Adolf Hitler's Religious Views - Persecution of Christian Churches

Persecution of Christian Churches

In 1999 Julie Seltzer Mandel, while researching documents for the "Nuremberg Project", discovered 150 bound volumes collected by Gen. William Donovan as part of his work on documenting Nazi war crimes. Donovan was a senior member of the U.S. prosecution team and had compiled large amounts of evidence that Nazis persecuted Christian Churches. In a 108-page outline titled "The Nazi Master Plan" Office of Strategic Services investigators argued that the Nazi regime had a plan to reduce the influence of Christian churches through a campaign of systematic persecutions. "Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said the report. The most persuasive evidence came from "the systematic nature of the persecution itself."

Consensus among historians who treat the matter of Christianity in prewar Nazi Germany is that the Nazi-backed "positivist" or "German Christian" church was endeavoring to make the evangelical churches of Germany an instrument of Nazi policy. Although ideas about racial superiority and the destiny of their race which animated the German Christian movement had been present in German religious circles as early as 1930, the movement was not formally established until 1932 when it officially became known as the German Christians with backing from Hitler himself. The pretension of the Nazi regime and of its Fuhrer that all Protestant churches in Germany should be subsumed under the leadership of the German Christians served as an impulse to action for other Christian leaders who saw the racist, ultra-nationalistic, and totalitarian emphases of the German Christian church as incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When those not in agreement organized their opposition and, calling themselves the Confessing Church, publicly proclaimed articles of faith that denied the position of the German Christians, they eventually came under severe persecution by the State. About the end of March 1935 six hundred of the principal leaders of the Confessing Church were arrested and many others received visits from the Gestapo to emphasize the government's point of view concerning these matters. Later, there were new arrests, and it began to be known that those who had been taken away were ending up in concentration camps. Given the totalitarian atmosphere of Nazi Germany at that time, it would be ingenuous to believe that these measures against the Confessing Church and in support of the policies of the German Christians might have been taken without Adolph Hitler's consent.