The Catholic Church helped many Nazis escape Germany after the war.When Hitler came to power, 98% of the German populace were Christians; the bulk of them being protestant Lutherans. Less than 1% of the population were Jewish!
Considering the lessons of love and altruism associated with Christian teachings, I have often wondered what could have prompted such deep rooted anti-Semitic hatred among the German followers of Christ! How could they justify the heinous nature of their genocidal apparatus? Could one man be so charismatic as to mesmerize millions of staunch Christians into complicity with such extreme social pathology.
Here is one clue:
Hitler was not the harbinger of ant-Semitism.. On the contrary, he was a by product of it. Hatred of the Jews had been festering centuries before he was born. Furthermore, anti-Semitism would be found in every country Jews settled in. But it was German Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who finally acted upon long held anti-Semitic sentiments and committed murder with the blessings of the state...all in the name of their political rock-star: Adolph Hitler.
The racist anti-Jewish Nazi ideology converged with anti-Semitism that was historically widespread throughout Europe at the time and had deep roots in Christian history. For all too many Christians, traditional interpretations of religious scriptures seemed to support these prejudices.
While Hitler was a persuasive and talented orator, that alone would not have brought a high school drop out like himself to power. It took a bad economy, high unemployment and campaign promises of relief. He seemed to be the answer to their prayers. Indeed . to most, he was a godsend; and, he promptly set out to solidify that image. Finally, after several failures, the time was ripe to facilitate an appeal for people to accept a known uneducated radical as their Fuerher .. They did!
For the most part, the laity, and their professional clergy, modified their Christian front to accommodate Hitler’s Nazism;sometimes under duress but most often due to a sense of revived hope and renewed confidence in the German spirit. Either way, Hitler attained his goal and became the face of unspeakable evil... placing the very souls of the German people in jeopardy as they forsook their Christian values for material gain and to exact personal animus against a hapless people: Men women and children who were either Jewish, non-German or those who did not fit the Aryan model.
This is the Christian legacy of Germany!
I try to tell Christians that Nazi's were Catholic Christians. They try to deny it but it's true. I was reading about the scientists who fled Germany when Hitler took over and I read this:
In Germany, all children have to take religious instruction in school. I was in the General Lutheran instruction group and instead of having the philosophy professor from the boys high school, we suddenly had somebody else. He turned out to be a Nazi and his main aim was to tell us that the Jews were Jews and they had killed Christ and they were awful people. That was essentially his message.
So the Nazi's were Christians. They used religion they didn't deny religion.