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The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, among the most aggressive anti-Church Nazis, wrote that there was "an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a heroic-German world view". [40] Goebbels saw an "insoluble opposition" between the Christian and Nazi world views. [40]
A Nazi mob ransacked Cardinal Innitzer's residence, after he had denounced Nazi persecution of the Church. [84] L'Osservatore Romano reported on 15 October that Hitler Youth and the SA had gathered at St. Stephen's Cathedral during a service for Catholic Youth and started "counter-shouts and whistlings: 'Down with Innitzer! Our faith is Germany'".
On 22 March 1942, the German bishops issued a pastoral letter entitled "The Struggle against Christianity and the Church". [29] The letter defended human rights and the rule of law, accusing the Nazis of "unjust oppression and hated struggle against Christianity and the Church" despite Catholic loyalty and military service. [30]
Kirchenkampf (German: [ˈkɪʁçn̩kampf], lit. 'church struggle') is a German term which pertains to the situation of the Christian churches in Germany during the Nazi period (1933–1945). Sometimes used ambiguously, the term may refer to one or more of the following different "church struggles":
Josef Mengele (1911-1979), Nazi SS officer and physician at the Auschwitz death camp who performed inhumane experiments on the inmates there. Known as the "Angel of Death". Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940), German physician, biologist, and eugenicist who introduced the concept of racial hygiene in Germany. He was a member of the Nazi party. [12]
Nazi persecution of the Jews grew steadily worse throughout era of the Third Reich. Hamerow wrote that during the prelude to the Holocaust between Kristallnacht in November 1938 and the 1941 invasion of Soviet Russia, the position of the Jews "deteriorated steadily from disenfranchisement to segregation, ghettoization and sporadic mass murder". [18]
The aggressive spread of atheism in the Soviet Union alarmed many German Christians", wrote Blainey, and with the National Socialists becoming the main opponent of Communism in Germany: "[Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible."
The second faction was the "Confessing Church", which opposed the "German Christians" and swore allegiance to "God and scripture, not a worldly Führer." [2] The Confessing Church moved to counteract the Nazis' grouping of all German people into a singular Protestant church (German Christians) in order to "de-Judaize" Christianity. [3]