Comments on: The rest is history: video on the roots of Nazi ideology

By: David+Foster

David+Foster — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 13:45:56 +0000

Here’s a statement of Nazi ideology, written by Goebbels himself, from 1932:

https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken32.htm

By: Dennis McMullen

Dennis McMullen — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 21:41:26 +0000

Hitler claimed to admire Nietzsche. The ideas discussed in this video about the will to life and the prerogatives of the strong echo passages in Nietzsche’s books. Nietzsche is a great philosopher because he was bold enough to lay out the consequences of their murder of God. Was Nietzsche evil himself or was he writing tongue in cheek to show his contemporaries the end results of their godless philosophy. That is the question. Philosophers, including Jewish philosophers, have tried to exonerate Nietzsche because he supposedly wasn’t antisemitic in his personal life. Others claim that his sister changed things to fit her Nazi ideology. But it doesn’t really matter, whatever Nietzsche’s personal feelings, his writings speak for themselves.

By: Miguel cervantes

Miguel cervantes — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 16:51:48 +0000

We spell it out as clear as day and yet he chases squirrels

By: om

om — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 15:14:17 +0000

You can spring the Kermit from the stir but you can’t get the stir out of Kermit.

A state of mind.

By: Karmi

Karmi — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 13:25:16 +0000

‘Life on Earth is a *LOT* like Life in a Prison…’ Were the Spartans Nazis? Was the Arab-Islam Slave Trade a Nazi business? Were the Aztecs Nazis? Was the Spanish Inquisition a Nazi Movement? Was Stalin a ‘Closet’ Nazi? Was Pol Pot a Nazi? Human history is littered with genocide, mass murder, and wars. If one believes the Bible, then even the Israelites/Hebrews slaughtered their fair share… Maybe “Nazi ideology” is just another term for the way humans are – society humans...

By: Steve (retired/recovering lawyer)

Steve (retired/recovering lawyer) — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 12:11:09 +0000

Looking for explanations for the rise of Nazism is a futile endeavor as long as one seeks to explain it in purely human terms. It is much like the current endeavor to explain the creation of the universe in exclusively materialistic terms. Of course, both of these things provide many hours of speculative endeavor to keep academics busy and gainfully employed. After all, what better employment could there be for the inhabitants of Laputa but to spend time in pointless endeavors and get paid for it, to boot?

By: Ray+Van+Dune

Ray+Van+Dune — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 03:13:46 +0000

I think it is inadequately appreciated that even pre-WW-1 Germans were already heavily steeped in a sense of their own racial superiority. The Nazis may have sown the seeds of it, I but they fell on fertile ground.

By: Christopher B

Christopher B — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 00:45:21 +0000

After reading all the comments I think Neo has it exactly right in the original post. You can pick pretty much any random Nazi leader and be pretty sure that you will *not* find somebody who would call themselves a committed adherent to Christianity.

If you want a different perspective that if I recall correctly pretty well aligns with this but likely goes into different details, I’d view Alec Ryrie’s lecture on the history of the Lutheran church(es) in Germany during the Nazi era. Though eventually coopted, the Lutheran Church was one of the last remaining groups pushing back on Nazi ideology

https://youtu.be/kEdnwpo28NM?si=lEnN_cAgdTQKjf4G

He also does a really really good lecture on the impact of Nazism and the Holocaust on Western religious thinking and broader culture. (Jesus, Hitler, and the Abolition of God)

https://youtu.be/EBrrsqhAXQI?si=ijbGIca4aekbX6A8

By: Eeyore

Eeyore — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 23:10:46 +0000

TBH, I don’t really trust those two. Not the sort of historians I’d turn to.

By: Niketas Choniates

Niketas Choniates — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 22:25:53 +0000

@neo:I think it’s very clear that they.used Christianity and appeased it at times, but actually hated and what’s more despised it.

I have no doubt some of them did, that’s pretty well established. But with others this is much harder to determine, and I think Hitler falls into this category. And it’s a question how prevalent this attitude toward Christianity was among “Nazi leaders”–unless we’re just going to leave out the ones who might not have agreed with it and declare them not to be True Nazi Leaders.

You have other Nazi leaders besides Hitler who are hard to discern too. Take Fritz Todt, who ran the entire German war economy (including slave labor) until his death in 1942 and reported directly to Hitler, and was a rival of Goering. Nobody seems to have much to say about what, if any, ideology he had, or how he felt about Christianity. (Happy to see any direct quotes you have handy.) They all talk about his administrative and engineering ability, I have great difficulty finding anything else.

Yet he joined the Nazi Party in 1922, and rose high in the ranks of the Party (reaching SA-Obergruppenfuehrer under Ernst Roehm) before being appointed to his high government position directly reporting to Hitler, so other Nazis must have thought he was a proper Nazi. He had a high personal loyalty to Hitler, keeping a painting of Hitler as a medieval knight on his office wall. So was he a “Nazi leader” and if so was he one of the ones who “used”, “hated”, and “despised” Christianity?

The easy thing to do is say, well Todt and the others like him weren’t “real” Nazi leaders, we can just stick to people like Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels whose views on Christianity are easy to establish. The harder thing to do, is try to find out for folks who were as important in the Nazi hierarchy as Todt was, but whose ideological views are obscure, what their views on Christianity were and THEN try to decide how prevalent those views were in the “Nazi leadership”.

It’s not nitpicking. To the extent that Nazi ideology explains what Nazis did, people like Todt cannot be left out, since none of it could have been done without him and the others like him.