As we witness the despicable treatment of Jews around the world, we start to wonder if this is what 1930s Germany was like. The Holocaust did not start with deportations and mass murder. It started with a slow and gradual process of exclusion and persecution of Jewish people. But let’s not forget, the measures were deemed legal. The Nazi-led German government, through the legislative process, gradually excluded Jews from public life, the professions, and public education.
Of course, the goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize Jews and to create a climate of hostility and indifference toward their plight, therefore preventing public sympathy from growing.
With Hitler’s rise to power, Jew-hatred became the official ideology and policy of the German regime. By 1938, organised campaigns took place that included destroying synagogues, mass arrests, destruction and looting of Jewish-owned businesses and official registration of Jewish property in preparation for eventual confiscation. It must have truly been a horrific time.
What I find interesting is the fact that just as Jew-hatred and Marxism are rising again in our age, so too were they prominent in Hitler’s time. Listen to Hitler’s own words: “I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit…The difference between (Marxists) and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it. Look at the workers’ sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets written specifically for the comprehension of the masses: all these new methods of political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin. All I had to do is take over these methods and adapt them to our purpose.”
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Although Hitler was not in full agreement with all of Marx’s ideology, he certainly held many Marxist views, and did so openly. On 27 January 1934, in an interview with Hanns Johst in Frankforter Volksblatt, Hitler said: “National Socialism derives from each of the two camps the pure idea that characterises it, national resolution from bourgeois tradition; vital, creative socialism from the teaching of Marxism.”
Knowing this, it should not come as a surprise that both Hitler and modern Marxists also hate Christianity. There was a man named Martin Bormann who was a personal aide to Hitler. He compiled a series of Hitler’s private conservations known as “Hitler’s Table Talk.”
One of the most prominent themes throughout these conversations is Hitler’s hatred of Christianity. It is recorded that on 10 October 1941, Hitler commented: Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.”
Four days later, on 14 October 1941, he said: “So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.”
In fact, during this time, even the words to the much loved Christmas song, “Silent Night” were changed to read:
Silent Night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,
Watches o’er Germany by day and night,
Always caring for us.
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright,
Adolf Hitler is Germany’s wealth
Brings us greatness, favour and health
Oh give us Germans all power!
Essentially the reason that Hitler sought to distance the German people from the hope of Christian beliefs is that he wanted people to be withdrawn from all influences hostile to the National Socialist philosophy of aggression. This meant that the influence of the Christian church would have to be minimized as thoroughly as possible.
Hitler had a definitive plan to achieve this, and under the pretext that the churches themselves were interfering in political and state matters, the Nazis would deprive the churches, step by step, of all opportunity to affect German public life. Sound familiar?
It is exactly what is happening in many Western nations today. The Nazis believed that the churches could be starved and strangled spiritually in a relatively short time when they were deprived of all means of communication with the faithful beyond their church buildings. Additionally, they terrorized others in such a manner that no Christian would dare to speak out openly against Nazi policies.
Hitler made it clear that church life could continue, but only under the condition that they accepted the Nazi program and offered no criticism of it. Again, we are seeing a similar pattern today in many Western nations.
People need to wake up to the fact that many Western leaders are not committed to liberty and freedom as you and I know it. They have been influenced by Marxist principles and are leading their compliant populations into very dangerous territory. For the Jew primarily, but also for the Christian, we are entering turbulent times indeed.
