This is the second in a two-part series. You can read the first part here.

The idea of loyalty to one man was used by Lutherans who harkened back to their founder’s stance against the Peasant Revolt of the 1520’s by evoking the Pauline claim to respect authority and the leader. This was also remembered as having occurred in history when the Roman emperors, once the great “anti-Christs” or persecutors, became hailed as protectors of the faith. In Germany the idea was focused on the relationship between the Holy Roman Emperor as the chief political entity and the Pope as the main religious official in Western Europe. Here again the old pre-Enlightenment idea of divine right of kings came into play as the rulers were men of God chosen to shepherd the German people. With the collapse of the Second Reich in 1918, the democratic Weimar Republic took effect. Many theologians criticized this democratic government’s replacing the monarchy than Germany had been familiar with for centuries if not millennia. Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus saw the Weimar regime as only a temporary institution before a greater, yet-to-come government created by Germans for Germans.¹ Fr. Phillipp Haueser detested the regime, leading to his involvement with the Nazi Party. Many theologians found their idea of a new monarch in Adolf Hitler. Albus Schlachlieter saw himself as John the Baptist for Hitler’s rise to power.² Haueser also echoed that idea. Paul Althaus saw Hitler as a “pious and faithful sovereign” and National Socialism as “a government with discipline and honor.” Emanuel Hirsch also saw Hitler in such terms as a Heaven-sent Christian leader. Hitler was seen as akin to the old Emperors of the First Reich who upheld Christian values of the German people. Hitler was not only the political leader of a new Germany but also a spiritual leader, seen as sent by God to reignite the Christian soul of the German people.

To make way for Hitler’s Aryan Reich, Christian theologians had to separate their religion from its Jewish roots, and Christ from his native ethnicity. Christ had to be a symbol for Aryan Germans divorced somehow from his true ethnic and religious Judaism³; it was an attempt to refashion the savior for Germany. For theologians, this project began before the formal rise of Nazism with the nineteenth-century quest to find who Jesus was in his original historical context began in Protestant seminaries and universities in Germany. While there had long been a distinction between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages, the research would be abused to show a historical reason for the differences between the two. The German theologian Karl August von Hase expounded upon the difference between Christianity being a universal religion and the particularism of Judaism.⁴ Even though these early thinkers were not advocating an explicit program of Jewish persecution, their research became co-opted by people who would. The work on distinguishing Christ’s mission from Judaism entranced other scholars who added a racial component to him. Christ became an Aryan. He was no longer part of the Jewish continuity, because he never had been, said these theologians and scholars. Thinkers went to great lengths to prove Jesus that was an Aryan and not a Jew. Lutheran Theologian Emanuel Hirsch proclaimed Jesus was not of Jewish blood because the residents of Galilee were not entirely Jewish when he was born.⁵ Fr. Haueser mused around the idea of Mary being of Aryan blood. Fr. Roth stated that Christ’s command to “love your neighbor” didn’t extend to the Jews, since every Jew in Roth’s words was “already a latent danger for the Christian religion and morality.”⁶ For many Theologians Christ was Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the Aryan Übermensch through which the Christlike nature was open to the Aryans. Fr. Josef Roth extolled this connection between the Übermensch and Christ, even though ironically Nietzsche had opposed Christianity and Christ. Even Josef Goebbels believed that was the goal for modern man, though mostly for the Aryans.⁷ From this the occult idea of the Aryans as the Chosen Race, and as successors of Christ, came into play. An Aryan Christ served to create a religious hero for the Nazi party, one that Germans were already familiar with. The capacity to contrast Jews with Christ only served to continue to stereotype the communities’ differences with the rest of Gentile Europe.

Due to the politicizing of the historical research, Judaism was separated from Christianity. Most theologians saw Jews as guests or resident aliens rather than citizens because of their faith and ethnicity. They were not part of the Gentile Christianity which had usurped their role in the world. Fr. Haueser explained that the rejection of Christ by the Jews took them out of the divine plan because they “ceased once and for all to be an instrument of divine grace and mercy. Other peoples stepped into [Gentiles/Aryans] the position of the Jews to become God’s people.”⁸ Aryan Gentiles had become the true Israel. Another fear had by some Catholic theologians was of the incorporation of Jewish ideas into the Christian faith, particularly the usage of the Old Testament as scripture. Lutherans had a great reservation about the Mosaic Law, which was equated with Judaism, with certain sections in the Pauline letters seeming to support that suspicion. These theologians also protested the Church of the Middle Ages for sinning “against the law of racial and national life.”⁹ Fr. Hauser, though a Catholic clergyman, actually praised Martin Luther as a “reaction of a good force to the unhealthy humor in the Church.”¹⁰ There was also a desire to return to the old pre-Enlightenment relationship between Christians and Jews, the reestablishment of the Ghetto. Gerhard Kittel was an advocate of this move backwards. Kittel himself used the laws found in the book of Ezra prohibiting intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles as evidence for the same rule in the Nuremburg Laws.¹¹ Bishop Alois Hudal reminded people that it was the state—not the Church—which had abolished the Ghetto. Fr. Josef Roth was the most vocal: he wrote an overall plan including boycotts of Jewish businesses, which later became standard German policy.¹² Most theologians did agree on the need for separation of the Jewish community from the rest of the Volk; however, they did not desire their outright extermination. While Jews were smeared with the age-old claim of deicide, most of these theologians had only wished to end Judaism by their conversion, not their deaths.¹³ However, the extent of hatred which the Nazis gave birth to was more than these theologians expected. Any criticism however, such as from Althaus, was often vague, and nonpolitical if it existed at all.¹⁴

Despite rhetoric from clergy and theologians, not all inside Germany were pleased at the new collaborationist and pro-Nazi tone of Christianity. Several Archdioceses became alarmed at the language being used by some of their own, as well as the fear that these clergy had replaced loyalty to the Hitler with loyalty to the Church. Both Roth and Haueser had published works without giving them to their superiors before publication. This was a massive red flag to several German bishops. Roth and Haueser had also frequently and openly criticized the Church in their support of the rhetoric of National Socialism. Haueser, especially in the late 1930s, was told by his superiors not to speak publicly. However, the priest defied the order. By the 1940s Haueser had left the Church, a Church he considered corrupted by Jewish influences. Roth left as well for similar reasons. Even though they had supported Hitler, the theologians did not support everything in the regime’s ideology. Paul Althaus wrote against the messianic idea of National Socialism saying, stating, “We are not saviors of the world; we do not dream that our fate holds messianic significance for the entire world.”¹⁵ Only the Christian faith could provide salvation. Haueser himself got into trouble for helping women French refugees in the beginning of World War II. Gerhard Kittel became another thinker who offered some resistance even as his theology helped to support the Nazis’ rise to power. Even with his anti-Judaism, Kittel helped his Jewish friends endure their hardships under Hitler during the 1930s, supporting them financially or in some cases getting them out of Germany. He was shocked at the extent of antisemitism in Germany that had developed. Again, many even of these initially pro-Nazi theologians were alarmed; their expectation was to convert Jews to Christianity, not eliminate them. Kittel, surprisingly enough, after the fall of France, was called to be an expert witness in the trial of Herschel Grunspan, the man who murder of a German Embassy worker in Paris ignited Kristallnacht. Much to the displeasure of the Nazi authorities, Kittel concluded that Grunspan acted alone and was not part of a larger “Jewish conspiracy.”¹⁶ Kittel also distanced himself from the party after realizing the extreme the Nazis had gone to against the Jews. Pope Pius XII was extremely vocal against the Nazis and condemned them. Some priests throughout occupied Europe did their best to save as many Jews as they could. And then one can find stunning examples of anti-Nazi clergy in the likes of Maximilliam Kolbe and Dietrich Bonheoffer. Kolbe ended up being sent to Auschwitz, and, seeing that one of the prisoners scheduling to be gassed despaired at leaving his family, volunteered to take his place. Bonhoffer is perhaps most famous precisely for his resistance to Nazism and repeatedly spoke against Hitler’s regime; he was executed in April 1945 just before the war’s end. By no means did all members of the clergy in Germany, whether Catholic or Lutheran, support the regime’s ideology whole-heartedly.

The rhetoric based upon Christian views fueled the ideology of the Nazi regime. Priests and theologians from both Lutheranism and Catholicism supported the goals of Adolf Hitler. The aftermath of World War I and its bitter peace made German theologians search for a way to better their nation. National Socialism seemed to extol similar virtues that these people were looking for—anti-Marxist, pro-Nationalist, and, above all, reactionary to the secularizing currents of the nineteenth century. The Antisemitic dogma of the party fit traditional Christian views on the Jewish people, especially as they had been cultivated within the Lutheran tradition. These clergymen and theologians hoped the Nazi party would restore Germany to greatness while also ensuring a return to a more traditional relationship between Church and state. They failed or refused to see what that the Nazi party sought: Hitler and state above all else—even the Christian faith. By the time they realized what the Nazis truly were, it was too late. What these theologians did not see was the lack of love and compassion in the regime, Christian attitudes to loving God first became love the State and Fuehrer first, love of neighbor became love of the (Aryan) German people. The theology that fueled the Nazi regime was the antithesis of Christianity, a movement built on love, selflessness, and spirituality, and it was all sacrificed to reclaim a nationalistic dream.

This of course is not unique to Germany, we see a rise of religious nationalism here in the United States, with much of the same theology and rhetoric as happened before. Instead of German expansion, its American Manifest Destiny. While explicit antisemitism is no longer in vogue among rightwing Christian nationalists, due to the Nazi Genocide of the Holocaust, other groups have filled the void—the LGBTQ community, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and indeed immigrants in general have become targets of Christofascist hate and fearmongering. The motivation to combine religion with nationalist is the fear of loss, and the exposing of national myth as just a myth. Fascism emerges from crisis; religious nationalism emerges at the religious sheen to justify it. To goal is to return to a time when everything was “exactly as God intended.”

1. Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 86.

2. Kevin Spicer, Hitler’s Priests (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 119

3. George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution (New York: Howard Fertig, Inc, 1978), 129.

4. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution, 130

5. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 164.

6. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests, 43.

7. Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), 120.

8. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests, 107.

9. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests, 130.

10. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests, 125.

11. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 62.

12. Spicer, Hitler’s Priests, 43.

13. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 109.

14. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 95-96.

15. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 92.

16. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler, 36.