Chapter 4 Excerpt
The rise in power of the National Socialists came not only from the disenfranchised but also from a group of misled, misdirected, and propaganda-driven Protestants and Catholics who had fallen victim to a politically pressured, and thereby misguided church. From its early days, the Nazi party was forced to deal with the dichotomy of Article 24 of the party program that stated “the party is built on the base of a positive Christianity” while balancing that against the practices of the party. With the Nazi’s policy of Blut und Erde (blood and soil), Hitler realized his party was at odds with the Lutheran and Catholic churches. It became obvious to Hitler and the party leaders that he was going to have to make Nazism into religion and Germany’s religion into Nazism.
To this end, the party found its “philosophical leader” in the form of Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg was a German-born, Russian architectural student, a disgruntled Russian revolutionist, and a journalist for the Nazi party’s paper Der Völkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer). Along with Hitler, he participated in the failed Munich Putsch, but he avoided imprisonment, unlike Hitler. Most ironically, Rosenberg was a Jewish anti-Semite, and developed the weltanschauung of “blood and soil.” The rally cry soon became: “The Cross must fall if Germany is to live” as well as Hitler’s line: “We wish for no other God than Germany.”
A similar unifying eugenic belief had been espoused in 1904 when Sir Francis Galton spoke. “[Eugenics]…must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for eugenics co-operates with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races.” George Bernard Shaw echoed this eugenic belief in the religion of inheritance and in 1904 said, “There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations.”
Not just enthralling secular thinkers, eugenics was embraced by many religious teachers, who incorporated it into Judeo-Christian religious teachings. At the turn of the century Protestants, Catholics, and Reform rabbis saw eugenics as a way to strengthen their congregations’ “germ-plasma,” thereby ridding them of the weaknesses of alcoholism, congenital disorders, mental illness, and criminal behavior.
To his credit, Charles Davenport noticed the potentially destructive power of eugenics. He is credited with recognizing the ideology’s potential for abuse. “Our greatest danger is from some impetuous temperament, who, planting a banner of Eugenics, rallies a volunteer army of Utopians, freelovers, and muddy thinkers to start a holy war for the new religion.” These prescient comments aptly displayed the danger lying in wait.
Hitler did exactly what they all had suggested, mixing the divine mysticism of Nordic power, purity, and God-given righteousness with this belief in Aryan “blood” superiority. Hitler looked for a leader who could combine these pseudoscientific beliefs into a religion to be taught from the pulpit. He found his religious collaborator and propagandist in Pastor Ludwig Müller, a fifty-year-old Wehrmacht chaplain who was willing to work with the National Socialists and develop the “Nazi priestcraft.” Hitler promoted Müller, who rose to become the bishop of Prussia in 1933