Catholicism The attitude of the Nazi Party towards the Catholic Church ranged from tolerance to near-total renunciation and outright aggression. Bullock wrote that Hitler had some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". The Nazi Party had decidedly
pagan elements. One position is that the Church and
fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic
Weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person. and a simple "atheist" by
Blainey. His fascist comrade
Benito Mussolini was an
atheist. Both were
anticlerical, but they understood that it would be rash to begin their
Kulturkampfs against Catholicism prematurely. Such a clash, though possibly inevitable in the future, was put off while they dealt with other enemies. The nature of the Nazi Party's relationship with the
Catholic Church was also complicated. Vatican daily newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano owned by the
Holy See condemned Adolf Hitler, Nazism, racism, and anti-Semitism by name, and in 1930 with the approval of
Pope Pius XII (then
Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli), the paper declared that "belonging to the National Socialist Party of Hitler is irreconcilable with the Catholic conscience." In early 1931, the German bishops issued an edict excommunicating all leaders of the Nazi Party and banning all Catholics from membership. The ban was conditionally modified in 1933 when State law mandated that all
trade union workers and
civil servants must be members of the Nazi Party. In July 1933 a Concord
Reichskonkordat was signed with the
Vatican which prevented the Church in Germany from engaging in political activities; however, the Vatican continued to
speak out on issues of faith and morals and it opposed Nazi philosophy. In 1937 Pope
Pius XI issued the
encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemning Nazi ideology, notably the
Gleichschaltung policy directed against religious influences upon education, as well as Nazi
racism and
antisemitism. His death prevented the issuing of a planned encyclical
Humani generis unitas, but the similar
Summi Pontificatus was the first encyclical released by his successor (
Pius XII), in October 1939. This encyclical strongly condemned both racism and
totalitarianism, without the
anti-Judaism present in the draft presented to Pope Pius XI for
Humani generis unitas. The massive Catholic opposition to the Nazi
euthanasia programs led them to be quieted on 28 August 1941. Catholics, on occasion, actively and openly protested against Nazi antisemitism through several bishops and priests such as Bishop
Clemens von Galen of
Münster. In Nazi Germany, political dissenters were imprisoned, and some German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the pastor of Berlin's Catholic Cathedral
Bernhard Lichtenberg and the seminarian
Karl Leisner. In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all
monasteries and
abbeys in the German Reich, a number of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the
Allgemeine SS under Himmler. However, on 30 July 1941 the
Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Monastery Storm) was put to an end by a decree from Hitler, who feared that the increasing protests by the Catholic segment of the German population might result in passive rebellions and thereby harm the Nazi war effort on the eastern front. In a report from 20 August, 1942, Gestapo stated that Catholics demonstrated passive resistance to Nazism, which included participation in the mass, religious devotions and pilgrimages, despite the restrictions and discouragement.
Plans for the Roman Catholic Church Historian
Heinz Hürten (professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Eichstaett) noted that the Nazi Party had plans for the
Roman Catholic Church, according to which the Church was supposed to "eat from the hands of the government." Hürten states the sequence of these plans: an abolition of the
priestly celibacy and a
nationalisation of all Church property, the dissolution of
monastic religious institutes, and an end to the influence of the Catholic Church upon education. Hürten states that Hitler proposed to reduce vocations to the priesthood by forbidding seminaries from receiving applicants before their 25th birthdays, and thus he had hoped that these men would marry beforehand, during the time (18–25 years) in which they were obliged to work in military or labour service. Also, along with this process, the Church's
sacraments would be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", the non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life. There existed some considerable differences among officials within the Nazi Party on the question of
Christianity. Goebbels is purported to have feared the creation of a third front of Catholics against their regime in Germany itself. In his diary, Goebbels wrote about the "traitors of the Black International who again stabbed our glorious government in the back by their criticism", by which Hürten states he meant the indirectly or actively resisting Catholic clergymen (who wore black
cassocks). Martin Bormann called for the disestablishment of the Catholic Church in Germany, arguing that it stands "in concealed or open opposition to National Socialism". Similar views were expressed for Reinhard Heydrich, who considered the dissolution of Catholic structures in Germany a matter of national security, citing "the hostility constantly displayed by the Vatican, the negative attitude of the bishops towards the Anschluss as typified by the conduct of
Bishop Sproll of Württemberg, the attempt to make the Catholic Eucharistic Congress in Budapest a demonstration of united opposition to Germany, and the continued accusations of Godlessness and of destruction of church life made by Church leaders in their pastoral letters."
Protestantism According to
Peter Stachura, the backbone of Nazi electoral support was rural and small-town Protestant
middle class, whereas German Catholics rejected the party and overwhelmingly voted for the confessional
Catholic Centre Party and
Bavarian People's Party instead. Both Protestant clergy and laymen were generally supportive of National Socialism, According to
Robert Ericksen, sermons in Protestant churches were full of praise for the new regime, with a Protestant church in Bavaria announcing that the Nazi party "may expect not just the applause but the joyous cooperation of the church." Falter observes that the Nazi Party found it challenging to build up any support amongst Catholics, and fared considerably worse in terms of both electoral support and new recruits in Catholic areas. Analysing the results of the
July 1932 German federal election, Steigmann-Gall concludes that religious piety among German Protestants, rather than
apostasy, was the defining factor in regards to supporting National Socialism, with most religious Protestants being most likely to vote for NSDAP. and as such, "the narrative of national identity in Germany was written in a distinctly Protestant language". On the 450th anniversary of Luther's birth, which fell only a few months after the Nazi Party began its seizure of power in 1933, celebrations were conducted on a large scale by both the Protestant Churches and the Nazi Party. At a celebration in
Königsberg,
Erich Koch, at that time the
Gauleiter of East Prussia, made a speech in which he, among other things, compared
Adolf Hitler to
Martin Luther and claimed that the Nazis fought with Luther's spirit. Even so, Steigmann-Gall states that the Nazis were not a
Christian movement. The prominent Protestant theologian
Karl Barth, of the
Swiss Reformed Church, opposed this appropriation of Luther in both the
German Empire and Nazi Germany, when he stated in 1939 that the writings of
Martin Luther were used by the Nazis to glorify both the State and state absolutism: "The German people suffer under his error of the relationship between the law and the
Bible, between secular and spiritual power", in which Luther divided the
temporal State from the inward state, focusing instead on spiritual matters, thus limiting the ability of the individual or the church to question the actions of the State, which was seen as a God ordained instrument. In February 1940, Barth specifically accused German Lutherans of separating biblical teachings from the teachings of the State and thus legitimizing the Nazi state ideology. He was not alone with his view. A few years earlier on 5 October 1933, Pastor Wilhelm Rehm from Reutlingen declared publicly that "Hitler would not have been possible without Martin Luther", though others have also made this same statement about other influences on Hitler's rise to power. Anti-communist historian
Paul Johnson has said that "without
Lenin, Hitler would not have been possible".
Protestant groups , a movement seeking a universal German Protestant realignment under the ideology of Nazism Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination. Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism. The
German Christians (
Deutsche Christen) were a movement within the Protestant Church of Germany with the aim of changing traditional Christian teachings to align with the ideology of Nazism and its anti-Jewish policies. The
Deutsche Christen factions were united in the goal of establishing a Nazi Protestantism and abolishing what they considered to be
Jewish traditions in Christianity, and some but not all rejected the
Old Testament and the teaching of the Apostle Paul. In November 1933, a Protestant mass rally of the
Deutsche Christen, which brought together a record 20,000 people, passed three resolutions: •
Adolf Hitler is the completion of the Reformation, •
Baptized Jews are to be dismissed from the Church •
The Old Testament is to be excluded from Sacred Scriptures. was a main proponent of implementing Nazi elements into German Protestantism, which caused major disruptions in the German Evangelical Church and eventually led to the creation of the
Confessing Church by some alarmed pastors such as
Martin Niemöller. The German Christians selected
Ludwig Müller (1883–1945) as their candidate for in 1933. In response to Hitler's campaigning, two-thirds of those Protestants who voted elected Lutheran minister Ludwig Müller to govern the Protestant Churches. Müller was convinced that he had a divine responsibility to promote Hitler and his ideals, and together with Hitler, he favoured a unified Reichskirche of Protestants and Catholics. This Reichskirche was to be a loose federation in the form of a council, but it would be subordinated to the Nazi regime. The level of ties between Nazism and the Protestant churches has been a contentious issue for decades. One difficulty is that Protestantism includes a number of religious bodies and a number of them had little relation to each other. Added to that, Protestantism tends to allow more variation among individual congregations than Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which makes statements about the official positions of denominations problematic. The German Christians were a minority within the Protestant population, numbering one fourth to one third of the 40 million Protestants in Germany. Dissenters were silenced by expulsion or violence. The support of the German Christian movement within the churches was opposed by multiple adherents of traditional Christian teachings. Other groups within the Protestant church included members of the
Bekennende Kirche,
Confessing Church, which included such prominent members as
Martin Niemöller and
Dietrich Bonhoeffer; both rejected the Nazi efforts to meld
volkisch principles with traditional Lutheran doctrine. Martin Niemöller organized the
Pfarrernotbund (Pastors' Emergency League) which was supported by nearly 40 percent of the Evangelical pastors. They were, however, (as of 1932) a minority within the Protestant
church bodies in Germany. But in 1933, a number of
Deutsche Christen left the movement after a November speech by Reinhold Krause urged, among other things, the rejection of the Old Testament as Jewish superstition. So when Ludwig Müller could not deliver on conforming all Christians to Nazism, and after some of the German Christian rallies and more radical ideas generated a backlash, Hitler's condescending attitudes towards Protestants increased and he lost all interest in Protestant church affairs. The Nazis weakened the churches' resistance from within, but had not yet succeeded in taking full control of the churches, which was evidenced by the thousands of clergy who were sent to concentration camps. After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 by members of the military and members of the
German Resistance movement, to which
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others in the Confessing Church movement belonged, Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. However, even the "Confessing Church made frequent declarations of loyalty to Hitler". Later, a number of Protestants were solidly opposed to Nazism after the nature of the movement was better understood. However, a number also maintained until the end of the war the view that Nazism was compatible with the teachings of the church. The small Methodist population was deemed foreign at times; this stemmed from the fact that
Methodism began in England, and did not develop in Germany until the nineteenth century under the leadership of
Christoph Gottlob Müller and Louis Jacoby. Because of this history they felt the urge to be "
more German than the Germans" in order to avoid coming under suspicion. Methodist Bishop
John L. Nelsen toured the U.S. on Hitler's behalf in order to protect his church, but in private letters he indicated that he feared and hated Nazism, and he eventually retired and fled to Switzerland. Methodist Bishop
F. H. Otto Melle took a far more collaborationist position that included his apparently sincere support for Nazism. He was also committed to an asylum near the war's end. To show his gratitude to the latter bishop, Hitler made a gift of 10,000 marks in 1939 to a Methodist congregation so it could pay for the purchase of an organ. The money was never used. Outside Germany, Melle's views were overwhelmingly rejected by most Methodists. The leader of the pro-Nazi segment of the
Baptists was Paul Schmidt. The idea of a "national church" was possible in the history of mainstream German Protestantism, but generally forbidden among the
Anabaptists, the
Jehovah's Witnesses, and the
Catholic Church. The forms or offshoots of Protestantism that advocated
pacifism,
anti-nationalism, or
racial equality tended to oppose the Nazi state in the strongest possible terms. Other Christian groups known for their efforts against Nazism include the
Jehovah's Witnesses.
Jehovah's Witnesses In 1934, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society published a letter entitled "
Declaration of Facts". In this personal letter to then
Reich Chancellor Hitler,
J. F. Rutherford stated that "the Bible Researchers of Germany are fighting for the very same high ethical goals and ideals which also the national government of the German Reich proclaimed respecting the relationship of humans to God, namely: honesty of the created being towards its creator". However, while the Jehovah's Witnesses sought to reassure the Nazi government that their goals were purely religious and non-political and they expressed the hope that the government would allow them to continue their preaching, Hitler still restricted their work in Nazi Germany. After this, Rutherford began denouncing Hitler in articles through his publications, potentially making the plight of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany worse.
Jehovah's Witnesses or "Bible Researchers" () as they were known in Germany, comprised 25,000 members and they were among those persecuted by the Nazi government. All incarcerated members were identified by a unique purple triangle. Some members of the religious group refused to serve in the
German military or give allegiance to the Nazi government, for which 250 were executed. An estimated 10,000 were arrested for various crimes, and 2,000 were sent to
Nazi concentration camps, where approximately 1,200 were killed.
Anabaptists There is an ongoing debate about the level of complicity Anabaptist communities had in the Nazi regime. Despite a historic pacifist stance, a number of Mennonite leaders and congregations embraced the rise of the Nazi Party. When the Reich persecuted the
Rhön Bruderhof and the Gestapo forcefully disbanded it in 1937,
Michael Horsch, brother of American Mennonite author
John Horsch and leader of the Federation of Mennonite Churches of South Germany, publicly disavowed and discredited the community. Horsch defended the government's actions and claimed the disbandment of the community was not persecution, but rather the result of internal mismanagement. Mennonite publications defended the German government's persecution of other sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, thus ensuring there was no association between those persecuted and Mennonites. In
Prussia, Mennonite leaders were highly outspoken in favor of the 1939
invasion of Poland, which some viewed as a war of liberation that would result in a fusion of Germany with Christendom.
Atheists ''
Heinrich Himmler agitated against
atheists: "Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid." However, the regime strongly opposed "Godless Communism" and all of Germany's
freethinking (
freigeist),
atheist, and largely
left-wing organizations were banned the same year. In a speech made during the negotiations for the
Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933, Hitler argued against secular schools, stating: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith." One of the groups closed down by the Nazi regime was the
German Freethinkers League. Christians appealed to Hitler to end anti-religious and anti-Church propaganda promulgated by Free Thinkers, and within Hitler's Nazi Party, the atheist Martin Bormann was quite vocal in his anti-Christian views.
Heinrich Himmler, who himself was fascinated with
Germanic paganism, was a strong promoter of the
gottgläubig movement and he did not allow atheists into the
SS, arguing that their "refusal to acknowledge higher powers" would be a "potential source of indiscipline". However, this progress began to falter as early as 1936. That year, Baháʼí-owned businesses in Stuttgart were vandalized, and their owners threatened—a reflection of the Nazi regime’s growing antisemitism, as many of the new German Baháʼís had Jewish heritage. In 1937, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and a key architect of the Holocaust, issued an official decree banning the Baháʼí Faith and all its institutions. The reason given was the Faith’s “international and pacifist tendencies,” which the regime viewed as subversive. This decree triggered a wave of persecution. Nazi authorities demolished several Baháʼí memorials, seized or destroyed archives and personal religious texts, and by 1939, began arresting members of the National Spiritual Assembly — the Baháʼí Faith’s elected national governing body in Germany. Further mass arrests took place in 1942, with some Baháʼís deported to concentration camps where they later perished. In 1944, imprisoned Baháʼí leaders were put on trial in Darmstadt. Despite a strong defense, the trial appeared to be a formality—the outcome already determined. All the defendants were found guilty, fined heavily, and ordered to cease all Baháʼí activities and associations. Baháʼís in other parts of Europe suffered similar repression, including in Hungary and Poland. Among them was
Lidia Zamenhof, daughter of
L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of
Esperanto, who was also arrested and ultimately perished under Nazi persecution.
Esoteric groups In the 1930s there already existed an
esoteric scene in Germany and Austria. The organisations within this spectrum were suppressed, but, unlike
Freemasonry in Nazi Germany, they were not persecuted. The only known case in which an occultist might have been sent to a concentration camp for his beliefs is that of
Friedrich Bernhard Marby. Also, some Nazi leaders had an interest in esotericism.
Rudolf Hess had an interest in
anthroposophy.
Heinrich Himmler showed a strong interest in esoteric matters. The esoteric
Thule Society lent support to the
German Workers' Party, which was eventually transformed into the Nazi Party in 1920.
Dietrich Eckart, a remote associate of the Thule Society, actually coached Hitler on his
public speaking skills, and while Hitler has not been shown to have been a member of Thule, he received support from the group. Hitler later dedicated the second volume of
Mein Kampf to Eckart. The racist-occult doctrines of
Ariosophy contributed to the atmosphere of the
völkisch movement in the
Weimar Republic that eventually led to the rise of Nazism.
Other beliefs In the Appendix of
The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, Conway has included a document: "List of sects prohibited by the
Gestapo up to December 1938." It mentions the "International Jehovah's Witness" under No.1, but also includes a so-called "Study group for Psychic Research" Astrologers, healers and fortune tellers were banned under the Nazis, while the small pagan "
German Faith Movement", which worshipped the sun and the seasons, supported the Nazis. ==Churches and the war effort==