The problem with history is that it does not exist in a
vacuum. It is a parade of events, some of which may have happened in the
distant past, that affect the present. In order to properly understand the past
sometimes we need to look at a number of different issues.
Nazi Germany happened because of a number of different events
that coalesced into some serious nastiness. The major event is the signing of
the Treaty of Versailles. After World War I, Europe and the United States
wanted revenge; they wanted payback for all that they had suffered and were
willing to do almost anything to get that payback. That desire severely screwed
the country’s economics, to the point that there simply was not enough money to
buy anything with. It was a country ripe for someone to take over and solve its
problems
When Hitler started taking over, he needed to do a number of
different things in order to properly do so. So he did a number of different
things to do so. First, he needed a scapegoat, and decided to go after the most
effective target: The Jews. Europeans traditionally avoided banking for the
most part; there was the issue that money was considered evil (it was
considered the root of all evils, after all), and so dealing with money was
something no one wanted to do for most of Europe’s history. As Jews were
considered outside normal society they were able to deal with money, and so
they eventually took over the dealing with money, as well as trading in
general. Although different groups took over the banking industry over time, it
nonetheless established a link between Jews and money. This made them an
obvious scapegoat in a financially depressed country, and Hitler took advantage
of that.
Once he had his scapegoat in place, his ascent began. In
order to stay in charge, he needed to control how people thought. Unlike Russia
and China, Hitler decided to subvert religion. In his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that religion
must serve the needs of the country, and so he started endorsing the Deutsche Christen (German Christians)
over the Catholic Church; not only did the German Christians support the Nazi
Party, but they also had all of the right tenets; they were hostile to Jews
(including excluding the Old Testament from their sacred scriptures), and the
Nazi Party was able to combine pagan and Roman symbology with their message,
assuring that Hitler would serve as a messiah. The Catholic Church also
endorsed the Central Party, the main competition of the Nazi Party. Eventually
the Catholic Church would seek a concordat with the Nazi Party in order to
protect their followers that would effectively keep it out of Germany’s
affairs.
So, not only did Hitler find the perfect scapegoat, and was
then able to subvert a religious organization to aid his ascent and get another
to back off. The German Christians were subverted on a number of levels; not
only were leaders promised power, but those that were against the take-over
were eliminated and replaced by Nazi Party members, and was soon able to
influence the laity into doing pretty much anything. Ironically, Hitler had
plans to eliminate all churches after the war, seeing Christianity as something
that should be eliminated as it was incompatible with Nazism due to its Jewish
origins.
Summing up: In order to solve Germany’s issues, Hitler was
going to take Germany to war. In order to gain support, he subverted the local
church. Once the war was over, he was planning on eliminating same church. Just
something to consider when the whole “Hitler as Christian” thing comes up…
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