<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hitler's Theological Language
John W. DavisÂ
<i>
Ohne Juda, ohne Rom, wird gebaut Germanienâs Dom! Heil!
Without Jews, without Rome, we shall build Germanyâs cathedral! Heil!</i>
Adolf Hitler, traditional conclusion to speeches, Menâs Asylum, Vienna, Austria, 1910-1913
The modern viewer observes the Hermann O. Hoyer painting, âIn the Beginning Was the Wordâ with nothing less than shock. What is so shocking about a dark picture that represents a man speaking to a small, attentive audience in a Gasthaus? Perhaps the image of Adolf Hitler, dressed in benign civilian attire as he addresses a diverse gathering of Germans, conveys a specific blasphemy. The title of the artwork, after all, alludes to the opening verse of Johnâs Gospel. Perhaps the direct parallel of Hitlerâs arms, bent in mirror image of the Nazi swastika on the flag which hangs directly behind him, conveys a subtle image of the crucified Christ. Maybe it is the transfixed attention of the listeners who are enlightened, both literally by the only ambient light depicted in the painting, and symbolically, by the message of the speaker from whom the light seems to issue.
Since the painting was made in depression era Germany, the contemporary viewer would immediately, even unconsciously, infuse a lifetime of learned Christian symbolism to the rendering. Here was the savior bearing a message of hope in those dark days of inflation, unemployment, and social chaos. He was the new Messiah, this Adolf Hitler. The artist wanted to show that Hitler was the redeemer of fallen Germany, the savior who would liberate them from the evil Versailles Treaty brought about by the lies and betrayals of the satanic Jews, none of whom is visible in this picture. Indeed, the mysterious origin of the paintingâs light over the listeners suggests Pentecost. That is the moment traditionally portrayed by symbolic âflames of enlightenmentâ, as if to show the truth of Christ shining on the apostles, who then went forth to spread the word. The paintingâs listeners would be so enlightened and spread Hitlerâs new truth.
The Nazi genius for propaganda allowed them to shamelessly usurp for their own ends symbols and terminology found in the Jewish and Christian writings of Tanak and New Testament. These symbols and words were ingrained in a German population through years of religious instruction, literary usage, and social convention. Even a secular German could not escape a language suffused with originally religious terminology.
This essay will consider Nazi usage and the context in which it flourished. I will demonstrate how one German-American Catholic priest, Monsignor Martin Hellriegel, in the spirit of a Papal encyclical of the time, countered such manipulation with truth, and brought back honest usage to words shamelessly exploited by the neo-pagans. Hellriegel saw in Nazi blasphemy the insidious twisting of the meaning of words which, Pied Piper like, led the listener away from the truth and into a dark forest of confusion and evil.
Adolf Hitler saw the world with a distinctly âreligiousâ viewpoint. That is to say his worldview was clearly bound up in a fall from grace, resurrection, and victory schematic. He specifically introduced this idea in Mein Kampf, and restated it in virtually every public utterance thereafter.
In the beginning was the Edenic German past, the great victorious Reich of Franco-Prussian War days. Was it not thunderous German cannon and proud soldiery which brought about this triumphal era? The wholesome Germanic stock prevailed in a sort of Darwinian triumph against lesser Europeans. This past was further characterized by a virtuous Germanic racial pride, a Volkish culture of simple honesty, hard work, communal integrity and physical wholesomeness.
Into this Eden came the evil serpent; into Eden came the Jew. Attached to the integrated Volkish host, the parasitical Jew leeched it of life. The Jew attained inclusion not through virtuous action and social harmony. Rather by blandishment, money, and exploitation of human frailty he affixed himself to the living body of the German people. The Jew, as characterized by his Talmudic philosophy, created a false trope to protect himself from expulsion from the alien body, the concept that the weakest must be protected. He spread his false doctrine through the liberal press, his servile politicians, and his religion. His philosophy was âunnaturalâ for it flew in the face of simple biology. To suggest that human dignity was not manifested in the triumph of the strong, (as proven by the victorious 1870 Reich), but rather in how the strong treated the weakest among them, was an insidious means of debilitating the otherwise powerful German race. âTo protect the weak, the outsider,â was a lie that could be traced back even to its cunning insinuation into the Christian concept of the Beatitudes or the Good Samaritan. How to expose this racial cancer, this contagious tuberculosis injected into Germanic culture? Consider, Hitler argued, what this cancer had already done.
The young Hitler, after some three years on World War I frontlines, wounded in the face by shrapnel, felled by a bullet to the thigh, recovered near wartime Berlin. During recuperation he traveled there to find it a nest of complaints and defeatism. This attitude prevailed even though Russia had collapsed in revolution and the French were in disarray. As Hitler later wrote it was obvious why Germany lost the war which by all observable accounts it was winning. Germany was betrayed. The November criminals sabotaged Germany and so stabbed the Fatherland in the back. They did so in thousands of cowardly ways. Their Marxist unions fought a common steadfastness on the home front. The inconstant Churches subverted the war effort by religious softness, while the worthless, lying politicians deceived the simple Volk. Behind them all was the wire pulling Jew. The Versailles Treaty brought them to power, a power totally unearned, totally corrupt, and totally alien to the German way.
The bourgeois liberals, the Marxists, and the Church, the Catholic Church in particular, militated against the Germanic race. Each in its own way brought about Germanyâs downfall. Philosophically, they all sought universality and converts to party, class, or religion respectively. Conversely, one was born into the German Herrenvolk. In any case, each had in its way brought about the downfall of Germany. Hitler would save the Germanic race from the crest of oblivion to which it had been brought. He would do so by excising from the land that very parasite which brought it to this end, the Jew, the manipulator behind each of these entities.
So it was that Hitler applied one of the lessons he learned best in the trenches of Belgium: propaganda. He would co-opt the strengths of his enemies to his own ends.
Religious language suffused the Third Reich. They Nazis turned the benign concepts about God to their own ends by subtle means. They were wolves in sheepâs clothing.
This distortion was exposed by the 1937 Vatican Encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, (With Burning Anxiety), uniquely published originally in the German language. It excoriated the consistent Nazi dismantling of the Concordat between Rome and Berlin. Not only had the Nazis broken virtually every component, among which were provisions for religious education, public practice of religion, and social activities, it had even begun to subvert the truths behind the language of the Christian religion.
Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculationâ¦Our God is the Personal God, supernatural,â¦who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.
Mit Brennender Sorge, Pius XI, Encyclical, 1937
The poison spread not only throughout Germany, but to Germans in America as well. The faux religion of Nazism, or at least the apparent acceptance of religion by the Hitler state, deceived millions. For example, by substituting apparently wholesome Hitler Youth activities for Confirmation ceremonies, or inserting Nazi themes into apparent prayers, or even creating National ceremonies to replace religious rituals, the cultural religiosity of the country was co-opted and believers duped into slowly accepting Nazi beliefs.
Let us examine one example of how this usurpation of language was identified, and how, in the spirit of Mit Brennender Sorge, it was countered in a most unlikely way. This example will demonstrate how the insidious influence of appropriated language was deftly and simply countered, so that Nazismâs influence was blunted among German- Americans before our entry into the war.
In night's darkest hour every November 9th, to commemorate the Nazi coup d'etat of 1923, a mystical midnight oath-taking ceremony took place in a sacred hall under the eyes of Adolf Hitler. There the SS, Hitler's special troops, took an oath of personal loyalty to him. One remembers, " Splendid young men, serious of face, exemplary of bearing and turnout. An elite. Tears came to my eyes when, by the light of the torches, thousands of Voices repeated the oath in chorus. It was like a prayer."
During their rise to power, the Nazis usurped virtually all traditions, symbols, and words of pious German Christianity. Indeed, the most egregious was to call Adolf Hitler the Savior. Perhaps this extract from the SS catechism characterizes this subtle transference best: The question, 'Whom must we primarily serve?' required the response, 'The people and our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler'. 'Why do we believe in Germany and the Fuhrer?' ' Because we believe in God,...and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom He has sent us."
Indeed, by 1941 the Hitler's successes appeared Providential, as he claimed. He raised Germans from the shame of Depression joblessness and revived a beaten peoples' pride by giving them military victory. His rule extended to virtually every land and nation of Europe, North Africa, and Eurasia to Moscow. But in his dominion salvation required absolute obedience to Hitler's belief in racial supremacy and hatred of the 'race defilers', the Jews. Hitler's rule required a gradual but inevitable denial of a personal, loving God in favor of faith in racial victory. Far away in little Baden, an American community settled by Germans on the banks of the Mississippi, a parish priest was composing a song that would strike the Nazis a blow from which they would never recover. Father Martin Hellriegel, a German immigrant and pastor to several communities in the St. Louis, Missouri area, considered the rise of racial nationalism in his former homeland. As Hellriegel read in the l937 Papal Letter titled, With Burning Anxiety, (the only Encyclical written in the German language), the Pope outlined how Germans had lost their way. They had abandoned traditional Christianity in favor of a twisted racial Darwinism that called 'immortality' not survival of man after life on earth, but survival of the race; that maintained 'revelation' was not God's word to Man, but suggested the triumph of race and blood over lesser peoples. The Pope further noted that daring to suggest that even the greatest of men was on a par with Christ, our Savior from sin and death, would be to make the man a "Prophet of Nothingness."
Hellriegel knew his people. To defeat subtle Nazi usurpation of Christ's words and mission, he would restate the Christian message simply and clearly for all the world. The pastor knew what Christ intended when our yes should mean yes, our no mean no. Hellriegel found an energetic, almost martial tune in an old copy of the Mainz (Germany) Church music book. To the music from 1870, he wrote new lyrics. They are a point by point rebuttal of Nazi beliefs. He called the song "To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King" and he wrote it in l941 at the height of Nazi power.
Hellriegel's opening salvo was that Jesus, not Hitler, was "...our Sovereign King, who is the World's Salvation". If Jesus was sovereign, Hitler was not. If, as the Catholic Church proclaimed, all in the world could be saved, no claim of racial peculiarity could stand. "All praise and homage do we bring, and thanks and adoration." was a direct slap at the obsequious accolades offered Hitler for having brought Germans back into wealth, prestige, and power.
It is the refrain, "Christ Jesus Victor, Christ Jesus Ruler, Christ Jesus Lord and Commander," which is the most powerful statement of faith. Hitler promised Sieg (victory), and was the Fuhrer (ruler), who rescued Germany from the hydra-headed oppressions of the Versailles Treaty, the traitorous Jews, the internationalist Church and Communists. At the very height of German battlefield victories Hellriegel declared not Hitler but Christ as the true Commander. (In later years, that intentional military term was changed to âredeemerâ.) Hellriegel's refrain, repeated over and over again, specifically denied each of Hitler's claims, just as had been done in the Papal Letter.
Indeed, "Thy reign extend, oh King, benigh, to every land and nation. For in thy Kingdom, Lord divine, alone we find salvation," contended that Christ's kingdom, not Hitler's empire, was where man would be saved. Even the very Hitler oath, required of every government and military official in Germany, was specifically attacked in this song. Not loyalty to Hitler; not, as the Hitler oath claimed, "I swear to thee, and to the superiors whom thou shall appoint, obedience unto death. So help me God.â, but rather as Hellriegel wrote, "To thee and to thy church great king, we pledge our hearts oblation, until before thy throne we sing, in endless jubilation."
The hymn âTo Jesus Christ our Sovereign Kingâ is sung even today. Hitler's claims lie long forgotten. The challenge this song threw at the apparent victor of Europe, at the height of his greatest power, was mighty. For, as each verse attested, there was a greater truth which stood in opposition to Hitlerism. There were other, more ancient meanings to the words usurped by the Nazis. Simple and clear, the hymn carried a power to change hearts by speaking the truth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
John W. DavisÂ
<i>
Ohne Juda, ohne Rom, wird gebaut Germanienâs Dom! Heil!
Without Jews, without Rome, we shall build Germanyâs cathedral! Heil!</i>
Adolf Hitler, traditional conclusion to speeches, Menâs Asylum, Vienna, Austria, 1910-1913
The modern viewer observes the Hermann O. Hoyer painting, âIn the Beginning Was the Wordâ with nothing less than shock. What is so shocking about a dark picture that represents a man speaking to a small, attentive audience in a Gasthaus? Perhaps the image of Adolf Hitler, dressed in benign civilian attire as he addresses a diverse gathering of Germans, conveys a specific blasphemy. The title of the artwork, after all, alludes to the opening verse of Johnâs Gospel. Perhaps the direct parallel of Hitlerâs arms, bent in mirror image of the Nazi swastika on the flag which hangs directly behind him, conveys a subtle image of the crucified Christ. Maybe it is the transfixed attention of the listeners who are enlightened, both literally by the only ambient light depicted in the painting, and symbolically, by the message of the speaker from whom the light seems to issue.
Since the painting was made in depression era Germany, the contemporary viewer would immediately, even unconsciously, infuse a lifetime of learned Christian symbolism to the rendering. Here was the savior bearing a message of hope in those dark days of inflation, unemployment, and social chaos. He was the new Messiah, this Adolf Hitler. The artist wanted to show that Hitler was the redeemer of fallen Germany, the savior who would liberate them from the evil Versailles Treaty brought about by the lies and betrayals of the satanic Jews, none of whom is visible in this picture. Indeed, the mysterious origin of the paintingâs light over the listeners suggests Pentecost. That is the moment traditionally portrayed by symbolic âflames of enlightenmentâ, as if to show the truth of Christ shining on the apostles, who then went forth to spread the word. The paintingâs listeners would be so enlightened and spread Hitlerâs new truth.
The Nazi genius for propaganda allowed them to shamelessly usurp for their own ends symbols and terminology found in the Jewish and Christian writings of Tanak and New Testament. These symbols and words were ingrained in a German population through years of religious instruction, literary usage, and social convention. Even a secular German could not escape a language suffused with originally religious terminology.
This essay will consider Nazi usage and the context in which it flourished. I will demonstrate how one German-American Catholic priest, Monsignor Martin Hellriegel, in the spirit of a Papal encyclical of the time, countered such manipulation with truth, and brought back honest usage to words shamelessly exploited by the neo-pagans. Hellriegel saw in Nazi blasphemy the insidious twisting of the meaning of words which, Pied Piper like, led the listener away from the truth and into a dark forest of confusion and evil.
Adolf Hitler saw the world with a distinctly âreligiousâ viewpoint. That is to say his worldview was clearly bound up in a fall from grace, resurrection, and victory schematic. He specifically introduced this idea in Mein Kampf, and restated it in virtually every public utterance thereafter.
In the beginning was the Edenic German past, the great victorious Reich of Franco-Prussian War days. Was it not thunderous German cannon and proud soldiery which brought about this triumphal era? The wholesome Germanic stock prevailed in a sort of Darwinian triumph against lesser Europeans. This past was further characterized by a virtuous Germanic racial pride, a Volkish culture of simple honesty, hard work, communal integrity and physical wholesomeness.
Into this Eden came the evil serpent; into Eden came the Jew. Attached to the integrated Volkish host, the parasitical Jew leeched it of life. The Jew attained inclusion not through virtuous action and social harmony. Rather by blandishment, money, and exploitation of human frailty he affixed himself to the living body of the German people. The Jew, as characterized by his Talmudic philosophy, created a false trope to protect himself from expulsion from the alien body, the concept that the weakest must be protected. He spread his false doctrine through the liberal press, his servile politicians, and his religion. His philosophy was âunnaturalâ for it flew in the face of simple biology. To suggest that human dignity was not manifested in the triumph of the strong, (as proven by the victorious 1870 Reich), but rather in how the strong treated the weakest among them, was an insidious means of debilitating the otherwise powerful German race. âTo protect the weak, the outsider,â was a lie that could be traced back even to its cunning insinuation into the Christian concept of the Beatitudes or the Good Samaritan. How to expose this racial cancer, this contagious tuberculosis injected into Germanic culture? Consider, Hitler argued, what this cancer had already done.
The young Hitler, after some three years on World War I frontlines, wounded in the face by shrapnel, felled by a bullet to the thigh, recovered near wartime Berlin. During recuperation he traveled there to find it a nest of complaints and defeatism. This attitude prevailed even though Russia had collapsed in revolution and the French were in disarray. As Hitler later wrote it was obvious why Germany lost the war which by all observable accounts it was winning. Germany was betrayed. The November criminals sabotaged Germany and so stabbed the Fatherland in the back. They did so in thousands of cowardly ways. Their Marxist unions fought a common steadfastness on the home front. The inconstant Churches subverted the war effort by religious softness, while the worthless, lying politicians deceived the simple Volk. Behind them all was the wire pulling Jew. The Versailles Treaty brought them to power, a power totally unearned, totally corrupt, and totally alien to the German way.
The bourgeois liberals, the Marxists, and the Church, the Catholic Church in particular, militated against the Germanic race. Each in its own way brought about Germanyâs downfall. Philosophically, they all sought universality and converts to party, class, or religion respectively. Conversely, one was born into the German Herrenvolk. In any case, each had in its way brought about the downfall of Germany. Hitler would save the Germanic race from the crest of oblivion to which it had been brought. He would do so by excising from the land that very parasite which brought it to this end, the Jew, the manipulator behind each of these entities.
So it was that Hitler applied one of the lessons he learned best in the trenches of Belgium: propaganda. He would co-opt the strengths of his enemies to his own ends.
Religious language suffused the Third Reich. They Nazis turned the benign concepts about God to their own ends by subtle means. They were wolves in sheepâs clothing.
This distortion was exposed by the 1937 Vatican Encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, (With Burning Anxiety), uniquely published originally in the German language. It excoriated the consistent Nazi dismantling of the Concordat between Rome and Berlin. Not only had the Nazis broken virtually every component, among which were provisions for religious education, public practice of religion, and social activities, it had even begun to subvert the truths behind the language of the Christian religion.
Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, more or less arbitrary, of human speculationâ¦Our God is the Personal God, supernatural,â¦who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side.
Mit Brennender Sorge, Pius XI, Encyclical, 1937
The poison spread not only throughout Germany, but to Germans in America as well. The faux religion of Nazism, or at least the apparent acceptance of religion by the Hitler state, deceived millions. For example, by substituting apparently wholesome Hitler Youth activities for Confirmation ceremonies, or inserting Nazi themes into apparent prayers, or even creating National ceremonies to replace religious rituals, the cultural religiosity of the country was co-opted and believers duped into slowly accepting Nazi beliefs.
Let us examine one example of how this usurpation of language was identified, and how, in the spirit of Mit Brennender Sorge, it was countered in a most unlikely way. This example will demonstrate how the insidious influence of appropriated language was deftly and simply countered, so that Nazismâs influence was blunted among German- Americans before our entry into the war.
In night's darkest hour every November 9th, to commemorate the Nazi coup d'etat of 1923, a mystical midnight oath-taking ceremony took place in a sacred hall under the eyes of Adolf Hitler. There the SS, Hitler's special troops, took an oath of personal loyalty to him. One remembers, " Splendid young men, serious of face, exemplary of bearing and turnout. An elite. Tears came to my eyes when, by the light of the torches, thousands of Voices repeated the oath in chorus. It was like a prayer."
During their rise to power, the Nazis usurped virtually all traditions, symbols, and words of pious German Christianity. Indeed, the most egregious was to call Adolf Hitler the Savior. Perhaps this extract from the SS catechism characterizes this subtle transference best: The question, 'Whom must we primarily serve?' required the response, 'The people and our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler'. 'Why do we believe in Germany and the Fuhrer?' ' Because we believe in God,...and in the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, whom He has sent us."
Indeed, by 1941 the Hitler's successes appeared Providential, as he claimed. He raised Germans from the shame of Depression joblessness and revived a beaten peoples' pride by giving them military victory. His rule extended to virtually every land and nation of Europe, North Africa, and Eurasia to Moscow. But in his dominion salvation required absolute obedience to Hitler's belief in racial supremacy and hatred of the 'race defilers', the Jews. Hitler's rule required a gradual but inevitable denial of a personal, loving God in favor of faith in racial victory. Far away in little Baden, an American community settled by Germans on the banks of the Mississippi, a parish priest was composing a song that would strike the Nazis a blow from which they would never recover. Father Martin Hellriegel, a German immigrant and pastor to several communities in the St. Louis, Missouri area, considered the rise of racial nationalism in his former homeland. As Hellriegel read in the l937 Papal Letter titled, With Burning Anxiety, (the only Encyclical written in the German language), the Pope outlined how Germans had lost their way. They had abandoned traditional Christianity in favor of a twisted racial Darwinism that called 'immortality' not survival of man after life on earth, but survival of the race; that maintained 'revelation' was not God's word to Man, but suggested the triumph of race and blood over lesser peoples. The Pope further noted that daring to suggest that even the greatest of men was on a par with Christ, our Savior from sin and death, would be to make the man a "Prophet of Nothingness."
Hellriegel knew his people. To defeat subtle Nazi usurpation of Christ's words and mission, he would restate the Christian message simply and clearly for all the world. The pastor knew what Christ intended when our yes should mean yes, our no mean no. Hellriegel found an energetic, almost martial tune in an old copy of the Mainz (Germany) Church music book. To the music from 1870, he wrote new lyrics. They are a point by point rebuttal of Nazi beliefs. He called the song "To Jesus Christ, Our Sovereign King" and he wrote it in l941 at the height of Nazi power.
Hellriegel's opening salvo was that Jesus, not Hitler, was "...our Sovereign King, who is the World's Salvation". If Jesus was sovereign, Hitler was not. If, as the Catholic Church proclaimed, all in the world could be saved, no claim of racial peculiarity could stand. "All praise and homage do we bring, and thanks and adoration." was a direct slap at the obsequious accolades offered Hitler for having brought Germans back into wealth, prestige, and power.
It is the refrain, "Christ Jesus Victor, Christ Jesus Ruler, Christ Jesus Lord and Commander," which is the most powerful statement of faith. Hitler promised Sieg (victory), and was the Fuhrer (ruler), who rescued Germany from the hydra-headed oppressions of the Versailles Treaty, the traitorous Jews, the internationalist Church and Communists. At the very height of German battlefield victories Hellriegel declared not Hitler but Christ as the true Commander. (In later years, that intentional military term was changed to âredeemerâ.) Hellriegel's refrain, repeated over and over again, specifically denied each of Hitler's claims, just as had been done in the Papal Letter.
Indeed, "Thy reign extend, oh King, benigh, to every land and nation. For in thy Kingdom, Lord divine, alone we find salvation," contended that Christ's kingdom, not Hitler's empire, was where man would be saved. Even the very Hitler oath, required of every government and military official in Germany, was specifically attacked in this song. Not loyalty to Hitler; not, as the Hitler oath claimed, "I swear to thee, and to the superiors whom thou shall appoint, obedience unto death. So help me God.â, but rather as Hellriegel wrote, "To thee and to thy church great king, we pledge our hearts oblation, until before thy throne we sing, in endless jubilation."
The hymn âTo Jesus Christ our Sovereign Kingâ is sung even today. Hitler's claims lie long forgotten. The challenge this song threw at the apparent victor of Europe, at the height of his greatest power, was mighty. For, as each verse attested, there was a greater truth which stood in opposition to Hitlerism. There were other, more ancient meanings to the words usurped by the Nazis. Simple and clear, the hymn carried a power to change hearts by speaking the truth.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->