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Tag: Karlheinz Deschner

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Daybreak Publishing Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte 2022!

 
EDITOR’S FOREWORD
[pages 5-8 of the forthcoming Edition]

In his after-dinner conversations Hitler said: ‘Christianity is the greatest regression humanity has ever experienced: The Jew has thrown back humanity one and a half thousand years’. And the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who once described himself as a Hitlerist, wrote: ‘The whole world has forgiven Christianity.’

Well, not the whole world. As I confess in my philosophical autobiography De Jesús a Hitler, Christianity played a central role in the destruction of my teenage life and my twenties, something I will never forgive…
 

Some clarifications

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was a Christian, wisely allowed Edward Ericson to abbreviate The Gulag Archipelago so that the heavy volumes of the original work could reach a wider audience in a single, readable tome. The present book, Christianity’s Criminal History: Volume I is an abridged translation of the first volumes of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. The original German volumes, and also the Spanish translation I have used, contain thousands of endnotes, which are omitted here. This preliminary translation is only the first step towards a more formal German-English translation of Deschner’s maximum opus.

In this abridged translation I have added a few headings, as well as several illustrations with footnotes explaining them, and brackets translating German or Latin terms. Unlike Ericson’s abridgement of the Archipelago, sometimes I have omitted ellipses between unquoted paragraphs, and I have simplified some sentences. I have also replaced some words. I refer to the phrases where the author uses the word ‘pagan’. I replaced it with terms such as ‘Hellenes,’ ‘defenders of Greco-Roman culture,’ ‘classical culture’ or simply added inverted commas on the word ‘pagan.’

The term I have chosen, Hellenes, requires some clarification. It could not be more significant that before the introduction of the pejorative term pagan to refer to unconverted citizens of the Roman Empire, whites were called héllenes or éthne by 4th-century treatises (the expression hellénon éthne can be translated into modern English as ‘the Greek races,’ i.e. the white peoples). As I am aware of the rhetorical use of language, instead of the author’s pejorative term ‘pagan’ I have sometimes chosen the non-pejorative term common in the 4th century vernacular, ‘Hellenes.’

White nationalists claim to be quite informed on the Jewish question. But very few are aware that Jewish subversion began with Christianity, as Hitler said in the opening lines of this preface. Who among today’s nationalists knows the true history of the religion of their parents? Who is aware that Christian fanatics used violence to destroy the ‘pagan’ (i.e., the Greco-Roman world)? Yes: Deschner wrote in German. But how many English-speaking racialists are familiar with Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, published in 2017?

Independently of the nationalists and the racial right, virtually all Westerners ignore the apocalyptic catastrophe of early Christianity after Constantine handed over the Roman Empire to his bishops. They know only the myths of the martyrs (see the chapter ‘The Persecution of the Christians’ in this book), the pious legends, hagiographies and the New Testament fictional tales we were told as children: topics covered in the first section of this abridged translation.

Karlheinz Deschner (1924-2014) was a liberal German. He spent the first sixty years of his life researching the history of the Catholic Church before beginning the ten volumes of his Kriminalgeschichte series in 1986, which he completed in 2013. The series is an encyclopaedic treatise on the true history of Christianity.

I started reading Deschner at the beginning of this century, when I was a liberal, and I would not wake up to the Jewish question until 2010. But Deschner, like all Germans of our time who aspire to see his books in bookshops, never woke up. In his Kriminalgeschichte he went so far as to harshly criticise the anti-Semites of the Early Church: passages omitted in this abridgement. This said, the difference between Deschner and liberal theologians like Hans Küng (The Church) and conservative historians like Paul Johnson (A History of Christianity) is that Küng and Johnson concealed a great deal of the criminal history of Christianity. It is remarkable how Deschner, a scholar who like me became an apostate, was able to see Church history in a way that Küng, Johnson and a veritable galaxy of other Christian scholars would never dream of. After waking up to the reality of the Christian problem I realised that Deschner’s massive work, despite his liberal bias, could be rescued. It just has to be processed through the prism of someone who is racially awake. Of course: if Germany had won the war, Deschner, shown here in National Socialist uniform as a young man, could have written his story from our point of view.
 

Three German holocausts

More than one holocaust with millions of victims each has been perpetrated against the Germanic peoples. After 1945, the Allies killed millions of defenceless Germans (see, for example, Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany: 1944-1947). This is the best-kept secret of modern history. Conversely, the genocide committed in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War by fanatic Catholics is fairly well known (in the next volume of our abridgement we will incorporate those chapters). But who knows about the millions of other Germanic peoples killed by Emperor Justinian, recounted in this volume?

If the Aryan Man is currently committing ethnosuicide, it is because the System has lied to him about his own History.[1] The System’s favourite method is what we might call lying by omission: not saying, for example, a word about what happened to the Germans in 1945-1947, or how Christianity was imposed on the white race by Constantine and his successors. It was not enough for the Imperial Church to destroy the Greco-Roman world in the 4th and 5th centuries. In the 6th century, after the fall of Rome, Justinian, the Emperor of Constantinople went on to commit a gigantic genocide of the Germanic race, which by then had established itself on the Italian peninsula. Deschner’s chapter on this Holocaust appears in his second volume, Die Spätantike (Late Antiquity), published in 1989. The full title in translation is: ‘Late Antiquity. From the Catholic “child emperors” to the extermination of the Arian Vandals and Ostrogoths under Justinian I (527-565).’ These were the two Germanic peoples that were exterminated during the Byzantine Empire’s military incursion into Italy and Africa (no wonder there are few pure Germanic peoples in those regions today).

Finally, Deschner died in the same year that Richard Carrier published a book which will be considered the most important book since Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ critical approach to the Gospels. I refer to Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Deschner did not have the opportunity to evaluate the Christ myth theory in its phase of full exegetical maturity. For a new history of Christianity to be complete, Deschner’s criminal history must be complemented by Carrier’s ongoing work, and even our axiological critique of Christianity (see our booklist on page 3).

César Tort
November 2022

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[1] See ‘Foundation Myth’ on pages 90-93 of On Exterminationism.

Categories
Catholic Church Constantine Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 172

Constantine I (also Saint Constantine or Constantine the Great)
was a Roman emperor from 306 to 337 c.e.

 

Karlheinz Deschner responds to Prof. Maria R.-Alföldi’s review

Mrs Alföldi reviews and censures in just twelve pages (148-159), and under the title ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?”, the seventy-two pages of my chapter ‘Saint Constantine, the first Christian Emperor: Symbol of Seventeen Centuries of Ecclesiastical History’, which appears in the first volume of my Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums [pages 157-176 of our abridged translation — Ed.]

Almost at the outset, she finds it ‘difficult to give even a rough account of the content of Deschner’s explanations’ (page 149). Why’s that? No doubt because she dislikes the content itself, which is divided into ten subheadings and thus perfectly outlined, just as she dislikes the non-academic orientation, which she describes as ‘popular’ and even ‘populist’ (page 159), ‘marked by a strong tendentiousness’ (page 149), which I had already explicitly acknowledged in my General Introduction. And at the end of her report, she urges a cautious handling of historiography, which I can only agree with all my energy!

Maria R.-Alföldi’s essay appears in the book’s third part, which the editor entitles ‘Model of Concrete Criticism’. Model, pars pro toto. I now submit this rebuttal, closely following the text, to a detailed critique.

‘It is read’, writes the professor ‘that Constantine falsified his genealogy.’ And also: ‘The first years of the young emperor’s rule in the West are nothing but dreadful wars against the poor Germans, who were later taken prisoner and mercilessly slaughtered’.

It all appears as terribly exaggerated by me, as untrue, although again this isn’t said explicitly. Both ancient sources and modern research confirm that Constantine’s barbarism was already in his time something infrequent and appalling. However, the lady critic prefers discreet insinuations, and hurtful ironies, which present me as an obscurantist historian, without her openly expressing it with decent malice aforethought.

But while Mrs Alföldi reproaches me, as she often does, of misleading the reader, it’s she who does it. And while she states that I suggest that Constantine carried out the war, she suggests already with the following sentence, and again against truthfulness, ‘once again one reads extremely emotional descriptions of atrocities of all kinds’ (page 150). Such descriptions, as I wrote, come to me in their entirety from the Church Fathers Eusebius and Lactantius.

With ‘underhanded acrimony’ (page 150), that is what I am reproached for, I then comment on the universal sovereignty of him whom she labels ‘Byzantine’ rhetoric. Constantine ‘forces the Church to come under his sway; and the Church in turn, according to Deschner, willingly and opportunistically bends over backwards to get at money and power’. But that would only be ‘a certain, perfectly recognizable palace group.’

No, because the Church as a whole achieved through Constantine, and his immediate successors, eminent influence and prestige. This is indisputable. Throughout the empire, the bishops exalted the dictator. Their tokens of favour were showered even on the hierarchies of distant countries, and reached the Catholic clergy as a whole—who was now a recognised and privileged caste—in the form of money, honours, titles, basilicas and other buildings; in the form of exemption from burdens and taxes, release from oath-taking and the obligation to testify, permission to use the state post, the right to admit last dispositions and bequests; moreover, the sovereign—as many others would do in the future!—delegated part of the state power to the prelates, although he also decided on matters of faith.

Quite a few prelates already imitated the style and ceremony of the imperial residence in their episcopal sees. Again and again, it is said in the sources: ‘He made them respectable and enviable in the eyes of all’, ‘with his orders and laws he brought them even greater prestige,’ and ‘with imperial munificence, he opened up all the treasures…’ Soon, precisely the greatest fathers of the Church, such as Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Cyril of Alexandria, will praise Constantine, who not only called himself co-bishop, ‘bishop for external interests’ (epískopos tôn ektós) but who modestly didn’t hesitate to call himself ‘our divinity’ (nostrum numen)…

The always obscene association of the throne and altar, especially in countless massacres from the 4th century to the present day, is not a product of my ‘tendentiousness’ (page 149), but something quite appalling. But as with so many conformists by profession, in her prose there is hardly any blood flowing, not a single drop; whereas it reminds me, as it seems to me, with all horror: ‘the battles are awash with blood’ (page 149) as if I had spilt it!

On the contrary, she ignores, no doubt with the bulk of the historians’ guild, the lamentable practice of hanging the little rascals and extolling the great ones. Nothing specifically Christian, no doubt. Already the African bishop Cyprian, martyr and saint, decried this practice in paganism and lamented that when blood is shed in private, the act is called a heinous crime, but if it is shed publicly it is bravery. ‘The extent of the havoc is that which leaves the crime unpunished.’

She speaks only in an aside, summarily and with the coldness of the investigator, of the ‘tragic end’ of Constantine’s relatives. Conversely, my prose narrates that the great saint had his father-in-law Maximian hanged in Marseilles, then had his brothers-in-law Licinius and Basianbus strangled; had Licinius’ son murdered at Carthage, ordered his own son Crispus poisoned (while murdering many of his friends) and had his wife Fausta, mother of five children, drowned in the bath… In addition, Constantine sent other parricides to hell using the terrible and long-gone insaculation (poena cullei, the particularly slow drowning in a leather sack).

This in no way fits in with his apologetic concept of the despot who is still highly celebrated by theologians and historians; who, ‘under the influence of Christian conceptions’, as the Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte exalts him, shows ‘a growing respect for the dignity of the human person’, the ‘Christian respect for human life’ (Baus, Catholic). That saintly usurer would, for example, have the tongues of informers cut out before their execution, would have the domestic servants who had taken part in the abduction of a bride killed, would have the slaves burnt and the wet nurses killed by pouring molten lead into their mouths, would have every slave and domestic who had accused his master executed immediately, without investigation or the production of witnesses.

On all these things and many more, the expert on Constantine doesn’t say a word. Quite the contrary: she goes on to say that I always treat the Constantinian penal legislation negatively, that I even ‘brand the emperor as anti-Semitic’, and this ‘despite the known fact that at that time the Jews were still free to practise their faith’ (page 151).

As if the Jews’ free practice of their faith were in contradiction with the anti-Semitism of the emperor, a sovereign who mocks the Jews as spiritually blind, a ‘hateful nation’ to whom he attributes an ‘innate insanity’; to whom he allows the visit to Jerusalem only one day a year. He bluntly forbids them to have Christian slaves, thus beginning their alienation from agriculture, with such grave consequences. Moreover, this is the first anti-Jewish law on conversion to Judaism (autumn 315), threatening both the Jew who converts and the Christian convert with the stake.

The specialist on the emperor silences the fact that her hero, with increasing power and freedom of movement, also attacked the pagans with increasing rigour.

This is particularly evident in the last years of Constantine’s rule, although he had no interest in opposing the vast majority of the empire. Nevertheless, Constantine forbade the rebuilding of ruined temples and even ordered their closure. In all the provinces, moreover, the temples were stolen and ‘plundered without regard’ (Tinnefeld) for him, his favourites and the churches; in fact, it came to ‘the theft of works of art such as had never occurred before’ (Kornemann). And then Constantine also arranged for their destruction. ‘He destroyed to the ground those temples which the idolaters held in the greatest veneration’ (Kornemann). ‘At a sign whole temples were lying on the ground’, Bishop Eusebius recounts in triumphant tones.

Nor did the potentate delay in ordering the burning of Porphyry’s fifteen books Against the Christians, in which he ‘advanced the entire biblical criticism of the Modern Age’ (Poulsen), which, according to the theologian Harnack, ‘has not yet been refuted’.

On all this Maria R.-Alföldi is once again completely silent…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: I won’t abbreviate the following 4,700 words of Deschner’s retort; the above translation is enough to provide an idea. My post tomorrow Sunday will be devoted to my aspirations on how to pass on Deschner’s legacy in the English-speaking community, especially among those non-Christians who still believe in the fourteen words.

Categories
Catholic Church Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 171

 

Response given

by Hermann Gieselbusch

– Reinbek, 23 August 1996 Sachbuchlektorat Rowohlt Verlag –

 
(Left, Karlheinz Deschner with his editor Hermann Gieselbusch.) After some thirty years of preparation, the first volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s ten-volume Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity) appeared in Germany in September 1986. The second volume was published in October 1988 and the third in October 1990. This marked the end of the first epoch: Antiquity.

Three imposing volumes, representing some 1,600 pages, with some 350 scientific notes, around half a thousand names of historical characters and as many place names and thousands of quotations from primary and secondary sources. In all, a veritable Milky Way of names, dates, Christian dogmas, titles and data.

Such a well-founded and fundamental accusation against Christianity—not only against the Church—has never been made before. In any case, the attacked party in principle adhered to Oggersheim’s rule: hold on.

When competent and professional Christians could not ignore it; when tens of thousands of readers devoured every new volume of Deschner’s historical Krimi every two years, when the number of annual departures from the Church was rapidly increasing sixfold and many of the dissidents were giving historical reasons in support of their decision—in particular the cruelties Deschner exposes—then it seemed to the attacked ministers of organised Christianity that the matter had passed the point of no return. And in 1992 they went on a counter-attack.

Hans Reinhard Seeliger, professor of historical theology at the Siegen University of Applied Sciences, organised a conference entitled ‘Criminalisation of Christianity? Deschner’s Church History on the Test Bench’: a three-day symposium at the Katholische Akademie Schwerte am Nordrand des Sauerlandes.

From 1 to 3 October 1992, lectures were given on the twenty-three chapters of the three volumes that have appeared to date, either in general or in particular. Most of the lecturers were professors from Germany and Austria: ordinary, extraordinary, supernumerary, and emeritus, as well as one professor and one honorary professor. Two belong to the Dominican order and one is a Franciscan. The spectrum of specialisations ranges from ancient church history, patrology, Christian archaeology, ancient history, ancient philology and Judaism to historical and systematic theology. The group was joined by a professor of criminal law (because Deschner’s is a criminal history!) as well as a newly qualified doctor of medicine from Freiburg.

Karlheinz Deschner was also invited—a chivalrous gesture—to present ‘the basic and general conception of his work’. One against twenty-two, a very tempting challenge for the combative spirit like Deschner. Nevertheless, he declined the invitation. He had already discussed the proposed topic at length in the general introduction to his work: ‘On the Subject, Methodology, the Question of Objectivity and the Problems of Historiography in General’, which consists of sixty printed pages. To this introduction, as Deschner himself wrote to the organisers, he had nothing to add. [1]

All lectures appeared in book form in the Catholic Traditionsverlag Herder in Freiburg, edited by the initiator Hans Reinhard Seeliger, with a total of 320 pages. On the cover we see the image of the Dominican Savonarola in Florence, painted by Fra Bartolommeo. A joke? (in 1498 Savonarola was burned at the stake). An aspiration? In any case, the editor writes in his introduction that ‘a “beheading” of the author would have been easy to execute’.

Of course, the book published by Herder, which is quite expensive by the way, has not been a bestseller. But even with a limited number of copies it fulfilled its function as a smokescreen. From now on, and with the very erudite reference to this collective volume, is interwoven the verdict that in that book more than twenty experts have shown that Deschner works in an unscientific way and writes with bias. When someone referring to Deschner now asks the Church painful questions, the initiate need only smile with a compassionate expression and refer to the said book—without having read it, of course—and with this magic trick of authority the whole historical mosaic of criminal history is diluted into complacency, and the soul seduced by Deschner must continue to believe that Christianity and its Churches have never had a criminal history, but only and exclusively a sacred history.

The philosopher Hermann Josef Schmidt, a professor in Dortmund, has thoroughly analysed the volume edited by Seeliger in Herder and published his exposé under the title Das ,,einhellige” oder scheinheilige ,,Urteil der Wissenschaf”? Nachdenkliches zur katholischen Kritik an Karlheinz Deschners ,,Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums”.

Deschner assumed that the interested reader can judge for himself which point of view is more convincing, and which author is closer to the critical and historical truth. Deschner, who continually advises his audience to examine what he says, not to ‘believe’ him, believes in the undertow of reason.

But to remain silent in this case would be self-harming and out of touch with reality. Calumniare audacter, semper aliquid haeret: Don’t be shy to slander, there is always something left! A foreign scientist recalled with special emphasis this old, and true, cynicism: Deschner should take a sharp, immediate and clear stand against his Schwerte critics.

The malignant flu in the winter of 1996 made it difficult for Deschner to write the fifth volume of the Criminal History, so he took up the Herder volume again, as a kind of spiritual gymnastics for convalescents, and looked for a modus operandi. To critically analyse the entire three-hundred-page-long text? Impossible. He could only proceed selectively by choosing a single article and analysing it in depth.

Deschner decided on the paper ,,Kaiser Konstantin: ein Grosser der Geschichte?” by Maria R.-Alföldi (the only woman in the Schwerte group). On the face of it, this lecture corresponds to the average level of volume. Some texts yield to all kinds of criticism. A few at least refrain from personal defamation and try to do justice to Deschner’s peculiarities and contribution: Maria R.-Alföldi occupies a middle ground and is therefore representative of the work.

She was born in 1926 in Budapest, received her doctorate in 1949, was appointed professor in Munich in 1961 and worked since then as a scientific advisor and later as a lecturer at the seminar for Greek and Roman history at the University of Frankfurt of Main in auxiliary sciences for archaeology and the history and culture of the Roman provinces (among the auxiliary disciplines of history are epigraphy, papyrology, glyptography and sigillography). Maria Radnóti-Alföldi has mainly published works on numismatics, such as Die constantinische Goldpragung: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Bedeutung für Kaiserpolitik und Hofkunst (1963) and Antike Numismatik: Theorie, Praxis, Bibliographie (1978).

Professor Radnóti-Alföldi is a corresponding member of the Academy of Science and Literature in Mainz. Hans Reinhard Seeliger, at the Schwerte meeting, introduced her as a ‘Constantine researcher of international standing’. Her lecture was received with particular sympathy at Schwerte, but here it seemed like a chorus to torpedo Deschner’s reliability as a historian. How many targets did she make? That is what Karlheinz Deschner discusses in the following reply.

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[1] Editor’s note: Our abridged translation of Deschner’s global introduction to his ten volumes can be read on pages 15-25 of a PDF. Deschner’s response to Professor Radnóti-Alföldi will appear in the next post.

Categories
Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Philosophy of history Racial right

Christianity’s Criminal History, 170

Karolus serenissimus augustus a Deo coronatus magnus pacificas (Charles, most serene emperor, great and peaceful emperor, crowned by God). As the beginning of his prolix title already read in 801, that peacemaking Caesar, crowned by God and reigning also per misericordiam Dei (by the mercy of God), the one who from 802 was also called imperator christianissimus and who (supposedly) died with the words of Psalm 31: ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit’, that man had prepared one slaughter after another, and in his forty-six years of rule—from 768 to 814—he had warred almost continuously with about fifty military campaigns. For only two years (790 and 807) he didn’t fight ‘A happy period for the Church’ (Daniel-Rops).

There is nothing strange about the fact that in the Chanson de geste—the French epic poems of the early Middle Ages—he is already ‘more than two hundred years old’, accompanied by his bravest paladins. He fought against the Lombards, the Frisians, the Bavarians, the Avars, the Slavs, the Basques and the Arabs in Spain, and the Byzantines in southern Italy, with offensive wars almost coldly planned and with which he inflicted death, often cruel and terrible death, on countless people.

And not only did he kill in the wars, but he also had 4,500 prisoners murdered and thousands of families banished. Or, as it is said in one of the oldest liturgical poems in honour of Charles: ‘He struck down thousands, cleansed the earth of the heathen weeds, converted the infidels, broke the statues of the gods, drove out the foreign gods’. For him, according to his biographer Einhard, the wars against the Saxons and the Avars were more important than all other political tasks. Moreover, for certain ecclesiastical circles in the 10th century, the Saxon wars were the most important work he did for the Christian mission.

It is not just that Charles ‘the Great’ in fact killed, subjugated and enslaved without pause (winters generally excepted); that he was nothing but a warrior, conqueror, murderer and predator on the grandest scale—which, as the most learned of scholars have long since taught us, was then so commonplace, so much a part of the ‘Saxon way of life’, was then so commonplace, so much the ‘good’ style of the time, that to criticise it would be a crass anachronism, from our ‘enlightened’ time as well as being arbitrary, rigorist, moralistic and square-jawed in the extreme. No, it is also about the fact that Charles ‘the Great’ carried out all this incredible bloodshed with the most intense participation of Christianity and the Church of his time (which, of course, were also ‘sons of their time’! according to the apologists). And that this Church never protested, but rather took full advantage of it all.

The point is that the Christian feudal state and the Christian feudal Church were one and the same thing—and the same thing in crime.

Charles, whose true ‘book of state’ was the Bible, and whose favourite works included Augustine’s City of God, not only ruled and acted as king of the Franks but also as an enlightened protector of the Church, as an interlocutor and ally of the pope, as evidenced by his legislation, his epistolary correspondence written by ecclesiastics and his closest collaborators. This monarch was a kind of priest-king, he was rector et devotus sanctae ecclesiae defensor et adiutor im omnibus (guide and devoted defender and helper of the Holy Church in all things).

Empire and Church became indissolubly intertwined in the imperium christianum, with hardly any difference between political diets and ecclesiastical councils. Charles convened synods, over which he presided; he chose bishops and abbots as he pleased, and in Saxony he instituted the bishoprics he needed. When he needed an archbishopric for his attacks on the miserly, he had the pope erect the archbishopric of Salzburg. He also disposed of church property, enriching popes and bishops with territories. He granted them numerous privileges of immunity and punished the violation of ecclesiastical immunity with the doubled royal penalty of 600 solids. He freed the bishops from taxes and granted them the right to mint money. He punished the plundering and burning of churches with capital punishment.

But above all, he imposed the universal obligation of tithes on the clergy and demanded tithes for the Episcopal churches at the state level. He also bequeathed three-quarters of his cash to the Church, which he took special care of in his last years (while he left only one-twelfth to his children and grandchildren as a whole, and one-twelfth to the palace servants). And the prelates were also entirely dependent on him, although their influence during his reign—considering him at least all the Frankish bishops as the universal head of the Church—grew considerably: under Charles, they marched to war, acted as judges alongside the counts and were at the head of the royal court.

A 1967 study lists no less than 109 places of worship of St. Charles. These include Aachen (where Charles’ death day, 28 January, is still celebrated in the cathedral today, and where I celebrated my name day as a child), Bremen, Brussels, Dortmund, Frankfurt (one of the main places of Charles’ cult), Fulgem (another of the main places of Charles’ cult), Falkirk (another of the main places of Charles’ cult’), Fulda, Halle, Ingelheim, Cologne, Constance, Lüttich, Mainz, Minden, Münster, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Strasbourg, Trier, Vienna, Würzburg and Zurich. It is also noteworthy that Charles received cultic veneration throughout Saxony. For centuries Charles ‘the Great’, Charlemagne, has been regarded as the ideal model ruler, and for many, for very many, he still is today.

Voltaire and Gibbon stigmatised his barbarism and denied him personal greatness.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon was exalted to the full extent of his power as a ‘Charlemagne redivivus’. After the founding of the German Reich in the 19th century, Germans rediscovered Charles’ Germanness and his bellicose spirit. In the fascist era, amid the Second World War, the 1200th anniversary of Charlemagne’s birth was celebrated on 2 April 1942, and he was presented as ‘Charles the Unifier’.

The Carolingian empire, the imperiun christianum, as Alcuin called it from 798, the regnum sanctae ecclesiae (Libri Carolini), stretched from the North Sea to the Pyrenees and the Adriatic. It covered what is now France, Belgium, Holland, western Germany, Switzerland, most of Italy, the Marca Hispanica and Corsica. It was approximately 1,200,000 square kilometres in area: almost as large as the Western Roman Empire.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s Note:

I have been very critical of American white nationalism on this site, but hardly at all of German National Socialism.

It is time to realise that Hitler and the Nazis weren’t perfect. As I implied in my post yesterday, if they had become wise instead of, using chess imagery, gambit the Third Reich against General Winter in Russia, they would have devoted all their efforts to understand the root causes of the dark hour. Karlheinz Deschner, the author of the above text, wouldn’t have hung up his Nazi uniform and become a philo-Semitic liberal because Hitler would have kept his Reich. Deschner could have written his criminal history of Christianity from the point of view of a Germany that had already transvalued its values.

I have said it and it bears repeating: To win the war we must know what we are fighting against. Both the most populist Nazis, like Goebbels, and today’s white nationalists emphasise Jewry. I think Manu Rodriguez, quoted in my post yesterday, was right: the Semitic hydra also includes Christianity and Islam. From time immemorial, anything to do with the Semitic race has been the enemy. Recall that Republican Rome began to decline just after Hannibal and the Carthaginians decimated the flower of the Roman army. That created the spiritual degradation that resulted in the later Roman Empire’s citizens beginning to interbreed with mudbloods. Eventually, the Judeo-Christians took advantage of that opportunity and the rest is history.

After I finish proofreading On Exterminationism, I will start putting together other books-PDFs of the most important entries on this site that show this meta-perspective.

Categories
Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 169

Charlemagne’s bloody laws

During his struggle, the king issued draconian laws, evidently whenever he believed that he had finally subdued the Saxons and could bring them to ‘order.’ Notable in this respect are the Capitulatio departibus Saxoniae (782) and the Capitulare Saxonicum (797). And as conversions to Christianity were forced by mass baptisms, while the Saxon people secretly persisted in their paganism and abhorred the clergy, Charles imposed a complete change of ideological education based on the total eradication of ancient beliefs and their rites and by the forced baptism of all Saxons.

Of the fourteen provisions of the Capitulatio, which carry the death penalty, ten refer exclusively to crimes against Christianity. He had previously sought the advice of the pope and was clearly guided by the missionary method of the Fulda monks for the extirpation of paganism, which began with unceremonious mass baptisms and the total destruction of their shrines.

A stereotypical morte moriatur (die without remission) threatened everything the heralds of the good news wanted to erase: the plundering and destruction of churches, the cremation of the dead, the rejection of baptism, the secret avoidance of baptism, the mockery of Christianity, the undermining of church property, the offering of pagan sacrifices, the practice of gentile customs (emphasis added!—Ed.), and so on. This was its tenor:

• If anyone violently breaks into a church and steals anything from it, or sets fire to the church, let him die without remission.

• If anyone out of contempt for Christianity does not keep the sacred fast of forty days and eats meat, let him die without remission.

• If anyone, according to heathen custom, causes the body of a deceased person to be destroyed by fire and reduces his limbs to ashes, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in the future among the Saxon people pretends to hide without having been baptised and stops approaching baptism because he wants to remain a pagan, let him die without remission.

• If anyone in agreement with the heathen plots something against the Christians and seeks to maintain hostility against the Christians, let him die without remission.

Even the transgression of the precept of fasting carried the death penalty!

Baptism in the first year of life, church attendance on Sundays and feast days, the taking of oaths in churches and even the observance of the canon law on marriage were ordered. As Alcuin had already criticised, ‘severe penances were imposed for the slightest faults.’

Since the forcibly converted Saxon people cared little or nothing for Christianity, they had to continue to be forced to support the Church. Everyone, noble, free and common, had to give the Church a tithe for the harvest of their fields and all their earnings. In addition, each church was to get two rural estates, as well as one manservant and one maidservant for every 125 inhabitants, so that the mass of the Saxons was exploited as never before.

The aim of Charles’ war could hardly be stated more clearly and convincingly: the destruction of paganism, expansion of Christianity and annexation.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 168

Frankish expansion from 481 to 814

 
Last uprisings, war of annihilation and ‘the serene height of the staff’

The war of the Saxons, which lasted for more than ten years, didn’t, however, affect the foreign sovereignty of the Franks, or even Christianity as such. Rather, it was directed primarily against their representatives and institutions, against the Church, their rigorous attacks on private property, and their brutal collection of tithes, of which Alcuin, Charles’ Anglo-Saxon adviser, had already complained, seeing predators (praedones) in the missionaries rather than preachers (praedicatores). ‘That tithes had destroyed loyalty and faith’ seems to have been a proverbial saying among the Franks. The northern Albigensians then fought the Church with the same harshness that the latter had shown. Everywhere the new temples were destroyed, the ecclesiastics were expelled, and not infrequently the Christian Saxons were murdered and their possessions plundered. In short, the entire ecclesiastical organisation north of the Elbe was completely eradicated.

The uprising grew into a war of annihilation lasting more than ten years, with extreme cruelty on both sides. The counter-offensive, which was only resumed in the autumn of 794 and in which Charles took several relics with him, consisted of simple raids of destruction. Several times he even used pagan Slavs, such as the Wilzos and the Obrodites, whose King Witzin was attacked and killed by the Saxons at the Elbe crossing. Charles plundered, destroyed and ravaged everything he could find, mainly with the use of firebrands, and killed thousands of people. After a victory at Kiel, it seems that 4,000 Saxon corpses littered the battlefield. And year after year he made large numbers of hostages, taking every third males—‘as many as he wanted’ the chronicler says—most of whom he ‘regularly killed’ (Bullough). Until 799 the ‘apostle of the Saxons’, ‘he who preached the gospel with a bronze tongue’ (Bertram), marched annually against them. In 802 he sent out another army, while he spent the whole summer in the Ardennes indulging in the pleasures of hunting. In 804 he returned in person to the battlefield, where the Saxons finally succumbed to his power.

To make any uprising impossible, he ended up ordering mass deportations with frightful large-scale population transplants, such as the Byzantine Christians had already practised. ‘He took out such several hostages as had never been seen in his day, nor the days of his father, nor in the days of the Frankish kings’, says one chronicler. The man who, as early as 794 at the synod of Frankfurt, openly presented himself as ‘head of the Western Church’, had his army settle thousands of Saxons with their wives and children in the years 795-799 and 804, totalling 160,000. Even today, the event is still remembered by some place names on Frankish soil, such as Sachsenfahrt and Sachsenmühie.

Many of the deportees, however, were placed in closely guarded camps and had to spend the rest of their lives there. One source even speaks of ‘total extermination’. And not a few Saxons, who had certainly not yet been cleansed of all pagan filth by the sacred bath of baptism, were sent in the course of the war to Verdun, the great slave emporium.

Thus, in the North, the relations of ownership and possession were completely changed. For even the territory stolen from the Elbe was again divided among bishops, priests and his lay vassals. And in the 9th century, numerous monasteries were founded in Saxony at the expense of private nobles.

Thus, using a thirty-three-year war, Charles had convinced ‘the most heathen’ of the idea ‘that there is still something superior to fighting and victory, superior to death on the battlefield’, as Cardinal Bertram, the encourager of two world wars and Hitler’s assistant, assures us. Charles had ‘planted the victorious and beneficent cross in the virgin soil of the Saxon country’. And, finally, most importantly, ‘the serene height of the staff acted beneficently and alongside the power of the royal sceptre and sword’.
 

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Editor’s immodest note: It is right here that you may notice not only the gulf between us and the white nationalists but even with the Nazis.

Hitler allowed, it seems to me amid the world war, a homage to be paid to Charlemagne because he had Germanic blood (as we shall see when I review one of the chapters of Tom Holland’s Dominion).

While Hitler and those closest to him were already aware of the Christian problem, they, like today’s anti-Christian racialists, didn’t realise that it was far more serious than the Jewish problem.

As we review Holland’s book you will see what I mean. For the moment I can only repeat my metaphor. The active substance that has been killing the white man since Constantine is Christian ethics (cf. the process of miscegenation in the Byzantine Empire and the Americas under Iberian rule). Jewry is only a catalyst that accelerates an ethnocidal process that already existed, albeit slower, in Christendom.

Even Hitler didn’t know that the main enemy was Christianity rather than Judaism: the modern catalyst of Christian ethics. Can you begin to glimpse why the message of The West’s Darkest Hour is the most important of all?

Categories
Charlemagne Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 167


Editor’s note: Above, Widukind, the leader of the Saxons from 777 to 785 and worshiper of Aryan Gods, during the Saxon Wars. Alas, Charlemagne, a worshiper of the god of the Jews, ultimately prevailed. For the context of these translations click here.
 

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The resistance of ‘the most heathen’ against Christianity and Frankish sovereignty didn’t disappear, but rather grew stronger. Rebellion broke out again throughout the country. Again Widukind appeared at the front, dragging the Frisians into his uprising. And again all offered sacrifices to the Gods between the Lawers and the Fli. All that was Frankish and Christian was persecuted, rejected and eliminated.

Charles rushed to Saxony, leaving the still-fresh grave of his young second wife, the blessed Hildegard, who died on 30 April 783 in Diedenhofen. Her disappearance must certainly have affected him, unlike the death of the 4,500 Saxons (yet that same year she gave him a successor, who was once again almost a female child). And through Saxony, he advanced again with much bloodshed and ‘with the help of God’.

With God’s help the Franks were victorious, and a very great number of Saxons fell there so that only a few were saved by flight. And from there the most glorious king arrived victorious in Paderborn. And there he assembled his army. And he continued his march to the Haase when the Saxons rejoined. There another battle was fought, and not a few of the Saxons fell, and the Franks were victorious with the help of God.

Those royal Annals, which we have just quoted, about the year 783, refer to the only two great pitched battles of the whole war, near the present Detmold and on the Haase, in the very heart of the Weser fortress. Only ‘a few of the great multitude escaped’, the chroniclers say of the Saxon defeat at Detmold, and ‘many thousands’ were killed. And according to another ancient source, also at the Haase an ‘innumerable multitude of Saxons’ covered the battlefield, ‘again many thousands more than before’. Again Charles won ‘with divine help’, returned among the Franks and ‘celebrated Christmas’ And in the meantime also many thousands were reduced to slavery.

In the following year (784) the monarch devastated Saxony, especially Ostrophalia, while his son, following in his footsteps, devastated Westphalia, again with God’s help, of course. ‘With God’s help Charles, the son of the great King Charles, was victorious with the Franks after many Saxons had died. By divine design, he returned unscathed to his father in the city of Worms’.

The winter of 784-785 was spent by Charles with the very young Fastrada, whom he had married the previous year, with her sons and daughters in Eresburg. And only then did the resistance of the Saxons gradually collapse. And while he was celebrating the resurrection of the Lord, he again sent out a soldiery, and he undertook ‘a campaign’ of devastation, plundering and clearing roads, setting fire to whole forests, destroying crops, blinding springs, murdering peasants, taking fortresses and fortified towns ‘for an order is an essential condition for their work’ (Daniel-Rops).

In 785 the Saxon people, so severely punished, seemed to have almost exhausted their capacity for resistance, and seemed, at last, to have submitted ‘to the soft and light yoke of Christ’, as the biographer of Abbot Sturmi, that fanatical missionary of the Saxons—who preached the fight against the pagans and demanded the destruction of the temples of their Gods and the cutting down of their ancient sacred forests to build churches on them—had long wished.

Charles had communicated his victory to the pope, who had sent him his congratulations, and at the end of June 786, he ordered a triduum of thanksgiving to all Christianity in the West, even beyond the seas, wherever there were Christians.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Evil Justice / revenge Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 166

The butcher of the Saxons

While Charles was making his conquests in northern Spain and losing them again—the only defeat suffered by a Frankish army under his command—Widukind, a Westphalian nobleman who had returned from Danish emigration (and who is first named in 777, when he failed to attend the Diet of Paderborn), advanced with his Saxons south to Fulda and west to Koblenz and Deutz. Feudal castles and churches were destroyed and villages burned and annihilated in a rampage that was not so much for booty as for revenge.

In 779 Charles advanced to the Weser, and in 780 to the Elbe. Again not only the East Saxons but even the Wenden on the other side of the Elbe and ‘people from the north’ were baptised. Again there were pledges of allegiance and new hostages were taken. At a national assembly in Lippspringe, the sovereign tried ‘explicitly to promote [the spread of Christianity in Saxony] and thus accelerate the development of feudal relations’ (Epperlein). Christian priests spread the new ‘enlightenment’ among the occupied burghs. ‘They carried crosses and sang pious songs; soldiers heavily armed with all kinds of weapons were their escorts, who by their determined gestures accelerated Christianisation’ (De Bayac).

The plundered territory continued to be distributed to bishops and abbots, missionary dioceses were created, churches were built and even minor monasteries, such as those of Hersfeit, Amorbach, Neustadt on the Main, were incorporated by Charles into the conversion of the pagans. And above all, of course, Fulda, whose abbot Sturmi held ecclesiastical and military command over the Saxon fortress of Erasburg until shortly before his death. In the northwest, the propaganda was carried out by Bishop Alberic of Utrecht, who had destroyed the remnants of paganism in West Frisia. On his orders and backed by Charles’ military power, Alberic’s monks smashed the statues of the gods and plundered the pagan shrines and everything of value they could find. The monarch gave part of the treasures of the temples to the bishop for ecclesiastical purposes. The Anglo-Saxon St Wilehad, who had already indoctrinated the Frisians, albeit without much success, organised the northern part of subjugated Saxony on Charles’ behalf from 780 onwards. Similarly, St Liudger worked in Central Frisia at Charles’ request.

But when the East Frisians, and also large sections of the population of Central Frisia, rose in revolt against the Saxons, destroyed the churches and turned to their former beliefs, the Christian preachers left the country in haste. The Englishman Wilehad, who shortly afterwards was consecrated bishop for the Saxon mission and first prelate of Bremen, fled to Rome and then devoted himself—according to Echternach—‘for two years to study and prayer’ (Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche). St Ludger, later Bishop of Münster, took refuge in Rome and Monte Cassino. Without the protection of the Frankish arms, the heralds of the good news couldn’t survive. But as soon as the occupiers regained control of the countryside, the ecclesiastical lords also returned with their swords to the propaganda front. Wilehad took up his seat in Bremen and St Liudger established himself, on Charles’ orders, east of the Lauwers. There, with the backing of royal power, he destroyed the pagan shrines (fana), advanced to the islands and, with the support of Frankish soldiers, devastated the sacrificial places of the Frisian god Phoete in Heligoland.

For the rest, many churchmen must have returned only reluctantly among the rebellious Saxons. And when the Saxons, along with the Vendeans, rose again under Widukind, their fury was focused on the clergy and Christianity, with many of the churches being set on fire, while the priests fled. A Frankish army was wiped out at Süntel, ‘almost to the last man being slain by the sword’ according to the Annals, which adds: ‘The Frankish loss was even greater than the figures might indicate’. Two dozen nobles also perished in the slaughter. But before Charles arrived, the Saxon nobility and some Frankish troops had already crushed the rebellion. The Saxon ‘nobles’ surrendered the rebels. And then Charles intensified the expansionist and missionary war until the famous beheading of Verden on the Aller and then, as usual, celebrated Christmas and Easter, the birth and resurrection of the Lord.

Even in the 20th century, ‘professionals’ in the Catholic and Protestant camps have sometimes tried to deny the orgy of cruelty and barbarism. Episcopalian devotionalists and some ‘specialised theologians’ worked shoulder to shoulder on this subject, especially during the Nazi period.

In 1935, the ecclesiastical spokesman of the Osnabrück bishopric spoke of ‘the fable of the Verden blood trial’. Similarly, the Protestant professor of Church History at the University of Munich, Kari Bauer, claimed in 1936 that the verb decollare (to cut the throat), which appears in the sources, was a misspelling instead of the original delocare or desolare (to banish); consequently, 4,500 Saxons were only expelled from the place. It must be said, however, firstly, that this verb or a similar one isn’t used in the various sources; and secondly, that four yearbooks of the time speak of the ‘slaughter’ (decollare / decollatio) of the Saxons. Such are the royal Annals, the Annales Amandi, the Annales Fuldenses and finally, in the first half of the 9th century, also the Annales Sithienses. And the chroniclers all from the most diverse places would have committed in a highly mysterious way the same ‘errata’.

And it would be a very different ‘misprint’ if, as one researcher suspected earlier, the author of the sources ‘as a result of a false reading of the original had removed a couple of zeros’ (H. Ullmann). On the contrary, Donald Bullough rightly observes: ‘But not to believe the king capable of such an action was tantamount to making him more virtuous than almost all the Christian kings of the Middle Ages’. The stabbing of a vanquished enemy on the battlefield was then commonplace unless one expected more profit from the slaves and the ransom money. And one thing is also easily forgotten: that most of the hostages, which the king took year after year, were regularly killed, as soon as those whose obedience the hostages guaranteed rose against the king again.

One day in the late autumn of 782, there stood 4,500 Saxons, squeezed like animals in the slaughterhouse and surrounded by their own ‘nobles’, who had handed them over, and by the paladins of the great Charles, ‘the pilot light of Europe’, as a manuscript from St Gallen of the 9th-10th centuries calls him. By his sentence, they were beheaded and thrown into the Aller, which swept them into the Weser and then into the sea. ‘There were 4,500 of them and that is what happened’ (quod ita et factum est), as the royal analyst laconically puts it, ‘and he celebrated Christmas’, just where the future ‘saint’ soon had a church built (not an expiatory chapel, but rather a triumphal chapel) and where the cathedral of Verden stands today: literally, on rivers of blood.

Just imagine: 4,500 people beheaded—and then the canonisation of the murderer! ‘It is true that he eliminated 4,500 Saxons’, writes Ranke, adding later, ‘but later on the serene tranquillity of a great soul stands out in him’.
 

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Editor’s note: Can we finally see why we should tear down the churches in Europe and behead the pope and his cardinals? Without avenging the crimes that the religion of the Semitic god perpetrated on the brave defenders of the Aryan religion, there is no mental salvation for the West. The cancer that’s killing us goes back long before the Jews took over our media, and I find it incredible that white nationalists not only refuse to see it, but continue to worship the enemy god.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 165

– For the context of these translations click here –

 
A mission along ‘military shock lines’

So now the Saxons not only had to answer for their subordination ‘with all their freedom and property’, but the territory of which they were dispossessed was immediately divided, and in the presence of numerous bishops, between the bishoprics of Cologne, Mainz, Würzburg, Lüttich and Utrecht, as well as between the monasteries of Fulda and Amorbach and into mission dioceses, according to the respective geographical situation, becoming firmly incorporated into the Frankish kingdom. Still, during Charles’ lifetime, the bishoprics of Münster, Osnabrüch and Bremen, the real ‘nerve centre’ of Christian propaganda among the Saxons, were established. Thus the division of the missionary bishoprics corresponded from 777 ‘to the military shock lines of the Franks on the Lower Rhine and Main’ (Lowe).

Illustration of a Widukind with the Saxons against Charlemagne in the years 777-785

Soon Charles brought missionaries from everywhere to the conquered territory: missionaries from Frisia and Anglo-Saxon, missionaries from Mainz, Rheims, and Chálons-sur-Mame. Clerical propagandists from episcopal cities and monasteries which in ancient times were already ‘feudal castles’ (Schuitze), but which at the beginning of the Middle Ages already had functions that later, when medieval politics was largely a politics of the burgs, belonged to the burgs proper. From Cologne, Lüttich, Utrecht, Würzburg, from Echtemach, Corbie, Visbeck, Amorbach, Fulda, and Hersfeld came the bearers of the good news to the adjacent heathen country. Everywhere the sword was followed by ‘the mission in inseparable connection’ (Petri), and the salvific event was ‘now inextricably interwoven with the military conquest of foreign territory as a common work of the Church and the feudal state’ (Donnert). Annexationist war and missionary politics and the sword and the cross, the military and the clergy, all now formed an inseparable unity, working side by side as it were. What the sword took away, preaching had to preserve. ‘The mission had made a promising start’ (Baumann).

The military backbone of Charles’ wars, ‘veritable bloodbaths’ (Grierson), were (according to the Roman model) the frontier fortresses, built on mountains and on the banks of rivers, which were difficult to conquer. It is therefore not surprising that the first fixed episcopal foundations were at the entrance and exit gates of the Weser fortress: Paderbom, where Charles later, on his return from East Saxony, stopped again and again with his troops, where he built a royal palace and, as early as 777, a ‘church of admirable grandeur’ (Annales Laureshamenses), the church of St Saviour, Osnabrück and Minden as well as the two oldest monasteries of the early Frankish period in Saxony: Corvey and Herford. ‘Under Charlemagne new monasteries were founded almost exclusively as footholds in the newly subdued pagan country’ (Fichtenau).

The bishoprics of Würzburg, Erfurt and Büraburg (in Fritziar) had also already been erected, precisely where a few years later Carloman and Pepin conducted their campaigns against the Saxons (743, 744 and 748). In addition to the missionary centres in Saxony, the monastery in Fulda also played a special role; also the monastery of Mainz, which soon became an archbishopric (around 780), to which the bishoprics of Paderborn, Halberstadt, Hildesheim and Verden were soon subordinated. Thus the ecclesiastical province of Mainz was, until its dismemberment in 1802, the largest in the whole of Western Christendom, while the new Westphalian foundations of Münster, Osnabrück and Ninden were annexed to the bishopric of Cologne.

It is easy to understand why ever larger estates were confiscated there in favour of the Church and protected by the burghs. Charles generously endowed many monasteries and supported them in their struggle against his serfs. Therefore, the Saxons must not only have seen in every Frankish missionary a spy or a defender of foreign sovereignty but ‘in every Christian settlement [they] saw a foothold for the aggressive Frankish armies’ (Hauk). Every war against the Christians was also for the Saxons a kind of religious war: a struggle for paganism and political freedom at the same time. This is precisely what intensified the Saxon resistance; this is precisely why churches were repeatedly destroyed and churchmen were expelled or killed.

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Editor’s Note: This is precisely what white nationalists fail to understand. The first step in recovering the Aryan culture is to destroy the Semitic religion which has been the great vampire of the white soul since Constantine, and then Charlemagne, handed Europe over to the bishops. If the destruction of the churches is done in the name of the transvaluation of all Judeo-Christian values, the next day the Jewish problem would be solved, insofar as there would be no moralising barriers that prevent us from solving it. Deschner continues:

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And just as in the first years of the Saxon conflict King Charles had already sent out repeated military expeditions against the Lombards, so in 788 he also made a famous ‘excursion’ against the Moors in northern Spain, an armed expedition, which, however, turned out somewhat differently… Since Charles’ Hispanic intermezzo had failed, the king tried all the harder to get even with the Saxons.

Categories
Charlemagne Christendom Evil Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 164

The Christian banners enter Saxony

Charles’ armies—which in the larger campaigns consisted of just 3,000 horsemen and between 6,000 and 10,000-foot soldiers—sometimes numbered more than 5,000 or 6,000 warriors. Unlike in the time of his grandfather Charles Martell, the core of the army was made up of heavy cavalry. The horsemen were armed with chain mail, helmet, shield and shin guards, with lance and battle-axe (worth approximately 18 to 20 oxen). And all this for Jesus Christ. The foot companies, still numerous, fought with mace and bow. (Only from 866, under Charles the Bald, was every Frank who owned a horse obliged to military service so that the infantry ceased to play an important role in the army.) Moreover, in the Carolingian wars, no soldiers were paid: the spoils of plunder were shared out.

The Christian butchery (‘mission by the sword’), with which Charles continued his father’s Saxon wars, began in 772. The ‘gentle king’, as he is repeatedly called in contemporary royal annals, then conquered the frontier fortress of Eresburg (today’s Obermarsberg, next to the Diemel), an important starting point of his military operations during the first half of the Saxon wars. And he destroyed (probably there) the Irminsul, the Saxon national shrine, consisting of an extraordinarily large tree trunk, which the Saxons venerated as ‘the pillar supporting the Universe’ in a sacred grove in the open air. Later Charles entrusted Abbot Sturmi of Fulda with the command of the fortress of Eresburg, which had been recaptured, again and again, lost, destroyed and rebuilt.

But other bishops and abbots also provided Charles with military services. Like the counts, they were also obliged to maintain a camp, an obligation which was also incumbent on the abbesses. Even at that time, clerical troops accompanied the Frankish army, so that, according to Sturmi’s biographer, ‘through sacred instruction in the faith, they might subject the people, bound from the beginning of the world with the chains of demons to the gentle and light yoke of Christ’. Exactly from that year onwards, Charles used a seal with the inscription: ‘Christ protects Charles, King of the Franks’.

After the Christians had completely plundered the place of worship, set fire to the sacred grove and destroyed the pillar, they left with the sacred offerings piled up there and with abundant treasures of gold and silver, ‘the gentle King Charles took the gold and silver he found there’, as the Royal Annals succinctly state. And soon after, on top of the plundered and destroyed gentile sanctuary, a church was built ‘under the patronage of Peter’ (Karpf), the gatekeeper of heaven, displacing the Saxon god Irmin (probably identical to the Germanic god Saxnoth / Tiwas). What progress!

Heinrich Leutemann’s Destruction of
the Irmin Column by Charlemagne

In the following years, ‘the gentle king’ fought mainly in Italy. Through the emissary Peter (that was the name of the envoy), Pope Adrian had invited him ‘for the love of God and in favour of the right of St Peter and the Church to help him against King Desiderius’ (Annales Regni Francorum). But already in 774, barely back from the plunder of the Longobard kingdom, the good King Charles sent four army corps against the Saxons: three of them ‘were victorious with the help of God’, as the royal analyst once again reports, while the contingent corps returned without even having fought, but ‘with great booty and without loss’ to the sweet home.

And then Charles himself somehow introduced ‘Christian banners into Saxony’ (Groszmann), with the result that ‘the war became more and more the war of faith’, as Canon Adolf Bertram acknowledged in 1899.

Concerned about the further course of the war, Charles had consulted an expert by courier if there was any sign that Mars had accelerated his career and had already reached the constellation Cancer. He conquered Sigibur on the Ruhr and crossed the Weser, ‘many of the Saxons being slain there’, advancing towards Ostfalia, intending ‘not to give up until the defeated Saxons had either submitted to the Christian religion or had been completely exterminated’. It was the programme of a thirty-three-year war ‘with an increasingly religious motivation’ (Haendier). Indeed, in its planning, it represented something new in the history of the Church, ‘a direct missionary war, which is not a preparation for missionary work but is itself a missionary instrument’ (H.D. Kahl).

This was precisely the decade in which the prayer of a sacramentary (a missal) openly called the Franks the chosen people. Charles’ wars against the Saxons were already regarded as wars against the heathen and were therefore considered just. ‘Rise, thou chosen man of God, and defend the Bride of God, the Bride of thy Lord’, the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin, one of his closest advisors, urged him. And later the monk Widukind of Corbey wrote: ‘And when he saw how his noble neighbouring people, the Saxons, were imprisoned in vain heresy, he strove by all means to lead them to the true way of salvation’.

By all means. As far as the year 765 is concerned, the royal Annals make it lapidary clear: ‘After having taken hostages, seizing abundant booty and three times provoking a bloodbath among the Saxons, the aforementioned King Charles returned to France with the help of God (auxiliante Domino)’.

Booty, bloodbaths and God’s help are things that keep coming back, and the good God is always on the side of the strongest. In 776, ‘God’s strength justly overcame theirs… and the whole multitude of them, who in panic had fled one after another, killing one another… succumbed to the mutual blows, and so were surprised by God’s punishment. And how great was the power of God for the salvation of the Christians no one can say’. In 778, ‘A battle began there, which had a very good end. With God’s help the Franks were victorious and a great multitude of Saxons were slaughtered’. In 779, ‘with the help of God’, etc. And between the regular mass murders in the summers, sometimes in this palace estate and sometimes in that city, the so-called peaceful king celebrated Christmas…

The heathen were being fought, and that justified everything. Groups of clergymen accompanied the beheader. Miracles of all kinds took place. And after each campaign, they returned with abundant booty. In the principality of Lippe, there were mass baptisms, especially of nobles: the Saxons came with women and children in countless numbers (inumerabilis multitudo) and had themselves baptised and left as many hostages as the king demanded.

And at the brilliant national assembly, held at Paderborn in 777 they again thronged and solemnly abjured ‘Donar, Wotan and Saxnot and all evil spirits: their companions’ and pledged faith and allegiance ‘to God the Father almighty, to Christ the Son of God and the Holy Spirit’.
 

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Editor’s Note: Can you see why WDH is the only worthwhile site among our forums? So-called anti-Semitic racialists are unable to see that overthrowing the Aryan Gods and putting the Jewish god in their place is the ultimate treason!