A technician is trying to import the 1,200 missing entries on this site with images, links, categories, etc. (the entries from the old incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour). It’s hard work and may take the rest of the month.
As there shouldn’t be two people working on the admin page at the same time, I won’t be adding new entries, or approving valid comments, until the technician finishes the job; hopefully, before this month is over.
Thanks for your patience!
I would like to say something about the seventh chapter of Hitler’s Religion; not just what I quoted here, but the entire chapter. My reading of this book continues to confirm my premise: The most influential NS men, and those who inspired them, were just one step away from reaching the other side of the psychological Rubicon, but didn’t reach solid ground. (N.b.: I cannot link to the article ‘My stepping stones’ on the psychological Rubicon for the moment, as a technician is just about to see if it is possible to upload the WordPress-censored entries here. If this new incarnation of WDH doesn’t appear for a few moments, don’t be alarmed: we’re reconfiguring it.)
From this follows the need to create a new religious movement to take this last step, a movement I call the priesthood of the sacred words. And in doing so I must confess that I find myself somewhat closer to Himmler than to Hitler on this point.
On pages 189-90 of Hitler’s Religion Weikart informs us that, although Hitler criticised Gothic cathedrals and medieval mysticism for their somberness, he didn’t believe that NS was a religious cult for holding mystical ceremonies. In fact, his 1938 Nuremberg Rally speech was an open rebuke to Himmler, Rosenberg and other neo-pagans in the movement. Rosenberg himself in his major work recalled that Hitler had disapproved of Himmler’s plans to reintroduce the cult of Wotan and Thor. Hitler was even suspicious of Rosenberg’s studies of Germanic prehistory because he preferred the cultures of Greece and Rome.
Recall from The Fair Race that the original cultures of Greece and Rome were founded by Norsemen, and that only in their more decadent stages did they undergo interbreeding. I can well understand Hitler on this point and what he said about Wotan in one of his after-dinner talks. But Himmler’s idea was the right one: for a movement to be successful, it is necessary for believers to feel the mysterium tremendum, what Jung and others call the numinous.
And that can only be inspired by a semi-religious movement. I understand Hitler because there were occult and parapsychological aspects in some high-ranking National Socialists that had to be rejected. But an ideal compromise would have been, as Manu Rodríguez rightly said in one of our books, to use the rebuilt Greco-Roman temples (starting e.g., by destroying the Vatican and putting in its place a huge temple to Zeus) to teach languages, history and literature of the peoples with Nordic blood (peoples that obviously include Greece and Rome in their origins).
The other reflection I wanted to communicate this day is due to the recent article ‘What is a Woman?’ by Spencer Quinn, who tells us: ‘It began in the 1960s, when we pretended that blacks were the intellectual equals of whites’.
That is not true. While Quinn is correct in saying that Matt Walsh (pic above), who produced the amazing documentary What is a Woman?, didn’t dare to name the influential Jews in gender ideology, the ideology of equality began in the writings of a much older Jew, St Paul. Constantine brought to Constantinople the inversion of Greco-Roman values we read in that famous verse in the Epistle to the Galatians, inducing, with all the power of the Roman Empire, a melting pot of races in the so-called second Rome. There began the Aryan decline big time. While the ancient Greeks and Romans with Nordic blood were racists, Christianity broke down the barriers—not something as recent as the 1960s.
Once I finish reviewing Weikart’s book on Hitler’s religion, we will continue translating Karlheinz Deschner’s history of Christianity.
Editor’s note: Here are some excerpts from the seventh chapter of Richard Weikart’s book.
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Under the leadership of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy had tried to blend a mystical racism with a scientific view of an evolutionary hierarchy of races. Despite professing the brotherhood of all humanity, theosophy taught racial inequality, and Blavatsky even endorsed the extermination of inferior races. Lanz also drew inspiration from non-mystical, non-occult sources, such as the physician and racial theorist Ludwig Woltmann. Before founding his own journal, Lanz wrote an extended review of Woltmann’s book, Die politische Anthropologie, for a freethinking journal and waxed enthusiastic about Woltmann’s racist doctrine of Nordic superiority. Woltmann’s book had been written for a prize competition for the best work on the political and social implications of Darwinian theory. He synthesized Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Arthur Gobineau’s theory of the racial superiority of the Nordic race.
[Left, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat.] Woltmann was a biological and racial determinist, believing that not only physical characteristics, but also mental and moral traits, are hereditary. Thus, one’s destiny is predetermined in one’s biological makeup. Race, according to Woltmann, is the key to historical development, because some races—the fair-skinned Nordic one especially—were superior. The Nordic race, he stated, is “the highest product of organic evolution,” and they were the founders of civilization. Further, he believed that races arose through an ongoing racial struggle for existence, and, like Gobineau, he thought that racial mixing was deleterious, leading to racial decline.
Though Lanz used the term Aryan rather than Nordic, many of his ideas about race were similar to those of Woltmann and other Nordic racists. Lanz believed that “race is the driving force behind all deeds,” determining the destiny of all peoples, or Völker. Racial wisdom was thus the paramount value, motivating him to establish a religion of race. Lanz warned that the Aryan race was threatened with decline, and his religion aimed at rescuing and preserving this endangered, but valuable, race. The key peril confronting Aryans was racial mixture. One of the more bizarre claims that Lanz made—based on his mystical interpretation of the Bible—was that the Fall happened when Eve copulated with an animal, producing progeny who were half-ape and half-human. These “ape-people” that Eve bore were the ancestors of the inferior races around the globe, such as black Africans, and their animal blood tainted all inferior races. This Fall involved racial mixture with a vengeance, and it dehumanized all non-Aryans, who supposedly had admixtures of animal blood coursing through their veins.
Unlike Hitler, who despised the Hebrew Bible as the effluvium of the Jewish mind, Lanz claimed that Moses was a Darwinist who—if interpreted in the proper mystical sense—taught Aryans how to triumph in the racial struggle through conscious racial selection. Lanz maintained that the Jews had succeeded historically despite their inferiority because they had appropriated the biblical wisdom that was really intended for Aryans. Aryans should embrace the Bible, including the Old Testament, “as the hard, racially proud and racially conscious book, which proclaims death and extermination to the inferior and world domination to the superior (Hochwertigen).” Unfortunately, Lanz continued, a false kind of love had been incorporated into the Bible by some misguided souls.
Elsewhere, Lanz elaborated that the kind of neighborly love and compassion that most people equated with Christianity, and which appeared in the Bible, was based on a misinterpretation hypocritically taught by the inferior races, the so-called “ape-people.” The word “neighbor” in the Old Testament really meant, he assured his fellow Aryan racists, one’s racial comrade. Thus the command to love our neighbor really “means that we only have to love our racial comrades, thus those who stand closest to our kind and our race.” In a 1907 issue of Ostara, he warned his fellow Aryans that they were committing race suicide by extending generosity to those of inferior races. Rather, they should always discriminate racially in their charitable giving. (Apparently, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan meant nothing to Lanz—or to Hitler.) Ominously, Lanz compared racially inferior people to weeds needing to be pulled. A major theme in this pamphlet and many others was the need to introduce eugenics measures to improve the race.
Many of Lanz’s doctrines became core tenets of Hitler’s worldview: the primacy of race in determining historical developments, Aryan superiority (with the Aryans being the sole creators of culture), the Darwinian racial struggle, the need for eugenics policies, and the evils of racial mixing. Hitler also shared Lanz’s view that Aryans had developed an ancient civilization in the mythical Atlantis. In a passage of Mein Kampf that decries racial mixing in a manner reminiscent of Lanz’s writings, Hitler admonished the state to elevate the status of marriage, which under the present system was supposedly contributing to biological decline. By hindering the marriages of those he dubbed inferior, he hoped marriages could “produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” By claiming that racial mixture could result in human-ape hybrids, Hitler was pulling a page out of Lanz’s repertoire. No wonder [Wilfried] Daim was struck by the similarities between Lanz and Hitler and supposed that Hitler’s ideology hailed largely from Lanz’s writings. Given all these parallels, most historians acknowledge the likelihood that Lanz’s Ariosophy influenced Hitler’s ideology, either directly or indirectly.
But another like-minded Ariosophist in Vienna, Guido von List, was probably even more influential among early twentieth-century Pan-German nationalists than his colleague Lanz. He introduced the swastika symbol into Aryan racist circles before Lanz, and his ideas were widely discussed in the Pan-German press in Vienna. List and Lanz propagated similar occult racial ideologies, and they belonged to each other’s organizations. Before becoming entranced with occult thinking, List wrote for Pan-German publications. He carried this intense nationalist and racist heritage with him into his occult Aryan religion.
Like Lanz, he claimed he was recovering ancient Germanic wisdom that had been lost, and he wanted to replace Catholicism with his mystical faith. He preached Aryan supremacy, the need to engage in the struggle for existence against other races, and eugenics measures to improve the vitality of the Aryan race. In 1908, he explained the core of his message: “The high meaning of this custom [of ancient Aryans] lay in the intention of a planned, widespread breeding of a noble race, which through strict sexual laws would also remain racially pure.” List wanted to reconstitute an ancient Germanic priesthood with esoteric knowledge that could elevate the racially purified and ennobled Aryans to dominate the globe.
We do not know if Hitler had any direct contact with List or the List Society when he lived in Vienna. Brigitte Hamann, however, believes that Hitler’s racial ideology had more in common with List than with Lanz. List, for example, taught that the Aryans evolved into a superior race during the Ice Age. They were steeled in body and mind by the harsh conditions, and they had to wage a bitter battle against the elements. Natural selection eliminated the weak, sickly, and less cooperative, leaving the robust, healthy, and more moral members to propagate their superior biological traits. Hitler narrated a similar tale of Aryan origins in his 1920 speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” List also viewed nature as the source of divine power, and according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, he reduced all morality to just one ethical precept: “Live in accordance with Nature.” Hitler’s ethical views also stressed conformity to nature and its laws…
In August 1918, shortly before the end of the war, he [Rudolf von Sebottendorff] founded the Thule Society in Munich as an organization to foster German nationalism and Aryan racism. The Thule Society adopted the swastika as its symbol and “Heil” as its greeting, thus contributing to later Nazi practices.
In June 1918, Sebottendorff acquired the Münchner Beobachter as the mouthpiece for the Thule Society. In order to attract young Germans to his movement, he featured sports articles in this newspaper. However, its real purpose was to advance his racist and ultranationalist views, so he also published articles on these themes. One early article he wrote was “Keep Your Blood Pure,” which sounds remarkably similar to Hitler’s racial philosophy in Mein Kampf. In this essay, Sebottendorff asserted that race is the key to understanding history. He was incensed that Christianity had led some Germans to embrace racial equality. He wrote,
Encouraged by Christianity they propagated the doctrine of the equality of humans. Gypsies, Hottentots, Brazilian natives, and Germans are supposedly completely equal in value. Too bad the great teacher, nature, teaches otherwise. It teaches: This equality is nonsense. It is the greatest lie that humanity has ever been talked into. To the destruction of us Germans. There are higher and lower races! If one values the racial mish-mash, the “Tschandalen” [this was Lanz’s term for inferior human races that had resulted from a human-ape hybrid] the same as the Aryans—the noble humans—then one commits a crime against humanity… Wherever one looks in the past, the bearers of Germanic blood have always been the bearers and creators of culture.
The affinities with Hitler’s worldview are obvious: racial inequality, the role of nature in confirming racial inequality, and the Aryans as the sole creators of culture. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Sebottendorff boasted that he had laid the intellectual foundation for Nazism.
Sebottendorff’s view of Christianity was similar to Hitler’s, too. He criticized many of its features, especially its tendency to promote human equality. While appreciating Luther’s anti-Semitism, he noted that it was nonetheless deficient, because it was based on religious, not racial, considerations. He also dismissed the notion that people should turn the other cheek. Rather, he proclaimed, they should strike back until their opponent remained on the ground. Strangely, Sebottendorff thought Jesus approved of this pugnacity, for he continued, “That was also the opinion of our Savior: He came to bring the sword”…
A different movement, neo-paganism, also held sway over some leading Nazis, especially Himmler and Rosenberg. Neo-paganism, the attempt to resurrect the old Germanic gods and goddesses, sometimes overlapped with occultism, though some neo-paganists were staunch opponents of it. Both schools of thought were anti-Christian in their orientation. The occultist Sebottendorff, for example, tried to resurrect the worship of Wotan and other ancient Germanic gods. Himmler and Rosenberg saw neo-paganism as a way to bring Germans back to their original pre-Christian religion. Neo-paganism countered the universalizing tendencies of Christianity and emphasized the distinctiveness of the Aryan race, even in their religion.
Despite all these historical connections between Hitler and occultists, the popular idea that Hitler was an occultist—or at least powerfully influenced by occultism—faces serious objections…
On The Unz Review, Robert Morgan said:
Anon: “The men that wrote and agreed on the words “all men are created equal” meant just that. But these same men did not view male negros as men, no more than any sane person today views male chimpanazees as men.”
Would that it were true! But, unfortunately, it is not. That negroes were regarded as men in those days is shown irrefutably by the fact that of the thirteen original states, five had already granted citizenship and the vote to negro freemen. As Supreme Court Justice Curtis wrote in his dissent to the Dred Scott decision, it is even likely that some of these negroes voted on whether or not to ratify the Constitution.
If it had been common at all to regard full-blooded negroes as non-human, then instead of a Civil War being fought over the question of their slavery, they could simply have been disposed of like a herd of infected cattle. But, perhaps fatally for the white race, it was the Christian religion and not science that shaped its conception of what was or was not human, and from Christianity’s earliest days negroes had been included in that category.
In modern times, as belief in miracles and the supernatural has given way to science, and nobody really takes Jesus seriously anymore, I think people have difficulty conceiving of how sincerely white people believed such religious nonsense back then. The above article’s author begins by quoting an historian who characterizes the Civil War as a Crusade, and that’s entirely correct. It was a religious dispute between two factions of white people, each considering the other a kind of heretic. The North’s attitude was summed up perfectly in their theme song, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the original version of which contained the lines:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.
This religious motive of the North is confirmed, on the part of the South, by Confederate General Henry Louis Benning, who in his speech to the Virginia Convention said:
The North entertains the opinion that slavery is a sin and a crime. I mean, when I say the North, the Republican party, and that is the North; and they say that any stipulation in the Constitution or laws in favor of slavery, is an agreement with death and a covenant with hell; and that it is absolutely a religious merit to violate it [source: here].
I notice that in his latest column, Paul Craig Roberts continues to push the canard that the Civil War was fought primarily for economic reasons. But this makes as much sense as saying that the original Crusades of medieval times were fought for economic reasons, and that the Christian religion had nothing to do with it. One can find economic reasons for anything, but when all of the participants are claiming that their motives are religious, it seems to me that it’s foolish not to give that side of it proper weight.
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Nota bene: The commenter of The Unz Review uses the pseudonym ‘Dr. Robert Morgan’: a character who appeared in the film The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price. Hence the image above, taken from a poster advertising the 1964 film.
Editor’s note: This is the first regular article after the June 8th accident: some excerpts from Richard Weikart’s chapter ‘Did Hitler derive his anti- Semitism from Christianity?’
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Hitler blamed the Jews for just about everything that he opposed: communism, capitalism, internationalism, liberalism, materialism, egalitarianism, pacifism, and, of course, Christianity. That sneaky rabbi Paul had formulated his version of Christianity, Hitler believed, on the “Jewish-Bolshevik” principles of human equality. When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he complained that the Christian churches were not sufficiently anti-Semitic. He asked, “In the Jewish question, for example, do not both denominations [Catholic and Protestant] today take a standpoint which corresponds neither to the requirements of the nation nor to the real needs of religion?” A few paragraphs later, he remarked that Protestantism was better than Catholicism in defending the national interests of Germany, but it was still deficient, because it “combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.” For Hitler, Christianity was essentially Jewish and thus weakened the German effort to combat the Jewish threat. He certainly did not see his anti-Semitism as congruent with the teachings and policies of the Christian churches…
Anti-Jewish animus was sometimes tempered by the Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbor and even one’s enemies. Also, Christians often opposed the biological racism that flourished in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth century. Historian Leon Poliakov remarks, “Judeo-Christian tradition was both anti-racist and anti-nationalist.” If one reads the biological racist literature of early twentieth-century Germany, one frequently finds that racist ideologues criticized the Christian churches for their racial egalitarianism.
Christian anti-Semites differed from racial anti-Semites because Christians usually did not object to the Jews as a biological entity; rather, they opposed their religion. If Jews would give up their Jewish religion and be baptized into the Christian faith, they would be accepted as full-fledged members of German society, as they often were. But the secular, racial form of anti-Semitism that flowered around 1900—and which Hitler embraced— regarded conversion and assimilation as the absolute worst things that could happen, because then Jews would intermarry with Germans. Hitler believed this would pollute the German bloodline with inferior hereditary traits. Thus, the key difference between Christian anti-Semitism and racial anti- Semitism was that the former wanted to assimilate the Jews into German society while the latter believed it was necessary to eliminate them physically from Germany. Racial anti-Semites usually did not see the churches as allies in their campaign against the Jews.
NS propaganda: “Baptism did not make him a
non-Jew” from Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (1938).
One of the leading figures in developing the racist anti-Semitism that became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term anti-Semitism. Marr warned in a popular book in 1879 that the Jews were conquering the Germans in a racial war. This battle of the Germans against the Jews “was from the beginning no religious [war], it was a struggle for existence, that was waged against the foreign domination of Jewry.” Marr, a harsh critic of Christianity, depicted his theory about the racial struggle against Jews as a secular, scientific standpoint. Because he believed the Jews were a race, not a religion, he advocated segregation and discrimination, not assimilation, as the cure for the “Jewish question”… Marr’s antireligious, racist version of anti-Semitism gained many adherents at the end of the nineteenth century, especially as biological racism exploded in popularity among secular-minded intellectuals…
In the period 1919 to 1923, one of the main topics in Hitler’s speeches was the Jewish threat. In August 1920, Hitler delivered a programmatic speech in Munich on “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” Hitler depicted the Aryans or Nordic people as a race that developed in the northern parts of Europe. Because of the harsh climate, the Aryan race developed a diligent character, viewing labor as a duty to the community. Also, the tough conditions of life weeded out the weak and sickly among them, giving them greater physical stamina and contributing to the development of an inner life. The Jews, on the other hand, never developed an appreciation for labor.
In sum, Hitler said, “We see that here two great differences lie in the race: Aryanness means a moral conception of labor and through it what we hear so often today: socialism, sense of community, common welfare before self-interest—Jewry means an egoistic conception of labor and thereby mammonism and materialism, the exact opposite of socialism!”
Hitler emphasized these moral and immoral traits of Aryans and Jews were biological and hereditary. In answering the question, “Why Are We Anti- Semites?,” Hitler made clear that he opposed the Jews’ supposedly hereditary immoral qualities, especially their laziness and greed. His anti- Semitism was not based on religious considerations. To be sure, he did mention a couple of passages from the Hebrew Bible, but these were used to illustrate Jewish greed and immorality, not because he opposed their religious beliefs or practices. Not only do we find zero Christian anti- Semitic themes in this speech, but Hitler specifically distanced himself from Christianity by accusing the Jews of spreading Christianity, a theme he would take up often later, but usually in private, not in public forums…
The secularized version of anti-Christian anti-Semitism that became prominent in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany was grafted onto the earlier Christian version of anti-Semitism. Centuries-old caricatures of the Jews were reinterpreted as Jewish biological traits. Further, the Christian churches in Germany and Austria continued to peddle a good deal of anti-Jewish animosity in the early twentieth century, thus giving succor to the Nazi anti-Semitic juggernaut. Both Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Christian anti-Semitism—thus, both religion and secularization—were necessary conditions for the advent of the Nazi Holocaust. The anti-Semitic message that Hitler preached, however, was far more anti-Christian than Christian.
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Editor’s note: In this chapter I begin to glimpse the tragedy of the leading NS ideologues and their compromise with the Christian masses of Germans.
The fact is that, publicly, they could not speak out. And they themselves believed in an Aryan and fictitious Jesus because there was no research like Richard Carrier’s (see the video linked in the sticky post).
That’s why they focused so much on the JQ—the CQ was taboo in Nazi Germany, as it still is now in American white nationalism.
For example, it is common on the racial right to distort the driving force that moved the Yankees to war with southern racists, something that Robert Morgan has taken issue with a galaxy of conservative commenters on The Unz Review for some time now.
The following is his last exchange this month but, as I don’t yet know how to modify the theme code of this new incarnation of WDH (the software automatically italicises all indented quotes and turn the indented quotes brown), I won’t indent Morgan’s next quotes or those he argues with:
Robert Morgan: Jared Taylor is such a brazen liar I decided to make an annotated version of his remarks about Lincoln.
“Lincoln didn’t like slavery, but he didn’t like blacks, either.”
Yet Lincoln was more responsible than any other man for freeing them and turning them loose on white people. I ask you, is this the action of a man who hated blacks?
“Once they were free, he wanted them gone.”
Correction: he once or twice said he wanted them gone, but his actions prove he didn’t.
“In 1862, when you’d think he was busy fighting a war, he was worrying about how to get rid of black people.”
But not worrying very much, apparently. In his last public address before being assassinated, he called for them to be made citizens and given the vote. It should be easy to see from this facile turnabout that at heart, Lincoln was no racist, but a dyed-in-the-wool racial egalitarian.
“He appointed James Mitchell as United States Commissioner of Emigration [of negroes] to find a place, far away, where all blacks would go. Mitchell invited a delegation of blacks to the White House so Lincoln could ask them to clear out.”
And here we come to the nub of the matter. Any “plan” that relied on all the negroes volunteering to leave was not a plan at all, only a pipe dream.
“This was the first time blacks had set foot in the White House on official business and not as servants, slaves, or workmen.”
In other words, on terms of equality with whites. Another first from Jared Taylor’s hero, “Honest” Abe. I suppose it’s fitting, in a way, that a liar such as Taylor should admire Lincoln, one of the greatest and most successful liars to ever hold the American presidency. And that’s saying something!
“He told the blacks that it was only because their people were in this country that Yankees and Confederates were slaughtering each other.”
Let’s note that this is the exact opposite of what Taylor and other Civil War revisionists argue. They are quite fond of making the astonishingly stupid claim that the Civil War had NOTHING at all to do with slavery. Why, it was only an attempt to save the Union, doncha know! LOL.
“He told them he had picked out a nice place for them in Central America, and asked them to convince all other blacks to pack up and go there.”
Asked them! To convince all the other blacks to pack up and go there! LOL. Yes, very realistic! If Lincoln actually believed that had a snowball’s chance in hell of happening then he must have been even stupider than the average “white nationalist” who buys into the lie that Lincoln didn’t like negroes.
“But, somehow, it’s today’s Democrats—not Lincoln in 1862—who are ‘the real racists’.”
Jared Taylor’s comical attempt to portray the Great Emancipator as “the real racist” is an epic fail.
Sollipsist: “No matter how big you make the word NOTHING, it still fails to accurately represent the factual and historical arguments that correctly identify slavery as a catalyst rather than a first cause.”
Robert Morgan: Lincoln says it’s the ONLY cause. Again, as Taylor puts it: “He told the blacks that it was only because their people were in this country that Yankees and Confederates were slaughtering each other. ”
How’s that for “factual and historical”? So who’s lying here? JT? Lincoln? Both?
Sollipsist: “It would be progress just to get most people to the point at which they’d realize (or maybe even grudgingly admit) that economics, manufacturing concerns, and centralized political control had ANYTHING to do with sending 600,000+ people to their death.”
Robert Morgan: In The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Union soldiers sang the line Let us die to make men free! N.b., they didn’t claim to be willing to die for manufacturing concerns, for economics, for tariffs, for centralized political control, or even to save the Union. Their cause was freeing the slaves. Without this moral cause, it’s hard to see how they would have justified the war, either to themselves or anyone else.
Yesterday I added a few words to the sticky post, indicating the German translations of some pieces originally published in the old incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour.
Update 12 June. This was the last post I published on the old incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour, on the same day they axed that site. As I said at midnight, fortunately I had a Word backup, so I can reproduce it again here. I consider the issue of the anti-Christianity of the NS Germans of the last century to be of the utmost importance for the reasons given by Coel Hen in his letter to me yesterday. Behold the last entry on my old site:
Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 5
(excerpts)
by Richard Weikart
Munich town hall
(a painting by Adolf Hitler)
Did Hitler want to destroy the churches?
According to Ernst von Weizsäcker, whom Hitler appointed
ambassador to the Vatican, Heinrich Himmler once told Weizsäcker’s wife, “We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.” The Security Service of Himmler’s SS kept church leaders and organizations under surveillance and continually proposed policies to limit and hinder their activities. The Gestapo arrested hundreds of priests and pastors, some for violating Nazi restrictions or encroachments on the churches, and others on trumped-up charges. Other leading Nazi officials were equally hostile toward the Christian churches. In June 1941, Bormann, who had recently stepped into Hess’s vacated position as leader of the Nazi Party Chancellery and had thus become one of the most powerful officials under Hitler, sent a circular letter to all Nazi Gauleiter about the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity. Therein he asserted, “National Socialist and Christian views are irreconcilable. The Christian churches are based on people’s ignorance… on the other hand, National Socialism builds on a scientific foundation.” Goebbels and Rosenberg wholeheartedly agreed with Bormann and Himmler and hoped to hasten the demise of the Christian churches. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials stressed the intense antagonism of the Nazi regime toward the churches, which was a common perception in the Anglo-American world at the time. And many historians, such as John Conway in The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45, provide abundant evidence of the Nazi regime’s anti-Christian character…
The question then emerges whether Hitler wanted to destroy the churches, hoped the churches would continue to exist after accepting Nazi dominion and ideology, or was he indifferent about their continued existence?…
When he reflected back on his religious upbringing, he claimed that he hated Christianity from his youth. Once he became a politician, however, his desire to see the end of Christianity was tempered by a realistic acknowledgement that the religion was too deeply rooted in the German people’s psyche and emotions simply to abolish it immediately. Even when Hitler privately uttered his most vicious threats against the churches during World War II, he often indicated that the destruction of the churches would not be a quick and easy project.
In sum, Hitler did want to destroy the churches, but for him, it was a long-term goal that required time and patience. He hoped to accomplish it by gradually increasing restrictions on the churches and, more importantly, wresting the education and training of the youth away from them. Undermining the churches was also subsidiary to many of Hitler’s more important goals, such as eliminating the Jews, crushing communism, building German unity, and expanding Germany’s borders.
Some of Hitler’s close colleagues understood his ambivalent position. His press chief, Otto Dietrich, explained that Hitler’s restraint toward religious groups was a political move. In order not to alienate supporters, he sometimes endured attacks from church circles, although he often privately threatened future vengeance against them. Further, Dietrich noted that Hitler’s private invective against the churches encouraged Himmler, Bormann, and other anticlericals in his party to attack the churches. Weizsäcker took a similar view of Hitler’s position toward the churches. While the official Nazi platform supported “positive Christianity,” Weizsäcker explained,
In practice, things were very different. Hitler himself took care not to attack the Churches openly. But he had from his youth been an enemy of the Church; and without his tacit agreement the rigorous measures that were taken would hardly have been possible. An acquaintance of mine heard him say that in one or two generations the Christian churches would die out of their own accord.
For Hitler, the church question was not a peripheral subject; it was a major topic of conversation. The theme came up repeatedly in his private conversations with Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other officials; in private speeches to party officials; in talks with his secretaries; and in his monologues. In July 1941, he told his entourage, “In the long run National Socialism and the churches cannot exist side by side.” When one of his secretaries asked if that meant he was going to launch a new war against the churches, Hitler responded, “No, that does not mean a war; the ideal solution is to do away with the churches by allowing them to shrivel away by themselves gradually and without violence.” Indeed, Hitler’s desire to destroy the churches through a gradual, nonconfrontational approach often brought him into conflict with more zealous anticlerical Nazi officials, who favored more drastic measures against the churches. Because of this, Hitler sometimes served as a moderating influence on anti-church policies. Nonetheless, his ultimate goal was the eradication of the churches, even if he was more patient than some of his comrades.
Before coming to power in 1933, Hitler recognized that an anti- Christian platform would be political suicide, so he consistently portrayed himself in public as supportive of Christianity and the churches. Even so, he was unable to cover up completely the animus toward Christianity that percolated through his party…
Many of Hitler’s most vociferous professions of support for Christianity occurred in speeches where he was overtly countering charges that he was anti-Christian… Still, Hitler had difficulty playing his juggling act between the churches and the anticlerical forces in his party, because anticlerical Nazis such as Rosenberg—who edited the official Nazi newspaper—often alienated Christians…
By early 1937, the Vatican had sent seventy diplomatic protests to the Nazi regime concerning violations to the Concordat. Pope Pius XI was fed up with the constant infractions and finally decided to publicly rebuke the Nazi regime for its continuous transgressions of the Concordat…
Less than two months after Pius issued his encyclical, Hitler held a long discussion about the church question with his Nazi colleagues. He told his comrades, “We must humble the church and make it our servant.” He then suggested several means to accomplish this: (1) ban celibacy, (2) confiscate church property, (3) forbid the study of theology before age twenty-four, (4) dissolve monastic orders, and (5) remove the right to educate from the churches. Once these were implemented, Hitler continued, the churches would decline within a few decades to the point that they “will eat out of our hands.” Soon thereafter, according to Goebbels, Hitler was seriously contemplating the separation of church and state, which he had threatened earlier and which would have been a major financial blow to the churches.
Though Hitler did not take these drastic measures, he did ramp up his persecution of the Catholic clergy and considered ending the Concordat…
While Hitler told his fellow Nazis that he did not want to take strong actions against the church during the war, his secretary testified to a friend—and Goebbels’ diaries made clear—that Hitler always reminded the Nazis this was merely a temporary expedient. After the war, he promised, he would reckon with the churches…
From 1940 to 1942, about three hundred monasteries and church institutions were closed, and the German army took over many church hospitals…
Many other clergy were harassed or imprisoned by Nazi authorities. One example was a Catholic priest in Berlin, Bernhard Lichtenberg, arrested on October 23, 1941, for praying for Jews and for those in concentration camps. Under interrogation, Lichtenberg boldly outlined multiple complaints against the Nazi government, including their elimination of religious instruction from schools, the attempt to remove the crucifix from schools, the killing of disabled people, and the persecution of Jews. He stated, “National Socialist ideology is incompatible with the teaching and commands of the Catholic Church.” After serving his two-year sentence, he was rearrested (just as Niemöller had been earlier) and died in November 1943 while awaiting transfer to Dachau.
However, while allowing and even encouraging the imprisonment of many clergy, Hitler was more cautious in dealing with bishops. Hitler was furious when Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen spoke out boldly in public sermons in July and August 1941 against the Nazi confiscations of monasteries and against the Nazi program of killing disabled people. Though some Nazi officials wanted Galen executed, Hitler demurred, arguing that arresting Galen would damage the war effort. He advised delay…
In September 1941, he had joked that he would cure the bishops’ “headaches” by taking their heads off…
Another indication of his hostility toward the churches was his treatment of newly annexed and occupied territories from 1938 to the end of the war. When Hitler annexed Austria… the Nazi regime began shutting down Catholic organizations, schools, monasteries, and in 1939 even abolished the church tax. As Hitler expanded into Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938-39, he likewise refused to apply the Concordat, even to the territories directly annexed to the German Reich. Hitler also denied the Vatican any authority over the Catholic Church in annexed or occupied territories…
In occupied territories with non-German populations, however, Hitler did not care if the people continued practicing their religion, as long as it did not foment any anti-German sentiments. However, he did want to eliminate any Polish leaders who might oppose Nazi rule, and this included the Catholic clergy. Before opening the Polish campaign on September 1, 1939, Heydrich organized SS commando squads who swept into Poland behind the regular army and murdered Polish intellectuals and leaders. They carried a list with 61,000 names, and by December 1939, they had killed about 50,000 men, including Jews, political figures, and intellectuals, but also many Catholic priests. Quite a few Polish priests were sent to Dachau during the war, too.
To Hitler, it was no issue if the allegedly inferior Poles kept their Catholic faith, as long as they served faithfully as slaves to the “master race.” In a meeting with Bormann, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, and Hans Frank, governor of the rump state of Poland known as the General Government, Hitler explained he favored allowing them to continue practicing Catholicism. He continued, “Polish priests will be fed by us, and in turn they will direct their herd in the direction we desire. The priests will be paid by us, and in turn they will preach what we desire. If a priest goes against the grain, then he will be dealt with mercilessly. The priests are to keep the Poles mute and stupid.”
On another occasion, Hitler implied that allowing other countries and peoples to keep their religion was useful, because the churches sapped their strength, which was to Germany’s advantage. In December 1941, he stated, “In any case, we would not desire that the Italians or Spaniards lose their Christianity: whoever has it, has bacilli constantly present.” In that same monologue, Hitler also boasted that he would “march into the Vatican,” expel the Catholic prelates, and then say, “Excuse me, I made a mistake. But then they are gone!” His fait accompli would strike at the very head of the Catholic Church, stripping the German Catholic Church of its international connections.
How serious was Hitler about attacking the Vatican and removing the pope?… What was Hitler planning to do to the churches after the war was over?… The ultimate goal of these policies was the complete elimination of the churches, even if it would take a few years or a few decades. Thus, Hitler was working toward the abolition of the churches with an incremental, not cataclysmic, approach…
A few months later, he derided Christianity as a poison bacillus akin to Bolshevism and suggested, “The struggle with the churches will perhaps last several years or under the circumstances maybe a decade, but it will certainly lead to a radical solution.” One of Hitler’s secretaries thought that if Hitler had won the war, he intended to initiate a vigorous campaign against the churches immediately by withdrawing from the Catholic Church…
“When we are free from Christianity,” he said, “the other peoples [i.e., non-Germans] can keep Christianity.”
We gain another glimpse of Hitler’s prospects for the churches after the war by examining his plans for rebuilding the bombed-out cities of Germany. Actually, Hitler’s scheme to rebuild the cities of Germany began even before the war. In 1938, the Nazi regime demolished St. Matthew’s Church in Munich and replaced it with a parking lot. When the Nazi regime was formulating plans to build several new urban developments, Bormann issued a directive from Hitler in July 1939 that no churches should be built in them, nor should places be reserved for their later construction. They had no place in the new order Hitler was creating.
THIS is the last PDF I’m uploading to this new incarnation of WDH, thanks to a comment from Concerned Lurker who informed me that someone had been saving, also in PDFs, some of the content of my site.
As I don’t know how to crunch PDFs in half in Photoshop, above I linked a PDF containing five entries that already appeared in the previous PDF (see WDH – pdf 434): ‘Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 3’, ‘The shadow of Amara’, ‘Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 2’, ‘Mantra post’ and ‘Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 1’.
Of the 435 PDFs uploaded here—the first PDF reproduces 2011 articles—, this is the only one that has repeated entries, although the upper five entries of #435 don’t appear in #434.
It is already midnight. Tomorrow I will upload the last two entries that, by June 8th, appeared in the now-censored incarnation of WDH (but which I had fortunately saved in Word).
Wish I could do more and will try to pitch in when I can. Have followed your work for some time and appreciate all the work you have done over the years. I hope that you are able to continue to share your content and the wonderful works you are able to translate and share with a wider audience.
The Christianity Question must be addressed. Your work is crucial for that. I started my journey many years ago. It’s taken many different avenues through the years but I’ve ended up at the CQ each time. Hence, both in concert with and because of your work, your insight and your research, I always find myself back on the same path with you, and am in step with you in many respects.
I understand the CQ is a hard realization for people but it must be done. It is the last hurdle to overcome, and the greatest and most painful for many. Your work is absolutely necessary exposure and a one-of-a-kind resource for those who are capable (and willing) to seek the wisdom of our ancestors. And even after settling one’s position on it, we then have to deprogram ourselves, detox and recover from this venom. It’s much easier to share this burden knowing that others tread the same path.
I’m confident that as we stir these old, ancient ashes, and tend to these small embers we have left, we will one day see them grow once again to a mighty inferno.
Hail Victory,
Coel Hen