A really long thingy about Hitler and the Catholics/Christians

First we want to bring up Hitler’s Kirchenkampf (Foreign words will be italicized and have their meanings after them. This one means Church Struggle and is pronounced Kir-Chen-Kampf), his attempt to essentially eradicate German Churches (Protestant and Catholic alike) with the end goal of establishing one German Protestant Church dedicated to loyalty to the Nazi Party above all. This was a section where we explained the Kulturkampf but hey you already know that; TLDR the Church knew where this was going and the Nazis had their game plan to follow. Now for more backstory, as article 24 of the Lateran Treaty specifically states “In regard to the sovereignty appertaining to it also in the international realm, the Holy See declares that it desires to remain and will remain outside of any temporal rivalries between other States and the international congresses called to settle such matters, unless the contending parties make a mutual appeal to its mission of peace; it reserves to itself in any case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual power. Consequently, Vatican City will always and in every case be considered neutral and inviolable territory.”(Lateran Treaty), dictating a mandatory impartiality of the Vatican when viewed as a political entity, and would (almost definitely) be viewed as null and void if any Pope were to go against it, leading to a probable Italian invasion of the Vatican and the resulting horrific results of that.

Ironically (and tangentially), the Italian government probably violated it in 1938 when they put out the Leggi Razziali (Racial Laws) based on the Manifesto Della Razza (Manifesto of Race) (A pseudo-scientific report about how Italians were pure descendants of the ‘Aryan Race’ and declared Africans and Jews inferior and the related Leggi Razziali (among other really dumb ideas) banned Jews from marrying non-Jews, a direct violation of the Papal Concordat that accompanied the Lateran Treaty, which stated in Article 24 that “The Italian State, wishing to restore to the institution of matrimony, which is the foundation of the family, that dignity which is conformable with the Catholic traditions of its people, recognizes the civil effects of the Sacrament of matrimony regulated by Canon Law...The provisions and the relative sentences when they have become definitive shall be carried to the supreme tribunal of the Segnatura.”which gave the Segnatura (essentially Papal Authority, literally a papal document with the signature of the Pope) the final say on marriage, and (was supposed to) guarantee that the Church had the final authority over her marriages and that only she could end them, something the Leggi Razziali section on Jew to Non-Jew marriages. This shows the disregard that Hitler (and his ally Mussolini) had for the Catholic Church, and it makes us skeptical of any collaboration between the two.

Back to the Kirchenkampf though, where Hitler tried to create the Reichskirche (Reich Church), attempting to turn the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund(German Evangelical Church Confederation, a loose council-y thingy sort of like a League of Nations for German Protestant Churches) into a really dumb Nazi dogmatic ‘Church’ that restricted baptism to Aryans only and a ton of other really really dumb ideas. To the credit of German Protestants they formed a counterpart called the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church) that stuck to universal baptism but never actually called out the Nazis for anything, but even then their resistance to Hitler led to many of their leaders being sent to concentration camps and being executed, and through the Confessing Church many passports and identification documents were donated to Jews, and a small number of Jews were hid by the Church. If you would like to hear more about them I recommend googling Marga Meusel or Hans Ehrenberg, they have some cool adventures and stuff, but I neglect to put them here because this one paragraph is definitely big enough.

The Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund(Evangelical Church in Germany, which had many members synonymous with the Confessing Church and was in a similar situation with it) actually issued the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis(Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, featuring signatories that were mostly members of the Confessing Church). Hitler also went as far as to create a clergy specific section of the Dachau Concentration Camp, and of the 2’720 recorded prisoners of this centre, 2’579 were Catholic Clergy (most of whom were taken from Western Poland after its capture).

This and innumerable other signs of Hitler’s persecution of Catholics tells us that, if history had gone differently, the Catholic Church in Germany (and indeed Europe) would have gone the same way as the Bruderhof (some communalist Protestants who try to be like the Apostles in early Acts) or the Seventh-Day-Adventists (We assume you already know about them), completely “disappearing” from Germany. It is really clear to us that the Nazis really disliked Christianity, but don’t take our word for it, here’s Heinrich Himmler (someone who’s remarkably ugly for one who was so sure that he was part of a perfect master race and yet another architect of the Holocaust) and his opinion on Christianity, “We live in an era of the ultimate conflict with Christianity. It is part of the mission of the SS to give the German people in the next half century the non-Christian ideological foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the German heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense”, this quote really speaks for itself.

Besides the general hatred Hitler showed for all Churches he could not control, he truly bore a specific hatred towards Catholics. During the Kristallnacht (okay come on you know this one), one of the highest profile assassinations was that of Erich Klausener, a leading German Politician who was the leader of the German political group Katholische Aktion (Catholic Action, a group dedicated to Catholic ideals and the rule of law and decency.) Six days before the Kristallnacht he gave a speech at the Catholic Conference in Berlin criticizing Nazi oppression and violence, as speech that very likely confirmed his death, ordered by Reinhard Heydrich himself (a future architect of the Holocaust who would be the leader of the Wannseekonferenz (Wannsee Conference, where the ‘Final Solution’ was thoroughly planned and finalized) and is known among WW2 nerds such as myself as potentially the most evil man in the Nazi regime, being called “The man with the iron heart” by Adolf Hitler, a man who definitely knew his evil)

.Catholic youth groups in Germany were also forcefully broken up, with their participants forced into the Hitler Youth (could very well be how the Pope ended up with that picture of him in the uniform, I recommend looking that up as it could add to future lessons or something) which prompted Pope Pius XI to take some shots at the Nazis saying that the Hitler Youth pulls its participants “away from Christ and back to paganism”(April 2 1934 Address to German Youth) and continued to condemn what he called Germanic Paganism several times throughout his reign.

In January 1935 the Nazi Minister of the Interior named Wilhelm Frick called for an end to “Church influence over Public Life”, and in April of that year daily religious papers were banned, followed by weekly (and other time frame) publications. Catholic organizations were slandered as Communist plots and the Hitler youth would chant anti-Catholic songs, paint their trucks with anti-Catholic slogans and lewd/offensive depictions of priests and nuns, culminating in the attack of the Archbishop of Paderborn (located in North Rhine-Westphalia) Caspar Klein. Political Catholicism was banned (by Hermann Göring, another crappy human) and Catholic Priests and Nuns were constantly heckled as perverts and homosexuals, often being persecuted and put on trial for this ridiculous claims. In Pius XII’s first ever encyclical, he really obviously calls out the Nazis, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression and Poland carving treaty), racism, and the destruction and partitioning of Poland, and even alluding that Christians were obligated to help Poland out, “The blood of countless human beings, even noncombatants, raises a piteous dirge over a nation such as Our dear Poland, which, for its fidelity to the Church, for its services in the defense of Christian civilization [no one expects John III Sobieski, the Lion of Lechistan and his Poles (and their really awesome biggest cavalry attack in human history (and their awesome Winged Hussar armour that makes them look super freaking awesome)) to show up and save Vienna and all of Christendom in 1683 let’s go outnumbered Christian Coalition Army], written in indelible characters in the annals of history, has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection in harmony with the principles of justice and true peace”, maybe even militarily if necessary.

We’ll skip over all the stuff you told us in class because that’s stuff you already know, this is meant to be newer stuff for you. Fast forward to the Nuremberg Trials, where the predecessor to the CIA (The Office of Strategic Services) reported on the Nazi’s goal of the “complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion.”(“The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of Christian Churches”), and the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, our final terrible human being for this session, and he really takes the cake. He is known to be a main author of the Lebenstraum (you know this too) and many Nazi Racial Theories (extremely ironic considering he was a quarter Estonian, a quarter Latvian, and a half French; and (of course) he contributed greatly to the Final Solution. He viciously hated Christianity, as he proclaimed that original sin contradicted the noble birth all Aryans intrinsically have (no I’m not making this up), and he painted a future for Germany so bleak that it almost sounds like some dystopian novel. He planned for the aforementioned National Reich Church of Germany to take total control over all churches, to cease publication of and destroy the Bible, to remove all copies of it as well as any saints from churches, and to (we swear this is 100% legit) replace those bibles with Mein Kampf (which was “to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book”) and to seriously and entirely unironically remove all crucifixes and crosses and replace them with swastikas. We realize we can’t really top that so uh yeah, sorry for all the reading you had to do and hopefully you learned at least one thing from this that you find useful next year.

Okay that's all I've got. thanks in advance and inb4
>This is pro Catholic Bias
Yes I know that, it's a Catholic school. I don't have too much of a choice
Yeah hopefully this is accurate and all that, if it isn't please tell me so I don't get fucked. Thanks fags

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You are just doing mental gymnastics to deny a connection with your precious church and are one sided to the point of charlatanism. Also underage B&

>>2897097
I never even said I was Catholic, it's a Catholic school so I have to suck the religion's dick whether I want to or not

Hitler was catholic,his invasion of orthodox russia shows he was following the vaticans eternal game plan of inquisition

>>2897116
At least call it Atheist USSR or something of that sort, 1940s Russia was anything but an Orthodox state considering the whole no religion thing going on

The Catholic zentrim party also voted for the enabling act,making Hitler a dictator, there was an alliance with the vatican

Hitler was a devout catholic. The catholic church personally celebrated his birthday.