Freddy, it wasn't me who started claiming that there were links between the Nazis and the Catholic Church. I have read it in several places, but the LAST time I read it, it was in an international news service article wherein the Vatican admitted complicity with the Nazis in France during World War II. This was in 1997, and was the result of a statement by the Vatican. In any event, I am not BUSYING MYSELF making claims at all. As I have said before in discussing this article, the reason the Church was complicit with the Nazis is that the political party opposing the Nazis in France was somehow a threat to the Catholics, and POLITICALLY, it served the interests of the Church to side with the Nazis instead.
Bormann is ONE Nazi. His writings are no more the final authority on anything than anyone else's (especially mine or yours). I have nothing against you or your belief system, either, and as I have said AD NAUSEUM here, whatever beliefs comfort people or make their lives easier, that's great. My interest in religions is more historical and political, and involves these groups as institutions.
But I guess if you are going to post long tracts by Bormann, I'd better bring Professor Hakeem back to somehow balance it all out--equal time and all that.
You have a first class mind, Freddy, and a very strong Christian belief system as well. Do you think maybe your belief system polarizes you, and causes you to overlook history when the political acts of religious groups are involved? I'm sure I polarize things the opposite way, but I am always trying to learn more about what REALLY happened historically, wherever that leads me. For example, I saw the movie "Amistad", and was really moved on an emotional level. It made slavery seem very real, and, of course, horrible. I went into it trying to stay skeptical, however, because I had read some news reports of how teachers were receiving informational packets on the subject, so that they could teach from the movie. It is first of all disturbing to me that children are not being exposed to original source materials to learn, and especially that a movie maker would package his product to schools. So anyway, while the movie evoked an emotional response in me, I still wondered how accurate it all was.
Then I came home and discovered a letter to the editor of our local paper, claiming that "according to the distinguished American historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, Cinque, the hero of 'Amistad,' returned to Africa after being set free and set himself up as a slave trader. (Oxford History of the American People, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 520)
Well, I don't have this book (I bet you do), but it seems credible. In the afterward of the movie, it is simply mentioned that Cinque returned to Africa, and discovered his village had been destroyed, and his wife and child(ren) gone, probably sold into slavery. If it is historically accurate that he became a slave trader, then the movie is misleading on his character in a major, and unethical, way.
Gee, this is rambling, but anyway, back to the Nazis, but trying still to find out what REALLY happened, here are Dr. Hakeem's essays:
Holocaust
Part 4: Catholic Reaction To The Nazi Holocaust
By Michael Hakeem, Ph.D.
The specter of Martin Luther was a haunting presence in Nazism and was in attendance at the Holocaust.
Numerous scholars have taken note of that fact.
For example, Professor Robert J. Wistrich, one of the profoundest students of worldwide anti-Semitism, writes:
"The seed of hatred sown by Luther would reach its horrible climax in the Third Reich when German Protestants
showed themselves to be particularly receptive to Nazi antisemitism."
The Lutheran editor of the American translation of Luther's works comments: "It is impossible to publish Luther's
treatise today . . . without noting how similar to his proposals were the actions of the National Socialist regime in
Germany in the 1930's and 1940's." The Nazis would now and then pay tribute to their mentor by staging an event
on a date or at a place associated with him. They declared, for example, that their first large-scale pogrom against
the Jews in November, 1938 was a pious operation performed in honor of the anniversary of Luther's birthday.
To cite but one more example, the installation of Ludwig MYller as Reich Bishop was conducted with great fanfare
in the church at Wittenberg where Luther had preached. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, names Luther as one of the great
heroes of the German people. The historian, Professor Friedrich Heer, is authority for the knowledge that Hitler "was
prepared to concede that Luther had prepared the way for his own work." He quotes Hitler as saying, as early as
1918: "He saw the Jew as we are only now beginning to see him today." (Ominous.)
What was it that Luther offered that made him so attractive to the Nazis? It was a book-length treatise, On the Jews
and Their Lies, in which he gave expression to his unbridled, not to say utterly maniacal, detestation of Jews, and
which contained more than a hint of genocidal intentions toward them. Luther's vehement attacks on the Jews were
frequently recalled and widely disseminated by the Nazis. The original edition of Luther's loathsome volume was
exhibited in a special glass case at party rallies in Nuremberg.
In page after page of Hitler's ranting against the Jews in Mein Kampf, one soon comes to realize that echoes of
Martin Luther are being heard. Julius Streicher, the chief party ideologist of anti-Semitism, argued in his defense at
the Nuremberg trials that he had never said anything about the Jews that Martin Luther had not said four hundred
years earlier.
No paraphrase or brief excerpts can give the full flavor of the seething hatred with which Luther assailed the Jews. It
has to be read to be believed. He can hardly find words vile enough to describe what he apparently believes are
creatures endowed with very little of human qualities. There is no malevolence, crime, immorality, and depravity he
does not attribute to them. He even resorts to gross obscenities.
Luther is not satisfied merely to mouth all this vitriol. He calls on the civil authorities to implement some hideously
cruel measures against the Jews. He recommends that their synagogues be burned. Their houses should be
destroyed and they should be forced to live like Gypsies under one roof or in a stable. Their prayer books and
Talmuds should be taken away from them. Their rabbis should be forbidden to teach, and they should be killed if
they violate the prohibition. They should not be permitted to travel. They should be deprived of all their cash, silver,
and gold. The young and strong, both men and women, should be forced to do hard, menial labor. If, after all this,
the Christians still feel threatened, the Jews should be expelled from the land.
At times, Luther seems as if he is all but calling for a holocaust: "We are at fault in not slaying them."
In their reaction to the Holocaust, the churches, the clergy, the theologians, and Christians at large had an
opportunity to show if there is substance to their claim that only a Christian presence can yield peace, justice, regard
for the preciousness of every human creature, and universal love. Christians were put to the test by Nazism and the
Holocaust and failed miserably. They predominantly allied themselves with the Nazis, and they remained essentially
silent about the major moral issue that confronted them--the staggering abuse, torture, enslavement, and slaughter of
many millions of men, women, and children for no other reason than that they were Jews. An insignificant number,
mighty or humble, spoke out against it.
One embarks on treacherous waters when seeking the truth on this Germanic nightmare. Unless one has a thorough
knowledge of the vast and ever-increasing relevant research and scholarship one can be fed much disinformation.
Christian apologists are fond of citing this or that instance of resistance to Nazism or of some rescue of Jews as
representative of common practice. Indeed, there were such isolated instances but they were just that.
Most important is the larger picture. What did the churches do officially? Were Christians massively opposed to
what the Nazis were doing? Did important church leaders, aroused by Christian reflex, unhesitatingly and unceasingly
publicly condemn the slaughter of the Jews?
Consider the Catholic Church. Only a few months after Hitler came to power, the Vatican joined him in a Concordat
whereby it agreed to recognize the legitimacy of his regime and to abolish all Catholic political and social
organizations in Germany in return for some concessions to the Church which Hitler proceeded very soon to
disregard.
The Concordat had stifling effects on any possibility of protest, and it served to confirm the propriety of support of
the regime by millions of Catholics. The eagerness with which the Vatican came to terms with the Hitler regime could
be expected from the history of its penchant for "forging diplomatic links with conservative or even fascist regimes
[because] it found most aspects of right-wing regimes congenial," to convey the point in the words of Professor of
History Michael R. Marrus.
Professor Friedrich Heer, in his magnificently researched God's First Love, backs him up, as do many other
historians. Heer gives a lengthy and vivid account of the political leanings (anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic,
anti-enlightenment) of Catholicism and the Church's leaders. It is this that led them swiftly into the Nazi fold and,
once in, kept them from opposing even the extermination of the Jews. Supporting his conclusions with copious
excerpts from Catholic publications, Heer shows the extraordinary support the Church gave the Nazi regime as well
as its wars, which most historians regard as flagrantly aggressive and monumentally unjust. He observes: "Catholic
theologians rightly discovered many affinities between Nazi ideology and Catholicism. . . . Many church papers . . .
became virtually propaganda organs of National Socialism." Heer finds that "the [Catholic] press worked smoothly in
the service of the war propaganda machine."
If Christianity is the only dependable bulwark against human cruelty and depravity, tyranny and unmitigated slaughter,
as its advocates claim, it requires that Christians at least say something against such abhorrences, doesn't it? And
certainly Christians should refrain from participating in them, shouldn't they? As has been said, only a few German
Catholics, high or low, spoke out against the Nazi treatment of the Jews, and large numbers of them participated in
the work of rounding up, transporting, working to death, running the concentration camps, waging the wars, and
executing innocents. Millions of Catholic soldiers, vigorously prodded by their bishops and priests, proudly fought in
Hitler's unjust and rapacious wars. In fact, evidence has been uncovered that some churches checked their birth
records at the request of the government in order to sort out Jews for it.
What about the Pope (Pius XII reigned during most of the era), topmost Roman Catholic, exemplar of Christian
truth and virtue, Vicar of Christ, moral teacher of his flock and of the world, defender of the right, promoter of
unrestricted brotherhood and universal love, and infallible interpreter of every wish and instruction of God? In
statements the likes of which occur in a multitude of objective histories by other scholars, Professor Nora Levin
concludes that the Pope "did not condemn the exterminations or exterminators as such. The Vatican . . . remained
silent through the Holocaust . . . . Appeals were made to the Vatican by Jews in the midst of the Holocaust and
those distant from it. But the hoped-for protest never came."
Appeals to the Pope that he speak out specifically against the genocide of the Jews came from many quarters,
Jewish and non-Jewish. The Pope was immovable. On several occasions, President Roosevelt's personal
representative to the Vatican outrightly requested the Pope to condemn the "incredible horrors" perpetrated by the
Nazis. Immovable. In one try, the President's representative forwarded to the Papal Secretary of State a
memorandum from the Jewish Agency reporting mass executions of Jews in Poland and occupied Russia and
deportations from several nations to the death camps and asked for suggestions as to how world opinion can be
brought to bear so the barbarities would cease. The Secretary replied that it had not been possible to verify that such
measures were being taken against the Jews. Immovable.
Actually there is rather conclusive documentation that the Vatican knew about it very early. After the Allies had
denounced the extermination in December 1942, the United States representative again asked the Papal Secretary
to issue a similar denunciation. The Secretary replied that the Vatican, pursuing a policy of neutrality, could not
protest specific atrocities and could only condemn immoral actions in general. (The highest representative of Christ
on earth was strictly forbidden from speaking out specifically about the slaughter of millions of innocent human
beings.)
There are two bits of evidence that lead to the hypothesis that the reasons given by the Vatican for refusing to object
to the extermination of the Jews were nothing but rationalizations. One is the fact that it had intervened on behalf of
Catholics of Jewish descent. The other is the Vatican's joining in the widespread protest against the euthanasia
program that disposed of Gypsies and other "unfit," a protest that had at least some positive effects.
Millions of human beings throughout history have learned that sometimes it is dangerous to live in Christian countries,
not to mention countries where other religions prevail, especially lethal when religion and government are allied.
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Holocaust
Part 5: The Protestant Reaction To The Nazi Holocaust
By Michael Hakeem, Ph.D.
Going by what the Christian clergy teach about the virtues that the faith inspires, Nazism, Hitler's wars, and the
Holocaust should not have been possible. Not only did they occur, but with insignificant and wavering exceptions,
neither theologians, clergy, nor ordinary Christians as individuals, nor churches as corporate bodies, objected. In fact
they overwhelmingly supported them. Look at three of the most distinguished German Protestant
theologians--Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanual Hirsch. These men were highly respected, extremely erudite,
uncommonly productive, and internationally known professors, each at a different, first-class university.
Professor Robert P. Erickson did an unusually comprehensive investigation of the three theologians' writings,
utterances, and activities as they pertain to Nazism and the Jewish Question. He reports his findings in a book,
Theologians Under Hitler. If anyone should know whether submission or opposition is demanded of the followers
of the living Christ when confronted with a regime as totally reprehensible as that of the Nazis, surely it would be
these theologians.
What conclusions did Erickson reach as to the stance of the three men who would be expected to exemplify the
ultimate in the embodiment of those noble values that millions of Sunday school children are taught attach to Christian
folk? They are grim:
"They each supported Hitler openly, enthusiastically, and with little restraint." In fact, they deemed it the Christian
thing to do. They "saw themselves and were seen by others as genuine Christians acting upon genuine Christian
impulses." Furthermore, all three tended "to see God's hand in the elevation of Hitler to power." Hirsch was a
member of the Nazi party and of the SS. The Nazi state, he said, should be accepted and supported by Christians as
a tool of God's grace. To Althaus, Hitler's coming to power was "a gift and miracle of God." He taught that "we
Christians know ourselves bound by God's will to the promotion of National Socialism."
Kittel and a group of twelve leading theologians and pastors issued a proclamation that Nazism is "a call of God,"
and they thanked God for Adolf Hitler. Kittel was a party member and he himself proudly claimed that he was a
good Nazi. He explains that he did not join it as a result of pressure or for pragmatic reasons but because he
concluded that the Nazi phenomenon was "a v”lkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foundation." He
accorded Christianity a place of honor in Nazi Germany precisely because of its position on the Jewish Question. He
said he was speaking for other theologians too when he maintained that agreement with state and Fhrer was
obedience to the law of God.
These theologians were drenched in anti-Semitism. For example, throughout the whole of the Nazi era, Kittel's
writings, Erickson has determined, "correspond to and support Nazi politics, including all of the policies on the
Jewish question, with the possible exception of genocide," but one is led to wonder. He never spoke out against
extermination. Indeed, he actually propounded what was purported to be a theologically solid Christian justification
for the oppression of the Jews, whom he referred to as "refuse."
Kittel discusses what he deems to be the only four options for dealing with the Jews. He rejects extermination but
not at all because of humanitarian motivation but because he thinks it does not work. In fact, he warns against
"so-called" Christian sensitivity, saying the faith is not weak sentimentality but a strong, principled anti-Jewish force.
His solution is to strip Jews of German citizenship and make them "guests." He would deprive them of civil rights,
debar them from the professions, keep them from marrying Germans, prohibit them from teaching Germans, and
impose on them other disadvantages and hardships.
All this still gives only a meager sample of the abominations these men spawned. Erickson concludes that they "were
not isolated or eccentric individuals .E.E.E. Their assumptions, their concerns, and their conclusions represent a
position that must have been common to many professors, theologians and pastors in Germany. They were not
extremists." The largest middle group in the churches, Erickson observes, "probably held views resembling those of
Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch."
From one fact alone, noted by Richard Grunberger, and confirmed by numerous historians, it is possible to learn that
the Protestant churches remained shrouded in silence while the Nazis were massively tormenting, torturing,
imprisoning, deporting, enslaving and killing the Jews: "The Confessional Church of Prussia was the only Christian
body in the twelve-year history of the Third Reich to protest publicly against the unspeakable outrages inflicted upon
the Jews."
The other extreme has been noted by the historians Rubenstein and Roth: "Of all the churches of Europe during the
period 1933-45, none was as silent or as indifferent to the known fate of the Jews, when it did not actively support
National Socialist antisemitic politics, as was the German Lutheran Church."
One hears much about the "Church Struggle" in Nazi Germany. The very term suggests, and some unscrupulous,
pious pretenders seek to persuade the world, that there was a mighty battle by the churches fought against the evils
of Nazism and that some courageous Protestant leaders opposed the Hitlerian plan to annihilate all the Jews. That
was not the Church Struggle. It was rather, as one writer put it, "the struggle of the church against the church for the
church." The apologists misleadingly portray a handful of "heroes" and "martyrs" of this struggle as fearless fighters
against the regime. In fact, the Church Struggle was fought out within the churches and was not in opposition to the
Nazi regime as such and certainly not to its anti-Jewish policies.
The struggle was waged between a union of a number of regional Protestant churches, known as "German
Christians" (it called itself the SA of Jesus) which was unreservedly committed to the support of the Nazi government
and its anti-Jewish policies, and the "Confessing Church," a body within the larger Evangelical Church (Lutheran and
Reformed), which was established particularly to oppose the "Aryan Paragraph." This was a law by which the state
sought to prohibit the baptism of non-Aryans (almost entirely Jews, of course) and to prohibit non-Aryans from
being pastors or holding other positions in the churches. The German Christians wholeheartedly adopted the Aryan
Paragraph as church law. The Confessing Church was opposed to it.
That was at the core of the Church Struggle. The Confessing Church opposed the restriction against Christianized
Jews because it went against scriptural doctrine, and it objected to the state's interference with the churches'
self-regulation. Courageous as they were for what they did, the three leaders of the Confessing Church--Pastor
Martin Niem”ller and theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth--still merit no more than one cheer because of
the narrowness of their concern and particularly, as will be seen, because of their irrepressible anti-Semitism. In
founding the Confessing Church, pains were taken to emphasize that it was as politically loyal to the state as were the
German Christians and that it was not criticizing the measures taken by the Nazi state which it acknowledged must
"bear the sword."
The Barmen Declaration of Faith, which is a statement of principles of the Confessing Church, composed mainly by
Karl Barth, says nothing about the Jewish Question. It was Jews who had become Christians that the Church was
concerned about. In the words of Professor John S. Conway: "The Confessing Church did not seek to espouse the
cause of the Jews as a whole, nor to criticize the secular legislation directed against the German Jews and the Nazi
racial philosophy." Further confirmation is provided by the latest, most comprehensive research on the matter,
Victoria Barnett's For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler, published in 1992: "For the
mainstream Protestant church and even within most of the Confessing Church, the question of church advocacy on
behalf of non-Christians Jews did not even arise."
So it was not Jews the Confessing Church was interested in but Christians. It insisted that baptized Jews were no
longer Jews; the state and the German Christians insisted that once a Jew always a Jew, even after baptism.
The "heroes" of the Confessing Church had strong antipathy toward Jews who refused to become Christian. Pastor
Niemsller's opposition to the Aryan Paragraph reflected more a concern for the church's independence from the
government than humane consideration for those affected by the policy. He said, in effect, that defending the
Christian Jews was a bitter pill that people had to swallow despite what they had to put up with from the Jews. He
referred to their "dark and sinister history of this people which can neither live nor die because it is under a curse
which forbids it to do either." The curse was imposed because they "brought the Christ of God to the cross."
Bonhoeffer saw in the Nazi atrocities proof of God's curse on the Jews. "The church of Christ," he said, "has never
lost sight of the thought that the 'chosen people,' who nailed the redeemer of the world to the cross, must bear the
curse for its action through a long history of suffering." Bonhoeffer, in his lectures of 1934, recommended that the
Jews should never be expelled from Europe. They should remain there so they can serve as exemplification of divine
wrath.
Barth was a rarity. From the beginning, he had no illusions about the nature of National Socialism, and he saw that it
was not possible to compromise with it. He was outspoken, and unlike the overwhelming majority of his theological
colleagues, he condemned the persecution of the Jews. In 1935 he emigrated to Switzerland. Barth would have
received more than one cheer here for his courage had he been able to disavow his Christian anti-Semitism, but he
could not. In 1942 he taunted the Jews for not subscribing to his religion: "There is no doubt that Israel hears; now
less than ever can it shelter behind the pretext of ignorance and inability to understand. But Israel hears--but does not
believe." In 1949 he continued to insist that the fate of the Jews' under Hitler was "a result of their unfaithfulness."
The clergy will contend that the Holocaust happened because the Germans and the Nazis were "not real Christians."
But renowned theologians in Germany believed that Nazism and its pogroms and programs were the will of God.
The unreasoning clergy don't seem to realize what a devastating blow it is to the coherence of Christianity to admit
that there is no agreement on what is and what is not Christian.
Michael Hakeem, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin--Madison.
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