Hitler and the Christians

Neuhaus provides an illuminating summary of Stephen Ozment’s history of Germany in the November issue of FT . This in particular: “‘The original motives for the war were completely self-centered, not Judeocentric or anti-Semitic. Germans wanted to avenge and repair, by total victory, the draconian reparations they had been compelled to pay and the terrible suffering they had endured since World War I.’ As for Hitler’s personal motivations, his chief target was Christianity, through which, in his view, the Jewish corruption worked its evil. ‘Pure Christianity,’ Hitler said, ‘leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind; it is whole-hearted Bolshevism under a tinsel of metaphysics.’ Ozment writes, ‘Thus, while Hitler subjected German Jews to a ‘final solution,’ he singled out the removal of the ‘rotten branch of Christianity’ as the ‘final task’ of National Socialism, with the removal of Slavs, Gypsies, and homosexuals in between. Beyond the Jewish Holocaust lay the eradication of Christianity.’” Ozment points out how vulnerable liberal Protestantism was to the lure and pressure of Nazism. No wonder, eradicating the Jewish elements in Christianity, preventing Christianity from continuing to be a “carrier” of Hebrew religion, was at the heart of the liberal agenda.