+gt;+gt; Nazi Germany was a VERY religious state, in fact, +gt; What was the state religio

 >> Nazi Germany was a VERY religious state, in fact,

 > What was the state religion of Nazi Germany?

"Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism
or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that
the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious
peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic
cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout
religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's staunchest
followers."

"Given their commitment to the method of faith (and their tendency to imitate
the Catholic Church), it is not astonishing that some Nazis went all the way
in this issue. A tendency never given the status of official ideology yet
fairly prominent in the movement was voiced in a demand made by several of its
leading figures (though Hitler himself regarded it as impractical until the
Nazis won the war): the demand that Nazism itself be turned into a full-fledged
religion. These voices urged a state religion supplanting the older creeds,
with its own symbols, its own rituals, and its own zealots avid to convert
christians into fanatic Hitler-believers, as, once, ancient missionaries had
converted pagans into fanatic christians. "Adolf Hitler," exclaimed one such
believer (the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs), "is the true Holy Ghost!"
(15)

"The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this development. To the
end, they could not decide whether to retain christianity, construing Nazism
merely as its latest, truest version ("positive christianity," this wing often
called it)--or to concoct a distinctively Nazi creed out of a hodgepodge of
elements drawn from pagan Teutonic mythology and romanticist metaphysics. In
either case, however, whether advanced as a form of or a successor to christ-
ianity, what Nazism did unfailingly demand of its followers was the essence of
the religious mentality: an attitude of awed, submissive, faithful adoration.
"We believe on this earth SOLEY (emphasis by writer) in Adolf Hitler...,"
intoned Dr. Robert Ley to a reverent audience of 15,000 Hitler Youths. "We
believe that God has sent us Adolf Hitler." (16)

Excerpts from "The Ominous Parallels" by Leonard Peikoff.

(15) Viereck, op. cit., p.289; quoting from Eugene Lyons, "Dictators into
	  Gods" (American Mercury, March 1939).

(16) Ibid.; quoting from the New York Times, February 11, 1937.


But of course, no one was killed in the name of god. (Eyes closed tight and
exclaiming, "Did not!")

The connection between the Catholic church an Facism lies not in the actual
teachings of Catholicism but in the methodology of teaching it. Hitler admired
the Church for this reason; its knowledge of human nature, it hierarchal
organization, its discipline, its uncommonly clever tactics.

Hitler is quoted as saying, "I have followed the Church in giving our party
program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has
never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years
since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its ammendment, every
logical criticsm or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized
that anything and everything can be built upon a document of that sort, no
matter how contradictory, or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will
swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be
brought to bear on it."