Hitler and the Holocaust (18 page)

5

BETWEEN THE CROSS AND THE SWASTIKA

It is a Christian action to expel the Jews, because it is for the good of the people, which is thus getting rid of its pests.

FATHER JOZEF TISO,
President of Slovakia
, August 1942

I must make heard the indignant protest of the Christian conscience and I proclaim that all men, Aryan or non-Aryan, are brothers, because they are created by the same God.… The current anti-Semitic measures are in contempt of human dignity, a violation of the most sacred rights of the individual and the family.

BISHOP PIERRE-MARIE THEAS (MONTAUBAN),
protesting the deportation of French Jews, September 1942

Christianity in Germany bears a greater responsibility before God than the National Socialists, the SS and the Gestapo. We ought to have recognised the Lord Jesus in the brother who suffered and was persecuted despite his being a communist or a Jew.

PASTOR MARTIN NIEMÖLLER, March 1946

T
he resurgence of Germany (
“Deutschland Erwache”
) and the destruction of the Jews (
“Judah Verrecke”
) had been organically related processes in Hitler’s mind ever since the “catastrophe” of November 1918. They had been framed in eschatological terms as a kind of cosmic war of the forces of light against the fiendish powers of darkness. “There is no making pacts with Jews,” Hitler had declared in
Mein Kampf
, “there can only be the hard either-or.”
¹
Pointedly, he warned his audience in the Munich beer cellars on 27 February 1925, “Either the enemy will walk over our corpses, or we will walk over his.”
²
In this life-and-death fight against the satanic forces of evil, Hitler liked to pose as the chosen redeemer of the Germanic
Volk
(and of the entire non-Jewish world), conducting a millenarian struggle for salvation. This militant style of salvationist politics borrowed frequently from Christian language and imagery while adapting them to widely prevalent obsessions about impending German national doom or “Aryan” racial extinction. The extremity of the German plight was used to justify in advance the inversion of all humanitarian values. “We want to prevent our Germany from being crucified too! Let us be inhuman! But if we save Germany, we have eliminated the greatest injustice in the world. Let us be unethical! But if we save our
Volk
, we have broken a path for morality again!”
³

When Hitler spoke of rescuing Germany, the “Aryan” nations, and European civilization from crucifixion by a “diabolical Jewish world-enemy,” he did not flinch from comparing himself to the Christian savior, blasphemous though such an allusion must appear in retrospect. In his early speeches in Catholic Bavaria, he regularly evoked New Testament passages
recalling that Christ “took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this [Jewish] adversary of all humanity.”
⁴
Jesus, too, he reminded his predominantly Catholic audiences, had lived in a “materialistic world contaminated by Jews,” where the state power was corrupt and incompetent.
⁵
In Hitler’s imaginary self-projection, Christ seemed more like Siegfried, a Germanic warrior-hero who had created a great world movement by preaching a popular anti-Jewish faith fused with intense patriotic idealism. Jesus’s crown of thorns was his “struggle against the Jews,” now made to serve as a model for Hitler’s own war against the materialistic “Jewish spirit.” It was as a Christian, the Nazi leader insisted, that he had a duty “to see that society did not suffer the same collapse as the Greco-Roman civilisation of Antiquity which had been driven to its ruin by this same Jewish people.”
⁶
On 12 April 1922, he emphatically declared in Munich: “I would be no Christian … if I did not, as did our Lord 2000 years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people is plundered and exploited.”
⁷
Draping himself in the colors of a fundamentalist anti-Semitic Christianity, he confessed to his Bavarian audience, “In boundless love, as a Christian and a human being, I read the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. I realise more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the cross.”
⁸

In another fiery speech in Munich, in December 1926, Hitler even claimed Jesus as a model and “pioneer” for the National Socialist cause. “The birth of The Man, which is celebrated at Christmas, has the greatest significance for National Socialists. Christ has been the greatest pioneer in the struggle against the Jewish world enemy. Christ was the greatest fighting nature which ever lived on the Earth.… The struggle against the power of capital was his life’s work and his teaching, for which he was nailed to the Cross by his archenemy
the Jew. The task which Christ began but did not finish I will complete.”
⁹
When Count Lerchenfeld, a former prime minister of Bavaria, had stated in a local Landtag (diet) session that his feeling “as a man and a Christian” prevented him from being an anti-Semite, Hitler’s reply was an unequivocal and total repudiation of any pacific, humanitarian standpoint: “I say my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by only a few followers, recognised those Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer, but as a fighter.”
¹⁰

Hitler’s vision of a militantly anti-Jewish Jesus developed in large measure out of the fin-de-siècle Austrian Catholicism he had imbibed in his childhood and adolescent years. As a young man in Vienna, he had admired the political virtuosity of Karl Lueger’s Christian-Social movement, in which an anti-Jewish and anticapitalist populism, fostered by the clergy, had played a central role. The devotion of the lower clergy to the poor and their sense of mission had made them—in Hitler’s words—“stand out of the general morass like little islands.”
¹¹
Indeed, the Catholic Church in his native Austria had, as he liked to recall, served as an important vehicle for the social mobility of many able individuals from the ranks of the people.
¹²
Other features of his boyhood religion, like the “mysterious artificial dimness of the Catholic churches,” the burning candles, and the incense also made strong impressions upon the young Hitler.

Learning from the experiences of his prewar apprentice years in Vienna, he concluded that any open confrontation with the Catholic Church must be avoided. The earlier failure of Bismarck’s
Kulturkampf
against German Catholics in the 1870s and of Schönerer’s crusade against Rome in 1900 were object lessons. Hence, from the early days of the Nazi
Kampfzeit
(time of struggle) he had avoided any involvement in the religious disputes that could adversely affect his own
image or the unity within his movement. Those like the Thuringian Nazi leader Arthur Dinter who attempted to introduce a Protestant religious sectarianism into the NSDAP were either expelled or accused of national betrayal and of “consciously or unconsciously fighting for Jewish interests.”
¹³
This ultimate disqualifying charge was even leveled at Hitler’s former comrade in arms General Erich von Ludendorff, the vehemently anti-Catholic hero of the German
völkisch
right. Both Ludendorff and his second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz, who had founded the Tannenbergbund in 1926, became obsessed with Jesuitism and the Roman church as implacable enemies of Germandom, no less deadly than “Judah” or Freemasonry. Hitler denounced this fanatical anti-Romanism and the internecine war between the Christian denominations in Germany as a disastrous diversion from the “Jewish peril.”
¹⁴

Hitler’s concern not to alienate traditionalist opinion was eminently political and made sense in a rural Catholic region like Bavaria, which had been the cradle of the Nazi movement between 1919 and 1925.
¹⁵
Moreover, Hitler recognized the affinity between local anti-Jewish religious traditions typified by such popular festivals as the Oberammergau Passion Play (which highlighted the Jews’ primary role in Christ’s crucifixion) and his own violent antiSemitism. The potency of this inflammatory strand of folk prejudice, accentuated by the linkage in the popular mind between Jews and Communism in post-1919 Munich, explains why Hitler sought to appropriate the Christian anti-Jewish tradition for his own demagogic ends. It is succinctly summed up in that notorious passage in
Mein Kampf
where he rails, “In defending myself against the Jews I am acting for the Lord [
vollziehe ich das Werk des Herrn
].”
¹⁶
The continuity is equally evident whenever Hitler’s speeches passionately evoked Jesus as “the scourge of the Jews” or praised the “utterance(s) of the great Nazarene,” who had always despised the golden mean, whether in politics or in life.
¹⁷
Small wonder, then, that the Nazis were eager in
the early years to tap into the centuries-old tradition of Christian antiSemitism for electoral purposes and present their doctrines as being compatible with “positive” Christianity. To understand what Hitler meant by this propagandist phrase, it is important to remember that his ideas in the 1920s were strongly influenced by the “spiritual” godfather of Nazism, the Bavarian Catholic journalist Dietrich Eckart, whom he admired as “an outstanding writer and thinker” and to whom
Mein Kampf
was dedicated.
¹⁸
Twenty years older than Hitler, Eckhart had introduced his raw, energetic protégé to Munich society, improved his social graces and his German, reshaping his racist antiSemitism and grooming him for the role of messianic savior of Germany. Eckart had invented the Nazi battle cry “Deutschland Erwache!” (Germany awake!), the title of one of his poems. In 1919, he began publication of the ultranationalist weekly
Auf Gut Deutsch
, which attacked the Treaty of Versailles, Jewish war profiteers, Bolshevism, and social democracy.

Eckart’s eclectic combination of
völkisch
racism with Catholic mysticism and his Manichaean view of the world as a battle between the forces of light and darkness (embodied by Aryan and Jew) appealed strongly to the early Hitler. He looked up to Eckart as a prophet, teacher, and father figure whose services to National Socialism were “inestimable,” and he shared his view that “the Jewish Question is the chief problem of humanity, in which, indeed, every one of its other problems is contained.”
¹⁹
Equally, he shared Eckart’s conviction that Christ’s revelation had been radically distorted by the apostle Paul and overlaid with a cold “Jewish” materialism, from which all social evils had subsequently proceeded.

In post-1918 Germany, the decadent condition of which Eckart compared to that of the late Roman Empire (where “Judaism” under the “cover” of Christianity had first engineered a moral collapse), the situation was perilous in the extreme. The prime causes of “decomposition” were capitalism, Bolshevism, and Freemasonry—three deadly modern agents
of
Verjudung
(judaization).
²⁰
The only salvation for the German
Volk
lay in a fusion of nationalism, socialism, and “positive Christianity,” though this trinity would have to be stripped of any Jewish component and reinterpreted in a fundamentally “antimaterialist” spirit. Eckart died in 1924, but his ambitious pupil later implemented his millenarian program of redemptive antiSemitism to devastating effect.
²¹

By brandishing the slogan of “positive Christianity” and projecting their leader as a deeply religious figure (Hitler’s frequent references to “Divine Providence” made this easier), Nazi Party image makers could suggest that their movement defended traditionalist values, especially against “godless Marxism.” The fervent nationalism that had seized hold of so many German Christians in 1914, and was especially common in Protestant circles, further played into Nazi hands.
²²
Among evangelical Protestants, who in the Weimar Republic remained vulnerable to nationalist appeals, there was a significant minority that became enthusiastic supporters of Nazism. They established their own “Reich Church” under Ludwig Müller, a militarist pastor already known for his hard-line nationalistic sermons and
völkisch
antiSemitism in the 1920s. His Association of German Christians professed “heroic piety” and a virile racism that sought to harmonize belief in Christ with the “blood and soil” doctrines of Nazi ideology.
²³
The German Christians were especially intent on banning marriages between Jews and Germans. But despite Müller’s dogged loyalty to the regime, Hitler remained unimpressed by his efforts.

Among Protestants, only the breakaway
Bekenntnis-Kirche
(Confessing Church)—the strongholds of which were in northern and central Germany—considered Christianity to be manifestly incompatible with the Nazi worldview. These opponents of Nazism were especially exercised by the introduction of an “Aryan” paragraph into doctrines of church life (which removed converts of Jewish origins) and by the demand of German Christians to eradicate the Old Testament
from church teachings.
²⁴
Nevertheless, even in the Protestant opposition a moderate antiSemitism was common enough. The guiding spirit of the Confessing Church, Martin Niemöller, had like many German Protestants originally welcomed Hitler’s rise to power as the beginning of a national revival. He fully shared the anti-Communism of the Nazis and their detestation of the Weimar Republic, which he himself had once branded as “fourteen years of darkness.” Nor was he immune to traditional German Protestant hostility to Jews and Judaism, with its impressive continuity from Martin Luther through the preacher Adolf Stoecker during the Second Reich to the Nazi theologians.
²⁵
The Confessing Church only once raised its voice (in a secret memorandum of 1936 to Hitler) to protest the campaign of hatred against the Jews, as well as the concentration camps and the pervasiveness of the Gestapo.