← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Hilaire Belloc
Thread ID: 13944 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2004-05-29
2004-05-29 00:36 | User Profile
Jesus is a linchpin of our history...the God of the Europeans. -- Alfred Rosenberg(n1)
IN June 1937, a thirteen-year-old boy by the name of Fritz Brüggemann wrote Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS and head of the German police, asking for some theological advice. Himmler, a leading "neopagan" in the Nazi movement, had formally left the Catholic Church in 1936, but had been lost to Christianity years before. Fritz Brüggemann had also left his church, which meant that he, like Himmler, formally went by the designation gottgläubig (literally "believing in God"). Those designated as "believing in God" did not just avoid church taxes; they were also making a statement about their rejection of Germany's two confessions and their interest in a new völkisch alternative. Still, for this young Hitler Youth squad leader from Schönebeck, a speech on religion delivered to his troop was causing him concern. He was not sure if he had heard correctly, but he thought he understood the speaker to say that Jesus had been a Jew. He wrote to see if the Reichsführer-SS could perhaps enlighten him on this question. He received a reply from Rudolf Brandt, Himmler's personal assistant and a leading figure in his entourage. "The Reichsführer is of the opinion" wrote Brandt, "that Christ was not a Jew. You must certainly have misunderstood the speaker."(n2)
It is puzzling enough that this Hitler Youth supposed Jesus to have been a Gentile, and expressed anxiety that he may have in fact been Jewish; even more surprising is that Himmler, one of the leading antagonists of Christianity in the party, assured him that Christ was of acceptable racial stock. Why would this committed opponent of the Christian religion, an unmitigated anti-Semite who personally oversaw the organization of the Final Solution, feel the need to protect the founder of this religious system from the indisputable reality of his Jewishness? Is it possible he wanted to spare the feelings of a young boy who had a lingering attachment to his Christian faith? This possibility is made less likely by an internal SS memorandum of 28 June, issued two weeks after Brandt's response, in which Himmler decreed: "In ideological training I forbid every attack against Christ as a person, since such attacks or insults that Christ was a Jew are unworthy of us and certainly untrue historically."(n3) He then added: "I desire that SS men be convinced of the worth of our own blood and our past, through knowledge of the actual history of our Volk, the prehistory of our Volk, the greatness and culture of our ancestors, so that they will totally root themselves in the value of the past, present, and future" Not only the person of Christ, but apparently Christianity as a part of German history, was to be respected in the SS.
If Germany's Christian past was to be valued, what about its Christian present? How could an attack on Christianity and the churches, which Nazi pagans like Himmler and Rosenberg were apparently so eager to see carried out, be reconciled with a respect for the Jew Jesus and his religious legacy? What might this tell us about the religious system that pagans hoped would eventually replace Christianity? Were there aspects of Christianity that pagans even admired? And what does this tell us about the lineages of pagan thought? Were Himmler's views on Christ, in other words, a product of his own idiosyncratic thinking, or were there intellectual precedents upon which he could draw? In this article, I will revisit the views of the Nazi movement's leading "pagans" (hereafter referred to as "paganists") in order to explore the possibility that they were not nearly as anti-Christian as has long been supposed. An exploration of their religious views, both their attacks on the Christian religion and their attempts to fashion a replacement faith, will demonstrate that their opposition to Christianity was characterized by tension and ambiguity. Even as they sought to edge the churches out of Germany's public life, they displayed clear limits to their apostasy.
Early works on church and state in the Third Reich, while generally painting a picture of ecclesiastical resistance to the paganism and anticlericalism of the movement, also drew a picture of nearly unqualified Nazi opposition to Christian institutions and Christian teachings.(n4) Within the past twenty years or so, more probing works have emerged examining churches and prominent Christians, especially Protestant, who were acquiescent to or even supportive of the Nazi movement.(n5) We now know that broad sections of Christian opinion were indeed enamored of Nazism. But however penetrating these recent works have been, they are in general agreement that, no matter how pro-Nazi certain Christians may have been, the Nazis themselves, or at the very least the leadership cadre of the movement, remained at best disinterested in Christianity, and at worst actively hostile. The strident anticlericalism of paganist leaders like Rosenberg and Himmler is often regarded as sufficient evidence that the Nazis were going to destroy the Christian churches at the opportune moment.(n6) It is commonly supposed that only Germany's defeat in World War Two spared the churches from a fate potentially as horrible or as total as that of the Jews.
Intellectual history is another field where connections between Christianity and National Socialism have been pondered, and the relationship deemed -- from the Nazi point of view -- at best nonexistent and at worst adversarial. Some forty years ago, Fritz Stern suggested in his classic study The Politics of Cultural Despair that Nazi paganism could trace its ideological origins back to apostate German intellectuals, who sought to create a new national religion "which hid beneath pious allusions to ... the Bible a most thoroughgoing secularization. The religious tone remained, even after the religious faith and the religious canons had disappeared."(n7) George Mosse, in his The Nationalization of the Masses, made a similar argument, stating that Nazi paganists, like their intellectual "forefathers" poured a new secular wine into the old Christian bottles: "For the National Socialist this basic form could not be abandoned, but should simply be filled with a different content."(n8)
We know from more recent scholarship that in fact much of the völkisch content of Nazi paganist thought found a receptive home among particular varieties of Protestant belief, well before the arrival of Nazism and even before the turn of the century. As Wolfgang Altgeld demonstrates in his recent monograph, ideas of national religion had found resonance within Protestant circles as early as the Wars of Liberation.(n9) Arguably, völkisch thought had emerged within established Protestantism by World War One: as Wolfgang Tilgner and Robert Ericksen have observed, the particular theological construct of Schöpfungsglaube, a departure within mainstream German Lutheranism, presaged the same kinds of völkisch theories for which the Nazis would later become infamous.(n10) But as with the literature on the churches under Nazism, we have an incomplete coupling. Whereas Nazism's direct or indirect indebtedness to Christianity is claimed in terms of intellectual precedents, this literature has not widened its scope further to reconsider the question of whether the Nazis themselves may have recognized this debt.
This discrepancy is particularly evident in scholarship on anti-Semitism the third major locus of inquiry where we see a discussion of the relationship between Christianity and Nazism. The question of the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism has of course garnered a vast and still-growing literature.(n11) The longstanding question about the influence of Christian anti-Semitism on later racial -- or Nazi -- anti-Semitism has recently been the topic of renewed and intense disagreement.(n12) A growing number of historians are beginning to rethink earlier assumptions that religious anti-Semitism played no part in the formation of its racialist counterpart. For instance, Peter Pulzer writes in the new introduction to his classic study on the subject: "I am more strongly convinced than I was when I wrote the book that a tradition of religiously-inspired Jew hatred ... was a necessary condition for the success of anti-Semitic propaganda, even when expressed in nonreligious terms and absorbed by those no longer religiously observant."(n13) While this rethinking is gaining currency in recent scholarship, it has suffered from an important drawback: it almost never takes the Nazi elite into account, since their views are usually regarded as providing proof that the movement was anti-Christian. Convinced of Nazism's ideological indebtedness to Christian anti-Semitism, scholars like the theologian Richard Rubenstein concur that the Nazi movement was nonetheless anti-Christian, based again on the statements of Nazis themselves. Unable to overcome this empirical stumbling block, Rubenstein can only argue that the movement as a whole was paradoxical, an argument with which empirically-minded historians strongly disagree.(n14) Among the questions this article will explore is the meaning of Christian anti-Semitism for Nazi paganists, and whether they may indeed have recognized the intellectual indebtedness that Rubenstein insists upon.
In what follows, attention is paid to three of the most important figures of Nazi paganism: Rosenberg, Himmler, and Erich Ludendorff, the famous general who became the most recognizable of Nazis in the movement's early years. While there were others in the Nazi leadership no less anticlerical than these, such as Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann, they were not representative of paganist thinking. In fact, not only were Goebbels and Bormann disinterested in devising a new religion, they also openly ridiculed those who were. By contrast, Rosenberg and Himmler both spilt considerable ink attempting just this. So too did Ludendorff -- and his wife Mathilde von Kemnitz -- even though he had been expelled from the party by the time of the seizure of power in 1933. However, while this study focuses on elites, it does not presume a "top down" theory of intellectual history; nor does it argue that these paganists were bona fide intellectuals in their own right. As has been pointed out elsewhere, paganists were by no means the dominant religious voice in Nazism; they were more likely to suffer rebuke from other leaders of the party, not only from Goebbels and Bormann, but also from Göring and Hitler himself.(n15) Rather, the choice of revisiting these "high priests" of paganism rests with their status as ideological arbiters of their movement. As Ian Kershaw points out in a slightly different context, zealous Nazis existed in all ranks of the party, but only those who displayed ideological commitment by "working towards the Führer" could achieve elite status.(n16) In the same way, when paganists lower down the ranks of the party came into conflict with the paganist "leadership" that leadership would prevail by dint of its overall power position. According to the logic of Nazi meritocracy, its closer proximity to Hitler had already demonstrated the purity of their ideological position. In other words, the choice of these individuals is not based on the presumption that they were the greatest intellects of the paganist movement, but rather that they ranked among the most powerful Nazis who were paganist. As an inquiry into Nazi ideology, this is not an exegetical focus on these individuals' own ideas; I do not ascribe the invention of paganist ideology to this leadership, but rather its articulation.
Erich Ludendorff was arguably the first paganist of the Nazi movement and easily the most recognizable of all early Nazis. After his abdication of his duties at the end of World War One, Ludendorff almost immediately became involved in the völkisch movement. It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the men most responsible for Germany's surrender would become a leading propagandist of the "stab-in-the-back" legend (Dolchstosslegende) almost immediately thereafter. Ludendorff took part in the failed Kapp Putsch of 1920, shortly afterward becoming a figurehead of the Nazi movement and taking part in the failed Hitler Putsch of 1923. During Hitler's brief imprisonment, Ludendorff attempted a takeover of the NSDAP with a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP), which fought with another splinter group, Julius Streicher's Greater German Peoples' Community, for the mantle of Nazism.(n17)
It was during this time that Ludendorff attempted to turn Nazism into an explicitly paganist religious movement.(n18) As part of this agenda, Ludendorff proclaimed the need for a complete divorce from Christianity. According to his adjutant Wilhelm Breucker, in 1924 "Ludendorff charged Hitler with having expressly based the party on positive Christianity in his program, and sought to demonstrate to him with biblical quotations that Christianity was and by nature had to be the sharpest opponent of every völkisch movement."(n19) Ludendorff's anti-Christian ideology was strongly influenced by his second wife, Mathilde yon Kemnitz. The daughter of a theologian and one of the very few woman neurologists of her day, von Kemnitz came to hate everything associated with Christianity, creating in its place a philosophy she called Deutsche Gotterkenntnis (The German Perception of God). As early as 1920, von Kemnitz had attempted to infuse the Nazi movement with her paganistic religious views, but had received a "brusque rejection" from Hitler, "to whom her ideas and teachings seemed like confused delusions."(n20) In Ludendorff, however, she found a more receptive audience. He used his power in the NSFP to bring Kemnitz into prominence, and at a NSFP party conference held in August 1924, the Ludendorffs attempted to impose their religious views. The main speech of the conference was read by von Kemnitz, who insisted on the centrality of a new religion for the Nazi movement that was anti-Christian in tone.(n21) Like her husband, she believed that behind the international powers of Marxism, Catholicism, capitalism, and freemasonry, the Jews were at work. But even the Jews were tools of another force -- namely the Dalai Lama, who sought to destroy Germany from faraway Tibet.(n22) This fantasy was too much even for Alfred Rosenberg, who later wrote that Kemnitz "made world history into an affair of mere secret conspiracies."(n23)
With Hitler's release from prison, the NSFP was disbanded and Ludendorff was increasingly marginalized, especially after the latter's disastrous showing in the 1925 presidential elections. In the same year Ludendorff founded the Tannenberg League (Tannenbergbund) as an exclusively mystical-religious sect. Hitler had a well-known contempt for any attempt to turn his political movement into a religious revival, regardless of the religion. When one of his earliest and truest followers, the ultrasectarian Artur Dinter, attempted just this, Hitler had him expelled. The same was true for völkisch paganists, either those residing in the National Socialist Party or in rival parties. Well into the Third Reich, Hider mocked Himmler in his circle of confidants: "What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind, and now he wants to start that all over again ... To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint!" Whereas Himmler attacked Charlemagne as an agent of Christianity against the pagan-Germanic tribes of ancient Saxony, Hider declared: "Killing all those Saxons was not a historical crime, as Himmler thinks. Charlemagne did a good thing in subjugating Widukind and killing the Saxons out of hand. He thereby made possible the empire of the Franks and the entry of Western culture into what is now Germany."(n24) Hider was equally dismissive of Himmler's forays into German prehistory: "Isn't it enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds."(n25) According to Albert Speer, "Goebbels, with Hider, took the lead in ridiculing Himmler's dreams, with Himmler himself adding to the comedy by his vanity and obsessiveness."(n26) Hider even approached Himmler himself in 1935, fully rejecting the founding of a new religion, calling it a "chimera." But rather than attack Himmler frontally, he took the indirect route of attacking Himmler's paganist ally Rosenberg, stating that he intended to take action against Rosenberg's epic Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts.(n27) It was not just for public consumption, then, that Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:
The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull's horns over their bearded heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack.(n28)
Two years after this passage was written, Hider expelled Ludendorff from the NSDAP. He additionally forbade members of the Nazi Party to enter the Tannenberg League.(n29) Undeterred, the Ludendorffs continued along their religious path. In 1931, Mathilde wrote a book titled Erlösung von Jesu Christo (Redemption from Jesus Christ), which sought to replace Jesus with a pantheistic adoration of nature. In it, and in her other writings of the period, Jesus was portrayed as an abhorrent alcoholic who did not even die on the cross. In this account, the Bible was a Jewish fraud that destroyed every völkisch impulse toward racial purity. Christians, often innocently unaware of the consequences, were propagating a faith that would lead to the destruction of Germany.(n30) The search for God was not to lead to Christ, but rather to the German countryside, to a divine "blood and soil": "Because the entire world is permeated with God's soul, the German plants and animals are not soulless, like the servants of Yahweh."(n31) Here was a literal deification of Germany, the soil and mountains of the fatherland, which church historians of the Nazi period have often regarded as emblematic of general Nazi thinking.
But if the Ludendorffs represented a clear break with, and attack upon, Christianity, for Erich Ludendorff at least the transformation was not without its ambiguity. While Christian doctrine and metaphysics were clearly rejected, Ludendorff displayed a feverish sectarian obsession reflective of a distinctly Protestant upbringing. In 1923 Ludendorff suggested there could be no compromise "in the struggle of the Christian-Germanic worldview against the three Internationals."(n32) In this context, Christianity and Deutschtum did not apparently contradict each other, at least not yet. At his putsch trial in February 1924, Ludendorff attributed Germany's malaise not only to Marxism and Judaism, which corrupted the German people "physically, racially, and morally" but also to "political Catholicism" and ultramontanism, which he blamed for the destruction of the Kaiserreich as well.(n33) At this time, however, Ludendorff offered no comparable attack on Protestantism. Instead, he made more than one reference to Germany's "Protestant Dynasty" for which he had fought loyally in the Great War, and which he accused political Catholicism and Bavarian particularism of trying to destroy.(n34)
That same year Ludendorff laid out his feelings on the Protestant faith in an extended interview. He was, for the moment, turning away from his struggle against Bolshevism to fight the "Roman Church," which was attempting to conquer northern Germany: "The black threat in Germany has become greater than the red." Ludendorff asserted that he had done his best to rouse the Protestant Church of north Germany to this danger, but with little effect. He emphasized that Prussia was the bulwark of Protestantism in Germany: "indeed, the world has received Protestantism from Prussia" However, since the return of the Jesuits to Germany after the failed revolution, the Catholic Church was making "terrible inroads" into the Protestant Church.(n35) Here Ludendorff was being both critical and sympathetic. While he lamented that the Protestant Church in his view was not sufficiently anti-Catholic, he nonetheless betrayed his belief that, by nature, it should be. Instead of blaming the state of affairs on a weakness of Protestantism, he pointed to the organizational strength of international Catholicism: "In contrast to the situation of the Protestant Church in northern Germany, the Catholic Church of southern Germany is extremely organized and well financed, and under the leadership of Rome has opened a determined but secret conversion campaign." The danger for Ludendorff was clear: if nothing were done to reverse the process, then Protestants would flock to the Catholic fold, making the entire nation once again Catholic.(n36)
Such statements do not prove that Ludendorff was a theologically committed Christian. But they display an unmistakable sectarianism derived from a Protestant identity and upbringing. Instead of rejecting Protestantism as merely another Christian faith, Ludendorff defends it as a standard-bearer of Germany's national struggle against insidious internationalism. However, by castigating the lethargy of the Protestants in response to the Catholic "threat," Ludendorff overstated the case. Many Protestants, especially those in the Protestant League (Evangelischer Bund, or EB), saw the Catholic danger in much the same way as Ludendorff. They even depicted Ludendorff as a Protestant warrior fighting Catholicism's supposedly ongoing Counter-Reformation. A speaker at one EB event referred to the failed Beer Hall Putsch in the following terms: "The pillar Ludendorff threw himself against the sea of the Counter-Reformation. On the 9th of November Ludendorff behaved like a true German and a convinced Protestant ... For us Protestants it is most painful that on 9 November 1923 the Protestant [Bavarian state commissioner] Kahr worked against the realization of the Protestant, Greater German State."(n37)
Catholics also tended to see Ludendorff this way. To a writer in the Augsburger Postzeitung, it was no coincidence that Ludendorff descended from Lutheran pastors. As a Prussian Protestant, he was considered "predestined" to join the Protestant League in opposition to Catholic Bavaria.(n38) A contributor to the Bayrischer Kurier picked up on this relationship as well, suggesting that the Protestant League wanted "to wage its religious-political struggle against Rome with the help of the völkisch party movement, because it is quite firmly convinced of the intrinsic similarity of its own worldview to the worldview of [this] movement." The paper suggested that both came together in the name of Ludendorff.(n39) In the Allgemeine Rundschau it was pointed out that Ludendorff was born in the frontier territory of Posen: "There, to be German is to be Protestant, and to be Polish is to be Catholic ... A sensitive national feeling [is] intimately tied with confessional tradition. Catholicism, the faith of the subjugated foreign people, is despised." Then came a revealing parallel: "Ludendorff is thus a type of Ulsterman, something of a German Carson."(n40)
The same year that he was expelled from the NSDAP, Ludendorff formally left the Protestant Church. In a letter to church authorities, he declared that he no longer believed in the Protestant religion. But perhaps more important was his resentment that the anti-ultramontanist and antimasonic campaign was insufficiently championed by his church.(n41) Given his attack on Hitler for supposedly going to Canossa, we can safely discount his polemic against the Protestant establishment as equally inflated. Nonetheless, in return for feeling snubbed by the church, Ludendorff would later profess his disgust that Protestant pastors, "who were supposed to be especially 'national'," could read from psalms full of reference to Zion, Yahweh, and Jerusalem.(n42)
Perhaps the most important paganist in the Nazi Party was Alfred Rosenberg. More than any other National Socialist, Rosenberg had pretensions to becoming the movement's great intellect and official ideologue. Early scholars of Nazism, taking Rosenberg's self-promotion at face value, greatly overestimated the importance of his ideas for the movement as a whole.(n43) The sheer volume of published works and administrative paperwork produced by Rosenberg and his orifices lent weight to this impression. Karl Dietrich Bracher came somewhat closer to gauging Rosenberg's true influence when he described him as "the administrative clerk of National Socialist ideology."(n44) But even in his role as "protector" of the Nazi worldview, Rosenberg encountered resistance and ultimate defeat at the hands of rival offices within the Nazi Party and state, thus throwing into doubt the hegemony of his ideas.(n45)
By far the most important of Rosenberg's many books was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (The myth of the twentieth century), published in 1930.(n46) It is still regarded by and large as the leading anti-Christian manifesto of the Nazi movement. Significantly, it was published as a private work, never becoming an official guide to Nazi thinking like Mein Kampf It never received the official stamp of the NSDAP, nor did the party's official publisher publish it. Given the fate that awaited Dinter and Ludendorff when they tried to make their religious views official party doctrine, Hitler would not have countenanced its publication by the official Nazi publishing house. Indeed, in the same book that put forth a new religious doctrine, Rosenberg felt compelled to assure his reader that he was not trying to resurrect a dead religion and that it should not be Nazi policy to engage in religious matters (pp. 5-7). Most of Rosenberg's opponents in the churches assumed that it was nonetheless the true guide to Nazi thinking -- some even supposing it was more influential in the NSDAP than Hitler's own book.(n47) In fact, many party members ignored it, as Rosenberg himself would later discover.(n48)
Mythus obviously represented the views of Rosenberg himself. Since he remained a "Reich Leader" throughout the course of the party's existence, and belonged to a sizable cadre of Nazi paganists, the views found in the book are worth our consideration. Speaking of the need to create a new religion, Rosenberg proclaimed: "Today a new faith is awakening: the myth of blood, the faith that the divine essence of mankind is to be defended through blood; the faith embodied by the fullest realization that Nordic blood represents the mystery which has supplanted and surmounted the old sacraments" (p. 114). This new religion would place the highest value in the idea of racial honor, which could "endure no equivalent center of power of any type, neither Christian love nor freemasonic humanism nor Roman dogmatism" (p. 514). This Christian "brotherhood of man" was nothing less than an attempt to allow Jew and "Turk" to take precedence over the European. In the name of Christian love, Europe was besieged by unrest and chaos: "Thanks to preachings on humanity and the equality of all peoples, every Jew, Negro, and Mulatto can be a full citizen of a European state" (p. 203). When the Nordic states of Europe were overwhelmed by the Roman south, the concept of honor was overtaken by that of Christian love: "Christianity ... did not know the idea of race and nationality, because it represented a violent fusion of different elements; it also knew nothing of the idea of honor, because in pursuance of the late Roman quest for power it subdued not only the body, but also the soul" (pp. 155-56).
Rosenberg also rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin: "The sense of sin always goes together with physical and racial crossbreeding. The abominable mixing of races creates ... inner uncertainty and the feeling that our whole existence is sinful." The Romans had been racially aware, according to Rosenberg, and so could only reject this Christian crossbreeding: "Everything still imbued with the Roman character sought to defend itself against the rise of Christianity, all the more because it represented, next to its religious teaching, a completely proletarian-nihilistic political trend" (p. 71). Rosenberg was also opposed to the Trinity, which he believed overlooked the spirituality of racial nationalism and led to the "nihilism" implicit in the biblical expression of Paul: "Here is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither man nor woman." This nihilism led to the purposeful destruction of Greek and Roman civilizations as culturally worthless. Another Christian doctrine rejected by Rosenberg was the "dogmatization" of the birth of the Virgin Mary, which was regarded as a negation of nature. In addition, he also attacked the biblical emphasis on the resurrection (pp. 77-78).
Hence we have a near total denunciation of Christian doctrines. As another of Rosenberg's biographers put it: "If we accept that the basic Christian beliefs are that Jesus Christ was God, that through His death and resurrection man is redeemed from original sin and that the soul survives the death of the physical body, it is clear that Rosenberg was no Christian."(n49) But if Rosenberg was not himself a Christian, how opposed to Christianity was his new religion? Here we are confronted with even more ambiguity than in the case of Ludendorff. For in spite of Rosenberg's denunciation of Christianity's history and his desire to build a new racialist faith, time and again he excluded the most important figures of the Christian faith --Jesus most importantly -- from his attacks, and upheld another Christian, the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, as the inspiration of his new belief system. Indeed, as we shall see, in the Mythus Rosenberg ultimately argued that Christianity itself could be reformed and saved from the "Judeo-Roman" infections of its clerical representatives.
Unlike the Ludendorffs, Rosenberg believed that Jesus had been an Aryan. Here he followed his most important mentor, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had maintained that "in all probability" Jesus had not been a Jew.(n50) In Mythus, Rosenberg affirmed his belief that whereas Jesus was born into a Jewish culture, "there was not the slightest reason" to assume that Jesus was Jewish. Christ's teaching that the kingdom of heaven is within us was a "thoroughly un-Jewish, mystical teaching" (p. 76). The traditional, ecclesiastical picture of Jesus had actually been a distortion of the Roman Church to present a picture of submission and meekness, in order to create an ideal that would foster servility. In its place Rosenberg called for a new, manly image of Christ: "Today Jesus appears to us as the self-confident Lord (Herr) in the best and highest sense of the word. It is his life that holds meaning for the Germanic people, not his agonizing death, which is the image of him among the Alpine and Mediterranean peoples. The mighty preacher and wrathful one (Zürnende) in the temple, the man who swept along his followers, is the ideal that today shines forth from the Gospels, not the sacrificial lamb of the Jewish prophets, not the crucified" (p. 604). Instead of the conventional image of Jesus as the sufferer, an old-new (alt-neues) picture had to emerge: Jesus the hero (p. 414). Jesus was not the "hook-nosed, flat-footed savior" of Southern European depiction, but the "slim, tall, blond" savior of northern European portrayals (p. 616). His entire being was a fiery resistance: for that reason he had to die (p. 607).
Although Rosenberg emphasized Jesus's human, temporal acts over his divine transcendence, this did not necessarily mean that Jesus had lost his divinity altogether. "In spite of all the Christian churches, Jesus is a linchpin of our history. He became the God of the Europeans" (p. 391). Rosenberg made other references to Christ's divinity: in the context of the "Nordic" Meister Eckhart, whom he regarded as both the ultimate Germanic religious hero and the "poet of the Savior" Rosenberg suggested that mankind should be independent of the clergy, made aware of its own spiritual uniqueness, and follow the example of Christ's own "holy union of divine and human natures" (p. 230). Rosenberg even adhered to conventional Christology when discussing Chamberlain's religious views: "A totally free man, who inwardly disposed of the total culture of our time, demonstrated the finest feeling for the great superhuman simplicity of Christ ... as the mediator between man and God" (pp. 623-34).
Rosenberg's frequent references to Christ (mentioned far more than Wotan or Nietzsche in Mythus) and his positive engagement with Jesus's historical and contemporary significance revealed an attachment impossible for the true anti-Christian. These attachments signified an ambiguous revolution against the cultural heritage of Christianity. But did Rosenberg admit to this lingering affection? Certainly the existing confessions were regarded as inadequate, especially the "Roman Church," which was considered beyond redemption. Institutional arrogance and a greed for power massively corrupted the papacy. The Catholic priesthood was, in Rosenberg's view, a racially defiled mixture that had infiltrated and infected ancient Rome. He accused Catholicism of superstition, pointing to the "millions" of Europeans killed in the medieval frenzy of witch-hunts and belief in magic (p. 67). In his view, the papacy and its racial contamination had destroyed the Germanic Middle Ages, marked by racial consciousness and productivity. As such, "eternal Rome" represented a "Jewish-clerical 'Christianity'," which propagated the theological separation of God from the individual that Jesus had worked against (p. 396). Rome had blocked out Christ, indeed put itself above Christ, separating him from the people and neglecting his teachings (p. 161).
In contrast to Catholicism, Rosenberg viewed Protestantism with considerably more warmth. Like Ludendorff early on, Rosenberg essentially asserted that the present-day representatives of Lutheranism, through their approximation of the Roman system, had become un-Lutheran. For Rosenberg, Luther's great deed had been the destruction of the priesthood and the Germanification of Christianity. He also regarded Luther as nothing less than the greatest forerunner of German nationalism, racial purity, and spiritual independence (pp. 84-85, 397). His attack on Rome was especially praiseworthy: "However much Luther was still rooted in the Middle Ages, his action brought about the greatest revolution in Europe after the invasion of Roman Christianity" (p. 183). Through his fight against Rome's clerical power, he saved the West from "Tibetan-Etruscan Asian" influences. Here again Rosenberg got his cue from Chamberlain, who had declared Luther "the greatest man in world history."(n51) Rosenberg could not be quite this effusive, however: Luther's shortcoming had been his adherence to the "Hebraic" Old Testament. Although he compensated for this with his later tract, "On the Jews and their Lies," and his declaration that Christianity would have nothing more to do with Moses, the Old Testament nonetheless remained part of Luther's canon (p. 129).
But not all was lost for Christianity. Rosenberg believed it could be redeemed if the Old Testament were removed from its corpus: "As a religious book the so-called Old Testament must be abolished for all time. With it will end the failed attempt of the last fifteen hundred years to spiritually make us Jews ..." Rosenberg went a step further, calling as well for the removal of "obviously distorted" portions of the New Testament. In addition, a new "Fifth Gospel" should be introduced (p. 603). These revisions, however sweeping, did not amount to a total negation of preexisting Gospel. Rosenberg lavished approval on two in particular, those of John and Mark. John held out the "first ingenious interpretation, the experience of the eternal polarity between good and evil," and stood against the "Old Testament delusion that God created good and evil out of nothing." The Gospel of Mark signified "the real heart of the message of kinship with God against the Semitic teaching of God's tyranny" (p. 604). Even the Christian notion of love that had apparently led to racial contamination in Nordic Europe could be salvaged: "Love, humility, charity, prayer, good works, mercy, and repentance are all good and useful, but only under one condition: if they strengthen the power of the soul, elevate it and make it more God-like" (p. 238).
The Christian religion could ultimately be redeemed if it expunged its negative aspects, those antiracial elements springing from "Syro-Etruscan" traditions, in favor of its positive aspect: the "genuine" Christianity that appealed to Nordic blood (p. 79). In some passages of Mythus Rosenberg was seemingly unqualified in his attacks; elsewhere, we see a defense of "real" Christianity and the "genuine" teachings of Christ. Rosenberg cast the religious task of the day as more of a "rediscovery" of Christianity than a rejection. Of the preexisting varieties of Christianity, Rosenberg believed, Protestantism came much closer to his vision than Catholicism. Protestantism in the beginning meant, "the blooming of the Germanic will to freedom, national self-determination, and personal spirituality. Without question it paved the way for what we now call the highest works of our culture and science" (p. 129). Where it failed was in keeping the religious center in Jerusalem. But Rosenberg did not therefore reject Protestantism out of hand. The Jewish elements it retained went against its original purpose: in his view, the Old Testament had been "smuggled" into an initially individualistic faith (p. 128).
The precise medium through which Rosenberg would overcome Christianity's drawbacks was the appropriation of Meister Eckhart. Rosenberg regarded Eckhart as "the greatest apostle of the Nordic West [who] gave us our religion ... who awoke God in our hearts, that the 'Kingdom of Heaven is within us'" (pp. 218-19). For Rosenberg, it was Meister Eckhart's era of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not the Renaissance or even the Reformation, which signaled the birth of the new Germanic man and his culture. Rosenberg was attracted by Eckhart's credentials as a medieval mystic twice tried for heresy by Pope John XXII and the curia at Avignon. By displaying his defiance of the pope and his rejection of Roman scholasticism and ecclesiasticism, Eckhart was a particularly appropriate candidate for the "new" faith. Eckhart proclaimed that the soul, not the church, the bishop or the pope, was God's representative on earth (p. 219). This emphasis on the individual soul and its self-determination was paramount for Rosenberg. God is not above man, Rosenberg believed, but lives in the individual soul. Rather than "surrender" to or fear God, the inner soul must be totally free, must communicate with God (p. 223). In this way, the individual could follow the example of Christ, who strove for a sacred union of divine and human natures (p. 230). Rosenberg's view of God revealed itself in a direct quote from Meister Eckhart: "God is not an annihilator of works, but an accomplisher. God is not a destroyer of nature, but its perfecter" (p. 231). This emphasis on an unmediated relationship between man and God meant that the clergyman, be he Catholic or Protestant, would cease to exist. However, unlike the priesthood, which would be annihilated, the church was to be sublimated. Rosenberg left open the possibility that it could find a place in his new religious order, provided it "did not prevent the Nordic soul from unfolding itself" (p. 219). Hence his call for a "German Peoples' Church" (Deutsche Volkskirche), which would embrace the faith propagated by Eckhart: "In place of a Jewish-Roman worldview steps the Nordic-Western soul-faith" (p. 252).(n52)
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In short, Rosenberg's ideology was not a rejection of Christianity per se, but a radical revision of it. If, through his rejection of Christ as well as Christianity, Ludendorff represented the true paganism of the Nazi movement, then Rosenberg was not a paganist. Whereas Ludendorff left the Protestant Church in 1927, Rosenberg did not leave it until 1933. Waiting until his party was safely in power does not fully explain Rosenberg's timing. Rather, it was brought on by the dismissal of the leader of the German Christians, Joachim Hossenfelder, by Reich Bishop Müller of the Protestant Church, who considered Hossenfelder too radical and a threat to his own position within the growing storm of the Kirchenkampf.(n53) Until this time, Rosenberg held out the hope that a space could be created in institutional Protestantism for his own views. This acceptance of Protestantism, albeit highly conditional, was presaged in Chamberlain's own estimation of Protestantism as the "natural" religion of the Germans. Chamberlain appears time and again as Rosenberg's primary -- and acknowledged -- intellectual inspiration. As Chamberlain's biographer puts it: "When as a youth in Riga he first encountered the Foundations, it struck him with the force of a revelation."(n54) While the paganist debt to Chamberlain is well known, much less appreciated is the positive reaction to Chamberlain's work that came from Protestant circles. According to a review of Chamberlain's Grundlagen in the Protestant journal Christliche Welt, "this book ... carries in it an apologetic strength for which our 'Christian world' will have much to thank." The highly charged attacks on Catholicism and materialism in Foundations also assured a warm reception among theologically liberal Protestants of the day. While confessional Lutherans firmly rejected Chamberlain's critique of organized religion and attempt to aryanize Jesus,(n55) liberal Protestants found their own views echoed in Chamberlain's call for a national Kulturreligion. Years later, in the Third Reich, it was not only the pro-Nazi "German Christians" who adored Chamberlain. Their opponents in the Confessing Church, a group often cast as the "true" anti-Nazi wing of Protestantism, felt he was their intellectual property as much as Rosenberg's or the German Christians'. In a 1936 article in the Confessing Church journal Junge Kirche, Chamberlain was described as "outstanding among the confessors of Jesus Christ at the turn of the century."(n56)
Even after the Nazis came to power and he formally left his church, Rosenberg maintained the distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism he had made in the Kampfzeit. He was given plenty of opportunity to revisit the original thesis of Mythus after the churches exposed it to a ringing condemnation. By now it also appeared that he might be a greater threat to the churches, since in 1934 he had acquired for himself the imposing title of Führer's Delegate for the Supervision of the Entire Intellectual and Ideological Education and Training of the NSDAP. Significantly, of the many clerical attacks on Rosenberg published after 1933, none were censored or banned by Nazi authorities.(n57) A comparison of two rebuttals he published in the mid-1930s demonstrates that Rosenberg continued to show a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism as a worldview, even while he eagerly attacked the clergy of both. His attack against the Catholic Church, called "On the Dark Men of our Times: A Reply to the Attacks Against the Myth of the Twentieth Century," was published in 1935.(n58) He dismissively suggested that religious Catholics should stay away from his Mythus, since it had not been written for them in the first place.(n59) He even suggested that it was their opposition to his book that had boosted its sales. He claimed that behind Catholic attacks against him stood a greater conspiracy: to separate the Catholic parts of Germany from the Protestant and merge them with France or Austria. During Weimar, the Center Party was the political arm of this conspiracy, and rightly feared that the ascent of Nazism would put an end to these plans. The Roman Church, Rosenberg claimed, had always used all means at its disposal to accrue power to itself. In this drive for domination, deceit and falsifications became standard practice. For instance, Rosenberg denied St. Matthew's claim that Jesus had assigned Peter to establish a church. Peter's episcopate in Rome was a falsehood, since the position of bishop was incompatible with the professions of an apostle. Roman Christianity was accused not only of hypocrisy, but also of actively seeking to destroy German national character.(n60)
Rosenberg's counterattack on Protestantism, published two years later, was given quite a different title: "Protestant Pilgrims to Rome: The Treason against Luther and the Myth of the Twentieth Century."(n61) Rosenberg fundamentally detached the contemporary Lutheran Church from its founder by suggesting that, whereas the Reformation began as a rebellion against Rome, the current leadership of the Protestant Church was slowly moving back in the direction of St. Peter. Ignatius Loyola, not Martin Luther, was now being made head of German Protestantism, thanks largely to the work of the Confessing Church. Sterile dogmatism and clerical infantilism were replacing Luther's fiery spirit of protest "against Rome and Jerusalem." The Confessing Church in particular was accused of treachery, of becoming "Jewish prophets" through their maintenance of the Old Testament.(n62) Calvinists came in for sharp condemnation, since they frightened people with notions of Hell and self-disdain, and inculcated a "Syrian inferiority complex." Rosenberg regarded Karl Barth as a "Calvinist pseudo-pope" who worked for nothing less than the "Calvinization" -- and therefore the destruction -- of German Protestantism. He also attacked Anglicanism for trying to propagate an "ecumenical League of Nations." Its attempt to create a world Protestantism was similarly regarded by Rosenberg as an attempt at recatholicization. But after this litany of condemnation, Rosenberg ended on a positive note: not all was lost for Protestantism. It could restore its credibility if it returned to Luther's original intent, recognized the "genuine original forces of Protestantism," abandoned the Old Testament, and divested itself of doctrines like Original Sin.(n63) Rosenberg tries in some ways to position himself as the defender of "true Christianity"; his vituperative attacks on nearly all forms of institutional Christianity make such a claim hard to believe. Just as untenable, however, is the widely accepted notion that he was anti-Christian. This would require a tendentious reading of the evidence, to the exclusion of the portion that shows Rosenberg retained more of Christianity than perhaps he was willing to admit.
Whereas Heinrich Himmler would emerge as a committed anti-Christian after the party came to power, during the 1920s he had yet to discover the mysticism and occultism for which he later became famous. Far from being anti-Christian, in Nazism's early years Himmler maintained a strong Catholic piety. In 1919 before he joined the party, Himmler wrote in his dairy: "Come what may, I shall always love God, shall pray to Him, and shall remain faithful to the Catholic Church and shall defend it even if I should be expelled from it."(n64) At this time he regularly attended church: confession and communion were important to him.(n65) He was particularly interested in the writings of Conrad von Bolanden, a postwar Catholic apologist. His only complaint about Bolanden's work was its negative attitude toward Protestantism: "I doubt that the Protestant religion is so lacking in content... On the contrary, it must have good ingredients, but Bolanden won't credit Protestantism with anything good."(n66)
While Ludendorff was waging his war against Christianity, Himmler, who had by now joined the NSDAP and participated in Hitler's failed putsch, was still attending church. But while he enjoyed church life, his attitude toward Catholicism began to change. His diary entries from 1923-24 criticized books on Catholicism that he read as "too doctrinaire" or "fanatical." Of the Jesuits he wrote: "It is now clearer to me than ever that it was a beneficial act of Bismarck's when he expelled [them]."(n67) He sympathetically related the experience of a fellow Catholic who, like himself, was involved in the völkisch movement: "He would like to confess but cannot believe in certain dogmas, thus [making confession] impossible. Yet he would like to, because he considers it cowardly to call the priest [only] at the moment of dying." Himmler added: "This is an exceedingly decent point of view."(n68) Himmler had not yet abandoned Christianity. He attacked the anti-Christian tone of a book on scientific theory by Ernst Haeckel: "the section that ... concerns his suppositions and attack on, and denial of, a personal God, is just terrible." Himmler also read Renan's Life of Jesus and enjoyed it, save for one major flaw: "Renan believed that Jesus was a Jew, and he is from all appearances a friend of the Jews." For Himmler, this was unacceptable: "However, he proves to me by his whole book that Jesus was no Jew, and that Christianity was and is the most important protest of the Aryans against the Jews, of good against evil."(n69) While Himmler would later profess hatred for Christianity, his basic characterization of Jesus as the great anti-Semite would remain unaltered. And following the pattern of other Nazis who would end up paganist, Himmler the Catholic began to have high regard for Protestantism, accepting "without comment" völkisch arguments equating Protestantism with Germandom and reserving his wrath for Catholics.(n70)
Perhaps puzzling in Himmler's diary is the reference to Ernest Renan, who far outside the circle of German völkisch philosophy, a Frenchman rather than a German -- is usually left out of the pantheon of proto-Nazis, or intellectuals whom Nazis read. However, as Susannah Heschel has recently pointed out, particular racialist concepts that the Nazis would later extend upon, especially the notion of the "Aryan Christ" could first be found in Renan's writings.(n71) It was the discipline of philology developed in Renan's time that had originally devised the very concept of "Aryan." According to Maurice Olender, notions of "Aryan" and "Semitic" long associated with the Nazis' own racial categories, began as linguistic concepts invented by philologists in the middle of the nineteenth century. The discourse on Aryan and Semite first arose as an intellectual debate within Christianity, specifically from the school centered around Renan that "exchanged the particular for the general" in order to "restore the historical centrality of Christ."(n72) What began in the nineteenth century as an academic attempt to assign essential characteristics to the ancient languages of the biblical era -- meant as a way of discovering the place of Indo-European languages in Christianity's originating moment -- became a way of assigning essential characteristics to the peoples who spoke them. Chamberlain's own conception of Christ's un-Jewishness, which he described using racialist discourse, found its origin in this new discipline, of which Renan was a leading exponent.
Unlike Himmler, Rosenberg never credited Renan. But the similarities between Rosenberg's and Renan's concepts are striking. In a manner to be directly copied by Rosenberg, Renan insisted that "real" Christianity had nothing to do with Judaism: "The special task of Jesus was to break with the Jewish spirit...[Christianity's] completion will consist in returning to Jesus -- certainly not in returning to Judaism."(n73) Elsewhere Renan wrote with greater racialist overtones: "Originally Jewish to the core, Christianity over time rid itself of nearly everything it took from the race, so that those who consider Christianity to be the Aryan religion are in many respects correct." Renan stipulated furthermore that the genius of Christianity was only expressed in the European race. If Rosenberg insisted that Jesus became the "God of the Europeans," Renan had done so some sixty years before: "Christianity improved itself by moving farther and farther away from Judaism and seeing to it that the genius of the Indo-European race triumphed within its blossom." Even Rosenberg's call for a "fifth gospel" was strikingly close to Renan's conception: "I beheld before my eyes a fifth Gospel [sic], torn but still legible."(n74) Rosenberg's redemption of Christian charity and love, provided it uphold racial honor and reject the Jewish God of destruction, was also to be found in Renan, who insisted that these ideas "come more from our ancestors, pagans perhaps, than from the selfish David or the exterminator Jehu."(n75) Nowhere did Rosenberg credit Renan for having originally authored these concepts: undoubtedly his own philosophical pretensions would have prohibited him from acknowledging the unoriginality of his ideas, especially if they were found to have originated in a Frenchman. At the very least, however, the proximity of Rosenberg's ideas to Renan's means that proof of paganist hostility to Christianity cannot be found in their Nordic mania, racialist Judeophobia, or call for a "Fifth Gospel."
If he still considered himself in some sense Christian during the Kampfzeit, Himmler would emerge after the "seizure of power" as a leading anti-Christian in the party. As the Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police, he was immeasurably more powerful than Rosenberg. Whereas Rosenberg's star would continue to fall during the course of the Third Reich, Himmler's would continue to rise: the height of his power came in 1943, when he added the portfolio of Reich Interior Minister to his other titles. After 1933 Rosenberg said of Himmler: "Our thoughts ran along similar lines; he always stressed that his attitude was close to mine."(n76) They and other paganists, most notably Richard Walther Darré, romanticized the peasantry and German prehistory, which Himmler interpreted as an Aryan struggle against malevolent Jewish-Roman forces. In 1934, Rosenberg noted with approval how Himmler's SS, "together with the peasant leadership, openly educates its men ... in an anti-Christian fashion."(n77) Himmler viewed the SS as something of a new priesthood or knight's order. Two Christian bodies were directly referred to when Himmler conceived the organizational é1an of his SS. One was the Teutonic Knights, the order of crusaders that had led a Christian "civilizing mission" in the east? The other was the Jesuits, which drew even more admiration from Himmler for the zeal for their cause and the "totality" and impermeability of their hierarchical structure.(n79) On its face, however, this admiration was limited to the form of these brotherhoods, not their content. Indeed, in the SS the form was to be explicitly emptied of its Christian content and filled with something professedly anti-Christian.(n80) In this sense, a revealing parallel is found in Himmler's attitude toward the Jehovah's Witnesses; he admired their style -- their tenacity and brotherhood -- but so hated what they stood for that he put them in the concentration camps as "enemies of the Reich."(n81)
While Himmler apparently had nothing more to do with his original faith, he still retained a deep religiosity. In 1935 he professed belief in "a Lord God who stands over us, who made us and our Fatherland, our Volk and the earth, and sent us our Führer."(n82) References to "Lord God" notwithstanding, he professed that his new religion would serve as a replacement for Christianity: "[O]ur business is to spread the knowledge of the race in the life of our Volk and to impress it upon the hearts and heads of all, down to the very youngest, as our German gospel."(n83) To an assembly of the SS he publicly stated that Christianity would play no part in the organization: "The guideline for us in our struggle is neither the Old nor the New Testament, but the political testament of Adolf Hitler."(n84) At a private speech in Berlin he was even more blunt: "We must finish with Christianity."(n85) He viewed the witch hunts that the Catholic Church propagated in the Middle Ages as part of a Judeo-Catholic race war against Germanic blood -- a view no doubt conditioned by his discovery that an ancestor had been burned as a witch in the seventeenth century. Himmler went so far as to assign a special SD-Referat in the SS to examine this subject.(n86) He also poured his derision on the Catholic priesthood, which he denounced as a "homosexual erotic men's league."(n87)
In place of Christianity, Himmler advocated ancestor worship and a myth of "Blood and Soil" both of which stood opposed to Christian dogma,(n88) and belief in immortality and an omnipotent God, whose anti-Christian credentials were considerably more uncertain. The question of what concrete form this replacement faith would take led Himmler down several roads. One was an adoration of the ancient King Heinrich I. Himmler celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of his death at Quedlinburg Cathedral in 1936, and was so enthralled with this medieval figure that he believed himself to be Heinrich's reincarnation.(n89) Another road was the obscure occultism of Hanns Hörbiger, who had propagated a theory of "Glacial Cosmogony," in which world history was a record of the eternal struggle between fire and ice, "linking the flood of Genesis and the destruction of the Teutonic kingdom of Atlantis to 'gravitational catastrophes' supposedly unleashed when the Earth 'captured' a moon in its orbit."(n90) Himmler's penchant for spinning off new feudalities to add to his growing empire extended to this sphere as well, with the founding in 1935 of the "Ahnenerbe der SS," a "research" body charged with, among other things, uncovering the religious prehistory of Europe in order to find a suitable Religionsersatz for the present age. Within the Ahnenberbe was a research section for the "History of the Indogermanic Faith" staffed with "Indogermanic theologians" who were assigned to help devise a suitable new doctrinal system.(n91) However anti-Christian he insisted he was, Himmler's views on Christianity were, like Rosenberg's, fraught with ambiguity and ambivalence. This expressed itself in SS policies regarding the religious feelings of its members. In a speech to SS leaders in 1936, the year in which he formally left the Catholic Church, Himmler spoke of his own family's Christian traditions:
My father, in accord with our family tradition, was a convinced Christian in his case a convinced Catholic. He knew exactly what my attitude was. However, we did not speak on religious points or converse about the political harmfulness and corruption of the Christian churches, about which we were once in agreement. Not once did I touch his convictions, nor he mine. I believe that we must maintain such a position toward those elderly who cannot bring themselves to our path. For this reason I have also demonstrated understanding, and will continue to do so in the future, when someone tells me: out of respect for my parents I must have my child baptized. Please! Certainly!... There is no use in disturbing the peace of mind of those with sixty or seventy years behind them.(n92)
This meant that even the burial of SS men's parents could be conducted in the Christian fashion. For a supposedly fanatical anti-Christian, who showed absolutely no interest in appearing otherwise even when it would have served his party's interest, this was an exceedingly mild approach to take.
Himmler consistently maintained that even within the SS, Christian viewpoints, while not endorsed by the organization, were nonetheless to be respected. Two years earlier, in reaction to one particular incident, he announced: "I forbid SS members to pester, annoy, or mock another for his religious views. Just as the German has never tolerated religious constraint on himself, so are the religious convictions of his neighbors holy and inviolable to him." This pertained not only to the religious views of individual SS men, but also to their conduct regarding religious institutions: "I most strictly forbid any disturbance as well as any tactlessness regarding religious events of all confessions (i.e., processions of the Catholic Church). Likewise, a tactful deportment when churches are visited out of historical or artistic interest goes without saying." Himmler added that this order was to be enforced on pain of expulsion.(n93) A year later he renewed the order, explicitly basing it upon the "National Socialist version of the age-old German right of freedom of conscience." Certainly this freedom of conscience did have its institutional limits. In the same memorandum, Himmler forbade members of the SS from "any leadership activity in any kind of religious or faith community (for instance, the German Faith Movement, etc.)."(n94) Holding a position of responsibility in the Christian churches was thus forbidden: but it was also forbidden for the churches' paganist rivals. (Simple membership in a religious community, Christian or otherwise, was still allowed.) Hence, while Himmler made it clear that he rejected Christianity both as doctrine and as institution, he allowed considerable latitude of Christian expression not only for SS men, but also in some senses even for himself. As we have seen, Christ could not be saddled with the curse of Jewishness. Even to his SS associates he professed a respect and esteem for his family's Christian piety.
During the war, Himmler continued to exhibit the same ambivalence that had marked his prewar attitude. At a 1942 speech delivered to the SS and German police leadership, Himmler spoke of the struggle of the races, and the need to fight off the Asiatic horde. Even while he attacked the "perversity" of Christian morality, he took a favorable view of the Catholic teaching that a childless marriage was the "greatest sin of all." Himmler stated his belief that "the decline in our [Germany's] birthrate around 1900 coincided with the time when the German people began inwardly to free themselves from their very keen commitment to the churches." This aspect of Christian orthodox teaching, Himmler declared to the assembled party members, "we can only welcome from a biological and racial point of view."(n95) Beside the declining birthrate, Himmler credited the Catholic Church with fighting another nemesis of Nazi ideology: Freemasonry. As he put it in 1940 to his confidant Felix Kersten, "Only one power has not allowed itself to be deceived, the Catholic Church. She is the inexorable enemy of all Masonry. It is certainly known to you that any Catholic is automatically excommunicated the moment he becomes a Mason." In this same eulogy, Himmler was less charitable to the Protestants: "Only the foolish Evangelical parsons have still not realized what is at stake. They join the Masons without realizing that they are digging their own graves."(n96) Having heard this, and possibly being aware of his other felicitous remarks about certain aspects of Christian ideology, Kersten asked Himmler point blank: "Why have you at one and the same time made implacable enemies of the Jews and Masons on the one side, and their professed enemy, the Catholic Church, on the other...?" On this occasion, Himmler was evasive, simply responding: "[T]hat is a thing which the Führer alone had to decide. To talk about it, now that the die has been cast, is quite pointless."(n97)
Kersten would have another opportunity to confront Himmler with his own ambiguity. In 1942 he heard of something incredible from an SS leader who had been invited to Himmler's house: "Himmler's small daughter said grace before lunch in his presence. He had gazed at the Reichsführer in astonishment, not being able to understand how he -- so hostile to the church -- could allow prayers to be said in his own house. It argued some discrepancy in Himmler's outlook." Kersten prodded Himmler to discern his real attitude. When he asked how the Catholic Church could best be described, Himmler answered: "As a joint-stock company from which the chief shareholders -- since its foundation and for nearly two thousand years -- draw a hundred or a thousand percent profit and give nothing in return. Insurance companies which always say that it's not in the contract whenever you make a claim are mere novices in the art of deception compared with this gigantic swindle."(n98) Here was a vituperative hatred for the institution of Christianity, but nothing as yet on the religion itself.
Kersten knew of Himmler's dabbling in non-Christian forms of religion and his interest in mysticism, and went so far as to read eastern religious texts himself to parry Himmler's religious thrusts. As he told Himmler: "I've read the Bhagavad-Gita, which you so prize, and other Indian writings and found in them much the same teaching as Christianity offers in the Sermon on the Mount. The Ten Commandments recur in a slightly different form in Buddhist doctrine, in the Vedas and Rig-Vedas. There's no doubt that the spirituality is the same, except that Christianity adds belief in a personal God who judges men after their death. It's the actual putting into practice of this teaching that would really make the difference." To this Himmler responded: "That's true enough, and I've nothing against Christianity in itself; no doubt it has lofty moral ideas." Himmler then proceeded to disclose the real reasons for his enmity: "[W]e have to be on our guard against a world power which makes use of Christianity and its organization to oppose our own national resurrection by methods of which we're everywhere conscious." Confronted with the distinction between hatred of Christian institutions and Christian ideology, Himmler plainly stated that he was really an anticlerical, not an anti-Christian. When Himmler let loose with an apparently anti-Christian statement, "Then we'll unfrock these priests -- neither their God nor their Virgin Mary will be able to do a thing for them then," Kersten immediately took him to task: "But you're surely not opposed to the Virgin Mary, Herr Reichsführer?" Again, Himmler conceded the distinction: "No, not at all. To link womanhood with religion is a noble idea. It suits our Germanic outlook."(n99)
There was even less ambiguity in Himmler's attitude toward Luther and Protestantism, in spite of Protestant "blindness" to Masonry. While still a Christian in the Kampfzeit, Himmler began to adopt völkisch arguments equating Protestantism with Germandom.(n100) Right up until the end of the war, the positive esteem for Protestantism that this one-time Catholic first expressed back then was still felt. In a secret speech to assembled SS leaders in May 1944, Himmler lectured on German history: "Only when the picture of history is placed before our eyes," he claimed, "does our mission for the future become clear." Himmler touched on one of his favorite subjects, the churches, and indicated that his hatred was really aimed at the temporal power of Catholicism: "[If] the Christian Catholic Church had remained what it was, fulfillment of the soul, the mediary to the Lord ... that would have been fine." But the church acquired temporal ambitions, and came into constant conflict with emperor and state. In Himmler's view, Germany suffered for centuries from this dilemma, especially since the Jews had infiltrated the church in order to dominate the German Volk. But after a long period of oppression and persecution at the hands of this power, the German spirit rose up in defiance: "A Luther, a Zwingli, a Calvin rose up, individual voices in this conflict of the spirit. The Germanic spirit protested, and for their newly founded confession they took the name Protestant. [Such struggle] has always been a hallmark of Germanic blood or German blood."(n101) In this instance, Himmler made Protestantism secondary, epiphenomenal of Germanness. But as a signifier of nationhood, both in blood and spirit, Protestantism remained exalted nonetheless. This was especially evident when Himmler tellingly referred to the Frenchman Calvin as "Germanic." Himmler here not only revealed his belief that to be Protestant is to be Germanic, but also that to be Germanic is, among other things, to be Protestant.
This attitude was revealed on other occasions as well. For instance, when discussing the Confessing Church, Himmler explicitly detached Martin Niemö11er from Protestantism. As he wrote sardonically but nonetheless revealingly to party judge Walter Buch: "It is Niemö11er's intention to convert to the Catholic faith."(n102) Just as Protestantism was a marker of national feeling, Catholicism was a marker of national betrayal: if a Protestant pastor stood against the Nazis, Himmler intimated, he must no longer be Protestant. Either that, or his faith - as in Rosenberg's emplotment -- must have been corrupted. Certainly Himmler revealed a direct admiration for the reformer himself. In March 1940, shortly before the beginning of the Final Solution, he held a conversation on the Jewish "problem" with Kersten. Himmler the historian proclaimed that Judaism had infected Catholicism, which in Luther's day the Vatican had been run by "Jew-Popes." But whereas the Catholic Church was blind, Luther saw and understood the Jewish peril: "You should read, moreover, what Luther said and wrote about the Jews. No judgment could be sharper."(n103) This is a clear indication that Himmler not only read Luther's "On the Jews and their Lies," as Rosenberg had done, but believed it sanctioned Nazi anti-semitism.(n104) Himmler held Luther in such esteem that in January 1941 his personal secretary wrote: "The Reichsführer-SS wishes to be remembered at the Luther Archive in Wittenberg after the war."(n105)
Paganists consistently showed preference for Protestantism over Catholicism, even going so far as to make it a barometer of Germanness. As well, Himmler and Rosenberg both claimed Luther's antisemitism as the direct ideological inheritance of the Nazi movement. If their new religious system was meant as a replacement faith for Christianity, a way of pouring new anti-Christian wine into old Christian bottles, the paganists demonstrated just how much old wine they were willing to retain in the process.
Nazi paganists were deeply concerned with discovering new forms of faith, new objects of veneration, which they believed were more suitable to their times. Some, like Rosenberg, actively searched for a new dogma, adulating heroism over humility, racial distinctiveness over universalism. Others, less concerned with mapping out a new völkisch doctrine, nonetheless articulated a racialist, mystical interpretation of the German past. Regardless of their different emphases, they refuted much that was central to Christian betel. But they did not simply rummage through the discourse of Christianity, picking out concepts like "salvation" or "redemption" and voiding them of their content. They went beyond the rhetorical appropriations of Christianity that accompany any political religion, retaining in addition a surprising amount of the Christian content.
Theirs was only a partial rejection of Christianity. By their own admission, the part of Christianity paganists most opposed was specifically "Roman." The institutional arrogance they decried was specifically "papal." Protestantism, particularly Lutheranism, in its intent if not in its execution, was often cast as the antidote; in contrast to Catholicism, it was national, personal, spiritual. If Protestantism after Luther had taken a wrong turn down the road to freedom, it was because "Rome" and "Judah" made it veer off course. Most revealing of all was the appropriation of Protestantism as an index of Germanness -- even by nominally Catholic paganists like Himmler. It could be argued that any attempt to create a new religion in Germany would have had to appropriate Luther in some way. But if the paganist agenda was to create a new national religion that would replace the Christian confessions in Germany, Luther and the sectarian divide his name evoked for the country's Catholics (who comprised nearly half the German population after 1938) would have been precisely the wrong symbol for their purposes. Paganist thought in fact reveals a surprisingly favorable view of Protestantism, one that went beyond mere calculation to reveal an affinity, perhaps even a dependence upon, certain varieties of Protestant thought. If contemporary forms of Protestantism were unacceptable, Christianity's overall renewal could ultimately be achieved with a rejection of the Old Testament and much Christian dogma. But Christ himself would remain in the center; indeed, rediscovering the "original" Jesus would in itself expunge those foreign, Jewish elements found within contemporary Christianity. As historians of German religion are showing with increasing empirical weight, some of the same goals -- most particularly the "nationalization" of Christianity, the removal of the Old Testament, and even the aryanization of Jesus -- were being articulated within bona fide varieties of Protestant thought, most particularly theologically liberal Kulturprotestantismus.(n106)
On some occasions paganists seemed simultaneously to deny the validity of any kind of Christian teaching and then demonstrate just how much of that teaching they still retained. On other occasions, they chose between what they revered and what they condemned. In other words, they seemed to oscillate between ambiguity and ambivalence. Such equivocation clearly precludes them from being considered Christian. But it also precludes them from being considered anti-Christian. So long as the leading Christian theologian Adolf von Harnack could call in 1920 for the removal of the Old Testament as "Jewish carnal law," which "lies below the level of Christianity,"(n107) the paganist attack on the Old Testament cannot in itself be used to demonstrate an antithesis to Christianity. In fact, no single aspect of paganist doctrine constituted an attack on Christianity as such. The elements that made up this doctrine could all, in one form or another, be found within Christian theological departures that preceded the paganists themselves. A thorough reexamination of the exact intellectual antecedents of Nazi paganism, one that would avoid a rereading of only a select few in favor of broader ideological currents, clearly needs to be undertaken. Regardless of what such findings will unveil, what I have attempted to show in this article is that none of the components of paganism, taken individually, constitute an ideological assault per se on Christianity. They could certainly be hotly anticlerical; but too much work has been done on anticlericalism in the modern European context any longer to conflate anticlericalism with hatred of the religion clerical institutions claim to represent.(n108) At a more immediate level, we have seen how the paganists themselves could temper their anticlericalism in surprising and revealing ways. The only solid empirical evidence we have that the paganists hated Christianity in toto is their profession to this effect -- fraught with such ambiguity and even contradiction as to make them far from conclusive. The only paganist to reject Christ in any shape, and the only paganist to be expelled from the Nazi Party, was Ludendorff.
Finally, we must consider the ways in which Nazism itself needs to be reexamined. If the paganists of the movement were incomplete in their apostasy, and qualified in their condemnation of Christianity, what were the attitudes of those in the Nazi movement who rejected paganism? If this was the vanguard of the Nazi "assault" on Christianity, what might this mean for others in the party, like Goebbels, Göring, and even Hitler, who never left their churches? Were there Nazis who in some way considered themselves Christian? And if so, what might this say about the Nazi movement as a whole?
Research used in this article was undertaken with funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, and I thank them for their generous support. My thanks as well to James Retallack, Shelley Baranowski, Carol Harrison, and the two anonymous reviewers for Central European History for their very valuable feedback on prior versions of this article.
2004-05-29 00:39 | User Profile
(n1.) Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (Munich, 1930), 391. (n2.) 16 June 1937, marked Geheim, NS 19/3134/2, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (formally Berlin Document Center: hereafter BAZ). (n3.) 28 June 1937, Sammlung Schumacher (hereafter Schu) 245/2/150, BAZ. (n4.) Among the very many works on this topic, two of the more prominent early examples are John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches (London, 1968) and Hans Buchheim, Glaubenskrise im Dritten Reich: Drei Kapitel nationalsozialistischer Religionspolitik (Stuttgart, 1953). (n5.) See, for instance, Shelley Baranowski, The Confessing Church, Conservative Elites, and the Nazi State (Lewiston, N.Y., 1986); Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (New York, 1992); Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, 1996); Robert Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emmanuel Hirsch (New Haven, 1985); Wolfgang Gerlach, Als die Zeugen schwiegen: Bekennende Kirche und die Juden (Berlin, 1987); Ernst Klee, "Die SA Jesu Christi": Die Kirche im Banne Hitlers (Frankfurt am Main., 1989). An excellent overview can be found in Susannah Heschel and Robert Ericksen, "The German Churches Face Hitler," Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 23 (1994): 433-59. (n6.) See, for instance, Klaus Scholder, A Requiem for Hitler (London, 1989), 112, 116, who speaks of a "Final Solution" which the Nazis had in store for the churches. This interpretation finds its advocates outside church history as well. Daniel Goldhagen maintains, àla Scholder, that the Nazis hated Christianity as much, if not more, than they hated the Jews: "[T]he climax of this apocalyptic enterprise [was] the eradication of the Christian churches." Daniel Goldhagen, "False Witness," New Republic (27 December 1993). (n7.) Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, 1974), xxv (emphasis in the original). (n8.) George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975), 80. See as well Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (London, 1985); James Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford, 1980); Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen, 1971). (n9.) Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: ÃÅber religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz, 1992), especially 165-81. (n10.) Aside from Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler, see Wolfgang Tilgner, Volksnomostheologie und Schöpfungsglaube: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Kirchenkampfes (Göttingen, 1966); Karl Kupisch, "The Luther Renaissance" Journal of Contemporary History 2 (1967): 39-49. (n11.) Just a few of the many important works include Hermann Greive, Geschichte des modernen Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Darmstadt, 1983); Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Antisemitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur "Judenfrage" in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Göttingen, 1975); Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich 1870-1914 (Ithaca, 1975). (n12.) See, among others, Robert Ericksen and Susannah Heschel, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, 1999); Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990); Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990); John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago, 1996). Recent works have scrutinized in much closer detail the place of the Vatican in fostering modern anti-semitism: John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York, 1999); David Kertzer, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Antisemitism (New York, 2001); Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Bloomington, Ind., 2000). (n13.) Pulzer, The Rise of Antisemitism, xxii. (n14.) Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, 1992), 31. (n15.) See Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem, 2nd ed. (Munich, 2001), originally published in 1970; idem, "Alfred Rosenberg: National Socialism's 'Chief Ideologue?'," in The Nazi Elite, ed. Ronald Smelser and Rainer Zitelmann (New York, 1993). (n16.) Ian Kershaw, "'Cumulative Radicalisation' and the Uniqueness of National Socialism," in Von der Aufgabe der Freiheit: Politische Verantwortung und bürgerliche Gesellschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Christian Jansen et al. (Berlin, 1995), 333. (n17.) Donald Tracey, "The Development of the National Socialist Party in Thuringia, 1924-1930," Central European History 8 (1975), 26-34; Dietrich Orlow, The History of the Nazi Party: 1919-1933 (Pittsburgh, 1969), 90-91. (n18.) Conway, The Nazi Persecution, 5; Jonathan Wright, "Above Parties": The Political Attitudes of the German Protestant Church Leadership 1918-1933 (Oxford, 1974), 77. (n19.) Wilhelm Breucker, Die Tragik Ludendorffs: Eine kritische Studie auf Grund persönlicher Erinnerungen an den General und seine Zeit (Oldenburg, 1953), 107. "Positive Christianity" refers to Point Twenty-Four of the Nazi Party's official program, which stated: "We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without wing itself to a particular confession": as printed in Alfred Rosenberg, Das Parteiprogramm: Wesen, Grundsätze und Ziele der NSDAP (Munich, 1922), 15ff, 57f. The ideological valences of this concept are explored in Richard Steigmann-Gall, "'The Holy Reich': Religious Dimensions of Nazi Ideology" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1999), 34-82. (n20.) Breucker, Tragik Ludendorffs, 108. (n21.) Erich Ludendorff, Vom Feldherrn zum Weltrevolutionär und Wegbereiter Deutscher Volksschöpfung: Meine Lebenserinnerungen yon 1919 bis 1925 (Munich, 1941), 350-51. Ludendorff makes no mention of the reception her speech received. (n22.) Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York, 1941). Viereck erred when he asserted that Ludendorff's personal influence on Hitler was "enormous" (p. 297). Nonetheless, the presumption that paganist ideas were hegemonic in the Nazi movement remained widespread long after this book came out. (n23.) Quoted in Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (London, 1972), 36. Rosenberg's own historical theories hardly revealed a levelheaded scholar. While he rejected Kemnitz's mythology, he propagated his own, firmly arguing that European civilization began with the lost continent of Atlantis: Mythus, 24-28. (n24.) Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York, 1970), 94. (n25.) Ibid., 94-95. (n26.) Ibid., 122. (n27.) "Aktennotiz Himmlers fiber eine Besprechung mit Hitler, 23. Oktober 1935," as quoted in Josef Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler als Ideologe (Göttingen, 1970), 90. There is no indication whether Hider followed up on this particular threat. Judging from the continued publication of Mythus, he made no serious effort to do so. However, Rosenberg's book was occasionally banned lower down the ranks of the party, for instance by the Breslau branch of the NSLB: 8 September 1935, NS 22/410, BAZ. (n28.) Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston, 1962), 361. (n29.) Albrecht Tyrell, Führer befiehl ... Selbstzeugnisse aus der "Kampfzeit" der NSDAP (Düsseldorf, 1969), 165-66. (n30.) Ekkehard Hieronimus, "Zur Religiosität der völkischen Bewegung," in Religions- und Geistesgeschichte der Weimarer Republik, ed. Hubert Cancik (Dèsseldorf, 1982), 172-73. (n31.) Mathilde Ludendorff, Deutscher Gottglaube (Munich, 1932), 20. (n32.) As quoted in Bayrischer Kurier, 27 March 1924, PolDir/6687/20, Staatsarchiv München (hereafter StAM). The Bayrischer Kurier consistently published anti-Ludendorff opinions, and so questions can be raised as to the veracity of the quotation. However, the paper names its source: the extreme nationalist periodical Fridericus (1923, no. 50). (n33.) Ludendorff, Vom Feldherrn, 271. (n34.) Ibid., 272. (n35.) Bayrischer Kurier, 31 January 1924, in StAM PolDir/6687/65. (n36.) Ibid. (n37.) Ibid., 27 February 1924, in StAM PolDir/6687/8. Kahr, an extreme reactionary in the Bavarian government, was at best a hesitant participant in the failed putsch, and later served as a witness for the prosecution at Hitler's trial: Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism 1919-1945: A Documentary Reader, 3 vols. (Exeter, 1983-88), 1: 26-35. The orator is identified only as "the engineer Herr Born." (n38.) "Die wahren Ziele der deutsch-vö1kischen Bewegung," Augsburger Postzeitung, 10 May 1924, in StAM PolDir/6687/41. The article also referred to Heinrich Hermelink, who after the war wrote Kirche im Kampf: Dokumente des Widerstandes und des Aufbaus der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland yon 1933-1945 (Tübingen, 1950), a work suggesting that the Protestant Churches were unambiguously anti-Nazi. In the Postzeitung article, reference is made to Hermelink's claim that Protestants in Germany then, unlike twenty years before, were no longer anti-Catholic. (n39.) Quoted in Klaus Scholder, The Churches and the Third Reich, 2 vols. (London, 1987-88), 1: 109. (n40.) "Mitten im Kulturkampf," Allgemeine Rundschau, 6 April 1924, in StAM PolDir/6687/89. Sir Edward Carson was the leader of the Ulstermen in the first decades of the twentieth century. For a discussion of Protestant sectarianism in the frontier areas of the German east, see Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914 (Princeton, 1995), esp. 167-205: "Religious and Nationality Conflict in the Borderlands of the Imagined Community." (n41.) Wright, "Above Parties," 75. (n42.) Ludendorff, Vom Feldherrn, 362. (n43.) Church historians in particular have traditionally argued that Rosenberg's ideas represented the party's ideology as such. See, inter alia, the various contributions in Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke, eds., The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit, 1974). (n44.) Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism (New York, 1970), 281. (n45.) The best account of Rosenberg's many failures in the Nazi party polycracy is Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg. (n46.) Rosenberg, Der Mythus. All page numbers noted in the text of this section refer to Mythus. (n47.) Jonathan Wright points to some in the clerical establishment who believed "that Rosenberg's views were more widely held in the party than Hider's": "Above Parties," 89. (n48.) Bollmus, "Alfred Rosenberg", 187. (n49.) Cecil, The Myth, 84. (n50.) The very title "Myth of the Twentieth Century" was a tribute to Chamberlain's "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" of 1899, a work that Rosenberg adored and for which "Myth" was designed as a type of sequel. Rosenberg's ideological indebtedness to and personal admiration of Chamberlain is convincingly demonstrated in Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York, 1981), 452-53. (n51.) Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1899), 26. (n52.) This call for a German Peoples' Church was unrelated to the "League for a German Church" (BdK), which was a church-political group within the established Protestant Church. While there were common ideological denominators between Rosenberg and the BdK, most importantly their mutual high regard for Houston Stewart Chamberlain, there was no formal contact between them. See Steigmann-Gall, "'The Holy Reich'," 88-89. (n53.) 15 November 1933, NS 8/256/173, BAZ. (n54.) Field, Evangelist of Race, 453. (n55.) Ibid., 236. (n56.) Quoted in Richard Gutteridge, The German Evangelical Church and the Jews, 1889-1950 (New York, 1976), 35. (n57.) Heydrich memorandum of 20 July 1935, R5101/23139/239, Bundesarchiv Potsdam. (n58.) Alfred Rosenberg, An die Dunkelmänner unserer Zeit: Eine Antwort auf die Angriffe gegen den Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1935). (n59.) This was Hitler's opinion as well: Scholder, Churches, 2:112. (n60.) Rosenberg, Dunkelmänner unserer Zeit, 5-18. (n61.) Alfred Rosenberg, Protestantische Rompilger: Der Verrat an Luther und der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1937). (n62.) Ibid., 10, 16, 24. (n63.) Ibid., 47, 77. (n64.) Quoted in Werner Angress and Bradley Smith, "Diaries of Heinrich Himmler's Early Years" Journal of Modern History 31 (1959): 271. (n65.) Bradley Smith, Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making, 1900-1926 (Stanford, 1971), 98. (n66.) Ibid., 99. (n67.) Ibid., 145. (n68.) Angress and Smith, "Diaries," 218. (n69.) Smith, Himmler, 145. (n70.) Ibid., 146. (n71.) Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, 1998), 154-58. (n72.) Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 15. (n73.) Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (Boston, 1907), 418. (n74.) Olender, Languages, 70-72. (n75.) Ibid., 78. (n76.) Albert Krebs, Tendenzen und Gestalten der NSDAP: Erinnerungen an die Frühzeit der Partei (Stuttgart, 1959), 119. (n77.) Hans-Günther Seraphim, ed., Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs 1934/35 und 1939/40 (Göttingen, 1956), 56 (entry for 19 August 1934). (n78.) Ackermann, Heinrich Himmler, 103; Felix Kersten, The Kersten Memoirs, 1940-1945 (New York, 1957), 32. (n79.) See in particular Heinz Höhne, The Order of the Deaths Head: The Story of Hitler's SS (New York, 70), 144, who emphasizes Himmler's fascination with and admiration for the form of the Jesuits as a supremely hierarchical-spiritual body, and cites Hitler's view that Himmler was "my Ignatius Loyola." (n80.) Ibid., 156: "All Himmler's rules for married life were designed to divorce his SS men from the Christian church. A man could only be promoted Commander if he turned his back on the church and declared himself 'a believer in God'..." (n81.) See, inter alia, Michael Kater, "Die ernsten Bibelforscher im Dritten Reich" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 17 (1969): 181-218; Christine King, "Jehovah's Witnesses under Nazism," in A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis, ed. Michael Berenbaum (New York, 1990), 188-93; Detlef Garbe, Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium: Die Zeugen Jehovas im "Dritten Reich" (Munich, 1994). (n82.) Völkischer Beobachter, 17 November 1935. (n83.) Ibid., 1 July 1935. (n84.) Ackermann, Himmler, 40-41. (n85.) Bradley Smith and A.E Peterson, eds., Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 159. (n86.) See Sönke Lorenz, et al., eds., Himmlers Hexenkartothek: Das Interesse des Nationalsozialismus an der Hexenverfolgung (Bielefeld, 1999). (n87.) 18 February 1937, MA 311, Institut für Zeitgeschichte (hereafter IfZ). (n88.) In a 1937 speech, Himmler declared: "The worst blow that Christianity ever took against us has been the blow against ancestors and ancestor worship": 18 February 1937, MA 311, IfZ. (n89.) Ackermann, Himmler, 60-62; Kersten, Memoirs, 153. (n90.) Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkish Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington, 1992), 193; Ackermann, Himmler, 45. (n91.) See Michael Kater, Das 'Ahnenerbe' der SS 1935-1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches, 3rd ed. (Munich, 2001), originally published in 1974, which is still the only monographic treatment of its subject. A more comprehensive look at the SS and religion is found in Wolfgang Dierker, Himmlers Glaubenskrieger: Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik 1933-1941 (Paderborn, 2001). (n92.) "Rede des Reichsführer-SS anlässlich der Gruppenführer-Besprechung am 8. November 1936 in Dachau" F 37/3, IfZ. (n93.) 15 September 1934, Schu 245/2/133, BAZ. (n94.) 20 September 1935, Schu 245/2/134-135, BAZ. (n95.) Speech at the Feldkommandostelle Russland-Süd, 16 September 1942, F 37/3, IfZ. (n96.) Kersten Memoirs, 31 (emphasis in the original). (n97.) Ibid., 32. (n98.) Ibid., 148-49. (n99.) Ibid., 155-56. (n100.) Smith, Himmler, 145. (n101.) "Rede des Reichsführers-SS am 24.5.44 in Sonthofen vor den Teilnehmern des politisch-weltanschaulichen Lehrgangs (Generäle)," NS 19/4014/10-33, BAZ, here 10-13. (n102.) 14 April 1942, MA 327, IfZ. (n103.) Kersten Memoirs, 35 (emphasis added). (n104.) Himmler's claim that "no judgment could be harsher" could only have been a reference to the following passage: "If I had power over the Jews, as our princes and cities have, I would deal severely with their lying mouths.... For a usurer is an arch-thief and a robber who should rightly be hanged on the gallows seven times higher than other thieves ... We are at fault in not avenging all this innocent blood of our Lord and of the Christians which they shed for three hundred years after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the blood of the children they have shed since then (which still shines forth from their eyes and their skin). We are at fault in not slaying them." Martin Luther, "On the Jews and their Lies" in Luther's Works, trans. Franklin Sherman (Philadelphia, 1971), 47: 289, 267. Since Himmler freely admitted to reading this tract at a time when genocide against the Jews was in its conception, Luther's impact on the later development of the Holocaust cannot completely be discounted. (n105.) 10 January 1941, NS 19/712/2, BAZ. What form this remembrance would take is not indicated in the files. (n106.) Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum, especially 165-81; Rainer Lächele, "Protestantismus und völkische Religion im deutschen Kaiserrreich," in Handbuch zur "Völkischen Bewegung" 1871-1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz and Justus Ulbricht (Munich, 1999), 149-63; Gangolf Hübinger, Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen, 1993), 273-75; Uriel Tal, "Liberal Protestantism and the Jews in the Second Reich, 1870-1914" Jewish Social Studies 26 (1964). For the engagement of Kulturprotestanten with the emerging völkisch ideology, see Field, Evangelist of Race, 182-84, 197, 217, 240, 311. (n107.) As Harnack put it: "The rejection of the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake which the great church rightly avoided; to maintain it in the sixteenth century was a fate from which the Reformation was not yet able to escape; but still to preserve it in Protestantism as a canonical document since the nineteenth century is the consequence of a religious and ecclesiastical crippling": Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: the Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John Steely and Lyle Bierma (Durham, N.C., 1990 [orig. 1920]), 134-35. For more on Kulturprotestantismus and racialist antisemitism, see Rita Thalmann, "Die Schwäiche des Kulturprotestantimus bei der Bekämpfung des Antisemitismus" in Protestantismus und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kurt Nowak and Gérard Raulet (Frankfurt am Main, 1994). (n108.) See, for instance, René Rémond, ed., "Special Issue: Anticlericalism," European Studies
2004-05-29 11:39 | User Profile
This excerpt from the article posted by Perun deserves underlining:
[COLOR=Blue] "At a 1942 speech delivered to the SS and German police leadership, Himmler spoke of the struggle of the races, and the need to fight off the Asiatic horde. Even while he attacked the "perversity" of Christian morality, he took a favorable view of the Catholic teaching that a childless marriage was the "greatest sin of all." Himmler stated his belief that "the decline in our [Germany's] birthrate around 1900 coincided with the time when the German people began inwardly to free themselves from their very keen commitment to the churches." This aspect of Christian orthodox teaching, Himmler declared to the assembled party members, "we can only welcome from a biological and racial point of view."(n95)" [/COLOR]
This is a "hostile witness" statement at its best, for Himmler was indeed very hostile to conventional Christianity.
I've read that the birthrates of Germanic Amish are still about on the same level as sub-Saharan Africa - and they do not have AIDS to decimate those figures, either...
Petr