A popular image of the Nazis is that they were fundamentally anti-Christian while devout Christians were anti-Nazi. The truth, however, is far more complicated because there were many issues on which Nazis and religious conservatives found common ground. Like any politician, Hitler was able to use these to his advantage.

In The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw writes:

[S]peaking before a mass gathering in the Catholic stronghold of Bavaria in April 1932, Hitler told his audience that while north German Protestants had labeled him a hireling of Rome and south German Catholics a pagan worshipper of Woden, he was merely of the opinion — here playing to some widespread anti-clerical sentiments — that priests in Germany, just as was the case in Italy, should end their political activities and confine themselves to denominational matters and pastoral duties: what the Pope had admitted to in Italy, he concluded, could not be sinful in Germany. In fact, he was at pains to stress, he himself was deeply religious, the ‘spiritual distress’ of the German people even greater than its economic misery, and the toleration of over fourteen million anti-religious atheistic Marxists in Germany highly regrettable.

Some of the most important commonalities between the Nazis and religious conservatives — especially Catholics — were anti-communism, anti-atheism, and anti-secularism. The Nazis were a “secular” party in the sense of not attempting to form a new church or religion and many Nazis tended to be anti-clerical, but support and promotion of “positive Christianity” was an important platform of the Nazi part from its earliest days.

Still, more than one prominent Nazi was anti-Christian and hoped to promote a new type of paganism. Such views were never officially endorsed by the Nazis or by Hitler, but their existence was more than enough to generate suspicion on the part of many Christians in Germany — at least, until the 1933 elections, at which point Christian leaders who had been critical of the Nazis experienced a miraculous conversion.

Despite these disclaimers, the negative image of ‘neo-heathenism’, which the NSDAP could not shake off, undoubtedly played a considerable role in bolstering the high level of relative immunity to Nazism which prevailed before 1933 in Catholic circles. Even after the disappearance of the Catholic press in the early years of the Third Reich, Catholic clergy were able to sustain the image through their own subtle ‘propaganda’ methods — greatly assisted by the often crude assaults of the Nazis themselves in the ‘Church struggle’ — and it remained throughout the Third Reich an important basis of the alienation of the Catholic population from the regime and of forms of partial opposition to Nazism in the Catholic subculture.

Even so, the notion that there might be some authoritarian, patriotic, anti-Marxist, residual ‘good’ in Nazism, that ‘National Socialism, notwithstanding everything, might succeed some day in eliminating from its programme and its activities all that which conflicted in principle and practice with Catholicism’, offered the opening for the volte-face which Catholic bishops were prepared to make following Hitler’s avowals of tolerance and support for the Church in March 1933 and the potential, too, for driving a wedge between ‘the god-fearing statesman’ Hitler and the anti-Christian Party radicals, especially Rosenberg.

There was criticism of and opposition to Hitler and the Nazis among Catholic leaders before 1933; after that, both criticism and opposition were relatively rare. When they did occur, it was more likely to come from individual Catholics or the few Catholic organizations that managed to hold on to their existence. Catholic prelates had very little to say that directly criticized the Nazis or the Nazi agenda.

Some Catholics, including the current Pope Benedict XVI, “learned” from their experiences in Nazi Germany that the best way to oppose evil, totalitarian regimes is through enforced discipline and orthodoxy with in the church. This is rather difficult to accept, though, when neither the church officials in Germany nor those in the Vatican were seen leading any opposition to the evil Nazi regime.

It wasn’t a failure of unity that prevented Catholics in Germany from standing up to the Nazis, it was a failure of leadership — and that’s not something which enforced discipline and orthodoxy can counter. On the contrary, dissuading individual Catholics from the idea that they can legitimately dissent from the decisions of the church hierarchy can actually make things more difficult because it will prevent them from stepping in when their leaders fail again.

 

Read More Book Notes from the