The Religious Beliefs of Leading Nazis
Within a large movement like Nazism, "it may not be especially shocking to discover" that individuals could embrace different ideological systems that would seem to be polar opposites. The religious beliefs of even the leading Nazis diverged strongly.
The difficulty for historians lies in the task of evaluating not only the public, but also the private statements of the Nazi politicians. Steigmann-Gall, who intended to do this in his study, points to such people as Erich Koch (who was not only Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reichskomissar for the Ukraine, but also the elected praeses of the East Prussian provincial synod of the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union) and Bernhard Rust as examples of Nazi politicians who also professed to be Christian in private.
Read more about this topic: Religious Aspects Of Nazism
Famous quotes containing the words religious, beliefs, leading and/or nazis:
“The English are probably the most tolerant, least religious people on earth.”
—David Goldberg (b. 1939)
“A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.”
—Walter Lippmann (18891974)
“Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.”
—Isidore Ducasse, Comte de LautrĂ©amont (18461870)
“If the Nazis have really been guilty of the unspeakable crimes circumstantially imputed to them, thenlet us make no mistakepacifism is faced with a situation with which it cannot cope. The conventional pacifist conception of a reasonable or generous peace is irrelevant to this reality.”
—John Middleton Murry (18891957)