German guy
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2010
- Messages
- 5,187
- Reaction score
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- Location
- Berlin, Germany
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Moderate
What a coincidence, religion has a long and violent history of suppressing any form of dissent and alternative authority, too.
Anyway, Hitler was a protestant and the German Evangelical Church supported the Nazi's....
"The Protestant Reich Church, officially The German Evangelical Church (German: Deutsche Evangelische Kirche) and colloquially Reichskirche, was a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism...."
Protestant Reich Church - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's rather obvious that neither Hitler nor the other leading Nazis considered their religious affiliation, if they had any, important enough to make it priority or inspiration for their plans. On the contrary, in Nazi ideology, Christianity was a "semitic slave religion unsuited for the Germanic soul" and was supposed to be replaced on the long run. Himmler i.e. had many plans for reviving old Germanic mythology and/or esoterics, and the other Nazis only paid lip service to Christianity:
They thought Christianity was incompatible with their idea of an unlimited quasi-religious belief in the state which they wanted to implement on the long run, but realized Christian ideas were still too strong within the populace to ignore them. So they did with the Protestant Church in Germany what they did with all other mass institutions too: They attempted to get them on party line. That's why they brought into existence the church of the "German Christians" according to which the old OT Jewish God was not the same God as the NT "Father", but in fact a "desert demon" or even "the devil", and Jesus was made an example for "Arian" bravery and heroism. This main "German Christians" church was supposed to get the Protestants on party line, not vice versa.
Those Protestants who disagreed with the "Germanification" of the Evangelische Kirche formed the Confessing Church, an anti-Nazi Protestant church which disagreed with Nazi ideology.