Religion and the Reich [View All]

Papers Reveal Nazi Aim: End Christianity.
Date: Friday, January 18 2002
By Edward Colimore (Courtesy of the Philadelphia Inquirer)

"Take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith - in Germany's Third Reich."

More than a half-century ago, confidential U.S. government reports on the Nazi plans were prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and are now available online for free - some of them for the first time ...

"Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said an OSS report in July 1945. "The best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan is to be found in the systematic nature of the persecution itself.

"Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich . . . and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers" ...

http://www.allbusiness.com/middle-east/israel/104325-1.html
http://www.elfis.org/2002/01/13/papers-reveal-nazi-aim-end-christianity/

How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity
By JOE SHARKEY
Published: January 13, 2002

... According to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi leader of the German youth corps that would later be known as the Hitler Youth, ''the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement'' from the beginning, though ''considerations of expedience made it impossible'' for the movement to adopt this radical stance officially until it had consolidated power, the outline says.

Attracted by the strategic value inherent in the churches' ''historic mission of conservative social discipline,'' the Nazis simply lied and made deals with the churches while planning a ''slow and cautious policy of gradual encroachment'' to eliminate Christianity.

The prosecution investigators describe this as a criminal conspiracy. ''This general plan had been established even before the rise of the Nazis to power,'' the outline says. ''It apparently came out of discussions among an inner circle'' comprised of Hitler himself, other top Nazi leaders including the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a collection of party enforcers and veteran beer-hall agitators ...

''The Catholic Church need not imagine that we are going to create martyrs,'' Robert Wagner, the Nazi Gauleiter of Baden, said in a speech, according to the O.S.S. study. ''We shall not give the church that satisfaction. She shall have not martyrs, but criminals'' ...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0DB1F39F930A25752C0A9649C8B63

Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion
Installment No. 1 - Posted: Winter 2001

July 6, 1945 - "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches"
A document prepared by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Research and Analysis Branch. Courtesy of Cornell Law Library, which holds the original document ...

http://www.lawandreligion.com/nurinst1.shtml