“You’ll see the day, 10 years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now.”
– Reinhard Heydrich
Eric Metaxas, in his revelatory book on the great German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who on April 9, 1945, was murdered at Flossenbürg concentration camp just three weeks before the Allied Powers defeated Hitler and the Nazis, wrote about “Nazi Theology” in chapter 11 and opened with this passage: “One sometimes hears that Hitler was a Christian. He was certainly not, but neither was he openly anti-Christian, as most of his top lieutenants were. What helped him aggrandize power, he approved of, and what prevented it, he did not. He was utterly pragmatic. In public he often made comments that made him sound pro-church or pro-Christian, but there can be no question that he said these things cynically, for political gain. In private, he possessed an unblemished record of statements against Christianity and Christians.”
Historically, particularly in the 20th century, there is ample evidence of tyrants who used some form of socialism, communism or fascism to rule over their nations as a demigod or messiah. In a section titled “A New Nazi Religion” Metaxas explains Hitler’s god complex and malignant narcissism, writing that “Since Hitler had no religion other than himself, his opposition to Christianity and the church was less ideological than practical. That was not the case for many leaders of the Third Reich. Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and others were bitterly anti-Christian and were ideologically opposed to Christianity, and wanted to replace it with a religion of their own devising.” Under Hitler’s leadership, William Shirer in his definitive book, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” wrote that “the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.”
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party’s chief racial theorist, concocted a plan whereby the Nazis would systematically replace Christianity and the churches with Nazi theology. Here are just a few arguments of Rosenberg’s program explaining what Hitler was open to approving and, under the pretext of war, would move to establish throughout Germany:
13. The National [Nazi] Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany. …
14. The National [Nazi] Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer’s “Mein Kampf” is the greatest of all documents. It … not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.
18. The National [Nazi] Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.
19. On the altars there must be nothing but “Mein Kampf” (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.
30. On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels … and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.
The Nazis first co-opted the true Christian church in order to later seek to destroy it and martyr as many true German Christians like Bonhoeffer as possible; therefore the Nazis called this new Nazi church movement, Deutsche Christens, “German Christians.” The perversion of Christianity allowed the Nazis to conflate the idea of Germanness with the idea of Christianity and to further conflate the idea of Germanness as antithetical to the idea of Jewishness, which facilitated the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews using Christian phraseology and idioms.
To show the evil intent of how the Nazis systematically perverted Christianity and used it as a cudgel against the Jews and Judaism, for example, Metaxas cited Doris Bergen’s book, “Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich,” writing that “the ‘German Christians’ preached Christianity as the polar opposite of Judaism, Jesus as the arch anti-Semite, and the cross as the symbol of war against Jews.” Fusing the German Volk (people) with the German Kirche (church) meant stretching and twisting the definitions of both. Step one was to define Germanness as inherently in opposition to Jewishness. To make Christianity one with Germanness meant purging it of everything Jewish. … For starters, they decide the Old Testament must go. …”
Historically, there are noted similarities between National Socialism and Democratic Socialism – both movements are totalitarian revolutions led by a charismatic, god-like messiah who places himself beyond correction or the rule of law; both use the power of the Leviathan State to amass unconstitutional powers unto themselves – for example, the Nazis burned down the Reichstag (Parliament), blamed it on the communists and used this power vacuum to eventually combine Hitler’s chancellorship with the presidency, leading directly to new tyrannical powers Hitler used to launch World War II and establish the Gestapo, the SS, concentration camps and the Holocaust. Also during World War II, the American left under FDR used dozens of “internment camps” to imprison hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Japanese, Italian and German American citizens without due process.
Today President Obama freely and arrogantly uses the vast machinery of government – NSA, IRS, EPA, Homeland Security, the Justice Department and HHS – for example, to force Obamacare to deconstruct the greatest health-care program in the world, to spy on us and to punish his enemies both foreign and domestic. Both socialist philosophies hate (practicing) Jews, Christians, Catholics, conservatives, tea-party members, capitalism, the church, the Bible and a free media. Progressives love to crush all dissenting voices, to systematically deconstruct societal morality by any means necessary.
The Nazis called their comprehensive program to reshape Germany into its ghastly image, “Nazification.” In America I call this existential evolution atheism movement the Progressive Revolution. Finally, both National Socialism/Nazi theology and Democratic Socialism/Progressive theology must and will be defeated because history has repeatedly demonstrated that liberal fascism will always fail – fascism always collapses upon the weight of its own immorality.
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