The war with Germany officially ended 8 May 1945, 80 years ago (the war with Japan would continue a little longer). This cataclysmic war cost tens of millions of people their lives. Many others were traumatised for life. Cities were bombed into piles of rubble. In terms of human lives lost, World War 2 was the most catastrophic war in history. It is good to remember the many men who fought, often at the cost of their lives, against the Nazi forces of darkness. We thank God that Hitler and his Nazi regime did not win the war because thereby were we not only liberated from the dominion of a cruel dictator, but from a dictator who elevated himself above God, a tyrant who wanted to stamp out Christianity and present Nazism as the new religion for Germany and for all the countries overrun by Germany. That’s not something we tend to think of, yet it’s the most frightening prospect if God had permitted Germany to win the war.
In his book, The Nazis and the Supernatural, Michael Fitzgerald shows with reference to various documents how, at the heart of the Nazi appeal to the people of Germany, there was a conscious attempt to present Nazism as a new religion. Hitler was “openly hailed as the saviour of Germany and his book Mein Kampf was accorded equal status with the Bible as a ‘holy book’”. In fact, the celebrations that were organised to promote Hitler and the party “were all consciously modelled on Christian ceremonies and traditions”. But dictators don’t like competition, not even from God. Hence, the worship of Christ, and subservience to His Word, had to be replaced by the worship of Hitler and his ideals.
Fitzgerald refers to Rauschning who, in his book Hitler Speaks, summarises a conversation he had with Hitler in which Hitler had remarked that, “When the time came, Hitler would bring the world a new religion. The blessed consciousness of eternal life in union with the great universal life, and in membership of an immortal people – that was the message he would impart to the world when the time came. Hitler would be the first to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, a joyous message that liberated men from the things that burdened their life. Hitler would restore men to the self-confident divinity with which nature had endowed them.” Hitler and his Nazi ideology was to supplant Christianity and provide a wonderful future!
Hitler would do this by channelling the German people’s religiosity into the Nazi cause and their service of God into a service of Hitler. Fitzgerald says: “Hitler was presented as the proper focus of worship, his ideals as the true religion of the nation and his party as the true church to which all true Germans should be looking.” Of course, Hitler was careful enough not to push his ideas too quickly at first but there was a general drift of Nazism to replace Christianity with his ideals. Indeed, in his Table Talk Hitler said he intended to destroy all religious bodies when he won the war.
Says Fitzgerald: “Just as he tried to make the Nazi Party replace the churches so too Hitler consciously set out to present himself as the Messiah for Germany. He demanded of his followers the characteristically religious qualities of obedience, self-sacrifice and faith.” Just look at the massive parades with their bands playing martial music, at torchlit processions, at the way Hitler was triumphantly welcomed and at his live broadcasts to the masses. “In a very real sense Hitler was elevated to the same status as Christ and it became increasingly common for him to be seen as a semi-divine being rather than a politician.”
In this way public meetings became a religious ritual, says Fitzgerald. Hitler preferred to speak to the public in the evenings because this lent itself better to creating the atmosphere associated with rituals and church services. And just as Christianity focussed on the salvation of God’s people and warnings against the enemy, Hitler focussed on the salvation of the privileged German race and the denunciation of enemies, especially the Jews. “In the place of God stood Hitler; in the place of the Devil, the Jews.” Hitler constantly emphasised that he represented goodness and positive values while the Jews represented evil. Indeed, he claimed in his book Mein Kampf: “I believe I am acting according to the intention of the Almighty Creator: by resisting the Jews I am doing the work of the Lord.” This is remarkable because hardly any of the Nazi leaders believed in God or Christianity. Hitler had privately claimed to be an atheist and many of the leading lights in the Party dabbled in occult beliefs. Hitler and the nazi Party were clearly antichristian.
However, they were aware that the people of Germany were by and large Roman Catholics or Lutherans. Slyly, therefore, they paid some lip-service to Christianity while seeking to Nazify the churches. Fitzgerald points, as example, to the German Evangelical Church headed by a pro-Nazi, Bishop Ludwig Muller. He saw it as his task to unify Protestants behind Hitler. Calling the church “the people’s church”, membership was restricted to those with “good German blood”. Jewish Christians were dismissed, the Old Testament was abandoned as unchristian and Jesus’ teachings were revised to conform to the demands of National Socialism.
One of the Nazi leaders, Rosenberg, promoted what he called “positive Christianity”. It was a new form of “Christianity” which was stripped of its Jewish heritage and which replaced essential Christian values with racist and ‘volkisch’ ideas. Says Fitzgerald: “Had the war gone differently Christianity would have faced a level of persecution not experienced since the time of the Roman Empire. It would have been replaced by Rosenberg’s bizarre ‘Thirty Articles’ among which were:
5 The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably … the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany…
13 The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and the dissemination of the Bible in Germany…
18 The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.
19 On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.
30 On the day of its foundation, the Christian cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels … and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.”
Although the Nazis called it “Positive Christianity” it was nothing else than National Socialism which proclaimed that, “National Socialism is the doing of God’s will. God’s will reveals itself in German blood.”
And if that is not sufficiently blasphemous consider what one Nazi Party leader, Kerrl, said: “True Christianity is represented by the Party and especially by the Fuhrer to a real Christianity. The Fuhrer is the herald of a new revelation”. The Mayor of Hamburg declared: “we can communicate directly to God through Hitler”. A group of “German Christians” stated that “Hitler’s word is God’s law”. And the head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Shirach, claimed: “the service of Germany appears to us to be genuine and sincere service of God; the banner of the Third Reich appears to us to be His banner; and the Fuhrer of the people is the Saviour whom He sent to rescue us.” A questionnaire to the League of German Girls asked if it was God or Hitler that was “greater, more powerful, and stronger”.
Nazism or the National Socialism of Hitler was a false religion that offered nothing but enslavement or, for Jews and those who did not bow the knee to this idolatry: death. Six million Jews were murdered in the gas camps. Millions of women and children died through the bombing and famine. Millions of men, caught up in the fight to promote Nazism or to defend their countries against it, lost their lives. Millions of others were incarcerated in POW camps where many died. Included with these were civilians accused of undermining Nazism in one way or another. And a few of these were ministers of the reformed churches who warned their congregations against the ungodly evils of the Nazis’ National Socialism. Those who survived have written of the horrors they witnessed. Like so many dictators seeking to establish their own idolatry, they are willing to sacrifice the lives of millions in order to promote their idea of a utopia on earth.
Some people might be inclined to think that if Germany had won the war, life in Europe would soon return to normal albeit under a German dictator. However, it is evident that Christians would have had to convert to the “Positive Christianity” which denied our Saviour and required the worship of Hitler and Nazi ideals. Like Daniels’ three friends, we would have had to worship the image representing the dictator’s ideals or face certain death. The Lord spared reformed people from an impossible situation. For this we may be truly thankful.
The Bible speaks of the “man of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2) who will come just before Christ returns. He opposes and exalts himself above God (vs 4), as Hitler did. But Hitler was evidently not the man of lawlessness. Like Nero, Napoleon and others incited by Satan to exalt themselves as though they were God, Hitler was prevented from being the final man of lawlessness of which the Bible speaks. By God’s grace he, like the others before him, was defeated. Christ provides the world with more time for people to turn to Him, the true and only Saviour. He provides more time for the full number of the elect to be gathered into His kingdom.
Thankful for the Liberation from horrors of World War 2 and from a satanic dictator, may we exploit the time God still gives us to honour, love, confess and serve Him and, as soldiers in the continuing spiritual battle, fight off every attack of Satan. The rapid dechristianisation of society foreshadows dark times ahead and who knows whether the inevitable “man of lawlessness” is not already being formed? Yet we know that he too is in God’s hand and his tentative, flickering, light will be snuffed out by Him who governs all and who will soon afterwards usher in the eternal Paradise of God.
Reference: Michael Fitzgerald, “A New Religion for Germany” in The Nazis and the Supernatural, Arcturus Publishing, London, 2020.