Everybody is correct here. To the Nazis, it was primarily a racial issue. They wanted to have their “pure” master race. However, they did employ religion as their means of convincing the masses because it was more effective than any rally or parade. They had no use for religion otherwise, and would’ve happily jettisoned it altogether had they succeeded in their plans. It took a confluence of history timing out just exactly wrong for the Nazis to come to power, but it was their takeover of the church that really made their horror possible.
As to why the church gave in, we have to go back to the 1817 Prussian Unification. The many states of what would become Prussia and Germany were either Lutheran or Reformed, and Lutherans would never share communion/fellowship with the Reformed, despite the latter’s attempts to do so. The civil leaders of Prussia realized that their dreams of competing with England or preventing another Napoleon couldn’t happen without a unified state and culture. So they forced the Lutherans and Reformed to merge into a weird, technically-separate-but-actually-generically-Calvinist church. To placate 300+ years of very separate tradition and teaching between Lutheran and Reformed, the Prussians imposed a common worship service and invented a narrative that made Calvinism and Lutheranism buddies. They raised up Calvin, Luther, Zwingli and others as if they were all on the same ‘side.’ They were made heroes of
the Reformation, rather than their Reformation
s. Those who didn’t conform to the ‘new history’ (Lutherans) were punished, often at the point of the noose or prison time (some escaped to other countries, including those who would found LCMS in America and the LCA in Australia).
This process only accelerated in the following century with the ascension of Bismarck. By the time he was made Chancellor, Luther and Calvin and Zwingli were no longer churchy names, but household ones – more civic heroes and national points of pride than religious scholars studied by your local pastor. Then came WWI. The victors left Germany with such heavy reparations, that little else was left for common folk other than their crushed national pride-- even their monarchy would be taken from them! (Partly their own doing, from socialist uprisings.) The Nazis seized on this with disturbing efficiency. Nevermind the lamentable fact that nearly every Catholic of the time preached ill of the Jews, nevermind that Luther was actually softer than others of his day (he wrote
Jesus Christ was Born a Jew in outreach to them) – the Nazis could abuse Luther as a ‘National Hero Prooftext’ for their evil. And they did.
