The Center for Garden State Families will now address how the German Church came under the Satanic seduction of Adolf Hitler. Our last article revealed how the Enabling Act of 1933 enshrined Hitler as the Dictator of Germany. Hitler pandered to the Church. However, he intended to destroy it and ultimately become the worshipped savior of Germany. The German Church was deceived. In his book, Hitler’s Cross, Erwin W. Lutzer writes, “That Hitler deceived the Church is clear enough. But we also must remember that the Churches of Germany had already sold out to the popular themes of German culture long before Hitler rose to power. They were prepared to be deceived; some would say, wanted to be deceived. The deceptions did not happen all at once but were part of a long history. The conditions of the Church prior to Hitler, says one historian, was just as to blame as Hitler’s opposition to the Church.” Further, Lutzer writes, “The Church for the most part, had abandoned the historic Christian faith and had opted for theological liberalism; that is, they read the Bible trying to separate the true from the false, denying the uniqueness of Christ. Without a clear message of repentance and faith in Christ alone as the Son of God, the Churches substituted the proud banner of a Christianized Nationalism for the meekness and humility of Christ.”
The Bible warns in 2 Timothy 4:3-4, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” We will understand the sad unfolding of a myth that promulgated the horrors of concentration camps. When theological absurdities, myth-making, and weakness confound the Church, it leads to untold atrocities. The Church acts as Salt and Light in the world and is a moral counter-balance in the face of tyrannical uprisings. When the Church succumbs to the culture, it incrementally loses its first love of Christ and forsakes and forgets God to become friends with the world. Patrick Henry said, “It is when a people forget God, that tyrants forge their chains.” In Nazi Germany, the tyrannical dictator Hitler and his henchmen forged more than chains. They fashioned and forged death camps and crematoriums for Jewish genocide. However, there was a stumbling block to this effort that needed to be removed because the Christian Church worshipped a crucified Jew.
Dietrich Klagges was a German educator and a friend of Joseph Goebbels who wrote the book called The Original Gospel of Jesus: German Faith. According to Klagges, he uncovered research that revealed the original narrative of the Gospels. In the chapter called “The Enemies,” Klagges contended that the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees was a racial issue. Further, Klagges discovered that Galilee had never been a Jewish region, and the Jews captured the area in 104 B.C. This region of Galilee consisted of Aryans who were subjugated by Jewish domination. Jesus was an Aryan who was in a racial conflict with the Jews.
In addition, The Institute for Research and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Ecclesiastical Life consisted of more than fifty Professors of Theology at Universities throughout the Third Reich including instructors and graduate students. This organization’s role was to reinforce and propagandize the non-Jewish Jesus. Because of this organization’s “research,” Germans could purchase a version of the New Testament sanitized of any Jewish elements and influence and promote the Aryan Jesus. In one of the most wicked displays of myth-making in Church history, Jesus Christ became an Aryan Jew-hating handmaiden to Adolf Hitler.
On November 13th, 1933, the German Christians revealed their agenda at a massive rally in the Sports Palace in Berlin. Dr. Reinhold Krause, a German religious educator, and a dignitary of the German Christians, gave a speech before twenty thousand people that called for a second Reformation. The first step toward this second Reformation was “the liberation from all that is un-German in liturgy and confession, liberation from the Old Testament with its Jewish recompense ethic, from all these stories about cattle-dealers and pimps. Our provincial Church will also have to see to it that all obviously distorted and superstitious reports should be expunged from the New Testament, and that the whole scapegoat and inferiority-type theology of the Rabbi Paul should be renounced in principle, for it has perpetuated a falsification of the Gospel.” This rally of blasphemy met with controversy because it offended some of the German Christians. Dr. Krause had to resign his position because of the radical Nazification of the Church. However, irreparable damage had already been done.
Banner in the picture reads: “The German Christian Reads the Gospel in the Third Reich”
As if this disturbing display of myth-making was not bad enough, we now turn to the absurd. We as Christians have Celebrated the Blessed Incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Our Celebration of Christmas glorifies the coming of God to this earth to liberate souls through His Salvation. In Nazi Germany, Mary and Baby Jesus were portrayed as a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan duo. Hitler commissioned a Nazi songwriter to rework the Christmas song Silent Night. This song was first composed by Joseph Mohr approximately 203 years ago. It was first performed as Stille Nacht on Christmas Eve in 1818 at the St Nicholas parish church in Oberndorf, a small village in modern-day Austria. The English translation that is most frequently sung today was published in 1859 by Episcopal priest John Freeman Young, then serving at the Trinity Church in New York. Hitler’s version was called Exalted Night of the Clear Stars, or Hohe Nacht der Klaren Sterne in German. The following are the lyrics that were sung for the Savior Fuhrer:
The Swastika Hilter's Broken Cross
First, they removed the Jewish heritage of Jesus. Then they removed His Deity by replacing Jesus with Hitler. Churches in Germany replaced the Cross of Christ with the Swastika, the Broken Cross because Hitler intended to break the Cross of Christ, remove Christianity, and replace it with the Doctrines of Mein Kampf.
We must ask ourselves why didn’t many Germans rise up in a coordinated resistance to stop the myth-making distortion of the Word of God and the Nazification of the Church? Why didn’t they rise up in resistance against the atrocities in Nazi Germany, from the Aktion T4 euthanasia program of the elderly and disabled to the genocidal rampage against the Jews? An Israeli article gives us some sobering insight, “In July 1933, during Hitler’s first summer in power, a young German Pastor named Joachim Hossenfelder preached a sermon in the towering Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin’s most important Church. He used the words of Romans 13 to remind worshippers of the importance of obedience to those in authority. The Church was festooned with Nazi banners and stormtrooper flags, its pews packed with the Nazi party faithful – including men in Brown Shirts of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazis’ paramilitary movement. This is one of the most explicit examples in which the German Protestant Church invoked Romans 13. Indeed, following an attempt to assassinate Hitler, a plotter blamed Romans 13 as a reason why there was not more resistance to the Fuhrer within the Third Reich. The idea some Americans have that there was a faction of Christians opposing Nazis – it was not like that, most Christians were Nazis and Nazis were Christians, and that’s just the way it was.”
Reverend John E. Warmuth, in his paper “Our Ultimate Obedience to God,” states that Romans 13 was in many ways the glue that held the Third Reich together. Adolf Hitler was a tyrannical despot, yet his favorite section of the Bible was Romans 13. Perhaps this was one instance when he enjoyed “Rabbi Paul’s” writings. In these verses, Hitler’s totalitarian reign of terror gave him authority, legitimacy, and validity. Warmuth writes, what the response of the German Church should have been, “So, what were Christians in Nazi Germany to do when asked to kill Jews and steal their property? What were Christians in Communist countries to do when told to spy on fellow Christians and turn them into the State? What do Christians in Dictatorships do when they are told to keep food and basic necessities away from certain ethnic groups in the country? We don’t do those bad things! We follow the example of Peter and James in Acts 5:29. When the governing authorities forbade them to speak in Jesus’ Name any more they answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Peter and James did not go into total, open rebellion against the authorities. They respectfully said they could not obey that particular command.”
Episcopal Priest David Simmons has written, “Germans of the 1930s were not immoral or stupid. They were highly educated, creative, and diverse by the standards of the time. They went to church in greater numbers than Americans do today. And yet, they allowed the unthinkable to happen to their neighbors. The sad reality is that the Church largely stood by, at best ignoring, at worst abetting, due to a cherry-picked interpretation of Romans 13. Much of German history since that time has been the work of trying to come to terms with how such things were allowed to happen. Much of Christian theology since that time has been wrestling with the failure of Christian institutions worldwide to respond adequately to what in retrospect was one of the most unmitigated evils in human history. If we allow any human government of any party or political persuasion to represent that obedience to its dictates are the will of God, then we will stand under the judgment of history and of God. There will be a real-world reckoning ending in tragedy for all.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” Many ask themselves how we got to this point where a pandemic has paralyzed this nation and others worldwide for almost two years? Our Churches have succumbed to the culture here and around the world. Liberal theologians have risen amongst us to question the true from the false in the Word of God. Many liberal theologians have questioned the Deity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, saying he was a mere man and an itinerant preacher. Many liberal theologians are committing the grievous sin of myth-making. Many churches, like the ones in Nazi Germany have exchanged the truth for a lie. They, too, have been prepared to be deceived and want to be deceived. Many pastors, like the ones in Nazi Germany hide behind the words of Romans 13 and promote submission to authority to their congregants. Instead of the Nazification of the Church, we have the Covid-fication of the Church. The Vaccinated Aryan is free to move about society while the Unvaccinated “Jew” must be hunted down for the “disease that they are” (Adolf Hitler). Like the Jews in Germany, we see how vaccine mandates are designed to ostracize individuals from society and simultaneously steal our fellow citizens’ ability and right to make a living. As our Christmas holidays approached, Fuhrer Anthony Fauci said the unvaccinated should be banned from these holiday gatherings. Like Hitler before him, it is all a veiled attempt to remove our Lord and Savior from our eyes to cast us into outer darkness that knows no light. Dear Reader, how long do we continue to let the wheels of injustice create victims of political malice before we rise up once and for all “to drive a spoke into the wheel itself?”