The Nazis moved swiftly in religious education. New regulations stipulated that all parents must enroll their children in religious instruction. Seven Catholic feast days were sanctioned as public holidays, and Nazi Party members who had left the church were ordered to rejoin. Until 1936, the German army stipulated that every serving soldier must belong to either the Catholic or one of the evangelical denominations.
But a lot of this, in retrospect, can be seen as tactical maneuvering. Many thought that the real founding moment of Nazism was the Nietzschean “death of God.” More recently, however, Richard Steigmann-Gall has shown how the National Socialists—Hitler as much as anyone else—never really followed through on their earlier intentions, in particular the much-advertised attempt to introduce, or re-introduce, “pagan” ideas. Instead, the Nazis’ original plan was for a concept expressed as “Positive Christianity,” which had three key ideas: “the spiritual struggle against the Jews, the promulgation of a new social ethic, and a syncretism designed to bridge the confessional divide between Protestant and Catholic.”
Positive Christians conceived of Nazism as a struggle not unlike Christ’s own, in particular his campaign against the Jews. Hitler, like many leading Nazis, held to the view that Jesus was not a Jew and that the Old Testament should be discarded from Christian teaching.14 The second aspect of Positive Christianity, its social ethic, was embodied in the phrase “public need before private greed.” This perhaps glib slogan enabled the Nazis to present themselves in an ethical-moral light in regard to their supervision of the economy. They could advertise as one of their main aims the desire to end class strife in Germany and to create, or more properly re-create, a “People’s Community,” an organic, harmonious whole.
The final element of Positive Christianity, the attempt to create a “new syncretism,” was in some ways the most important, because many leading Nazis viewed the divide between Catholics and Protestants as the greatest stumbling block to the national unity that they would need if they were to force the changes in society that they were intent upon. Himmler expressed this most clearly: “We have to be on our guard against a world power which makes use of Christianity and its organization to oppose our own national resurrection by methods of which we’re everywhere conscious.” He was anti-clerical but not anti-Christian, he added. The elevation of the Volk, the community, as a mystical, almost divine entity, was the main device for overcoming the sectarian divide, and at the same time a political maneuver to combat the rival analyses of Marx and the materialist economists of the West.15
More than theology, or paganism (which many Nazis, despite Himmler, thought was laughable), Positive Christianity stressed active Christianity—helping the Volk, preserving the sanctity of the family, keeping healthy, practicing anti-Semitism, getting involved in the winter-relief program to feed the poor—rather than reflection. Indeed, these activities seemed designed to prevent contemplation, and again this suggests that the Nazis’ real concern over Christianity was that it represented potentially the most powerful force against them.
“RACES ARE GOD’S THOUGHTS”
During the Weimar years there was a continual battle between the rationalists—the scientists and academics—and the nationalists, the pan-Germans, who remained convinced there was something special about Germany, her history, the instinctive superiority of her heroes. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler had stressed how Germany was different from France, the United States and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. From time to time, Hitler attacked modern art and modern artists. Like other prominent Nazis, he was by temperament anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mold, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other top men.
Alfred Rosenberg’s family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century on a family holiday in 1909. He now felt he had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the fledgling NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-partei, the German National Socialist Workers’ Party) and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His writing ability, his knowledge of Russia and his facility with the Russian language all helped to make him the party’s expert on the “East”; he also became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. During the 1920s, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, he began to see the need for an ideology that went beyond Mein Kampf, and in 1930 he published what he believed would provide the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its title was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, usually translated as The Myth of the Twentieth Century.16
Mythus is a rambling and inconsistent book. It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilization—the text stretches to more than seven hundred pages. The third section is entitled “The Coming Reich”; other parts deal with “racial hygiene,” education, religion and international affairs. Rosenberg was another of those who argued that Jesus was not Jewish, that his message had been perverted by St. Paul, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mold by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating the “fake” doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno—all of which beliefs, Rosenberg insisted, were “unhealthy.”II
His aim—and at this distance his audacity is breathtaking—was to create a substitute faith for Germany. He advocated a “religion of the blood” which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a “race-soul.” He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, the anthropologist H. F. K. Günther, who claimed to have “established on a scientific basis the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race.” Like Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection with the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece and Germany, and to do so he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Frederick the Great and Henry the Lion to produce an entirely spurious but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past.
For Rosenberg, race—the religion of the blood—was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration: individualism and universalism. “The individualism of economic man,” in effect the American ideal, he dismissed as “a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.”
Hitler seems to have had mixed feelings about Mythus. He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it, publication not being sanctioned until September 15, 1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Probably, Hitler put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics, which would surely follow publication. If so, he was being no more than realistic—the Vatican was incensed by Rosenberg’s argument, and in 1934 placed Mythus on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, archbishop of Cologne, set up a “defense staff” of seven young priests who worked around the clock to list the many “errors” in the text, the corrections being published as anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities so as to evade the Gestapo. Rosenberg nonetheless remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.
Mythus left no doubt as to what the Nazis thought was wrong with German civilization—and this despite the book being hardly coherent.18 In terms of both organization and style it left a great deal to be desired, to the extent that one of Rosenberg’s Munich colleagues felt the need to publish a g
lossary of no fewer than 850 obscure words and phrases to be found in it. One German theologian dismissed it as “stark dementia.” Yet after Hitler had finally approved its publication, all schools in the Reich were forced to order copies, ensuring that Rosenberg became a rich man.
One of the incoherences in the book is that although Rosenberg identified Christianity as part of the intellectual problem facing the Nazis in regenerating Germany, he also veiled his ideas in what has been called a “Nordic mist.” He attacked the growth of astrology and other superstitions in Germany, and he opposed Steiner’s anthroposophy, which he dismissed as a parallel to the precepts of the Masonic lodges. In declaring that the cult of Wotan was dead, though, he was no orthodox heathen, as some early Nazis were. But he did not count himself an atheist. The loathing that the Nazis had for the churches was based largely on political grounds, because Hitler’s acolytes realized that, should they have chosen to (which they mainly did not), the churches could have mounted the most forceful opposition to Nazi ideology. Officially, and on the surface, everyone was free to believe what they wanted, provided those beliefs did not interfere with the aims of the state (as did the beliefs of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who rejected military service).
Although Rosenberg wrote respectfully about Jesus Christ as a heroic historical figure, he also wrote approvingly of the Arian heresy, which denies Christ’s divinity (a view popular among early Lombards and Goths). Robert Cecil says that Rosenberg, like Himmler, “delighted in all expressions of religious heresy.” He also rejected the doctrine of original sin—at least insofar as it applied to Germans—and the idea of the afterlife and the “dismal pictures of the pains of hell.” He made his views plain in the memoir he wrote in the Nuremberg jail: “Man’s existence is perpetuated only in his children or his work.” He refused all religious paraphernalia before his execution.
On the other hand, he deplored the decline of Christianity because it left, he thought, an intellectual/emotional gap that would be filled either by the Jews or the Marxists. He based his substitute faith in Mythus on one of Paul de Lagarde’s aphorisms: “Races are God’s thoughts.” This led directly to “the religion of the blood,” in which (as noted earlier) each race evolved its own religion and had its own “race-soul”—“race is the external form of soul.”19 Only through the survival of the race could the individual soul survive the death of the physical body. In one of his speeches he said, “From this secret core . . . there develops what we call racial characteristic [Volkstum] and race culture.”
Rosenberg was much influenced by his discovery of the medieval Dominican friar Meister Eckhart, who as long ago as 1327 had been obliged to appear in front of the Pope and Curia to answer accusations of heresy. Rosenberg persuaded himself that Meister Eckhart had been defending a German form of faith against the arid scholasticism of Rome and its priestly tyranny. In this way, he managed to find (a German) historical precedent for what he himself was doing. The clear line from Eckhart to Luther to the race theorist H. S. Chamberlain proved to Rosenberg that Germany had continually sought to distance herself from Rome, that she was in some way special, theologically speaking.
Of the precursors it was Chamberlain who was of most use—not surprisingly, since he was still alive at the time and very much part of the same intellectual tradition as the Nazis. Chamberlain in his books had recognized what he regarded as the Aryan race. He knew that outside the realm of language this was a fiction, having nothing to do with anatomy. He got around this by saying that individuals were Aryan if they felt themselves to be Aryan; if they had the experience of being Aryan, then they were. This conveniently allowed Rosenberg to include many impressive figures from the past as Aryan achievers, further solidifying what was an entirely artificial concept. A final plank in this construction was the work of H. F. K. Günther (already introduced), who claimed to have identified on a scientific basis the racial characteristics of Nordic-Aryan man, in a line that stretched from India to Greece to Germany, a northern trajectory to compare with the “classical” version that went up through Greece and Italy to France.
Historically, Rosenberg purported to show that nations, cultures and civilizations rise and fall according to their racial purity, which implied—more than implied—that the racial inclusivity of Christianity could not be successful and could not apply in Germany. “For example, the Germanic ideal of living in conformity with nature and esteeming fine physique and manly beauty has been undermined by Christian antagonism to ‘the flesh’ and by sentimental ideas about preserving the lives of defective children and allowing criminals and those with hereditary illness to propagate their defects.” As he put it, the “feebler” nations became, through absorbing the Christian doctrines of individualism and love of humanity, the more easily could they be ruled, or dominated, by Rome. This is why the doctrine of original sin was eschewed. Rosenberg told people at a Nuremberg rally: “The German people is not born in sin, but born in nobility.”20
A later enemy was Freemasonry, which, Rosenberg said, had its origins in England, France and Italy, promoting individualism and then the “atomization” of democracy. In this way, a German tradition of honor and aristocracy was pitched against the more “Western” notions of equality, not just of all Europeans but of all races. But Rosenberg was not content with this: most abhorrent to him were the Jews and the Marxists (often the same people), through which we arrive at economic man as “a figment of the Jewish mind.”
Against all these forces the only salvation, for Rosenberg, was a new faith. “Within the bond of race man can escape ‘the throttling of individual life under the materialistic pressure of the age.’ Without this faith he is condemned to frustration and despair.”21
And this was the underlying appeal of Nazism: “to stand together, to feel strong, to act heroically.” People were able to feel chosen, potential heroes, simply by virtue of being born Germans, “predestined to greatness,” while all opponents were “flying in the face of the laws of Nature.” Each German was, in effect (and this was a Nietzschean idea), a “superman.” The “blood” was the divine essence which had to be defended against all others.
Why was this idea so powerful? A lot had to do with the political atmosphere in Germany after the Great War, with the fact that, intellectually speaking—in science, in philosophy, in music, in drama and other forms of literature—Germany had led the way and was now brought low. There was such a feeling of resentment for this somersault in her status (as Nietzsche had also foreseen, long before the war) that the inconsistencies, non sequiturs and errors in Mythus were allowed to pass without significant comment. Nor did it matter that many of Rosenberg’s main ideas were in fact Christian, so long as the Christian symbols were changed (as they were). “The men of the coming age will transform the heroes’ war memorials and glades of remembrance into the places of pilgrimage of a new religion; there the hearts of Germans will be constantly shaped afresh in pursuit of a new myth.”
The new religion needed a tradition, but one in which the Second Reich was felt to be inadequate. So Rosenberg and Himmler looked back to Saxon times. At Verden in Lower Saxony, where Charlemagne had defeated heathendom, Rosenberg called for a memorial consisting of 4,500 stones, one for each Saxon slain. In May 1934, he organized the commemoration of the seven hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Altenesch, in which a whole community, condemned as heretics by a Catholic bishop, had been put to death. In front of a crowd that Rosenberg later claimed was forty thousand strong, consisting predominantly of peasants and farmers, he asserted “to great applause”: “The Holy Land for Germans is not Palestine. . . . Our Holy Places are certain castles on the Rhine, the good earth of Lower Saxony and the Prussian fortress of Marienburg.”22
Rosenberg’s job was to an extent made easier by the fanatical following achieved by Hitler—many Germans simply saw him as a Messiah, ascribing to him supernatural powers. But other traditions were fabricated. One of these was the “blood flag
,” said to be stained with the blood of sixteen Nazis killed before the Feldherrnhalle in the Munich putsch of November 1923. This flag was henceforth used to dedicate other flags, echoing the apostolic succession. In 1934, the remains of the dead putschists were removed without the permission of their families and placed in a new “Temple of Honor” in Munich. Hitler called out the name as each coffin was brought in and a detachment of the Hitler Youth replied “Here!” From now on, the Nazi dead were referred to as “summoned to Horst Wessel’s standard,” in honor of the “least savory of all the Nazi heroes,” Horst Wessel, the author of the lyrics to the party anthem.
The traditional churches in Germany were somewhat compromised by the fact that in the nineteenth century they had become tainted with nationalism, anti-socialism and anti-Semitism and so found it difficult to oppose the NSDAP, though the Catholics made more of a stand than the Protestants did, at least until Hitler came to power. The abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918 meant that the evangelical churches had lost their secular head, and they “relapsed into a loose association of twenty-eight Land Churches.” More than that, Lutherans who believed that God manifested himself in history not once, in the person of Christ, but repeatedly, were, as one critic put it, “painfully exposed to the euphoria of the hour.” “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler,” said one.23
But Rosenberg did not want too much religious organization. Along with Hitler and Himmler he recognized that, if it chose to do so (which it did not, as mentioned earlier), the organized church could become the only real threat to National Socialism. As far as Rosenberg was concerned, as Lagarde had said, “the state cannot create a religion,” for religion was something between a man and his own soul or, “if he had the good fortune to be a German, between himself and the folk-soul.”
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 38