Was hitler a catholic?

[Reservoir_Dog]

Reservoir Dog

*The Centre Party was part of the coalition that made hitler chancellor and did vote in the first of the Enabling Acts that made him dictator. *

Again, you are deliberately deceitful. You phrase your sentence so as to make it appear that the Catholics were all for Hitler. Just the opposite. The Centre Party was the last to join the coalition, and then only because the handwriting was all over the wall. Hindenburg, the only really plausible halt to Hitler’s advance, was old and dying. The Nazis were inevitably going to assume absolute power with or without the Centre vote. When this was realized, everybody made the best deal they could with Hitler, including the Centre Party. Hitler promised the Centre all kinds of considerations to get their vote. Then, as soon as he got in power, he repudiated all his promises and the Centre party, along with all the other parties, crashed into oblivion.

I guess you’re never going to see these facts of history, so it’s the last time I’m going to bother correcting your revisionist history of Nazi Germany.

*Completely misleading, but helpful for any apologist. *

Not the least bit misleading. It’s a fact of history that the Nazi party pulled many more votes from the Protestant sector of Germany than from the Catholic. That is why Hitler began to persecute the Catholic Church as soon as he got in power.

Again, you are hopelessly uneducated on this subject.

(emphasis added)

I can’t help how you interpret a straightforward comment. The Center Party voted in hitler and voted for the first of the Enabling Acts. If it didn’t do either, cite the contrary.

The Church did not allow RCs to join the NSDAP until after '33, that’s why the nazi vote looks the way it does in the misleading maps. Catholic participation was allowed after the Concordat.

You don’t need to make endless excuses or offer unconvincing explanations for the Church, it was caught in a bad spot with consequences not entirely foreseeable. But excuses do not make for honest history. The fact is that the Vatican danced with the devil when it signed the Concordat and the Centre Party voted in hitler as chancellor and the Centre Party voted in the first of the Enabling Acts that made hitler dictator. You can’t excuse that with a handwave.

You are saying that the Centre Party and German Catholics had no choice but to go along to get along? with hitler??? That sounds like moral relativism at its worst. Here’s a hint: some people did not go along faced the consequences. Some of them were even protestants. But let’s not go too far in that direction.

No more ad homs. You get your one shot in.

 

[MikeDunphy]

The Center Party voted in hitler

I don’t believe that is correct. As I understand it, after both the election of November 6, 1932 and March 5, 1933, Hitler’s coalition consisted of his NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker’s Party) and the DNVP (German National People’s Party), with the Center Party (Zentrum) *not *part of the coalition.

See for example William L. Shirer’s The rise and fall of the Third Reich: a history of Nazi Germany, pp 188-196.

… and voted for the first of the Enabling Acts.

Unfortunately that is true. With Hitler already in power, and with threats of violence on one hand (Nazi storm troopers present in force chanting “Full powers – or else! We want the bill – or fire and murder!” source]), and with promises from Hitler of restraint on the other hand, the Center party members did give in to his demand for the “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich” [the Enabling Act].

They failed to act heroically.

If anyone wants to read about a Catholic who *did *heroically oppose the Nazi evil, Giorgio Perlasca’s story in The Banality of Goodness is amazing.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

I don’t believe that is correct. As I understand it, after both the election of November 6, 1932 and March 5, 1933, Hitler’s coalition consisted of his NSDAP (National Socialist German Worker’s Party) and the DNVP (German National People’s Party), with the Center Party (Zentrum) *not *part of the coalition.

See for example William L. Shirer’s The rise and fall of the Third Reich: a history of Nazi Germany, pp 188-196.

Unfortunately that is true. With Hitler already in power, and with threats of violence on one hand (Nazi storm troopers present in force chanting “Full powers – or else! We want the bill – or fire and murder!” source]), and with promises from Hitler of restraint on the other hand, the Center party members did give in to his demand for the “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich” [the Enabling Act].

They failed to act heroically.

If anyone wants to read about a Catholic who *did *heroically oppose the Nazi evil, Giorgio Perlasca’s story in The Banality of Goodness is amazing.

Ok, you’re correct on the coalition government that appointed hitler as chancellor. But until the Enabling Act passed, the chancellor’s powers were still constitutionally limited. Party boss Kaas and the other party leaders sold the Centre Party’s votes for dubious promises from hitler.

 

[John_Pascendi]

More to the point, if Hitler was a Catholic, was he a Catholic in good standing with the Church? Some like to point out that anyone baptized a Catholic is a Catholic until he dies, whether or not he renounces Catholicism. I don’t see the point of debating this. Clearly Hitler was baptized a Catholic. But the real question is whether as an adult he was a practicing Catholic in good standing with the Church.

Or if he was something else, what was he? Pagan? Atheist? Etc.

…this is an old smear against the Catholic church. Was Judas an apostle of Jesus when all of the while he was planning to betray Him? Was Karl Marx a Jew when he wrote…“On the Jewish Question” in college which was so anti-semtic Hitler later on quoted from it word for word? Was Benny Arnold a patriot when he became a traitor to Washington etc etc.When one reads the left wing National Socialist party of Germanys 25 pt.program one sees no catholicism but rather communism. Hitler was also arrested as a male prostitute at age 19 in Berlin…was he a choir boy…mmmmm then again he smirks. Benito Muss.was also not a Catholic but another leftwing nutcase who hated people and joined the world wide movement against all that is good…ie.Catholicism…amen and amen

 

[inocente]

I think we miss something when we take a discussion of Hitler only as an opportunity to say “I’m glad I’m not a lunatic, I’m glad I’m not like that.”

I can try to put myself into the shoes of your guy on the bus, or of a brown shirt thug, or of an SS officer. But with Hitler I don’t know where to start – there was something inhuman in him that precludes me from saying there but for the grace of God. It’s this alien quality that causes some to say he was just plain evil and others to call him insane (clinically perhaps sociopath or what was once called moral insanity).

 

[inocente]

It’s a fact of history that the Nazi party pulled many more votes from the Protestant sector of Germany than from the Catholic. That is why Hitler began to persecute the Catholic Church as soon as he got in power.

You’ll already be aware that this is getting close to dangerous ground.

If we try to blame the Holocaust on Hitler alone, or on one sector of society, or on anything else alone then it may happen again. There was universal culpability, and many of us here may have been swept along too.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Reservoir Dog

Ok, you’re correct on the coalition government that appointed hitler as chancellor. But until the Enabling Act passed, the chancellor’s powers were still constitutionally limited. Party boss Kaas and the other party leaders sold the Centre Party’s votes for dubious promises from hitler.

I’m satisfied with your explanation so long as you recognize that **all **the parties put Hitler in power, not because they all wanted him, but because they were resigned to getting him forced upon them and made the best deal they could to cut their losses and survive under the Nazi terror. If that seems cowardly, I can agree with some reservations. But there’s a huge difference between being cowardly and being the champion of Hitler, which the Catholic Centre party and the bishops certainly were not.

If you don’t agree with this summary of the situation, then your ad hominems against the German Catholics will just have to be flushed down the historical toilet along with all the other scandalous lies about Hitler being championed by the Catholic Church and the Pope.

Nor have you produced evidence (please do so, and cite your source) that contradicts the well documented fact that Hitler and the Nazis got considerably less support from the Catholic voters than from the Protestants. This has to be credited to the influence of the bishops who publicly campaigned against him before he came to power.

The Concordat was a last desperate move by the Church to protect itself from the wrath of Hitler and the Nazis. It failed, as history well documents, because the Nazis immediately began to close down Catholic newspapers and magazines within the first year after the Concordat was signed.

Unless you have lived under such a regime as the Nazi one (which I doubt that you have) you cannot distinguish carefully between moral relativism and trying to survive under a reign of terror. The bishops and the Centre party hoped and prayed that Hitler could be softened by diplomacy. They later learned that this could not be done, and that he was more than ever an enemy of the Church. The bishops in the Netherlands in 1942 stood up to the Nazis and condemned the persecution of the Jews, for which standing up the Jews of Holland were almost entirely wiped out by the Nazi Gestapo. Those bishops refused to dance with the devil (as **you **might say), but the devil danced anyway … all over the Jews.

Hitler was a maniac. How much of a maniac was not fully realized by anyone until he had fully consolidated his power. The Church leaders early on misjudged the enormity of his intentions, but the Church was never in Hitler’s corner championing the Nazi cause. In only one area did the Church make common cause with the Nazis, and that was in the design of the Nazis to defeat international Communism. The Church can hardly be blamed, or accused of being relativistic, when the Communist cause was openly atheistic and determined to annihilate Christianity.

Until you see that and acknowledge it, you have no right to complain about ad hominems. The bigots who hate Catholicism will never stop lying about the Catholic Church, and we have every right to expose them.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

inocente

*If we try to blame the Holocaust on Hitler alone, or on one sector of society, or on anything else alone then it may happen again. There was universal culpability, and many of us here may have been swept along too. *

I don’t blame the holocaust on Hitler alone. Nor do I blame it on the Protestants who largely supported him. They also were deceived. But without Hitler it seems unlikely to me that any German leader without Hitler’s insane genius for mesmerizing the German people would have succeeded in achieving the same colossal disaster for Germany and the Jewish people.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

Reservoir Dog…
Until you see that and acknowledge it, you have no right to complain about ad hominems. The bigots who hate Catholicism will never stop lying about the Catholic Church, and we have every right to expose them.

Since you won’t lay off the ad homs and you won’t stop intentionally misrepresenting my position, I can’t say I’m all that interested in discussing this with you.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

You’ll already be aware that this is getting close to dangerous ground.

If we try to blame the Holocaust on Hitler alone, or on one sector of society, or on anything else alone then it may happen again. There was universal culpability, and many of us here may have been swept along too.

hitler outmaneuvered all of his political opponents, including some, like the Centre Party and the Army and the conservatives, that should have been his solid enemies. Everyone’s favorite whipping boys, the Social Democrats (voted against) and the communists (excluded) were the only dissenters to the Enabling Act.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

ReservoirDog

Everyone’s favorite whipping boys, the Social Democrats (voted against) and the communists (excluded) were the only dissenters to the Enabling Act.

From 1933 on both of those parties also perished. There was only one party left standing, the Nazis, who immediately began to persecute the Catholic Church despite the Concordat for having opposed them all along.

*Since you won’t lay off the ad homs and you won’t stop intentionally misrepresenting my position, I can’t say I’m all that interested in discussing this with you. *

I guess the feeling has to be mutual since you persist in leaving the impression that the Catholics were willing supporters of the dictatorship. At least that’s the impression you leave with me. If I’m wrong, please clarify your position by allowing at least that the Catholics were not willingly suckered into the Nazi whirlwind of tyranny.

Still waiting for your statistics on the Protestant versus the Catholic vote for Hitler.

 

[Reservoir_Dog]

ReservoirDog
…
Still waiting for your statistics on the Protestant versus the Catholic vote for Hitler.

Wait all you want. I said, I’m not going to discuss any issue with you because of the way you have routinely misrepresented my position. This kind of dishonesty would get you squashed in a professional setting, I understand this is the internet with no real consequences for how you post, so the best response is to not discuss anything of substance with you.

 

[Richardprins]

However he may have been baptized, he appears to have rejected the Christian religion and instead adopted an essentially occultic viewpoint. The influence of Theosophy (which still employs the swastika as a symbol) seems to have been prevalent. “Spiritual but not religious” seems to be a descriptor of the Hitlerian approach.

To cast his views in contemporary categories, probably the closest would be “New Age”. The Aquarian notions of contemporary New Agers owe to the Theosophical doctrines of the cataclysmic succession of races as a process of human spiritual evolution. Note the orientation of Nazi propaganda regarding the creation of a new society inhabited by new men, etc., as well as the Theosophical importations of Atlantean heritage of the Aryans, etc.

Lol.

 

[Betterave]

Since you won’t lay off the ad homs and you won’t stop intentionally misrepresenting my position, I can’t say I’m all that interested in discussing this with you.

Charlemagne, were you intentionally misrepresenting RDog’s position? Shame on you!

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Reservoir Dog

*Wait all you want. I said, I’m not going to discuss any issue with you because of the way you have routinely misrepresented my position. This kind of dishonesty would get you squashed in a professional setting, I understand this is the internet with no real consequences for how you post, so the best response is to not discuss anything of substance with you. *

So far as I know, there has been no misrepresentation of your position, deliberate or otherwise. But I see you want no further discussion, which is fine. I let the record of our exchanges speak for itself.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Returning to our theme, Hitler was not a Catholic after World War I. That would not prevent him from pretending to be a Christian, maybe even a Catholic on occasion, if it served his purpose to do so. However, his chronic hostility toward Christianity in general (and his persecution of the Church in particular after he signed the Concordat) shows that he would never have been obedient to the bishops or the pope in anything. A man must always be judged more by his actions that by his words. Hitler deserves to be judged as the least Christian and the most monstrous of men. No doubt the German bishops thought they had a chance to tame him (and protect the interests of the Church) once he got the power he craved, but it seems the power only corrupted him all the more. When pure and constant evil began to spill out of him through the Gestapo, there was nothing to do but for everyone to get out of his way the fastest way they could. Some of the Jews (the one who were able to) followed this strategy and fled to America or anywhere they could find asylum.

It is one thing to oppose a man who can be reasoned with and whose behavior can be altered by being exposed to reasonable principles; it was quite another matter to deal with a monstrous lunatic, opposition to whom would only produce even greater monstrous lunacy and disaster. The bishops knew this full well and chose the course of public silence while working behind the scenes in various and sundry ways to limit the extent of tragedy for the Jews and the Germans. Any scandalous notion that the bishops were actually in Hitler’s corner, and that Pius XII was Hitler’s Pope, is simply and utterly absurd … yet this does not stop enemies of the Church pretending that it is so.

 

[KingJohn]

I just wanted to bring this back.

The answer is no. Here’s some evidence:

The book Hitler’s Secret Conversations 1941-1944 published by Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc.first edition, 1953, contains definitive proof of Hitler’s real views. The book was published in Britain under the title, _Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944, which title was used for the Oxford University Press paperback edition in the United States.

All of these are quotes from Adolf Hitler:

Night of 11th-12th July, 1941:

National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (p 6 & 7)

19th October, 1941, night:

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity.

This gives me reason to believe he was an Atheist.

 

[ngill09]

I just wanted to bring this back.

The answer is no. Here’s some evidence:

This gives me reason to believe he was an Atheist.

You can hate Christianity and not be an Atheist. I think the final virdict on this should be that he was a mystical sort of pagan.

 

[Love4All]

You can hate Christianity and not be an Atheist. I think the final virdict on this should be that he was a mystical sort of pagan.

Pretty sure he was a “brother of the left hand path,” in the way Crowley spoke of it.

 

[KingJohn]

You can hate Christianity and not be an Atheist. I think the final virdict on this should be that he was a mystical sort of pagan.

Well, he was no Christian neither was he a Catholic. I like to call him an Atheist because it was clear, he didn’t believe in God. Atheists can try and twists and distort all they want, Hitler hated God and didn’t believe in him.