Nazi Pulpits?

Steigmann-Gall acknowledges that some important Nazis, such as Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, were profoundly anti-Christian and sought to restore the ancient religion of the pagan Germanic tribes. But many others, he argues, considered themselves Christians whose political movement was at least potentially compatible with Christianity. And these Nazis’ effort to fit Christianity to Nazism was, Steigmann-Gall insists, condoned by many Protestant clergy in Germany who supported the so-called “Positive Christianity” movement, which called upon the Protestant churches to eliminate the Old Testament from the Christian canon and project an Aryan Jesus at war with the materialism of the Jews. Hitler himself claimed that the anti-Semitic legislation that culminated in the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 was consistent with Christian principle: “I recognize the representatives of this race as a pestilent for the state and the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of the schools and public functions.”

Although Hitler was baptized a Catholic, he eventually turned on the faith of his parents and presented himself as something of a Protestant until 1937, when out of frustration in his efforts to unify the Christian churches, he initiated a campaign of intimidation and terror to silence his clerical opposition. Deeply distrustful of the Catholic Church, he sought to counter its influence in Germany by creating a church that would transcend the rivalries of the religious denominations and would place loyalty to the Third Reich ahead of any other allegiance. At first he aimed to unite Protestants and Catholics. But once he realized that the Catholic Church was too great an obstacle to the Nazification of the churches, he sought to unite the Protestant churches as a bulwark against Catholicism.

Hitler’s efforts to create a unified Protestant Church were stymied early on when the Reich Synod in April 1933 passed the “Aryan Paragraph,” which demanded the removal of all Christian pastors with Jewish ancestry from their posts. In November the Reich Synod called for the removal of the Old Testament from the church canon.

These actions were opposed by the Catholic Church as well as by Protestant ministers from the German Evangelical churches who subsequently formed the Bekennende Kirche or “Confessing Church.” Many of those who formed the church resistance to Hitler were themselves anti-Semitic. Martin Niemoller, for example, displayed little opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism and in 1935 told his congregation that Jews “bear the curse, and because they rejected the forgiveness, they drag with them as a fearsome burden the unforgiven blood-guilt of their fathers.” As Steigmann-Gall informs us, until the outbreak of war in 1939, when Niemoller volunteered for military service from his prison cell, he made no sign of rejecting this position. In opposing the Aryan Paragraph as a precondition for the establishment of a German national church, dissident clergy, such as Niemoller and Otto Dibelius, took affront not because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but because National Socialism rejected the universal nature of Christianity which sought to convert the non-believer. The Aryan Paragraph, in effect, meant that baptism had no effect when it came to Jews.

Most Nazis who identified themselves as Christian were not interested in doctrinal questions, Steigmann-Gall writes. Rather, they focused on social issues and used biblical passages to reconstruct their image of Jesus and his social message. A large number of Nazis believed that they were following, if not Christian metaphysics, at least Christian ethics. In a speech defending National Socialism against the charge that it was a pagan movement, Josef Goebbels asked, “Is it paganist to mount a winter relief drive, thereby feeding millions of people? Is it paganist to give back to the Volk its inner freedom? . . . Is it paganist to restore the ethos of the family? . . . Is it paganist to erect a state upon moral principles, to expel Godlessness, to purify theater and film from the contamination of Jewish-liberal Marxism?”

Although Steigmann-Gall’s “The Holy Reich” makes a persuasive argument that the “pagan” nature of National Socialism has been overstated, he is less plausible in convincing us that the Nazis were indeed following the tenets of Christianity. By eliminating the Old Testament from the biblical canon, reinventing Jesus as an Aryan, and depicting the struggles of Christ as the archetype of the eternal battle between the Aryan and the Semite–as well as rejecting the efficacy of baptism–the Nazis altered fundamental Christian doctrine.

One needs to ask Steigmann-Gall a series of questions. Do the Nazis’ references to Christianity implicate Christianity in any serious way? Does the fact that many Protestant clergy supported National Socialism make National Socialism a Christian movement? Our own home grown neo-Nazi Aryan Nation also consider themselves Christian. Likewise the Ku Klux Klan in its heyday had the support of a great many Christian clergymen. Does this cause them, in fact, to be Christian? Before making the claim that most Nazis viewed themselves as followers of the gospel, Steigmann-Gall needs to undertake serious theological work to define what makes a Christian a Christian. His failure to do so leaves the reader to conclude that National Socialism was essentially a non-Christian movement that used Christianity to further its genocidal objectives.

Jack Fischel is author of “The Holocaust and Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust.”