"No priest, no evil one/Can keep us/From feeling like Hitler’s children."

That creepy line, according to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, was part of a Hitler Youth song popular during the late 1930s. Goldberg has posted two excerpts from his book in response to the idea, still widely prevalent, that Hitler was a Christian of some sort or another (a strong Catholic, according to some):

Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis
 worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional 
Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish 
this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung
 while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society. 
To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German 
historian Götz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with
 lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for
 with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned
 religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to
the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to
 state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,”
Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.” Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional
 Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day
 of the Seizure of Power. Each November the streets of central
 Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his “old fighters” 
replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories
 were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against
 Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo
history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of
 Christianity.

Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed
 into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian
 God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his 
right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that
 “just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the
 German Volk from decay.” In April 1933 the Nazi Congress of
 German Christians pronounced that all churches should catechize
 that “God has created me a German; Germanism is a gift of God.
 God wills that I fight for Germany. War service in no way injures the 
Christian conscience, but is obedience to God.”7 When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints,
 Hitler’s rage got the better of him. “Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia . . . The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years . . . and
 will continue after Christianity has disappeared . . . We must get 
used to the teachings of blood and race.” When the bishops objected
 that they supported Nazism’s secular aims, just not its religious innovations,
 Hitler exploded: “You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of 
the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany.”

In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938
 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction
for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether,
 and Jacobinism reigned supreme.

Read more here and here.

Meanwhile, ZENIT reports: "New evidence published today by the newspaper of the Italian bishops gives more credence to the belief that Adolf Hitler had planned to either kidnap or kill Pope Pius XII."

Comments

[Chris]

Liberal Fascism is an amazing book! A must read!

[Ann Couper-Johnston]

Interesting to read this. It is obviously the inspiration for a book entitled "Hitler's Children", published in both German and English. I have the German edition. However, I can easily show my anyone who does not read German the way the regime got into the minds of the people. There are two photos one after the other. One shows tiny children (kindergarten age - maybe 3 or 4 years old?) in a row, with their teacher in front facing them, and all making a Hitler salute. The second shows a lady making the sort of place you might set up, with candles and flowers, to put your statue of Our Lady on a major feast day ... but instead there is a large picture of Hitler.

I find both those pictures (and especially taken one after the other, as they are printed) revealing and chilling in equal measure.