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http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=77520568
The Portrayal of Christianity
in the History Textbooks of Nazi Germany
GILMER W. BLACKBURN
The study of history in National Socialist Germany
served a demolition function.
Students were taught to recognize threats to their way of life,
all of which were subsumed under Jewish internationalism
and included Christianity,
Marxism, democracy, liberalism and modernity.
The history written by the Nazis undergirded an ersatz religion
whose central theme was the German people's faltering attempts
to obey the divine will of a racial deity.
A major priority of Nazi educators was the liberation
of the fierce Germanic instincts
which more than a
thousand years of foreign influence had repressed;
and in their estimation,
Chris
tianity bore a major responsibility
for blunting the expression of that Germanic spirit.
The new German schools would help create a militarized society
which would both purge the national spirit
and promote the high-tension ethos which accepted war
as a normal condition in a life of struggle.
1.
At the back of Hitler's anti-Semitism there is revealed
an actual war of God.
This is so, of course, only for Hitler himself.
His party comrades had no notion of the fantastic perspectives
in which their master saw their concrete struggle.
1
It was in the old Garrison Church at Potsdam in 1933
that the aged Reich President, Paul von Hindenburg,
extended the official hand of recognition to Adolf Hitler,
the newly appointed chancellor, who solemnly gave honor to God
in his address to the distinguished assemblage
and pledged his emphatic support to the maintenance
of Christianity in Germany
2 .
The inaugural ceremony of the Hitler regime in a Protestant church
pres
ented the Fuehrer an unparalleled opportunity to begin
a policy of studied duplicity which characterized his government's
attitude toward religion from the start.
By perennially injecting affirmations of religion into his speeches,
the Nazi Fuehrer was able to pose as the defender of Christianity against
"godless Bolshevism,"
while behind the scenes craftily planning the utter annihilation
of the Christian faith.
3
Mr. Blackburn is associate professor of history in Gardner-Webb College, Boiling Springs, North Carolina
____________________ 1 Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York, 1940 ), p. 49.
2 Birger Forell, "National Socialism and the Protestant Churches in Germany", in The Third Reich (London, 1955 ), p. 811.
3 Gordon Prange,
ed., Hiller's Words: Two Decades of National Socialism, 1923-1943 (Washington, D. C., 1944 ), p. 88. </span>