Religion
In reply to the discussion: Corruption, Duplicitousness, and Lying are Important Christian Values, Apparently. [View all]Bretton Garcia
(970 posts)And want to disavow him.entirely. No doubt he had his differences with Chridtianity. But? My statements above also seem mostly well substantiated.
In fact, I lived in Germany after the war,.in Munich, Bavaria; where Hitler got his start. That part of Germany was heavily Catholic, and there were holy statues everywhere. Earlier, note, probably more than 20,000,000 German Christians had joined the Nazi Party, or the war effort. I was ablel to speak with many of them.
Likely Hitler did depart from Christianity in many ways, privately. But publicly he couldn't push against it very hard. Because of public resistance.
And in fact, Hitler and the Church were able to mostly coexist, without very open conflict, for more than a decade. Likewise Mussolini, in Rome itself.
The Church today makes much of any differences. But the vast majority of Germans continued to say they were Christian, even as they went to war with the world. In particular for that matter, the anti-Semitism at the center of Nazism, was clearly consistent with replacement theology. When I lived in Germany in the 1950s, the famous "Passion plays," like Oberamagau, still pictured the Jews around Jesus as evil ugly persons, who were in effect, his murderers.
So Christianity and the vast bulk of Nazis,.managed to work together far, far more cooperatively than Christian scholars like to admit.
Much later, by the way, I went on to talk with many Catholic cardinals, bishops. Including Joe Ratzinger; the German cardinal who became Bennedict XVI. Few if any knew or could face his past. Most were in classic Freudian Denial. But among those who knew, there were many concerns. The subject was so shocking, so forbidden, so "Verboten," that it was effectively suppressed; pushed out of consciousness. And in the end, Joe Ratzinger was accepted by the rest, as their Pope.