Volk, one of His orders. And of course they didn’t just say the German Volk, they said the Volk as a category.
That idea spread to a lot of countries in the 19th century – Britain, the United States, scholars have seen this in South Africa as well. Protestant societies that begin to imagine that they are God’s chosen people. In South Africa it was the Afrikaners, the Boers, who began to imagine that they were a white elite among an African majority, they had already received enough evidence from God that they were the elect. In the United States, there is a history, tied to Nativism but not exclusively, that suggests that God favors the Anglo-Saxon nations. In Germany you see this developing too. It’s a very elaborate intellectual history which I don’t really get into in my book. I explore it enough to show that the Nazis weren’t inventing all of this as a hodge podge to justify their policies from one week to the next. They had a certain ideological consistency about them.

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There's was a selective Christianity

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Like all reactionary parties, the Nazis paid lip service to Christainity when they had to win votes, but this respect vanished once they held the reins of power.

The Nazis came to see Christianity as an alien ideology, a "slave religion" as Nietzche put it, and tried to revive old pagan myths.

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The Nazis came to see Christianity as an alien ideology, a "slave religion" as Nietzche put it, and tried to revive old pagan myths.

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Actually, this idea is largely ill-founded. Nazis were very often Christians, and Hitler stated many times that he was a Christian, attended services, etc. The best book for background is "The Holy Reich" by Richard Steigmann Gall.

http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521823714

There was a quite small "pagan" movement among the Nazi leadership. They wanted to replace Christianity with pagan myths, as said above.

But this was far from the majority current; the most eminent historian of the church under the Nazis says that perhaps 15% of leading Nazis were "paganists".

There were some Christian oppositionists to the Nazis, such as Martin Niemoller, or the White Rose group. They were extremely small in number, compared to the churches, especially Protestant, which supported the Nazi Party.

And, by the way, the claim that the Bible was replaced by Mein Kampf is completely silly. There was a tiny church, the Reich Church, which did this. It never numbered more than 5000 persons.

The overemphasis on the pagan strain in Nazi ideology comes in part from a forgery handed out by the Allies as war propaganda. That book, called The Revolution of Nihilism" was published in about 1941 in English, and claimed that Hitler and his followers were nihilists; it had the effect of persuading the West that they were fighting non-Christians or anti-Christians.

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I've often wondered how a predominately Christian people like the Germans could produce the Nazis.

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When people say the Nazis, or any other evildoers, are "not real Christians", they try to have their cake and eat it too: all the believers who do good things are real Christians, but all the believers who do bad things -- including bad things in the name of religion -- are not real Christians. Face it, there have been some heroic and admirable Christians in history -- and there've been some horrifically evil Christians, and many venal ones.

Believers of all stripes can commit horrible acts like rape, murder, genocide and unjust wars. They may nonetheless be sincere believers in the tenets of their religion, e.g., the divinity of Christ, the Ten Commandments (as they interpret them) etc. Most Christians can, should and do feel comfortable judging Hitler as not a good Christian, and his actions as completely contrary to the tenets of their religion, even though many Christian leaders supported or failed to adequately oppose him at the time. Likewise, most Muslims, for example, can, should and do feel comfortable judging Osama bin Laden as not a good Muslim, his actions as completely contrary to the tenets of his religion, even though many Muslim leaders supported or failed to adequately oppose him at the time.

But it's disingenuous to deny that Hitler is a Christian or that bin Laden is a Muslim. It's rather self-serving to try to define our religion (I'm assuming here that Cougyr is Christian) to protect it from the taint of evil acts committed by our co-religionists.

btw, I'm not saying 9/11 is comparable to the Holocaust; I'm just saying both men did terrible things that mainstream interpretations of their religion can't (or at least shouldn't) condone.

[ 30 June 2005: Message edited by: puzzlic ]

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Originally posted by Papal Bull:
And at the time, Himmler and others tried to make a Norse pagan movement to solidify the power of the "Northern Aryans".

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No where do I find this idea of "myth creation" so pronouced as I do when I read, "Ring of Power," by Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. The Abandoned Child, The Authoritarian Father, and the Disempowered Feminine, A Jungian UNderstanding of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

The mythology of a culture, in this case Western civilization, instructs us about values, patterns, and assumptions on which this culture is based. When we stop to examine our mythological heritage, we may be enlightened or appalled by how much it is metaphor for what exists in contemporary reality, how much our mythology is about us. Page 2

After reading, you gain insight into what was going on in Hitler's rise, as perverted his vision was, he took hold of the public to glorify and create this vision he had of a new society.

But the irony is, that his psychological problems were masked, and I think of the movie written brought forward, into that new society.

There were good people. The "White Rose." Some were very afraid of their own?

You get a good sense then, of the leaders who come out and espouse a radical view of some utopian idealization. Heaven, shangrila, or even Elysium for the sake of a dying for, a warped radical view, like muslim extremism.

There are still tangibles things, for sane good people who want truth, and not the kind who espouse and steal this "power of discernation" from another. None religiously defined but can found in messages of what ever bible you adhere too?

There can still be a heaven? But not the kind, that would steal souls. It would have been one of free choice I think, might had become better persons? Worked through, the debri of personality?

That link confirmed all of my worst fears.

You have to listen to what these guys preach quite openly in Canada now, and the massive drive they are making to draw people in!

This is almost exactly (but for a few carefully positioned self-editing exercises) what these evangelicals are saying quite boldly everyday now.

And now the feed is absolutely from American Evangelicals, not Canadians as much, but they too are incredibly emboldened since they got this massive bolstering from their brothers to the south.

I cannot deny I am worried. It's not that I don't think Canadians are much smarter than that, it's just that you cannot believe how manipulative this movement is. They are coming at this from every imaginable front, a huge onslaught, and we're all just sitting back and waiting for the hammer to fall.

Unless this is exposed to the mainstream, how will it be curtailed?

Well, it's far easier to take seats in Canada with the multi-party system than it is in the U.S. They only need a small margin to win a huge number of seats, and they have a multitude of political action groups to come at this from every possible angle.

They won't be disclosing who they are, they are using think tanks, and new named action groups disguised as issue-driven or political proponency, and are paying for interview time to obtain the influence that no one else has or can afford in this country.

The mainstream media is buckling to their power, and watch as they are quickly becoming the dominant force.

Evangelicals are getting plum talk hosts jobs as well, and most won't have any idea why the 'rhetoric is changing', many don't identify their backgrounds to the public.

But what your link said was just a tiny part of what my research has unearthed.

There's a whole lot more to this story, but the racist connection is not audible in any direct way except for when McVety said on his show "we have to stop the Muslim movement in Canada". That was back last November, and he is far too slippery to repeat that in this political thrust! He also attacked Aboriginal Art on the back of the $20 bill as pagan symbols, and said that this government was trying to destroy Christianity and replace it with paganism!

Now, he's not going to say that in public since he is the front man for this movement. He's got to keep the racism very much under wraps to get that power!

and the end of the world, beat the drum scare-tactics are being used everyday now under the radar of most Canadians.

What gets me is that this has always been the agenda, but now they are banking on these same minorities to get to power here.

And they are banking on homophobes, a host of other emotionally charged issues to very shrewdly draw people in without them even knowing it.

Like the big push to eradicate child porn. This is now talked about on mainstream media, as though it is rampant.

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Originally posted by Cougyr:
The Nazis were Christians too. I've often wondered how a predominately Christian people like the Germans could produce the Nazis. This interview helps to explain.

There are other sources as well.

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well a lot of Christians in several nations saw themselves as "the chosen" at one time or another. Some English Christians (the British Commonwealth) thought of themselves as the descendents of one of the 12 tribes of Isreal

Christian Normans and Danes tried to trace their roots back to the 12 tribes of Isreal, and some American Christians believed the United States of America was the chosen Nation. All the attempts to create a myth of origin were fabricated, revisionist, and lacked any evidence to support claims of being chosen, or one of the lost tribes. The claims are still the basis of claims for those that are "Christian Identity".

for more info

NOVA

[ 01 July 2005: Message edited by: TemporalHominid ]

Anti-semitism is a product of Christianity(in the sense of Christian culture), not Islam, paganism, or any other religion. Therefore, Christianity bears the lion's share of responsibility for the anti-semitism that the Nazis appropriated.

However:

The Nazis took the raw material of Christian anti-semitism and made it into something very much their own creation. Specifically, they fused traditional relgious anti-semitism with Social Darwinism, to create a biological anti-semitism which appealed to pseudo-intellectuals who might otherwise have found anti-semitism too mired in relgious mumbo-jumbo for their tastes. This strain of thought survives today not on the Religious Right(which rejects Social Darwinism because it cannot accept the evolutionary theory on which the thepry is precariously based), but among the "Bell Curve" crowd, who tend to have a higher degree of mainstream repsectability than the anti-Darwinists(when's the last time you saw a Newsweek cover extolling creation science, the way they did with The Bell Curve?)

If anyone doubts that the sociobiologists are the true heirs to the Nazi ideology, check out the "theories" of Kevin MacDonald. This guy isn't some fundamentalist crank running a theme park in Alabama, but a tenured professor at a major American univeristy, whose books get advertised in mainstream liberal publications:

http://tinyurl.com/cgeph

Not to say that the Religious Right isn't fascistic in its own way, but I'd say they have more in common with the Catholic Phalange movement in Spain than with Nazism.

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Christian Normans and Danes tried to trace their roots back to the 12 tribes of Isreal, and some American Christians believed the United States of America was the chosen Nation. All the attempts to create a myth of origin were fabricated, revisionist, and lacked any evidence to support claims of being chosen, or one of the lost tribes. The claims are still the basis of claims for those that are "Christian Identity".

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Originally posted by jeff house:
There was a quite small "pagan" movement among the Nazi leadership. They wanted to replace Christianity with pagan myths, as said above.

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Not even ... this was not quite what it appeared to be.

Both sides were experimenting with new forms of psychological warfare at this time, among them appeals to supernatural beliefs. Typically this took the form of claiming to have "evil powers". The British did it, making a big deal about their mediums when the sub war started to turn sour for the Germans (a concept later revived, incidentally, by the Americans during the Cold War under the name 'remote viewing'). Similarly Churchill's quip about speaking favourably of the Devil if Hitler invaded Hell came after a campaign of subtle propaganda implying British Freemasons were channeling Satan to help win the war. The Americans employed these techniques too, mostly in Asia. Some interesting examples here, if you scroll down to the section titled "superstition" and check out the documents linked to:

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/oss/ossjapan.htm#superstition

Eg, I suggest concocting stories to the effect that "certain unheard of colors were found in the rice fields; that monstrosities, such as double headed fowl or animals were born; that there has been a tremendous increase in the cases of men and women who have been bewitched and changed into foxes in certain sections of Japan"; all of which points to evil things to come and the anger of the Gods

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
A few thoughts:

Anti-semitism is a product of Christianity(in the sense of Christian culture), not Islam, paganism, or any other religion. Therefore, Christianity bears the lion's share of responsibility for the anti-semitism that the Nazis appropriated.

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This is incorrect ... anti-semitism was widely established in the Classical world as well. More likely Christianity merely preserved and passed on this element from the Romans (who seem to have got it from a strain present in Greece).

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There may have been some real pagans in the Nazi ranks too ... it probably added to the effect to actually have a small group of them. But the whole thing was by design of some office in the OKW, from what I recall.

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Absolutely not. There was a specific, pro-pagan movement within Nazi ranks, and included extremely high ranking Nazi leaders.

The most important of these was Reichfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, who made sure the pagan movement among Nazis had meeting places, literature, insignia, and a programme.

The volkish movement on which the Nazis fed also lived on Wagnerian images of Walpurgisnacht, Wotan, and Valhalla.

While it is important to refuse to give Christians a pass on Nazism, it is just as bad to fail to note that paganism and the occult were deeply implanted within the Nazi movement.

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
A few thoughts:
Anti-semitism is a product of Christianity(in the sense of Christian culture), not Islam, paganism, or any other religion. Therefore, Christianity bears the lion's share of responsibility for the anti-semitism that the Nazis appropriated.

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This is incorrect ... anti-semitism was widely established in the Classical world as well. More likely Christianity merely preserved and passed on this element from the Romans (who seem to have got it from a strain present in Greece).

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I am quite willing to stand corrected on this particular matter. I suppose I should have said "anti-semitism as we know it", by which I mean the economic ghettoization of Jews in certain professions, and the religious stigmatization of them as the murderers of Christ.

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I am quite willing to stand corrected on this particular matter.

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I think you are eseentially correct, though. There were certainly anti-Jewish opinions and attitudes in existence throughout the Roman world, in Pharaonic Egypt, etc.

But Christianity bears much of the blame for the last 2000 years of antisemitism. The church has fearlessly propagated antisemitic attitudes and ideas for centuries.

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
If anyone doubts that the sociobiologists are the true heirs to the Nazi ideology...

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I think you were right the first time. Classical anti-semitism was absorbed by Christianity when it stopped being a Jewish sub-sect and started being a player in the "Who's going to be the new popular religion in the Roman Empire?" stakes. This happened very early in the game, first or second century, before the New Testament was in its final form.

Since it's absolutely impossible that Christ could have been crucified by anyone other than the Romans, the gradual procedure of shifting the blame from them to the Jews is an interesting process to watch, and a good measure of the change from a Jewish to a Greco-Roman religion. Its ultimate form labels Jews as Christ-killers and makes Pilate a saint.

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
If anyone doubts that the sociobiologists are the true heirs to the Nazi ideology...
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Are you calling Richard Dawkins a Nazi?

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Let me rephrase that:

People who claim(as does Kevin MacDonald) that Jews have evolved biologically to produce a race that inexorably seeks to undermine the host culture while at the same time feeding parasitically off of that culture, have a lot in common with the Nazis. Because that is very close to what the Nazis believed.

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
I'm ashamed to say I don't know much about Dawkins.

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Originally posted by jeff house:

Absolutely not. There was a specific, pro-pagan movement within Nazi ranks, and included extremely high ranking Nazi leaders.

The most important of these was Reichfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, who made sure the pagan movement among Nazis had meeting places, literature, insignia, and a programme.

The volkish movement on which the Nazis fed also lived on Wagnerian images of Walpurgisnacht, Wotan, and Valhalla.

While it is important to refuse to give Christians a pass on Nazism, it is just as bad to fail to note that paganism and the occult were deeply implanted within the Nazi movement.

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The creation of myth is a important method used to embue quality to any plan? If the understanding did not exist to take hold of society in trouble, he might have past as a lunatic just voicing his idea, yet he appealled to the desperation of folks in economic troubles and learnt to direct this hate to the "have and have nots."

Here's soemthing to think about.

Serbian goes on a rampage for ethinic cleansing that stewed for generations, while the cruel hand of fate, now went after the Croats, who had sided with the Germans. Did it end there, with Serbian aggression ignited?

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Originally posted by voice of the damned:
Does the economic quarantine of Jews in banking and allied professions originate in pre-Christian times?

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Yes, the economic quarantine does, but not the stereotype of Jews as swindlers or hoarders. Not sure exactly what the origin of this was in the Classical world. The only thing I can think of was that, other Eastern cultures often used their temples as treasuries, deposits for precious metals, and rulers regularly made withdrawals. Judaism had very strong attitudes about violation of their holy sites, so when Hellenic and later Roman rulers of the area tried to make withdrawals as they did often in other Middle Eastern holdings, and met with violent Jewish opposition, they probably figured the Jews were exceptionally attached to wealth (rather than understanding the religious element behind what the Jews saw as a desecration). Some of the most famous incidents of conflict between Jews and Romans or Greeks involved attempts to tax the temple in Jerusalem.