review excerpts & url: _The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945_

[pynchonoid]

H-NET BOOK REVIEWS
Published by H-German at h-net.msu.edu (June, 2003)

Richard Steigmann-Gall. _The Holy Reich: Nazi
Conceptions of
Christianity, 1919-1945_. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
2003. xvi + 294 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-521-82371-4.

Reviewed for H-German by John S. Conway
<jconway at interchange.ubc.ca>, Department of History,
University of
British Columbia

Richard Steigmann-Gall's lively and sometimes
provocative study of
the relationship between Nazism and Christianity
breaks new ground.
He takes issue with those, like this reviewer, who
argue that Nazism
and Christianity were incompatible, both in theory and
practice.
Instead he examines more closely the areas of overlap
and the
consequent ambiguities in the minds of many leading
Nazis.  He
rejects the view that, when Nazi orators before 1933
made frequent
use of a Christian vocabulary, it was purely a
tactical device to
gain votes.  Later on, such deceptive religiosity
would be discarded
as no longer needed.  Instead he shows the extensive
and consistent
appreciation of Christianity as a religious system in
the Nazi
ranks, even among several members of its hierarchy. 
Similarly he
disputes the claim that those Christians who flocked
to the Nazi
cause were shallow-minded opportunists, jumping on a
popular
political bandwagon.  Instead, he argues that the
stressful
conditions of a defeated Germany led many sincere
Christians,
particularly Protestants, to regard the Nazi cause as
theologically
justified as well as politically appropriate. 

[...] Steigmann-Gall finds that even those
Nazis most hostile to the churches could still have an
ambivalent
relationship to Christianity.  For example, Alfred
Rosenberg, in his
book, _The Myth of the Twentieth Century_, made
numerous positive
references to Christ as a fighter and antisemite, and
was even
warmer in praise of the noted mediaeval mystic Meister
Eckhart.  If
the Church could be purged of its Jewish and Roman
accretions,
Rosenberg could look forward to a Nordic-western soul
faith which
would reincarnate a purer Christianity. In this he was
only adopting
the ideas of at least one extreme wing of "German
Christian"
Protestantism.

Certainly, these "paganists," as Steigmann-Gall calls
them,
exercised little control over Nazi policy.  Hitler
stoutly and
consistently rejected any talk of an ersatz religion
based on German
myths or culminating in Valhalla.  [...]  in 1934
Hitler refused to back the radicals and in 1935
appointed an old crony and primitive Protestant, Hanns
Kerrl, to be
Minister of Church Affairs.  The kind of Christianity
Kerrl affirmed
was proclaimed in his speeches: "Adolf Hitler has
hammered the faith
and fact of Jesus into the hearts of the German
Volk.... True
Christianity and National Socialism are identical."  

[...]  Steigmann-Gall argues persuasively that the
Nazi Party's 1924
program and Hitler's policy-making speeches of the
early years were
not just politically motivated or deceptive in intent.
 Agreeing
with the view taken by Hitler's fellow-countryman, the
Austrian
theologian Friedrich Heer, Steigmann-Gall considers
these speeches
to be a sincere appreciation of Christianity as a
value system to be
upheld.  

[...]  But his final view that, in light of the
post-1945
ideological imperatives, Nazism had to be depicted as
an evil and
unchristian empire seems overdrawn.  Yet he is
undeniably right to
point out how much Nazism owed to German Christian,
especially
Protestant, concepts and how much support it gained
from a majority
of Christians in Germany.  That is certainly a
sobering lesson to be
drawn from this interesting and well-reasoned account.

[...] continues:

<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=55161057430311>


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