“The baby Jesus was Jewish. This was both a problem and a provocation for the Nazis,” explained Judith Breuer, who organised the exhibition using the items she and her mother collected at flea markets over 30 years. “The most popular Christian festival of the year did not fit in with their racist ideology. They had to react and they did so by trying to make it less Christian.”
The regime’s exploitation of Christmas began almost as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933. Party ideologists wrote scores of papers claiming that the festival’s Christian element was a manipulative attempt by the church to capitalise on what were really old Germanic traditions. Christmas Eve, they argued, had nothing to do with Christ but was the date of the winter solstice – the Nordic Yuletide that was “the holy night in which the sun was reborn”.
The swastika, they claimed, was an ancient symbol of the sun that represented the struggle of the Great German Reich. Father Christmas had nothing to do with the bearded figure in a red robe who looked like a bishop: the Nazis reinvented him as the Germanic Norse god Odin, who, according to legend, rode about the earth on a white horse to announce the coming of the winter solstice. Propaganda posters in the exhibition show the “Christmas or Solstice man” as a hippie-like individual on a white charger sporting a thick grey beard, slouch hat and a sack full of gifts.
But the star that traditionally crowns the Christmas tree presented an almost insurmountable problem. “Either it was the six-pointed star of David, which was Jewish, or it was the five-pointed star of the Bolshevik Soviet Union,” said Mrs Breuer. “And both of them were anathema to the regime.” So the Nazis replaced the star with swastikas, Germanic “sun wheels” and the Nordic “sig runes” used by the regime’s fanatical Waffen SS as their insignia.
Housewives were encouraged to bake biscuits in similar shapes. One of the exhibits is a page from a Nazi women’s magazine with a baking recipe: “Every boy will want to bake a sig (SS) rune,” proclaims the accompanying text.
The Nazification of Christmas did not end there. The Christmas tree crib was replaced by a Christmas garden containing wooden toy deer and rabbits. Mary and Jesus became the Germanic mother and child, while dozens of Christmas carols, including the famous German hymn “Silent Night”, were rewritten with all references to God, Christ and religion expunged. At the height of the anti-Christian campaign, an attempt was made to replace the coming of Christ the Saviour with the coming of Adolf Hitler – the “Saviour Führer.”
“We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem,” wrote the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937. “It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion,” he added.
This kind of thing would be a palliative against the historically ignorant who think that Nazism, or fascism in general, is a “right wing” or “Christian” phenomenon. But they won’t read it — it conflicts with what they were taught in government schools.
I’m not aware that anybody ever claimed that the Nazis were particularly Christian. In fact, a lot of the Nazi leadership had publicly broken with Christianity. Hitler, raised a Catholic, didn’t practice as an adult but neither did he explicitly break from the church.
One could argue that Hitler was following and expanding on Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, which was a war on the political power of the Roman Catholic Church.
Part of the problem with evaluating the Nazis attitude to religion is the fact that, in Germany ever since the Protestant Reformation, there was no separation of church and state. German state governments did and do collect a “church tax” which is paid to the registered church of the individual German.
I have heard it. It’s probably said more to people that can be insulted by it. I don’t know if he “explicitly [broke] from the church” but the Nazi position was explicitly and officially that Christianity was a foreign religion to weaken the German people by separating them from their traditional Gods. Wiccan rituals and the Occult were brought back in official fora and both the Lutheran and Catholic sects were persecuted by the Nazis in the same manner as the Jews; the Nazis just started later because so many common Germans were Christian.
I’m not aware that anybody ever claimed that the Nazis were particularly Christian.
Apparently, you don’t get out much.
I have regularly heard the Nazis branded as part of Christianity. This is most often invoked in response to the death toll of Communism, that “organized religion” had killed even more people than Communism, and in particular, that the extermination of the Jews is the result of Hitler following the dictates of Christianity.
Which is not to say that various Christian sects haven’t in the past (and some still) tolerated and even encouraged anti-Semitism.
But it is most often in defense of Communism and its body count that we hear the suggestion that the Holocaust was an outgrowth of Christianity.
Actually, what’s happened here is that Rand has conflated Christians with the political Right, a relatively recent historical association of those two groups in the United States. Historically, Christians have been politically distributed all over the map, with Catholicism generally adhering to Leftish values and Protestantism generally adhering to Rightish values. The phrase “Reagan Democrats” was coined for traditionally left-leaning Christians who crossed the ideological divide to vote for a Republican who had been billed to Christian America as a man with strong Christian values. About the same time the advent of the Moral Majority marked a movement on the part of many left-leaning American Christians from a priority on living the beatitudes to a more conservative defense-and-responsibility narrative.
The Nazis were not particularly Christian; they were particularly German. They employed a daily dose of Nordicism in their propaganda lessons. All things German were good: Lutheranism, Nordicism, Wotanism (mistakenly referred to as Wiccanism in the above post). Nordicism and Wotan became the inspiration for Albert Speer’s architecture, Richard Wagner’s music and parts of Hitler’s war strategy.
The dichotomy between the Hebrew birth of Jesus of Nazareth and the baptism of Gentiles to make them Christians was an invention of Paul. The Romans unwittingly settled the war between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians by killing the (at that time more numerous) Jewish Christians en masse during the siege of Jerusalem by Titus. At the time they didn’t realize that they were crafting Christian theology; they set out only to quell yet another pesky Hebrew uprising.
As for the idea that Christmas began to paper over the Nordic yuletide, that’s preposterous. Christmas began as a replacement of pagan rituals from the Mediterranean rim, as did the traditional drinking of blood from a consecrated animal to reaffirm the connection with one’s god (usually Baal/Pales under a polite nod to the Roman Gods during that time period in the Near East). It took another hundred years to penetrate the Odin/Jupiter/Zeus mythology and pick up the Christmas tree.
Actually, what’s happened here is that Rand has conflated Christians with the political Right
Ummmm…no.
A lot of people have been doing that for decades, but not me.
So a revisionist historian is quoted in a magazine that can’t even spell the guy’s name right (Steigmann with two n’s, per his official biography) saying “Hitler was really a Christian” and everybody’s supposed to man the barricades? It’s barely a squall in a teacup.
Jonathan Card – nobody, not even Steigmann, is claiming that Hitler persecuted Christians. He did continue a policy started under Bismarck of attempting to reduce the political power of the Catholic church.
Lurking – The “organized religion killed more” argument takes into account things like the Crusades and the 30 Years War. In the later event, Germany’s population dropped by half over the course of the war. This does not defend or excuse Communist massacres, merely points out that man is very good at killing.
Anti-Semitism in Europe has a number of causes, but saying that one of them was a perversion of Christian doctrine is pretty uncontroversial.
J. Bradford Stanley – some of the Christian / Jewish dichotomy got started even before Titus. You see in the Gospels as you go from older to newer versions (Matthew to Luke) more of a distinction from “the people” to “the Jews.”
The famous poem “First they came…” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…) was written by a Lutheran pastor when he refused to allow the Nazis to redefine Lutheranism according to Nazi propaganda.
Catholicism was particularly singled out (18% of Polish Catholic clergy was killed on the invasion, many in concentration camps) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians#Nazism). Some have pointed out that because 3 M Catholics were killed in Poland, but 6 M Polish were killed in a majority Catholic country, that this is relevant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism#Nazi_Germany); it is not necessarily meaningful. There is also an (uncited) mention of a Nazi belief that Aryans were inherently Protestant; from the other sources, this should be understood in the light of a severely edited and revisionist understanding of Lutheranism.
Nazis absolutely persecuted Christians; it’s often ignored because, as the population was largely Christian, it wasn’t yet as strong as the persecution of Jews.
Never heard anything about the Nazis being Christians. In fact I heard plenty about their belief in Helena Blavatsky’s Aryan race mumbo jumbo (Theosophy), and their attempts at reviving Germanic Norse mythology. Yet another cult merchandised by an ugly russian woman.
As the Nazis started losing WWII they rediscovered Christianity (in particular Catholicism) and started claiming they were the descendants of the Teutonic Knights crusading against evil Slavs, while the Soviet Union evoked Alexander Nevsky.
AFAIK communists are not supposed to follow any religion, germanic or otherwise, they are supposed to be atheistic.
I’ve heard that early on in the rise to Nazi power they attempted to discredit the Jewish relation to the Christian community. After all there was a fairly sizable number of German Christians they didn’t want to alienate. They claimed that Jesus was not really a Jew. They alleged that the Jews revised history of Jesus to make him Jewish in order to make themselves relevant; oh, those crafty Joos.