Religious study in the Third Reich has no meaning different from that of other instruction: it means lessons in National Socialism, the religion of the National Socialists. Baldur von Schirach, the Hitler Youth Leader, cries, “The experience of comradeship in battle, the experience of unity is, for us, not only a political but a religious experience as well.” And Alfred Rosenberg is even clearer: “When an S. A. man puts on his brown shirt, he is no longer a Catholic, a Protestant or a believer in Germanhood” (not even that!) “but only a German fighting for his entire nation.”
That Religion is still taught in the schools seems, at first glance, merely a tactical concession, to make it possible to remain within acceptable limits and avoid battle with the strong power of the Church. An attempt is made to turn this necessity into a virtue, to enlist simple faith, which demands no proof, into the service of the cause. “Faith” is to replace “knowledge.” The German must believe in the world mission of Germans; in German superiority; in the divine purity of his Führer. The lessons in Religion are an opportunity to bring up children in a faith which, to be sure, is at the other pole from Christianity, in that it preaches hate as against love; arrogance versus humility; force versus charity. Nevertheless, it is called by the National Socialists “positive Christianity.”
Every class in Roman Catholicism opens with the formula: “Heil Hitler! Blessed be Jesus Christ, in all Eternity, Amen,” and closes with: “Blessed be Jesus Christ, in all Eternity, Amen. Heil Hitler!” The sequence, sandwiching everything else between Heils, is enforced by an edict of January 5, 1934. And the Protestant religious lessons, which include the same formulas, must, according to the “Plan for Teaching Evangelical Religion in Public Schools in the National Socialist Spirit,” emphasize “that the existence of our people, in their racial peculiarity, has been willed by God and that it is an act of unfaithfulness toward God if racial values are not considered or if they are destroyed.”
All of this is simple, if you accept the premise that Hitler has come to his people directly from God. After that, there can be no scruples: his plans are God’s plans, his methods God’s methods, and his will God’s will. It is so easy that a man like the Reichsstatthalter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, can exclaim, “Our faith is nothing but the Weltanschauung of the Führer! No one can serve two masters! This world-theory gives expression to the will and to the conscience given us by God!” And Dr. Robert Ley, leader of the German Workers’ Front, adds, “Our only aim and purpose must be to live according to the teachings of Adolf Hitler, which are the gospel of the German people.”
“Our only purpose,” they say, “our only aim. The gospel,” they assert. Nothing could be less complicated.
Of course, at the beginning, while the regime was still expecting an opposition (which never materialized), it must have been difficult to combine the “New Gospel” with the lessons in Christian faith which had been hastily prepared for school use. Edicts, then, were ambiguous and complex, lacking the admirable directness of Mutschmann or Ley today.
The edicts addressed to teachers of religion may be summarized: Both faiths, National Socialism and Christianity, draw their strength from the God of the Universe. Teachers must remember that they have to do away with differences of opinion, and emphasize the German experience of God. The Old Testament must be carefully expurgated. Only those portions of it which treat of biological questions or are necessary for the understanding of the New Testament are to be used. For, as a whole, the Old Testament mirrors the Jewish spirit, and tells of the downfall of a people having nothing to do with godly matters.
This official description of the Bible is a gentle one. At mass meetings other opinions appear: Gau-Obermann Krause described the Old Testament in the Sport Palace in Berlin as a “book for cattle-drivers and procurers”; and he was never reprimanded.
Officially, the Nazis demand the recognition of Jesus. But they convert him into a hero without fear, a Siegfried of Nordic stamp who waged war on the Jews until he was killed by them. Side by side with the gentler words intended for export, there are any number of Krause-like comments. The Fountain, in the Jan. 2, 1934, issue, declares: “How high Horst Wessel towers over that Jesus of Nazareth! That Jesus who pleaded that the bitter cup be taken from him! How unattainably high all Horst Wessels stand above this Jesus!”
It must be repeated that nothing can be said in Germany without official sanction. Thus, the words of journalists are, in their way, as “official” as government statements. Journalists write what Ministers think; but the Ministers are careful.
In the schools, too, the Ministers have helpers, with “Lines of Direction” and “Plans for Education,” which enlighten the populace as the Ministers desire. One group of Hanover teachers published a three-part curriculum for religious instruction.
1. God and Nature: Christian tradition and its explanation. The mechanical-materialistic concept of the world and its end-products, namely, Liberalism and Marxism [in France, Germany, Russia]. The modern scientific concept of the world and its religious meaning. Biology and Christianity. 2. Religion and Race: a. Hebraism and Christianity. b. Roman Christianity from the Council of Trent to the present time. c. Islam, Buddhism. d. The German Faith Movement. 3. Christianity and the Germanic Weltanschauung: Germanic faith in God and the Christian mission. The Savior. The ideals of monks and knights in the Middle Ages. Parsifal, Ekkehard. Luther [here the addition of suitable letters from Paul]. Arndt [a militarist playwright] and Schleiermacher [a philosopher whose place here is arbitrary] with retrospective accounts of Pietism and Idealism. Statesmen and soldiers: Bismarck, Hindenburg, W. Flex. Christianity and National Socialism. Struggles for a National Church in past history and in the present.
It would be superfluous to remark that the whole curriculum is an insult to the Christian religion, “Biology and Christianity” — it is difficult to find two other such remote concepts, anywhere. And “Hindenburg and Walter Flex” — a general and a writer on military subjects, in the religion course! Yet these gentlemen find room in their curriculum for “race,” “the ideal of knighthood,” “Arndt” — whatever pleases the Nazi leaders is taught. German children learn that Hitler is pious and reverent; this is one of the things they must believe — it cannot be proved. After the blood bath of June 30, 1934, they were informed that the Führer had piously and reverently retired to the solitude of his little house in Berchtesgaden, near Munich. He was visited there by a little old woman, who asked him how he hoped to accomplish his mission, and how he had come to arrange the blood bath. “Silently the Führer pulled a volume from his pocket… it was the New Testament.”
There is a “Twenty Questions” game in Religion, as there is in Geo-politics, and with the same purpose.
“Who, children, is it in these days who most reminds us of Jesus — through his love of humble people and his readiness for self-sacrifice?”
And the answer is: “The Führer.”
“Who most reminds us of the disciples, because of their loyal attachment to the Führer?”
“General Goering, Dr. Goebbels, and (before the blood-bath) Captain Roehm.”
One teacher went further. The pupils in the Public School in Wanne, Queen Louise’s School, had to copy this “Credo” from the blackboard: “I believe in Germany, God’s other beloved Son, Master of His own Self, conceived under the Nordic Heavens, born between the Alps and the Sea, suffered under Papists and Mammonists, calumniated, beaten, and thrust into misery, tempted into Hell by Devils of all sorts after decades of poverty and affliction, arisen again from the national Death into Ekkehardt’s, Bach’s and Goethe’s world of the Spirit, where He sitteth at the side of His brother of Nazareth, at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”
The writer of that lunatic passage is named Deppe. It was quoted in the General Evangelical-Lutheran Church Newspaper on May 14, 1937.
There are slogans provided for German youth. The children must learn one a week, and recite it each day of that week. “Judas, the Jew, betrayed Jesus, the German, to the Jews.” What impressive madness! And no one can distinguish the religious slogans from the National Socialist ones:
Versailles ist Lüge, Schmach und Schand,
Versailles ist Dein Tod, O Vaterland, —
Du bist ein deutsches Kind, so denke dran,
Was Dir der Feind in Versailles angetan!
Versailles was a lie, a shame, a brand,
Versailles was your death, O Fatherland,—
You are a German child, so think thereon,
What at Versailles your enemies have done!
“But the Fatherland sitteth on the Right Hand of God the Father Almighty….” Is it National Socialism or is it religion?
It is both; it has to be. The words and concepts are synonymous and interchangeable. At morning chapel, the platform is decorated with the swastika. Hitler’s photograph hangs under the crucifix. Choirs of children sing the heroic deeds of the Nazis: the glorious explosion of a bridge by Leo Schlageter; the death of Horst Wessel. Even such Christian festivals as confirmation are utilized. “Just after dark,” a report begins, “the school was lined up on the parade ground with lit torches; a central flame was kindled, and the boys to be confirmed were admitted into the first hundred, or upper school. The headmaster made an address in which he stressed their new obligations in pursuing those personal ideals of Honor, Cleanliness, and Courage, which their country demanded. He then presented each boy with a side-arm, which his new status in the first hundred requires him to wear, and with a text. These texts closely resembled the ‘Graces’ said occasionally before meals; for example: ‘One does not beg for justice, one must fight for justice.’”
Pagan festivals, too, are given the same rank and importance, and are celebrated everywhere. The Sonnenwendfeiern (solstice festivals) are in particular favor. Participants leap the bonfires, swearing eternal faithfulness to National Socialism, which “continues in its course like the sun.” And the Nazis rejoice over the “lovely custom.” Political Education, the organ of the Saxon N.S. Teachers’ Union, writes: “What has suffered most in the course of the last thousand years of our history has been the connection with the religious treasure of our ancestors, which, however, could not be entirely done away with. That is easy to understand — in spite of the methods of force used in Christianizing our ancestors — which resulted in the conscious and stubborn derogation of the so-called heathen worship of idols, the memories of whose festivals, however, could not be entirely obliterated from the memory of the people….”
To retain the respect of the outer world, the Nazis have taken the easiest way out, placed the “so-called” before the “heathen,” and referred to “the religious property of our ancestors.”
The ensuing confusion is great. The faithful of all religions in Germany fight passionately for their beliefs, and, because of outside pressure, have the only organizations in the country which could not be suppressed or driven underground. A few members of these groups do still protest — and our wholehearted respect and sympathy goes to them. They are the relatively small number who, because of their moral qualities “and their fear of God,” are not qualified to take part in the “conquest of the world by the Nazis.” They are persecuted, like the Jews, with every kind of slander, pseudo-science, and open pornography. And the Nazis see to it that school-children learn what evil-doers the clergy are — the clergymen who are imprisoned for the sake of their faith, these “moral criminals” and “seducers of the young.” Care is taken to “enlighten and inform” German children on this point.
A newspaper, chosen haphazardly, lies before me. It is the Freiburger Zeitung of June, 1937, and two closely-printed pages deal exclusively with reports of “immorality” trials throughout the Reich. Even if the material disgusts the editors, they have no choice; it is an official report, and must be printed. “A sequence of horrors…. Monks trespass against cripples…. The lunatic asylum as a place of refuge…. With dragging steps and trembling limbs, physically deformed, these poor victims stood stuttering and weeping before the judge in order to repeat, with horrible gestures, their despairing accusation against the bestial criminal…. All kinds of unnatural lechery…. Debauches of greatest magnitude…. Horrible homosexual crimes…. Thirteen poor crippled children subjected to abominable misdemeanors in the cell of a cloister…. The child raped, and a bunch of roses given to the mother!… Disgusting shamelessness of a criminal in a priest’s cassock….” Page after page, in three thousand other German papers as well as in Freiburg; day by day, for weeks. And the verdicts of “Not guilty,” which the judges are again and again compelled to hand down, are, by decree, printed in a corner, in small type.
A credible report from the Rhineland states that pupils have become possessed by pathological sexual aberrations, as a result of reading newspaper accounts of criminal actions. Usually the school does nothing to cure this disease; on the contrary, it promotes it. The children swarm in front of the Stürmer stands, discussing these things excitedly. Sexual psychosis is already so widespread that trust is failing; the doctors in the public schools are, even now, not permitted to examine girl pupils except in the presence of the teacher. A true incubus has taken possession of large sections of the population. Its political use is clear: the Catholic Church “is to be made impossible and to be destroyed.”
The campaign fought on a sexual basis has assisted this attempt of Hitler’s. Shortly after the “immorality” trials, Catholic priests were forbidden to teach Religion in German schools, losing one of the oldest privileges of the Church, and giving the Nazis a final sphere of influence.
But what had happened, actually? Where were the “thousand sexual crimes” referred to by Goebbels in the Sport Palast and in his attack on Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago? Out of 30,719 Catholic priests and monks in Germany, the Nazis themselves have accused 120, found 68 guilty, and left 52 still awaiting trial. In the Nazis’ own balance, 0.39 per cent of the priests have been accused; and, whether just or unjust, the important fact is that, with tremendous pressure from those in power, and after a scarifying public denunciation, the Nazis were able to accuse only one-third of one per cent of the priesthood, and condemn no more than one-sixth of one per cent.
In Rome, the Church recognizes this war against it. The Vatican knows how undeclared wars can break in all their violence, and an editorial in the Osservatore Romano of September 14, 1937, says: “Proofs of this hidden and open war against the Church and against the rights guaranteed to the Church by the solemn concordat, are the continuous campaigns on the part of the immoderate and, to say the least, indecorous press, and the recent ordinances tending to take religious teachings out of the hands of competent authorities — that is to say, the clergy — or demanding that the clergy reform the catechism in the National Socialist sense, which implies a negation of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith. The Nuremberg Congress, moreover, showed that the penetration of Nordic paganism into the Nazi movement is constantly progressing, and the official representatives of the Nazi Party, far from opposing this penetration, are encouraging: it. Formerly the Holy See received repeated assurances in writing, and orally, that Rosenberg’s works were his private affairs, for which the Reich Government assumed no responsibility. But the official propaganda of Rosenberg’s ideology is assuming even greater proportions. His ideas have become the basis of all courses for teachers depending on the State and the Nazi Party, and have entered the schools, with the result that the German Government’s declarations and assurances have lost their value.”
The fanatic war of National Socialism against the Church is being fought on so large a field that the history of any one battle is a broken epic of victories that are not victories at all, apparent retreats, offers of peace, agreements made to be withdrawn. One thing is clear: the stake of the war is the souls of the children. Both sides are battling for their future.
“If there are still individuals in our generation who believe they cannot change any more, then we shall take their children and educate them to be what is necessary for the German people.” — Adolf Hitler.