"Those who blame God for the Nazi Holocaust should note that the roots of the
Nazi ideology lay in a definite rejection, indeed a bitter hatred of not just
Judaism, but the God of the Bible and authentic Christianity. In this connection
it is interesting to note the following thoughts written by Friedrich Nietzsche,
the German philosopher who first proclaimed that “God is dead.”
That the strong races of Northern Europe have not repudiated the Christian God certainly reflects no credit on their talent for religion.
[Speaking of the Christian concept of God] The God of the great majority, the democrat among gods (NB Nietzsche loathed democracy), has nonetheless not become a proud pagan god; he has remained the god of the nook, the god of all dark corners and places, of all the unhealthy quarters throughout the world.
What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency. The weak and ill constituted shall perish; the first principle of our philanthropy. And one shall help them to do so. What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the weak and ill
constituted: Christianity.
Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands in the antithesis to the tonic emotions which enhance the energy of the feeling of life: it has a depressive effect. Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction: it defends life’s disinherited and condemned.
This philosophy of 19th century German atheism clearly has a spiritual link to Nazi ideology. One wonders what Nietzsche would have thought of the strong, powerful, pitiless ones, the SS, “selecting” the fittest specimens as they ran past them naked – the strong to be worked to death in concentration camps, the weak and “ill-constituted” to be taken away to the gas chambers. What does the modern world need, hard, pitiless anti-Christian men and women, or those who will follow the one Nietzsche despises so much? He said:
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God (Jesus speaking in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5.3-9).
There was no doubt what kind of people Hitler wanted. He said “Antiquity was better than modern times because it did not know Christianity and syphilis.” His main reasons for rejecting Christianity were as follows:
1. It was the religion which sided with everything weak and low.
2. It was purely Jewish and Oriental in origin. “Christians bend their backs to the sound of church bells and crawl to the cross of a foreign God”.
3. The religion began 2000 years ago among sick and despairing men who had lost their faith in life.
4. Christian ideas of forgiveness of sin, resurrection and salvation were just nonsense.
5. The Christian idea of mercy was dangerous. One must never extend mercy to an enemy. “Mercy is an un-German concept.”
6. Christian love was harmful. Love paralyses.
7. The Christian idea of equality of all human beings before God meant that the inferior, the ill, the crippled, the criminal and the weak were protected.
The Nazis may have marched into battle with “Gott mit uns” (God with us) as their motto, but their god was a pagan antichrist god,
and they followed
a false
messiah, Adolf Hitler,
and bowed down before idols of power, physical force
and
the dream of world domination by the Teutonic Master Race.
Is it surprising that
the fruit of this demonic ideology was the nightmare of destruction and
slaughter which followed in their wake?...their aim was to replace authentic Christianity with a program for a new German Christianity:
1) Throw out the Old Testament – it is a Jewish book. Also throw out parts of the New Testament.
2) Christ must be regarded not as Jewish, but as a kind of Nordic martyr put to death by the Jews, a kind of warrior who by his death saved the world from Jewish domination.
3) Adolph Hitler is the new Messiah sent to earth to rescue the world from the Jews.
4) The swastika replaces the cross as the symbol of German Christianity.
5) German land, German blood, German soul, German art – these four things must become the most sacred things of all to the German Christian.
In effect the Nazis were replacing Christianity with a new paganism which drew its strength from Wagner’s music and the Nordic myths of pre-Christian times. One of the prime movers in this direction was Alfred Rosenburg to whom Hitler awarded the National Prize, Germany’s version of the Nobel Prize, in 1937. Rosenburg wanted a return to the old Teutonic religion of fire and sword. There was even a hymn for the new German Faith Movement:
The time of the Cross has gone now,
The Sun Wheel shall arise,
And so, with God, we shall be free at last
And give our people their honor back."
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