Hitler was NOT an Atheist!

[LAGC]

Can't believe how often this comes up in general conversation with people...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWvvSdxu9eo

[baldguy]

1. Hitler was a Catholic.

[struggle4progress]

15. Your vacuous sloganeering really sheds no useful historical light on the question

[struggle4progress]

16. Excerpts from Hitler's Table Talk

stenographic notes of Hitler's private conversations (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1953)
... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance ... http://www.davnet.org/kevin/articles/table.html

The Nazis were consciously manipulative, and -- depending on context -- took different and inconsistent stands on religion, in order to further their social control. Even the Nazi goal of exterminating Judaism was temporarily conditioned by political considerations, as shown by the case of Rabbi Kupperstock, who was a WWI hero to many Germans:

Why the Nazi's paid a life-long pension to a chassidic rabbi, and provided stormtroopers to safeguard his yeshiva.
by Leah Abramowitz
http://www.ashkenazhouse.org/protrabbi.html

[Goblinmonger]

24. You do see the inherent contradiction in what you post, right?

You post the Table Talk excerpt (and Table Talk has its own problems which I'm sure you are aware of) to prove that Hitler hated Christianity and then you post "The Nazis were consciously manipulative, and -- depending on context -- took different and inconsistent stands on religion"--like maybe the first part you posted?

[struggle4progress]

31. Nope: not playin. If you think there are contradictions in my view, point them out explicitly,

because I'm not going to try to hallucinate meaning into vague accusations. Similarly, if you think there are "problems" with Table Talk as a historical document, you should point out the problems explicitly: I'm not going to engage in a futile game of trying to guess what you mean. Finally, if you do not think the Nazis were manipulative and dishonest in their political maneuvers, and that their path to power didn't involve inconsistently telling different people different things, then say so explicitly: don't hint at it and expect me to try to infer what you might be saying

[Goblinmonger]

34. I did point out the contradiction, but I'll make it even more clear

1. You say that Hitler wasn't a Christian because of what he said in Table Talk.
2. You say that the Nazis are notorious liars about religion.
3. Ergo, if we believe your #2, then #1 shouldn't be believed.

As to Table Talk, if you haven't read about the flawed translations and deliberate manuipulation of the text by apologists, then I'm not going to do the work to educate you. It's on the internet for you to read. Have it at.

[struggle4progress]

36. If you cannot distinguish between political tactics and the linguistic issues raised by

the Liar Paradox, no meaningful discussion is possible, :hi:

[Goblinmonger]

38. I don't have it in me

to deal with apologists tonight. If you aren't going to even address the fact that the English translation we have comes from a French translation by François Genoud who adds most of the anti-Christian stuff that cannot be found in the original German, then I have nothing more to say.

[struggle4progress]

40. Your habit of name-calling is a sloppy and lazy substitute for real thinking. If you

dislike Table Talk, there is no shortage of other independent historical material that shows the Nazis tried to appeal to the churches only in the early years and then attacked them after consolidating enough power to feel more secure

Here are excerpts from some reviews of: The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945 by J. S. Conway

Richard M. Hunt
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 385
to the end, the fall of Berlin.
... Using the unpublished archives of the Reich Chancellery, Ministries, Nazi party, and Gestapo, he examines the shifting policies of Hitler's government toward all the significant church institutions of Germany. He shows that these policies evolved through several cycles of spurious collaborations, intimidations, repressions, and appeasements, and he makes the important point that, although the Nazi pressures were ultimately irresistible, they fluctuated in intensity according to the demands of ideology, party intrigues, and foreign-policy considerations ... At different times and for different reasons, the clergy and faithful of these churches were exposed to a full range of Nazi coercions, extending from mild censure to physical incarceration in concentration camps ... In the end, the most extreme and consistent measures came to be exerted against the Jehovah's Witnesses. This small group of pious believers opposed Nazism with such near-fanaticism that even Heinrich Himmler expressed a certain admiration and envy for their self-sacrifices. The Nazis punished such devotion with fearful vengeance; at least a third of the Witnesses' following lost their lives in the holocaust ...

Beate Ruhm von Oppen
The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Jan., 1970), pp. 631-632
... Conway shows the Nazi initiative in the church struggle. He explains and documents the strategy, tactics, machinery, and weaponry of this war of religion. He does something to remind contemporary readers of the overwhelming power of the police state which recent hind-sighted scenarios have tended to neglect ...

David Schoenbaum
The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1970), pp. 458-461
... An evidently unsolicited testimonial to the consolations of the Church by a popular flier shortly before his death in action in 1942 led only to a massive hunt for the presumable forger. While Adolf Cardinal Bertram protested that the author's intent had been
to show Christian faith as a source of strength in the performance of duty to Volk and Vaterland, a number of priests disappeared in concentration camps. The heart of the matter was a self-fulfilling proposition. "Christianity and we National Socialists have one thing in common, and one thing only," the presiding judge, Roland Freisler, told Count Helmuth Moltke at his trial in 1944. "We claim the whole man" ...

Guenter Lewy
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Jun., 1971), pp. 340-342
... Of ruthlessness there was indeed plenty in Nazi Germany. The churches were deprived of most of their property, their ministers were defamed through false charges of currency smuggling and sexual perversion, Christian youth and trade organizations were dissolved, the denominational press was suppressed, and several thousand clergymen were imprisoned in jails or concentration
camps. While houses of worship were allowed to stay open, the regime insisted that the churches limit themselves to purely "spiritual" matters concerned with the next world ...

James Hastings Nichols
Church History, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Mar., 1970), p. 130
... With all due honor to scattered individuals, Niemoeller, Bonhoeffer, the priests of Dachau, von Galen, the Scholls, etc., who show that the apostasy was not quite total, the story of the churches is still largely that of "betrayal, timidity, and unbelief," a corruption already near fatal when the Nazis came to power. It is history not to be read by Christians without personal examination of conscience.

[Goblinmonger]

41. Referring to someone

who attempts to erase the impact of religion on Hitler's actions an apologist is hardly name calling. You may want to look up the word apologist. It's an accurate description of what you are doing on here as well as on the Irish blasphemy thread. That you take so much offense to it is likely more reflective of your own defensiveness and not my "lack of thinking."

As to Hitler. I do not, and have never, contended that religion was the sole motivator for what happened in Germany. It was one of many, many factors. But for you, and others, to completely dismiss it is ridiculous. Yes there were economic and many other factors, but the hatred of Jews has a long history in Christianity and Hitlers views of his own Christianity, though certainly twisted in comparison to what mainstream Christianity looks like, moved him to do what he did (as evidenced in Table Talk, fyi--read the next sentence after you "Bolshevik" quotation if I remember correctly). If this discussion were with some noob to the forum that doesn't seem to have the exposure to all of this, I might go through the process of cutting and pasting the quotations and linking to the articles that talk about how flawed Table Talk is. But you aren't that noob, and, as a result, I don't have it in me to point out all of that to someone who should, and probably does, know all of that already.

[struggle4progress]

43. As usual, you dishonestly put words in other people's mouths

[roguevalley]

39. Hitler ordered that the churches be brought to heel like every other

institution but he was raised religious.

[struggle4progress]

17. Nazi Policy and the Catholic Church

... In February 1933 Hermann Goering banned all Catholic newspapers in Cologne, citing that ‘political’ Catholicism — ie commenting on government policy — would not be tolerated. Responding to protests, he denied this was part of a deliberate campaign against Catholics; the government, he claimed, would “seal its own doom with such a policy.” Though the ban was lifted, it sent a warning tremor through the largely Catholic Rhineland, and gave an accurate indication of possible future government moves. A further straw in the wind was apparent when Storm troopers (SA) broke up meetings of Christian trade unions and the Catholic Centre Party ... Thousands of Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) activists were in concentration camps by the end of June 1933 ...

The most important strand of Nazi policy was, essentially, to strangle Catholicism by eliminating all organisations supported by the Church, from schools and children’s groups to Catholic Trade Unions. By 1939, this had been largely accomplished. Replacing them were National Socialist or “Community Schools”, the workers Labour Front and the Hitler Youth with its female counterpart, The League of German Girls. One initial campaign against Catholic schools in Munich reduced the percentage of students attending from 84% in 1934 to 65% a year later. In 1937, parents were asked to choose their child’s school in front of two witnesses, usually SA men in full uniform. Hints would be given of possible future trouble and loss of employment if Catholic schools were chosen.

Meetings were regularly held to vote on the issue of Catholic or Community Schools. In Speyer, a town of some 40,000 situated on the Rhine, one working man wrote to his bishop giving details of how his ‘vote’ had been obtained in 1937: “ I was told to go to the Parish Council Offices. On arriving there I declared that I wanted the Roman Catholic school and prepared to leave. The local Nazi cell-leader held me back and wrote a note to my firm stating that because of my declaration I would be dismissed from my job. A police constable then told me if I didn’t change my mind I would never obtain public work again” ...

Thus, on October 27, 1938, Adolf Wagner, Bavarian Minister of the Interior stated with pride: “The denominational schools throughout the whole of Bavaria have now been transformed into Community schools.” By January 1939 it was estimated that more than 10,000 Catholic schools had been suppressed and by the end of April that year the London Catholic Herald reported that a further 3,300 schools had been abolished by decree in what was described as “A black day for the Catholic Rhineland” ...

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0033.html

[ironbark]

22. Cardinal Clemens von Galen ‘Against Aktion T4’

Stands heroically amidst the speeches that changed the modern world.

http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/galen.htm

http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20051009_von-galen_en.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4

"The sermon sent a shockwave through the Nazi leadership all the way up to Hitler. As a result, on August 23, 1941, Hitler suspended Aktion T4 which had accounted for nearly a hundred thousand deaths by this time.

The Nazis pondered what to do about the Cardinal. They eventually retaliated by arresting and then beheading three parish priests who had distributed his sermon, but left the Cardinal unharmed to avoid making him into a martyr."

[struggle4progress]

18. Jewish references erased in newly found Nazi Bible

Last updated at 14:47 07 August 2006

An institute in Germany has unearthed a Nazi bible ordered by Adolf Hitler to replace the old and new testaments expunged of all references to Jews ...

... his plan was to gradually 'Nazify' the church beginning with a theological centre he set up in 1939 to rewrite the Holy Bible. He appointed lackey professors to work on a thoroughly Nazi version that would remove all references to Jews and all compassion ...

One order found in the archives for a special exhibition in Eisenach of the institute?s bizarre work came from Walter Grundmann, the anti-Semitic director appointed by Hitler.

He wrote in 1941: "The Bible must become Jew-free and the German people must see that the Jews are the mortal enemy who threaten their very existence" ...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-399470/Jewish-references-erased-newly-Nazi-Bible.html

[Goblinmonger]

23. Hitler thought that the Jews (esp Paul)

corrupted the message of Jesus (who he felt wasn't a Jew and Paul and other Jews just said he was) and Hitler wanted to change Christianity from the Jewish abomination he felt it was to what it rightfully should have been. You may not like that version of Christianity, but Hitler wasn't trying to end or stop or purge Christians; he was trying to purify the religion he loved and tell the true story of his God.

Hitler was involved in a very heinous, bloody, and twisted version of the Scotsman argument.

[struggle4progress]

32. Unsurprisingly, you provide no historical evidence whatsoever for this nonsensical claim

[Goblinmonger]

33. Your quotation talks about it.

How he wanted to take all the Jewish references from the bible. Why would he want to do that if he didn't care about the rest?

[struggle4progress]

37. You insist on viewing everything without context and without any sort of political framework.

The Nazis were interested in consolidating Nazi power. From a pragmatic perspective, they did not seek to do this in one single step but in a sequence of steps, during the course of which they attempted to cultivate the view "this is really the last thing we're going to ask for." With respect to the churches, they first shut down all religious organizations and affiliated political apparatus, except for the churches themselves. They then sought to exert political control over the churches more directly, amalgamating the Protestant churches into a single Reich Church and (attempting through negotiations with the Vatican) to limit the freedom of the less compliant Catholic church. The Bible was then rewritten for the Reich church and some effort was made to influence the popular practices associated with the Christian holidays. Table Talk indicates clearly the ultimate intent of such maneuvers, which of course had not obtained their finally goal when Germany was defeated

[Goblinmonger]

42. Yes,

and you talking quotations out of a context that not two sentences later have Hitler talking about him trying to purify the religion of Christ from its Jewish bastardization is somehow wonderful but, yeah, I'M the one that doesn't view anything with context.

[struggle4progress]

20. Nazi concentration camp unveils monument to Catholic priests killed in Holocaust

Berlin, Germany, Nov 6, 2006 / 12:00 am (CNA).- A new stone sculpture was unveiled in Germany this weekend to commemorate the many Catholic priests and monks killed in a lesser-known World War II Nazi concentration camp near Berlin.

The sculpture, unveiled Saturday, is engraved with a cross and the names of 96 clergy who died at Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the north-west outskirts of Berlin, reported Deutsche Presse-Agentur ...

To date, historians working for the Archdiocese of Berlin have documented the names of 711 Catholic clergy from Poland, Germany, and other European nations who were incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen camp.

Hundreds were later transferred to Dachau and other Nazi sites, where they died. One of the surviving inmates, Kazimierz Majdanski, now 90, went on to become Catholic bishop of Szczecin-Kamien ...

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=7987

[struggle4progress]

44. "We do not want any God other than Germany itself" is attributed to the top Nazi in Konrad Heiden's

1935 text A history of national socialism (Knopf), at page 100 in a recent reprinting

http://www.jstor.org/pss/1947802
http://books.google.com/books?id=qcQOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=A+history+of+national+socialism++By+Konrad+Heiden

That, of course, is not a Catholic stance

[Towlie]

2. Yes, but he wasn't a TRUE Scotsman... err... I mean he wasn't a TRUE Christian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[Strong Atheist]

45. .

:yourock:

[Eric J in MN]

3. Hitler wasn't a vegetarian, either, but that myth is even bigger.

http://libaware.economads.com/hitlernotveg.php

[provis99]

6. your source link is complete nonsense.

Hitler was a vegetarian.

http://www.geocities.com/hitlerwasavegetarian/

[bbinacan]

8. How's this souce?

"After the early 1930s, Hitler generally followed a vegetarian diet, although he ate meat on occasion."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler#Health

[Goblinmonger]

13. Well, I'm not a racist

but I do beat the shit out of some blacks once and a while, but otherwise...

He ate meat on occasion, i.e. NOT a vegetarian. Not that hard of a concept.

[saltpoint]

77. One of his biographers, Tolan, claims that Hitler

was vegetarian.

Who should we believe in this one?

[provis99]

4. "Gott mit uns"...

seems to be a funny thing to put on every Wehrmacht belt buckle, if Hitler was an atheist.

[ejbrush]

12. For what it's worth,

"Gott Mit Uns" was stamped on Prussian, and later Imperial German, belt buckles from at least 1847 on. Got nothing to do with Adolf at all.

[SidneyCarton]

28. +1

Always nice to see that someone actually reads their history around here.

[moobu2]

65. Itt was from an earlier Christian tradition in Germany

that the Nazi's continued to use. That's kind of the point.


Nazi-ism and the Holocaust had it's roots in the earlier german/christian traditions, so it would make sense that they would use these christian slogans etc...

[Dogmudgeon]

5. I guess people keep mistaking him for Stalin

:shrug:

After you kill your first million, people tend to overlook little things like church attendance.

--d!

[provis99]

7. no evidence that Stalin was an atheist, either.

[HeresyLives]

10. Stalin was a seminary student.

And while he punished the church, it was because they were supporters of the Czars and wielded a great deal of power.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Right, and no seminary student ever became an atheist...

:eyes:

especially not if he was a member of the Communist Party.
.

[Igel]

49. Yet under his rule

church attendance could get you kicked out of the Party, anti-religious/atheist propaganda was standard. Churches were shuttered or, more often, converted, and the priests brought well into line. The schismatics that Lunacharsky and others under Lenin cooperated with and made promises to had been abused under Lenin, but viciously persecuted under Stalin.

Of course, you could make much of the fact that as soon as WWII started Stalin turned to the Orthodox Church, supported them, etc. However, it was just manipulation--those who didn't go and fight for an atheist Soviet Russian were told to go and fight by the priests for Holy Mother Russia.

After the war, the church was treated like crap again.

Note that Saddam Hussein, a student of Stalin in many ways, did the same in the '80s during the Iraq-Iran war, and even more so after 1991. Built mosques, turned to Salafists for support, added, was it, part of the Shahada to the Iraqi flag, etc., etc. His secularism was much in doubt as far as actions are concerned, but he was probably still not pious himself in any way. But as with Stalin, it worked.

[SidneyCarton]

29. If Stalin wasn't an Atheist...

It was only because he believed that HE was God.

[LAGC]

35. Yep.

There was certainly plenty of leader-worship going on under Stalin. Just like with (Dear Leader) Kim John-Il in North Korea today.

If that's not de facto religion, I don't know what is.

[timeforpeace]

9. Whew. Glad that's cleared up.

[progressoid]

25. Yep, I doubt we'll have to discuss this again.

[Meshuga]

11. Even if we found proof that he was an atheist

Why would that matter? He didn't kill in the name of atheism. He killed in name of racism, eugenics, antisemitism, totalitarianism, and for all that the Nazis stood for.

[moobu2]

19. It matters because there’s a long ongoing movement by Christians

To deny the central role Christianity played in the holocaust.

[struggle4progress]

21. Your vacuous sloganeering really sheds no useful historical light on the subject:

If one wants to understand what happened in Germany during the Nazi era, one must attempt to understand the mindframe of the people involved and the circumstances of their lives. If there is no doubt that many Germans were originally naive about the Nazis, and that when their illusions were removed many showed a primary interest in saving their own skins, rather than in ethical opposition -- which would, of course, often have been a suicidal stance. The original naivity about Nazi methods was not peculiar to Germany: Chamberlain today is primarily remembered as an idiot for having compromised with the Nazis, but the popular view at the time was rather different -- and a number of people who perhaps should have known better were similarly idiotic

The questions that one should ask are: What did the Nazis intend and why? How did the Nazis attempt, by politics and by terror to achieve their goals? And what were the responses and outcomes? If one asks such questions, then it will be clear that there are various biographies associated with the answers, from which one can see how real people reacted to real events: these biographies will be interesting and complicated, and one actually can learn something from them -- whereas your vapid ideological generalizations really illuminate nothing

[PassingFair]

52. Right, the Nazi invented anti-semitism...Germans were "naive".

From the good Martin Luther:

Learn from this dear Christian, what you are doing if you permit the blind Jews to mislead you. Then the saying will truly apply, 'When a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into the pit" . You cannot learn anything from them except how to misunderstand the divine commandments, and, despite this, boast haughtily over against the Gentiles — who really are much better before God than they, since they do not have such pride of holiness and yet keep far more of the law than these arrogant saints and damned blasphemers and liars.

Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in-which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and vehming his eyes on them. God's wrath has consigned them to the presumption that their boasting, their conceit, their slander of God, their cursing of all people are a true and a great service rendered to God — all of which is very fitting and becoming to such noble blood of the fathers and circumcised saints. This they believe despite the fact that they know they are steeped in manifest vices mently, just as the devils themselves do. And where you see or hear a Jew teaching, remember that you are hearing nothing but a venomous basilisk who poisons and kills people merrily by fasten- And with all this, they claim to be doing right. Be on your guard against them!

Side note: Could anyone have BEEN more OBSESSED with circumcision than
this guy?

http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/documents/luther-jews.htm

[struggle4progress]

53. It is dishonest of you to put such words as "Nazi invented anti-semitism' in my mouth, since I never

said anything resembling that

The snippet that you take from Luther's voluminous writings is certainly problematic: the work was not at all popular when he wrote it, as a very sick and very old man, and it was never taught as part of Lutheran theology so far as I know, perhaps because nobody really knows what to make of it, with its combination of ugliness and inconsistency ("It is a great, extraordinary, and wonderful thing that the Gentiles in all the world accepted, without sword or coercion, with no temporal benefits accruing to them, gladly and freely, a poor Man of the Jews as the true Messiah"). There is, perhaps, a case to be made that Luther intended some sarcasm, since after at least one of the anti-Semitic rants Luther turns of his readers and accuses them of exactly the same character flaws; examining more complicated possibilities -- such as the possibility that the piece contains some demented combination of sarcasm, bitterness, and an emerging anti-semitism -- would require a mastery of the late medieval German and a familiar with the polemics of the time. There is no question, of course, that the Nazis dug this piece from mouldy library stacks and used it: but your implied effort to identify Nazi anti-semitism with Lutheran theology would ignore inconvenient historical details, such as the fact that solidly Lutheran Denmark refused to cooperate with Nazi holocaust plans

[PassingFair]

54. Snippet? Did you click on the link?

To claim that Christianity was not
the main influence in the scapegoating
of Jews in Germany is what is dishonest.

[struggle4progress]

55. Sloganeering won't help us understand what happened, if we want to prevent a recurrence.

Only a detailed study of actual historical mechanisms can do that. Waving about a piece from four hundred years before doesn't shed light on historical mechanisms. When the Nazis consolidated power, a number of observers noted the völkische Germanic paganism of the anti-semitic Wotan societies was closely associated with the Nazi movement: no serious political analysis can ignore this important aspect of the period

[PassingFair]

56. Speaking of "sloganeering"...none of these said:

Odin mitt uns.



You are arguing degrees.

I don't have to go back to Luther to show the
contempt for Jews within Christian circles.

Here's the warm and lovely Father Coughlin

http://www.fathercoughlin.org/father-coughlin-anti-semitism.html

snip> The times had watched Father Coughlin lend support to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Then at a speech Coughlin gave in the Bronx – perhaps his most famous – he gave a Nazi salute and yelled out, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing." Proving this statement wasn’t a one-time lapse of judgment, Coughlin stated "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted," after the Jews across Germany were attacked, killed and burned out of house and home. <unsnip

Here's the Shitheel's church, still standing.

[moobu2]

58. Ironic that as an architectural element,.

they have the giant corpse of a Jewish guy hanging on the side of the building.

[struggle4progress]

59. The Vatican, of course, silenced Coughlin before WWII began. And regarding the

belt buckle, see the comment in #12 upthread

[PassingFair]

60. They stopped him from "preaching" on the air in 1942...

well after the start of WW2, and he
continued to preach to his local
flock until 1966.

I know people who went to church there.



"The final blow to Coughlin’s influence came in 1942. His initial support for Hitler and Mussolini, coupled with his continued condemnation of the Soviet Union, America’s ally, and persistent push for isolationism, no longer represented the majority opinion. Viewed as a political liability, Archbishop of Detroit Edward Francis Mooney ordered Coughlin to abandon the airwaves, stop production of Social Justice, and return to his parish duties. Although Coughlin was forced to comply, he continued to write a number of pamphlets during the 1950s and 1960s in which he condemned communism. "

[struggle4progress]

61. Hmmm.

... Monsignor John A. Ryan, another nationally known priest, turned on Coughlin after Coughlin’s shunning of Roosevelt and increasingly anti-Semitic viewpoints. Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, and Bishop Francis Spellman continuously worked to get the Vatican to silence Coughlin. In 1936, Coughlin was ordered silent by the Vatican. Father Coughlin never wavered in his speech, however, and as the year drew on, his radio show became ripe with anti-Semitic tones ... http://www.fathercoughlin.org/father-coughlin-anti-semitism.html

... Coughlin supported the populist Louisiana politician Huey Long, until Long was assassinated in 1935, and then supported William Lemke‘s third party in 1936. Thus, as Coughlin became a bitter opponent of the New Deal, his radio talks escalated in vehemence against Roosevelt, capitalists and Jewish conspirators. Kennedy, who strongly supported the New Deal, warned as early as 1933 that Coughlin was “becoming a very dangerous proposition” as an opponent of Roosevelt and “an out and out demagogue.” Kennedy worked with Roosevelt, Bishop Francis Spellman and Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) in a successful effort to get the Vatican to shut Coughlin down in 1936 ... http://www.traces.org/admirersofnazism/coughlin.html

... In 1937 the Vatican, believing that Coughlin was effective in combating the spread of communism in the United States, intervened on his behalf when his new superior, Archbishop. Edward Mooney, attempted to silence him. This intervention enabled Coughlin to embark on the most vitriolic and controversial phase of his public life, which lasted until Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, who had rebuked Coughlin for his activities during the 1936 Presidential elections, became pope in 1939, at which time the Vatican withdrew its support ... http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1973/4/1973_4_102_print.shtml

... In response to the November 10, 1938, "Kristallnacht" attack on Jews in German-controlled territory, Coughlin began by asking, "Why is there persecution in Germany today?" He went on to explain that "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." The owner of WMCA, the New York station that carried Coughlin's show, refused to broadcast Coughlin's next radio message ... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX96.html

... In 1939, the Code Committee of the National Association of Broadcasters forged new rules and placed increasingly rigid limitations on the sale of radio time to controversial spokesmen. This was directly aimed at Father Coughlin and his unwillingness to concede his throne as the nation’s top dissenting voice. Now, manuscripts would have to be given in advance, and stations were threatened with a loss of license should they not comply with the new standards on "free speech." In a 1939 issue of Social Justice, Coughlin stated that he had been forced off the air by those who controlled circumstances beyond his reach ... http://www.fathercoughlin.org/father-coughlin-radio-priest.html#cancellation

... In April 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered a federal grand jury investigation of "Social Justice" because of its apparently pro-Axis propaganda. Three weeks later, the U.S. Post Office suspended the publication's second class mailing privilege, and after years of trying to prevent Coughlin from publishing his anti-Semitic attacks, the Archbishop of Detroit Edward Mooney successfully forbade the priest from having any ties with "Social Justice" or "with any other publication" ... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX96.html

Apparently the actual story about the efforts to silence Coughlin is considerably more complex then the accounts either you or I have provided. It seems the church hierarchy made an effort to silence him around 1936, and that this effort promptly became ensnared in political issues, including Coughlin's popularity and American isolationism, as well as conflicting attitudes of his various immediate superiors and questions regarding what view the Vatican took of the local hierarchy's prerogatives. Pacelli is known to have disapproved of Coughlin, but private interests took the first meaningful steps: he was finally off the air around 1939. And it seems action by the US government in the context of the War finally shut him down completely

[PassingFair]

62. I may not have "provided" the accounts, but I knew about them.

I also knew that he started as a populist
supporter of the working man, and became
a crazy person.

The Vatican didn't "silence" him.

They didn't even excommunicate him.

Although Mooney must have threatened
him with it in 42.

P.S.: I own some of his tracts, which I
purchased at a garage sale near his
church a few years ago.

He rants like an Ayatollah.

[SidneyCarton]

30. And there's a long ongoing movement by Atheists

To pin the entirety of responsibility for the Holocaust on Christianity.

This horribly oversimplifies the Holocaust, ignoring the effects of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Pan-Germanic philosophy, eugenics, the effects of WWI violence on Germany during the interwar period, etc. Did Christianity play a role, certainly, it was the host in which the bacilli of Anti-Semitism inhabited during much of European history, but to assign it the central role in the Holocaust is ahistorical and sloppy scholarship.

[kwassa]

57. what central role did Christianity play in the holocaust?

I was unaware that Christian clergy operated the concentration camps, or performed the deportations.

[TZ]

64. And the rumors that Jews were Satan worshippers

WHO KILLED CHRIST had nothing to do with it? Fuck it, I've heard the Jews killed Christ bullshit in MODERN CHURCHES myself. If anyone doesn't think there were inflammatory anti-semitic messages passed out by the Catholic Church then is an idiot. And Hitler did go to church. BTW, there is evidence of Catholic persecution of Jews as far back as even to Shakespeare's time--if not earlier.

[HamdenRice]

26. So? Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were. nt

[darkstar3]

79. Oh, joy, THAT old chestnut...

Let me see if I can put this in writing as well as it sounds in my head...

Atheism is an incredibly simple concept. To be an atheist, one must simply LACK belief in all supernatural/spiritual beings.

Many people conflate this with agnosticism (which I think Heisenberg (sp?) might have something to say about), materialism (which we can have a whole different debate on later), and the God Complex. The God Complex is the problem we see here.

To provide my own somewhat non-psychological definition: The God Complex simply states that a) in the absence of other godlike beings, or b) in SPITE of other godlike beings, I (communal) am my own god. I've heard this particular position from more than one fellow atheist. To wit:
"There is no God, or gods. We are all gods to ourselves." -- This is a direct quote from a fellow atheist coworker.

The problem with the God Complex is that, sometimes, this leads to the desire to have others worship you. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and many other extreme sociopaths can be considered as having traveled this particular road.

But there is a difference between atheism and those who suffer from the full-blown God Complex. After all, not everyone who suffers from the God Complex has divorced themselves from one of the "higher power" religions. We have past US Presidents who can prove that easily.

The point I'm trying to make here is that you can't lay the crimes of these people at the feet of atheism in general. These guys were lunatics long before the gods of their childhood religions, and the murders they committed were done in the name of their own causes, not atheism. They placed themselves as the highest authority on earth, their own gods, and they would not allow anyone to dissent from that "fact." So, you could argue that psychology was responsible, and you could argue that fierce nationalism was responsible, but I don't think you can safely argue that atheism was directly responsible for the millions killed under these dictators.

As a poster I'm somewhat fond of on this board has said before, "there's just no there, there."

[SidneyCarton]

27. No shit, really?

Hitler was a lapsed Catholic, with delusions of his own prophetic calling to lead the German people into some sort of Aryan Valhalla. Considering the fact that he slaughtered thousands, if not millions of his fellow Catholics, and Christians, and considering SS plans for the absorbtion and dissolution of German Protestantism following a possible victory, (SS members were forbidden to wear their uniforms to church, or participate in Church government) I think it could strongly be argued that Hitler was hardly a Christian either.

[Towlie]

46. Or at least he wasn't a TRUE Christian, right? (See my post #2 about the No True Scotsman fallacy.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[SidneyCarton]

48. The question is not whether or not Hitler was a TRUE Christian.

Because that falls immediately into the whole Scotsman mess, it is whether or not he still considered himself a Christian, and that is unclear from documented evidence. I will not contest that Hitler was a theist, because he himself claimed that he was given a mission by "providence" to redeem the German people. This falls in line with an entire line of reasoning in RW German culture in which a "Fuehrer" a kind of cultural-artistic prophet would come and revitalize German culture with a new "Germanic religion" which may include elements of de-Judaized Chrisitianity, as well as Germanic theatrical and aesthetic elements in it. These were the ideas put forth by some of the ideological forefathers of Nazism, such as de Lagarde, Langbehn and Moeller van der Bruck.

Friedrich Stern's "The Politics of Cultural Despair" deals with this, it's a fascinating read, I highly recommend it.

[and-justice-for-all]

47. Did they ever excommunicate Hitler?

Speaking of which; One can not be an Atheist if he sees himself as a God and wants to be seen and worshiped as such.

This is always the case in a dictatorship; be it Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin or who ever. The only thing their citizenry has to fear, is their supreme leader. They all have a God Complex and all believe in the supernatural one way or another, but none of which were an example of being an Atheist.


Hitler and Catholic Papel Nuncio Archbishop Orsenigo


Catholic Hitler with Catholic Reich Bishop Muller


Hitler attending Catholic Church



Stalin Reinstates the Church, 1942-43
From Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, From the Great War to the War on Terror, by Michael Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 233-236:
http://faroutliers.blogspot.com/2008/08/stalin-reinstates-church-1942-43.html

[struggle4progress]

50. I will merely point out that your caption "Hitler attending Catholic church" is completely bogus:

bogus: the photograph is of the Lutheran Marinegarnisonskirche (now called Christus- und Garnisonkirch) in Wilhelmshaven, a town visited somewhere around 1933. And of course, the photo does not show the person "attending" church: it shows him walking out of a church door -- there is, to my knowledge, essentially no historical evidence he attended church or took religion seriously after moving out of his mother's house

Similarly "Catholic Reich Bishop Müller" is a stupid and ignorant caption: as Reichsbischof, Müller was the head of the protestant "Reich Church," which was the institution under which the Nazis attempted to consolidate all the Protestant churches in German. Müller was an ardent Nazi and anti-semite, and he had no problem allowing the Gestapo to spy in the churches

Incidently, a mere picture of a handshake is not very informative, without context. A friend of mine, who despised W, was unexpectedly caught in a situation where a pleasant handshake with W simply could not be avoided without pointlessly embarrassing a number of people; the handshake occurred, was photographed, and to my friend's great chagrin was published.

[rug]

51. What if he were?

Hitler doesn't represent atheism anymore than Torquemada represents Christianity.

[moobu2]

63. The Nazi’s were anti-abortion,

anti-condoms, anti-gay, extreme pro-(Aryan)family and prone to hero worship.... Sound familiar?

[SidneyCarton]

66. At various times so were the Stalinists...

Extremists of every stripe tend to be misogynistic, hero worshipping homophobes. As to the pro natalism, it was not unique to Nazi Germany, most nations that fought in the First World War, worried that the awful slaughter of the previous generation would lead to future weakness, and adopted policies that restricted birth control and encouraged fecundity.

[moobu2]

67. When Stalinist,

Maoists, communists or whoever set up worship centers on nearly every corner in my town, gain as much influence in our government and start knocking on my F-ing front door!!!, maybe I'll be concerned about them. I'm not really right now.

[SidneyCarton]

68. Where exactly do you live that the actual Nazi party does this?

[moobu2]

69. I was talking about christian churches obviously

Edited to add...where I live, we only have christian conservatives basically, most of them only a bible verse or 2 away from another christian inspired horror and just waiting for some charismatic person to usher it in. There's probably some so called liberal christians somewhere here, maybe, but I've never seen any.

[SidneyCarton]

71. Sigh...

Moobu, does your piano have more than one key? Sometimes I wonder, it seems that the symphony of thought from you on this subject can be essentially rendered thus:

Christians=Fascists=Bastards=Potentially Murderous Fanatics=Be Afraid!

If that is truly how you see the world, I pity you.

[Starfighter]

70. There is no doubt

Hitler was a christian

[SidneyCarton]

72. As a historian, I find your statement rather oversimplified.

Would you care to back that up with actual evidence?

Yes, I know he was born a Catholic, but was he a practicing Catholic?

I will admit from his statements that there is no doubt he was a Theist, but saying he was a Christian requires a little more than the belief in "providence" which he claimed.

[saltpoint]

76. I think I get what you're saying but come at the Hitler issue from

the notion that Jesus was not a Christian.

Jesus, if he existed, was very, very likely a Jew.

[Rob H.]

73. Some quotes from the man himself:

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."

"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator; by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord...I would like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people...."

"Loyalty and responsibility toward the people and the Fatherland are most deeply anchored in the Christian faith."

"I have followed the Church in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed... The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it."

Peter de Rosa, former Jesuit priest and theologian: "In 1936...Hitler assured his lordship (Bishop Berning of Osnabruch) there was no fundamental difference between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. Had not the church, he argued, looked on Jews as parasites and shut them in ghettos? 'I am only doing,' he boasted, 'what the church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively.'"

Edit: Typo.

[kwassa]

74. and your quotes are .... meaningless.

by the way, including links on your quotes would be very nice.

Anyone who thinks that Hitler's fundamental motivation was Christian are historically illiterate.

Hitler spoke endlessly on a variety of topics. There are some atheists now who have a political agenda of pining the blame for the Holocaust on Christianity, and cherry-pick a limited group of Hitler's sayings to prove their interpretation. This is an incredibly false premise, and distorts the historical record altogether.

Hitler used Christian terminology to advance his political ends. Nothing more, nothing less. He wanted to win German support, and he succeeded.

[Joe Chi Minh]

78. He was, of course, anything but a Christian. Kwassa nailed it. It was simply

political expediency.

Heck, if atheist pop-singers recognise the power of Christian association by wearing crucifixes and writing Christian references in songs, just to to turn a buck, do you think Hitler would have been too dim to do it. He was a half-wit in many ways, but he was very politically astute, at least, with a short-term perspective. He was an autodidact who presumably played truant from his very limited studies all too often for his purposes. Demagoguery and war seem to have constituted the full scope of his interest; and by war, I don't mean generalship by any stretch of the imagination.

For much the same reason - politics - Hitler was very careful to avoid offending Hindenberg. From Wikipedia:

"Hitler was always very conscious of the fact that the President was the Supreme Commander-In-Chief of the German armed forces, and that given that Hindenburg was a revered figure in the German Army, that if the President decided to sack Hitler as Chancellor, there was little doubt that the Reichswehr would side with Hindenburg. Thus, as long as Hindenburg lived, Hitler was always very careful to avoid offending him."

LAGC, you are completely and utterly wrong, and one wonders, with so much information at our finger-tips, how you manage to cling to the notion that Hitler was a Christian. I have read that, like Thatcher and Reagan, he and some of his cronies, were keen on some New Age ideas, but that seems to be as far as any interest in religion of his, went.

[saltpoint]

75. No matter how carefully we examine Hitler's religious upbringing or early

denominational allegiance, I feel it is more than fair to say that he could be described as having abandoned the tenets of his faith, possibly correspondent to his strategic rise to power.

Once a specific demographic of human beings was demonized, taunted, humiliated, and in horrifyingly large numbers hauled off and murdered, the subject of 'faith' or 'religion' as regards Adolf Hitler no longer obtains.

The Minotaur killed the man in him likely long before he accomplished total control but likely well after his childhood alliance with an ethical entity.

Certainly there are megalomaniacs who invoke the Divine, but, it seems to me, it's only to rationalize their savagery.

[libguy9560]

80. Who cares what religion he believed in?

As far as I'm concerned, ALL religion is nonsense.