Two articles disagreeing whether Hitler was a Christian appear below:

Children's Games with 'atrocity statistics'

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said,
but since no one was listening, it needs to be said again"  Andre Gide

 (Investigator 143, 2012 March)


Reading Brian de Kretser's A Murderous Church (#140) and Bruce Bennie's Reply (#142) I am reminded of playground disagreements among fellow pupils at Nailsworth Primary School during early childhood years. Whatever the topic of disagreement, repartee between participants frequently ended in similar fashion:  

'My dad could beat your dad in a fight!'
'No he couldn't – my dad is in the army, killing lots of Japs.'
'My dad's a better soldier than yours, he's driving a tank.'

The origin of the original dispute had soon evaporated in a contest of parental worthiness!

I have no problem with the statistics provided by both writers; if anything, possibly both understate the total human casualties, but it is arguable whether Bennie is citing 'like for like'. The Christian killings were openly justified, as such, by Scriptures and doctrines of the various Churches, while, although 'political incorrectness' was often claimed justifying 'purges' of the so-called 'Communist' elites, the majority of the millions who died under Stalin (or Mao – some 38 million died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward, 1958-1961, alone! – omitted by Bennie!) were mostly the result of bureaucratic mismanagement and wide-spread famines.

Surely, a key difference is that when Christians launched their killing crusades, they did so claiming that they were following God's instructions to destroy unbelievers. [I remember providing a Christian critic at an open air meeting in the Adelaide Park — where I regularly addressed meetings in the late 1940s — with a list of more than a hundred verses from the Bible, advocating or reporting 'unbelievers and/or blasphemers' being killed. Many of the references, of course, related to the horrific biblical stories reporting how Joshua and his confederates went about conquering their Lebensraum (see Deut ii 30, 34 and Deut iii 6 for starters)].

Here are a few comments from a more contemporary 'Christian campaigner':
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to a man who once in loneliness, surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them… In boundless love as a Christian man, I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion, I recognize more profoundly than ever before – the fact it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have a duty to be a fighter for truth and justice, and as a man, I have to see to it that human society does not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago – a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people." Adolf Hitler, Munich, 12 April, 1922.
A few years later our one-time Christian campaigner published his better known masterpiece, Mein Kampf. I have an English edition, published by the official Nazi press, in Munich 1936, where on page 727, the future Fuehrer writes: "If, at the beginning of the War, or even during the War, twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jewish corrupters of the people had been forced to submit to poison-gas, just as hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from every social class and from every trade and calling had to face it in the field, then millions of sacrifices made at the front would not have been in vain..." [Tragically, in spite of the mass sales of this book in Germany; "a marvelous book", the declared opinion of a well known member of British royalty, but Britain's foreign secretary declined reading it, while those few who did refused to take it seriously – subsequently, six million Jewish people (and millions of other 'sub-humans') paid for this omission with their lives.]

Richard Dawkins had apparently forgotten that George W Bush told the world that he had launched his invasion of Iraq because God had spoken to him and told him to "go and get those weapons of mass destruction"…and that every day of the war he received his 'war reports' in a folder with a sketch and citation taken from the Christian bible. Amazingly, Christians always tell me that 'Hitler and Bush' were not 'true' Christians…ignoring the fact that, in a very real sense, both individuals could justifiably argue their actions were in line with Biblical teachings and instructions.

In this respect, life is much easier for both atheists and communists. Neither has 'sacred texts' to follow. Even the latter, who may (unfortunately) treat writings of Marx or Lenin et al with more respect than any text ever deserves – but nowhere, in any of their secular writings, is there a call to massacre peoples (or individuals) because they hold differing beliefs.

Bob Potter

HITLER — A FOLLOWER of CHRIST?

 Anonymous

 (Investigator 144, 2012 May)


Dr Potter and Hitler

Dr Potter (Investigator 143, pp 56-58) apparently accepts Hitler as Christian because Hitler in 1922 stated: "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter… How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison."


The Bible Against Anti-Semitism

The New Testament repeatedly warns that many people will exploit the name of Christ for evil ends. For example:
But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions. They will even deny the Master who bought them — bringing swift destruction on themselves. Even so, many will follow their licentious ways, and because of these teachers the way of truth will be maligned. (I Peter 2)
"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one doing the will of my Father in heaven." (Matthew 7:21)
If self-recommendation is sufficient evidence of a person's goodness — which Dr Potter implies is the case — then every criminal who pleads "not guilty" should immediately be released. Society could save $billions on criminal investigations simply by believing every suspect who says "I'm innocent."

Dr Potter, however, is not that naïve, but has attempted to create prejudice through misinformation. Potter's quote from Hitler reveals Hitler as an anti-Semite already in 1922 — twenty years before the "Holocaust".

The Bible clearly opposes anti-Semitism by teaching that ALL followers of Jesus were initially Jews, and that Jews constituted the Christian majority for a generation.

New Testament opposition to anti-Semistim was debated in Investigator 136 to 140 and is exposed as a controversy in which millions of people, i.e. anti-Semites, were misguided.

New Testament comment about Jews as a people or nation is positive: "Then what advantage has the Jew? ... Much in every way." (Romans 3:1-2) When the Bible criticises Jews it's of individuals, groups and crowds who on specific occasions acted contrary to their own Scriptures. The only Bible criticism of All Jews, innocent and guilty, is statements that refer to all humans everywhere such as: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…"

Jesus said: "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy… Blessed are the peacemakers..." (Matthew 5) The title of "World's most merciless opponent of peace" could arguably go to Hitler. To confuse Hitler with Christ or Christianity ought therefore to be impossible unless one is driven by an ideology and willing to use any flimsy argument to justify it.


Hitler

In public speeches Hitler sometimes referred to "The Lord". Such statements were crowd-pleasers so that people would transfer their positive regard for Christianity toward him. Hitler more often referred to "providence" and that's where his faith lay.

Many leading Nazis believed in occultism, mysticism, paganism and astrology — "Soon, the military planning sessions with the Chiefs of Staff were being postponed and interrupted while the impatient generals waited for their Führer to consult fortune tellers…" (Brown 1989)

The Nazis planned to replace Christianity with paganism and call paganism "Christianity":
The Nazis justified their avowed intention of replacing Christian services and symbols with their own by arguing that their brand of paganism was not anti-Christian but true Christianity! ... Hitler spoke fervently and frequently against organized religion… 'The religions are all alike, no matter what they call themselves. They have no future — certainly none for the Germans… Whether it is the Old Testament or the New Testament, it's all the same old Jewish swindle… One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both.' (The Nazis and the Occult, 2007, pp 155-156)
 The book Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944 originated as shorthand transcription by secretaries of what Hitler said informally. The book was published in 1953. Hitler's many anti-Christian comments include:
Hitler was evidently anti-Christian, racist, bigot and atheist — completely rejecting the Bible's God.

Atheists may try to distance atheism from Hitler with: "How can any honest seeker of truth rely on Hitler's table talk when the entire transcript was edited and kept by the anti-Catholic Bormann?" To this, one could reply: "How can any honest seeker of truth impugn Bormann of text-tampering when Bormann was one of Hitler's closest, most loyal admirers who would not have jeopardized his position by misrepresenting the Fuehrer?"

Hitler's friend and armaments minister, Albert Speer, referred to Table Talk without criticism to point out it has mainly the highlights and much more was said.


Bush Like Hitler?

Dr Potter next implied that President Bush, by orchestrating the 2003 invasion of Iraq, acted like Hitler, and both followed biblical precedent.  

Neither Hitler nor Bush appealed to what Potter calls "horrific biblical stories" of Israel's 14th-century BC war with Canaan as precedent for their respective policies. If they had both would have been wrong. I refer Dr Potter to the debate about Canaan in #132 to #138 which shows that the survival of Israel's religion rather than Canaanite religion was necessary for the "blessing of all the nations of the earth". I also don't recall where Bush claims he orchestrated the UN invasion because God "spoke to him" — Potter should give the reference.

We discussed Iraq previously (#117; #119). Under Saddam Hussein up to 4 million Iraqis perished violently over 30 years. Since minorities (in Iraq's case 10% Sunni) cannot oppress majorities indefinitely there would eventually have been massive payback. When oppression and political massacres are policy, it won't be stopped by appeals to ethics, but requires intervention by a power stronger than the oppressor. Iraq's Shia and Kurds are not clamouring for Saddam-style oppression to return, which suggests they consider his removal justified.


REFERENCES:

Brown, G. 1989 The World's Greatest Mysteries, Octopus Books, pp 25-29

Cameron, N. & Stevens, R.H. (Translators) 2000 Hitler's Table Talk, Enigma, Great Britain
http://archive.org/stream/HitlersTableTalk/HitlersTableTalk_djvu.txt

Roland, P. 2007 The Nazis And The Occult, Arcturus.

http://ed5015.tripod.com/