To: Brumar89 who wrote (7671 ) 6/20/2010 11:02:20 AM From: Solon Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 69300 secularhumanism.org “it was no accident that the races deemed inferior by Western Christian societies and “science” were the same!” “Roughly two-thirds of Germans were Protestant, almost all of the rest Catholic. The pagan minority claimed at most 5 percent. Explicit nontheism was limited to an intellectual elite and to committed socialists. Just 1.5 percent of Germans identified themselves as unbelievers in a 1939 census, which means either that very few Nazis and National Socialist German Worker’s Party supporters were atheists, or that atheists feared to identify themselves to the pro-theistic regime. Most religious Germans detested the impiety, secularism, and hedonistic decadence that they associated with such modernist ideas as democracy and free speech. If they feared democracy, they were terrified by Communism, to the point of being willing to accept extreme countermethods. Thus it was a largely Christian, deeply racist, often antidemocratic, and in many respects dangerously primitive Western culture into which Nazism would arise. It was a theistic powder keg ready to explode.” “Reich iconography, too, reveals that Nazism never cut its ties to Christianity. The markings of Luftwaffe aircraft comprised just two swastikas—and six crosses. Likewise the Kreigsmarine (German Navy) flag combined the symbols. Hitler participated in public prayers and religious services at which the swastika and the cross were displayed together. Hitler openly admired Martin Luther, whom he considered a brilliant reformer.19 Yet he said in several private conversations that he considered himself a Catholic. He said publicly on several occasions that Christ was his savior. As late as 1944, planning the last-ditch offensive the world would know as the Battle of the Bulge, he code-named it “Operation Christrose.””Official proclamation by Protestant Church leaders of Anhalt, Lubeck, Mecklenburg, Nassau-Hesse, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, and Thuringia, 1941 - “From the crucifixion of Christ to the present day, the Jews have fought Christianity or misused and falsified it in order to reach their own selfish goals. By Christian baptism nothing is altered in regard to a Jew’s racial separateness, his national being, and his biological nature. A German Evangelical church has to care for an further the religious life of German fellow countrymen; racial Jewish Christians have no place of rights in it. “