In the beginning of Hitler's term as Chancellor of Germany, before the Enabling Act was voted on that gave him dictatorial powers, he posed as both anti-Semitic and as a friend of the German Catholic and Protestant Churches. Many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, were misled into supporting the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis in the pre-World War II years.

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How the Catholic and Confessing Church Survived Under Hitler's Pagan Nazi Regime:
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We naturally want to interpret pre-World War II history from our modern democratic perspective haunted by the black and white bulging eyes of starving waifs and skeletons half alive looking up at us from the concentration death camps, but nobody in the 1930’s realized just how evil Hitler was. The fascist dictators Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain were the champions of the Catholic Church, protecting the church from the godless communists, so Christians were slow to see the evil in Hitler’s more radical anti-Semitic Nazi regime. We will examine both the struggles of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany and also the struggle of the Protestant Confessing Churches in trying to keep the Christian faith alive under a brutal pagan Nazi totalitarian state.

We will also discuss:
• Preceding German history under Bismarck and his Kulturkampf, World War I, the Versailles Treaty, the Catholic Centre Party, and the Weimar Republic.
• Anti-Semitism, and the stab in the back myth that victory was stolen from the Germans.
• How Hitler tried to follow Mussolini’s example in the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.
• How Hitler was tried for treason, won a national audience, and wrote Mein Kampf, My Struggle, while in prison.
• How Hitler was able to rise to power by posing as an enemy of the communists after the Reichstag Fire, and having the Reichstag pass the Enabling Act making him dictator, and later Fuhrer, of the Third Reich.
• How Hitler out-maneuvered Papen and Hindenburg in the Night of the Long Knives, when the SA Brownshirt leadership, including Ernst Rohm, and many of Hitler’s opponents were murdered.
• How Cardinal Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, and Pope Pius XI negotiated the Reich Concordat with Papen and Hitler.
• How Hitler promoted Positive Christianity and the German Christian Church, which was a Nazi church with pagan ideology, to control the Protestant churches.
• How Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed the Confessing Church Movement to counter the Nazi corruption of the churches in the Barmen Agreement.
• How Ludwig Muller, the Nazi protestant bishop, was thwarted when church leaders protested to Hitler.
• How church leaders, including Bishop von Galen, compelled the Nazis to back down from their extreme sterilization and euthanasia programs that preyed on the disabled, the feeble, and the mentally ill.
• Stories of the Nazi concentration camps, and the work camps that employed slave labor.
• How the papal encyclical “With Burning Concern,” released by Pope Pius XI, opposing Nazi brutality and anti-Semitism, was read on Palm Sunday in every Catholic Church in Germany.
• How the Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, deepened the horrors of the Holocaust, where many Jews were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps and work camps.

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This is original content based on research by Bruce Strom and his blogs. Images in the Public Domain, many from Wikipedia, some from the National Archives, are selected to provide illustration. When images of the actual topic or event are not available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. The ancient world was a warrior culture out of necessity, to learn from the distant past we should not only judge them from our modern perspective but also from their own ancient perspective on their own terms.

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