Nazi Paganism

We rarely hear about the pagan religious ideas promoted by the Nazis, but every once in while, I come across another story. This one is from an article by Timothy George at First Things, who wrote about Paul Schneider, “the first Protestant pastor to die in a concentration camp at the hands of the Nazis”:

Schneider…was asked to preside at the funeral of a seventeen-year-old member of the Hitler Youth named Karl Moog. Before the benediction had been pronounced, the local Nazi district leader, Heinrich Nadig, interrupted the service to declare that young Karl had now crossed over into the heavenly storm troop of Horst Wessel, to which Schneider replied: “I do not know if there is a storm of Horst Wessel in eternity, but may the Lord God bless your departure from time and your entry into eternity.”

Sturmführer Horst Wessel was a Nazi party activist and author of the popular Nazi hymn “The Flag on High” (also called the Horst-Wessel-Lied). After his violent death in 1930, he was elevated as a hero in the Nazi pantheon. The Wessel story was incorporated into the pagan mythology the Nazis were seeking to revive. Alfred Rosenberg, the master of Nazi ideology, claimed that Wessel had not really died but now led a celestial storm troop. Those who died in the service of the Nazis, like young Karl Moog, were summoned to join the Wessel storm troop above. Just six months prior to the funeral incident, the Nazi bimonthly Der Brunnen declared: “How high Horst Wessel towers over that Jesus of Nazareth—that Jesus who pleaded that the bitter cup be taken from him. How unattainably high all Horst Wessels stand above Jesus!”

Pastor Schneider refused to subordinate the Christian Gospel to such a pagan myth. When Nadig repeated his graveside claim about Horst Wessel, Schneider said: “I protest. This is a church ceremony, and as a Protestant pastor, I am responsible for the pure teaching of the Holy Scriptures.”

After this confrontation, Schneider was placed in prison for five days, but he did not back down.

Eric Metaxes wrote a bit about Nazi paganism in Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy:

Since Hitler had no religion other than himself, his opposition to Christianity and the church was less ideological than practical. That was not the case for many leaders of the Third Reich. Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and others were bitterly anti-Christian and were ideologically opposed to Christianity, and wanted to replace it with a religion of their own devising. Under their leadership, said Shirer [in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich], “the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.”

I would love to find a resource that delves more thoroughly into this topic. Your recommendations are welcome.

Comments

[Allan]

Amy, I am sure you know of this resource, but just incase I suggest reading Hitler's Cross by Erwin W. Lutzer

[Amy]

Allan, I did not know of that book. Thanks!

[scbrownlhrm]

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Martin Luther King Jr.

[Carolyn]

I read Metaxes' book on Bonhoeffer this summer and was completely captivated by it. Such inside information about what was really happening in Germany at the time, and the PR job Hitler did to capitalize on Germany's humiliation after WWI and his vow to make it a super power again. The picture of the "church" in Germany at the time and the courage it took to stand against it as it was manipulated by Hitler was stunning. The giants of our faith stood tall and accepted death over capitulation--what champions of God's Word!

[Scott Richardson]

Hi Amy,
Though you may be asking for only non-fictional resources, I would still like to recommend "That Hideous Strength" written by C.S. Lewis in 1945. It is his spiritualized allegory of the rise and fall of a fictional evil/dystopian empire in the heart of England. Though it contains a great deal of supernatural events and mythologies, it sheds light on many philosophies and motives that fuel the rise of such ‘progressive’ National Socialistic institutions.

Of course, the truth of the Nazi party is stranger and even more hideous than Lewis’s fiction.

[Amy]

I love That Hideous Strength. :-)

[Bud]

I am reading the revised (2012) edition of "Hitler's Cross." Chapter 3, "The Religion of the Third Reich, Then and Now" provides valuable information on the topic.

[Louis Kuhelj]

I think that it is very difficult to find much definitive work on this topic because it was the SS that were considered the high priests of this "New Religion" and they kept their mouths shut. There is a glimpse here and a glimpse there into what it was, but most of it was well hidden. As such it was clearly an occult pagan religion that was hostile to Christianity and its core values.

[scbrownlhrm]

“If ever the book which I am not going to write is written it must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom’s specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. Large areas of ‘the World’ will not hear us till we have publicly disowned much of our past. Why should they? We have shouted the name of Christ and enacted the service of Moloch.” (C.S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”)

The trinity of [Mindset, Action, Philosophical Necessities] need to all agree, that is to say, not violate one another necessarily.

Love’s ontology need never apologize for it is the very Sum, the very Context from which all lesser sums, all lesser contexts subsume the very thing we call definition. Though, many of us who ascribe to the truth of such do need to apologize (perhaps daily, as I), or did need to apologize (perhaps more globally, as C.S> Lewis eludes to). The good news is that Christianity actually has something left at the end of such a process of contrition: Love’s Ontology, that innately triune geography of E Pluribus Unum. Whereas, we find in Atheism and even in Pantheism that at end of any such process the very acts of cruelty we despised are left fully intact, on ontology’s necessity.

This is not the case with Immutable Love.

Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. claimed a kind of Power to Unarmed Truth amalgamated with Unconditional Love and of course such a notion smells of insanity here in this Now, here inside of the Outside where Love’s Void fills the emptiness by definition, vacuums themselves being, of course, contingent. We must not mistake Suffering’s limits as the Beginning or the Ends or the Means for by such a mistake we think we can employ such things and thereby raise the Ceiling and/or lower the Floor of this Loveless Outside and somehow fly beyond fragmentation, somehow broaden the walls of our prison. But we never will be able to break the barriers of the Highs and Lows of Deuteronomy 28’s Descriptive of the Cold Outside, on ontology’s necessity but hell on earth. There is Love’s Uncreated Other whereby our very Self may find E Pluribus Unum, for Uncreated Love’s Necessarily Triune just is Such and thus all who enter into Him are as He is ipso facto, and He is Love. We find no story but one on planet Earth capturing the full breadth of Love’s necessarily triune landscapes prescriptively describing all that lies within and outside of E Pluribus Unum, and a peculiar story it has been, but Pastor King reminds us of the beautiful end of all things by his words, frail as they may be, by his actions, marred as they may be, and by his own sacrificed-self, fragile as it was, poured out, now filled up.

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” Martin Luther King Jr.

Christianity’s ontology of Love’s necessary triune E Pluribus Unum amidst Self-Other-Us which just is its A and which just is its Z coherently defines all lesser fragments as but the Cold Outside and actually, truthfully, coherently, has love remaining once sin is called sin, once ugly is called ugly, once cruelty is called cruelty. No other ontology can make this claim, for the ugliness, cruelty, and treachery are on necessity, at best, part of god, as in pantheism, or, at worst, greeted with eyes glazed over with necessary indifference, as in atheism.

Fortunately it is not Christian-ity nor is it the Christian which Immutable Love offers the world. He offers Love, that is to say, He offers, in the realest and fullest sense of that word, Himself. Love’s Ontology just is that necessarily triune landscape of E Pluribus Unum and such is God Himself, and the Means He employs are from A to Z Himself just as the Ends He offers are from A to Z Himself.

[scbrownlhrm]

Autocorrect and weaknesses again. Apologies for typos.

What read as this:

Love’s ontology need never apologize for it is the very Sum, the very Context from which all lesser sums, all lesser contexts subsume the very thing we call definition. Though, many of us who ascribe to the truth of such do need to apologize (perhaps daily, as I), or did need to apologize (perhaps more globally, as C.S> Lewis eludes to). The good news is that Christianity actually has something left at the end of such a process of contrition: Love’s Ontology, that innately triune geography of E Pluribus Unum. Whereas, we find in Atheism and even in Pantheism that at end of any such process the very acts of cruelty we despised are left fully intact, on ontology’s necessity.

Should instead read as:

Love’s ontology need never apologize for it is the very Sum, the very Context from which all lesser sums, all lesser contexts subsume the very thing we call definition. Though, many of us who ascribe to the truth of such do need to apologize (perhaps daily, as I), or did need to apologize (perhaps more globally, as C.S Lewis eludes to). The good news is that Christianity actually has something left at the end of such a process of contrition: Love’s Ontology, that innately triune geography of E Pluribus Unum. Whereas, we find in Atheism and even in Pantheism that at the end of any such process the very acts of cruelty we despised are left fully intact, on ontology’s necessity.