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The Nazi Party in Power

Nazis and Religion

The consensus vies is that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it. In contrast, Richard Steigmann-Gall is assistant professor of history at Kent Sate University, argues that many in the Nazi movement believed the contours of their ideology were based on a Christian understanding of Germany's ills and their cure. The "positive Christians" waged a struggle with the party's paganists. This was not just a conflict over religion, but over the very meaning of Nazi ideology itself.

Active Nazis from the leadership down to the lower levels of the party were bitterly opposed to the Catholic Church, but had a much more ambivalent attitude to Protestantism and to Christianity in a wider sense. Far from being uniformly anti-Christian, Nazism contained a wide variety of religious beliefs. An enduring legacy of the Protestant Reformation was the division of Germany into fairly distinct regions of religious practice. Roman Catholicism remained the preeminent faith in the southern and western German states, while Protestantism became firmly established in the northeastern and central regions. The unification of Germany in 1871 under Prussian leadership led to the strengthening of Protestantism. Otto von Bismarck sought to weaken Roman Catholic influence through an anti-Roman Catholic campaign, the Kulturkampf, in the early 1870s.

There was not a unified "Nazi view" of Christianity. Some Nazis were pagans, others considered themselves to be Christians, and many shifted their views over time. As for the official position of the regime, there was no evidence of a Nazi plan to rid Germany of all forms of Christianity. Rather, the Nazis planned to eliminate Catholicism and to reshape Protestantism. Indeed, many National Socialists actually considered themselves to be good Christians. They could do so because they rejected the traditions and lines of authority within the existing Protestant and Catholic churches. Freed from hierarchy and tradition, they were able to interpret Scripture according to their own views.

Hitler claimed that his movement had discovered the true meaning of the New Testament. The Old Testament was excluded because it was "Semitic"; God's law was to be identified with racism. Hitler portrayed himself as the prophet of this doctrine, which the Catholic Church had perverted; and the "positive Christianity" to which the program of the Nazi Party referred was meant to heal the confessional divisions between German Catholics and Protestants, and to unite the nation in its fight against the Jews.

Bolstered by some extremely harsh writings by their German hero Martin Luther, the Nazis reformulated biblical teachings to serve their racial doctrine. They elected a hand-picked Reich bishop to unify Protestant Churches into a single new confession of "German Christians" whom they then hoped to exploit. This plan for "positive Christianity" failed, however, because too many conservative Protestant ministers rejected the core values of Nazism. By 1937, it became clear that the Nazis would not be able to construct a single German, Protestant Church.

In the early 1930s, the German Catholic bishops had condemned National Socialism as a "heresy incompatible with Christianity" and forbidden Catholics to become members of the Party. At that time a condemnation of the moral and doctrinal errors of National Socialism was prepared [but not released] by the Holy See. The "hidden encyclical" of Pope Pius XI was couched in terms intelligible to Adolf Hitler, such as the following: "The Church condemns as heretical the opinion that human nature is not essentially the same in all people, but that mankind which now inhabits the earth is composed of races so different from one another that the lowest of them is even further from the highest race than it is from the highest kind of animal that resembles man... The Church condemns the view that any mixture of blood with a foreign and inferior race, in particular a mixture of the Arian with the Semitic race, is, by reason of that mixture alone, a most heinous crime against nature and marks a grave fault in the conscience."

Pius XI (1922-39) and other leading figures in the curial establishment believed that such statements would be interpreted, in Germany, as a declaration of spiritual war. The Führer was sensitive to the nuances of the Vatican's official voice. Ambiguous in his alternations between respect and loathing for the Church, he hesitated to repudiate Christianity. Some in the Vatican saw Hitler as a perfidious enemy of Christianity, others as a Catholic conservative who might be taken at his word.

Pius XI had begun, in March 1933, to take a more positive view of Hitler than previously. Communism -- the worst of threats, in the Vatican's eyes -- was the reason. The Führer was the only figure on the international stage, apart from himself, to stand up to the "world-danger of Bolshevism," and earned the Pope's praise. That praise implied no sympathy for Hitler's other goals or methods. In August of the same year, Pius XI, during a conversation with the British diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, described the "German persecutions of the Jews" as "an offence not only against morality but against civilization." Yet it was with Hitler's government that the Vatican ratified a Concordat one month later.

Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pius XII, as papal nuncio to Bavaria, reported to the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, on November 14, 1923, about Hitler's failed attempt at a putsch in Munich five days earlier. The Nazis, Pacelli stated, had attempted to rouse the rabble against the Church, the Pope, and the Jesuits. A "vulgar and violent campaign" in the popular press, directed by Hitler's followers against Catholics and Jews, was signaled on April 24, 1924.

Pacelli in 1933 negotiated with the government of Nazi Germany the Concordat that would cast, throughout that decade, a shadow on the policy of the Vatican. The senior member of teh German Catholic hierarchy - the infinitely painstaking, incurably anxious, and utterly unimaginative Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau - had urged the Pope, on September 2, 1933, to ratify the Concordat as soon as possible on the grounds (among others) that to fail to do so would worsen the position of the German episcopate. Having condemned National Socialism as heretical, then withdrawn the condemnation, the bishops were rarely capable of facing the Nazi dilemma with unity or decisiveness.

The Nazis had praised the Italian Concordat, prohibiting clerical involvement in politics. But nothing, for Hitler, was guaranteed by the Concordat except a boost to his international prestige. Gleeful at the Vatican's acknowledgment of his government's legitimacy, he ignored the concept of "reciprocity" from the outset. Cardinal Gasparri, then Pacelli's predecessor as secretary of state, added, in what was to become a leitmotiv of caution: "I am of the opinion that Hitler's Party corresponds to nationalist feeling in Germany. Therefore a politico-religious struggle in Germany over Hitlerism ["hitleranismo"] must be avoided at all costs, especially when the Eminent [Cardinal] Pacelli is secretary of state."

After Kristallnacht and a series of repressive measures against Catholics in the Third Reich, the moral and doctrinal grounds for a condemnation had become more urgent and detailed, but Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) hesitated to speak out. Pius XII was informed early on about the massacres taking place on the eastern front, but he publicly condemned neither Nazism nor the persecution of the Jews, nor did he provide refuge. By 1942, the pope "knew and believed a great deal about the exterminations." In 1943, when Germans took control of northern and central Italy and attempted to exterminate the region's Jewish population, the Vatican knew very clearly the magnitude of the genocide. What did Pius XII do to aid Jews during World War II? Despite a persistent myth to the contrary, Pius XII and his assistants at the Vatican did very little on behalf of Jews in Italy, the country where the pope was in a position to be most helpful.

During the Hitler regime, except for individual acts of resistance, the established churches were unable or unwilling to mount a serious challenge to the supremacy of the state. A Nazi, Ludwig Müller, was installed as the Lutheran bishop in Berlin. Although raised a Roman Catholic, Hitler respected only the power and organization of the Roman Catholic Church, not its tenets. In July 1933, shortly after coming to power, the Nazis scored their first diplomatic success by concluding a concordat with the Vatican, regulating church-state relations. In return for keeping the right to maintain denominational schools nationwide, the Vatican assured the Nazis that Roman Catholic clergy would refrain from political activity, that the government would have a say in the choice of bishops, and that changes in diocesan boundaries would be subject to government approval. However, the Nazis soon violated the concordat's terms, and by the late 1930s almost all denominational schools had been abolished.

Toward the end of 1933, an opposition group under the leadership of Lutheran pastors Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed the "Confessing Church." The members of this church opposed the takeover of the Lutheran Church by the Nazis. Many of its members were eventually arrested, and some were executed--among them, Bonhoeffer--by the end of World War II.

In their effort to combat the influence of the Christian churches, whose doctrines were fundamentally at variance with National Socialist philosophy and practice, the Nazi Government proceeded more slowly. The extreme step of banning the practice of the Christian religion was not taken, but year by year efforts were made to limit the influence of Christianity on the German people, since, in the words used by the defendant Bormann to the defendant Rosenberg in an official letter, "the Christian religion and National Socialist doctrines are not compatible."

In the month of June, 1941, the Bormann issued a secret decree on the relation of Christianity and National Socialism. The decree stated that: " For the first time in German history the Fuehrer consciously and completely has the leadership in his own hand. With the Party, its components and attached units, the Fuehrer has created for himself and thereby the German Reich Leadership, an instrument which makes him independent of the Treaty.... More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs, the Pastor. . . Never again must an influence on leadership of the people be yielded to the churches. This influence must be broken completely and finally. Only the Reich Government and by its direction the Party, its components and attached units, have a right to leadership of the people."