Talk Elections

The previous thread on this subject was not salvageable as it was, but a thread to discuss the topic of Holocaust denial and the motivations of those who deny the facts is appropriate for the History forum, and a search failed to reveal an older existing thread on the topic.

Anti-Semites grasping at straws/lying through their teeth.

And the idiots naive enough to believe them too.

I've known a few people, educated people who didn't hold grudges against Jews before, who accepted the Holocaust denial story just because they went on a Holocaust Denial website and they were swayed by the pretty little graphs and distorted facts.  When I tell them that, after four months of Holocaust Studies in 12th grade of my Senior year that the Holocaust was most definitely real and that if anything people undersell how truly horrible it really was, they respond that I am a victim of public school propaganda forced onto the American public by the Bilderberg Elite or some crap like that.
There are some people in this world who no matter how hard you try will want to believe that there is something else beyond the tin can label.  Well, in the Holocaust that's just it: PEOPLE F***KING DIED.
Why this fact is continued to be denied beyond me other than it being propagated by anti-Jew racists and being bought and sold by idiot "New Believers".

This is really a sad story. I discover every day how easily people can be indoctrinated and made to believe the most despicable lies.

And thank you Ernest for deleting the other thread.

Holocaust denial would be laughable if it weren't so disgusting, as disgusting as the Holocaust itself. Words simply are not strong enough to describe this morbidity.

And the really depressing thing are not active anti-semites that are denying the Holocaust took place. What's really depressing are simple fools, who are buying this indoctrination.

Even if we're going to consider that widely accepted number of 6 millions Jews killed in the Holocaust is innacurate, it still doesn't make the Holocaust less horryfic. And the people who are trying to lower the number are usually part of the denial movement, looking for a way to justify their believes. That's why I don't like this kind of talk.

It's obvious that the Holocaust did take place. No sane person is going to claim that literally hundreds of thousands of eyewitness accounts, documents and other evidences are forged.

I do find it rather interesting in terms of human psychology, just like with the Truther movement. As in, why people go through all this to convince themselves of something so obviously ridiculous.

I remember there was a sketch once on Swedish TV about where Holocaust deniers think all those Jews went to. There was something about them waiting around for a late flight somewhere, IIRC.

All conspiracy theories can throw seemingly convincing details at you, but some of them are theoretically unsound whereas others are at least conceivable. Like, I think the Birther movement (or even the Moon landing hoax) are examples of conspiracies that make sense on a theoretical level (but are disproven by the details) which makes me see how people could believe it basedon faulty information.

But Holocaust denial?

The official position of Combat 18 - the SA to the early BNP's NSDAP - was that the Holocaust didn't happen but they wished that it had.

Which... er... says everything, really.

What do you consider holocaust deniers?  Because its a very touchy subject to me as a German Catholic with Jewish family members.  I believe that, unlike in most books, Jews, though specifically targeted for destruction, were not the only ones killed, and represent only (bad word choice) about 6 million of the 18 million people killed in the Holocaust.  Nazis would've gone on to kill the Catholics, (which they began to), and would've eventually wiped out everyone who wasn't a white aryan atheist.  Furthermore, I believe that textbooks unfairly single out Germans as the sole participants in the Holocaust (when many civilians of Poland, France, Estonia, Latvia, and more participated voluntarily in the execution of thousands of Jews and other races).  Finally, books and museums (particularly the Museum of Tolerance in L.A. which I went to on a field trip) use the terms Nazi and German a little to interchangeably for my comfort.  A German, by definition, is a resident or descendant of a resident of Germany.  I am proud to be a German.  A nazi, by definition, is someone who prescribes to an anti-semitic, nationalist-socialist ideology.  Furthermore, a Nazi, to me, is an advocate of Hitler's policies, including those in regard to the Holocaust.  Now, my grandmother and her brother and mother lived on a farm in Germany during the 1930's and 1940's.  Her entire family, with the exception of one of her uncles and great-aunts, was anti-Hitler.  Does this make her a Nazi?  She did not even know about the Holocaust until she came to America in 1954.  My great-uncle, her brother, was an officer for several weeks, serving not in the death camps or guarding hitler or beating civilians, but involuntarily serving a boring guard duty in Poland.  When his squadron was en route to defend Berlin, he jumped out of a moving vehicle to escape, feeling that Americans and the Allies represented liberty from Hitler, whom he had quietly opposed from the beginning.  (He and my grandmother were particularly upset with his restriction of Catechism).  He nearly died, pretended to be dead, and the car kept moving.  It turns out he got out right before they began branding all the soldiers as S.S.  He was not a Nazi, in my opinion, that vile label is reserved for the pigs at the top of the chain of command.  Now I've given my rant.  Feel free to comment.

Jersey, I don't think there is a soul on here who holds the Germans as a whole responsible for the terrible actions of the Nazis.  Okay, maybe a few really stupid troll posters, but I think anyone who is anywhere near rational does not.
But yeah, the Holocaust was a wholly horrible event for more reasons than the fact that it targeted Jew and it was flamed on by people, both in Germany and outside of it, who enabled Hitler's plan.

But yeah though, I agree that it is unfair that Germans as a whole get the Nazi label or that people continue to joke about them all as Nazis or nationalistic types or people who wear black suits and shot "heil!".

Jersey, question.  You complain about use of "German" and "Nazi" interchangeably during the context of the Second World War, arguing that it leads people to attribute what the Germans as a whole did in the war with the actions of the NSDAP.

A.  Isn't it fair to do so in the context of the war?  Referring to the Wehrmacht as "German soldiers" or "German forces" makes a lot more sense than saying "Nazi forces," given that they were the army of, well, Germany, which happened to be under a Nazi regime.  I'm not arguing for collective blame, but I am saying that the actions that happened in the war can't be brushed away with "the Nazis did it," because many atrocities were committed by people that weren't in the Nazi Party or, in fact, weren't even Germans themselves (such as Lithuanian, Romanian, etc. Nazi auxiliaries, collaborationists all over Europe...).

B.  Do you take issue to people referring to the Imperial Japanese Army or Imperial Japanese Navy as "Japanese" rather than "Imperial Japanese forces" or whatever?  Sometimes people end up with this weird "the war against the Nazis and the Japanese" phraseology that implies that with the Germans we were only at war with the bad lot running the show but in the Pacific theater we were at war with the entire Japanese nation.

I really doubt that a Catholic like Hitler wanted to kill all Catholics.

As for Holocaust denial, here's the what Oskar Gröning a SS soldier turned into a clerk in Auschwitz (sorting the confiscated possessions of murdered prisoners)


or Oswald Kaduk a SS guard who took active part in the attrocities.


If not even the people commiting the crime denies it, why should anybody else?

I don't think Hitler did consider himself a Catholic.

You are right. But killing Catholics would have meant wiping out most of the population in Southern Germany, so it was always out of the question.
There is no evidence that he ever had such plans. And when it comes to Hitler historians have left no stone untouched.

As he stayed member of the Church his entire life, yes he were Catholic (like much of the rest of the Nazi elite), something not even the Catholic Church try to deny.

A. German army, yes.  But to label everyone of those men, who were drafted at sixteen years of age, as Nazis, monsters, and ruthless brutes, is unfair.  As I said, my opinion is that a Nazi is anyone who prescribes to the national-socialist, white supremacist, anti-Semite ideology, or who participates directly in assisting them or directly furthering their cause.

B. I am saying that everyone labels the nazis as the worst people ever, when, as you said, Japanese forces were as ruthless, and nearly as brutal.  Also, the Chinese killed their own in Teananmen Square; none of these get the coverage that the Holocaust did.  The horrors that are occurring in the middle east and Africa are disgusting; children being raped and killed by the thousands like animals.  Meanwhile, the Soviet soldiers raped over two million German girls - and of the ten million casualties of the March on Berlin, three mullion where girls who were killed during (or committed suicide after) rape by Soviet soldiers.  Meanwhile, countless similar atrocities were committed during the Japanese internment here in the U.S., livelihoods were destroyed, and more.  Now, I really don't like it when people cry "racism" or "unfair", but these other stories deserve to be told.  My grandmother often tells me of a neighbor caught listening to BBC on the radio, who was carted away never to be seen again.  She also tells me of Moraccon soldiers burning her neighborhood to the ground, as she watched in horror, six years old, cowering behind a cow in her barn.  The Moroccan soldiers also were infamous for the rape of many young girls, and for intentionally leaving their prints on the bedsheets of houses they would pillage in order to leave fingerprints.  She tells me of a girlfriend she had growing up, who slept with her mother in the same bed to hide from the enemy soldiers.  The Moroccans came into her house, and the girl fled from the room, jumping out a window to escape.  She broke her leg, and it never healed right.  My Oma has recounted how she once observed the doctors re-breaking the leg, and yet nothing they could do would help.  The girl died at eighty scarred emotionally and physically handicapped for life, with a limp for nearly seventy years.

Are you starting to see why my grandmother maintains a streak of disdain for African-Americans?

Well, what would he have done when he was finished with the Jews?  Sat down and read a book?  He would've descended further and further into insanity, wiping out everyone who he deemed unfit for life, or who got in his way.  Who would be his new scapegoat?  The gypsies?  No, not a high enough population.  The Turks?  Not really present in modern Germany.

What is this.

What is what?  My Al Pacino speech, or these fine people I am conversing with?

The genuinely bizarre and utterly novel argument that you just spewed out.

Think about it from the standpoint of a crazy person.  Or even any dictator.  We need someone to blame when things get bad.  The Jews were scapegoats for centuries.  Who would the government blame if they succeeded in wiping them out?  If it still doesn't make sense, put on your crazy cap.

I was about to PM you about this thread.  I've read six books about Nazi Germany within the last three months, and...well...as you can see from my earlier response, I wasn't about to touch most of this s**t.  You can if you want.

Which argument?  If you're referring to my grandmas prejudism, I'm not defending it, just offering explanation.  I'm tired and moving on of it's something else.

Again, I agree it's kind of unfair how history subjects are presented sometimes.

As someone who had a pretty proud Ukrainian American AP World History teacher and later Holocaust Studies teacher I do admit that I am often troubled by how less of a focus that History teachers (at least in America) put on other horrible events.  When I was 17-19 years old I was obsessed with learning about the Soviet Union, especially about the Stalin era atrocities.  When I learned that Stalin actually killed like a gazillion people as well, maybe even more than Hitler, I was shocked and wondering why my history teachers tended to shy away from him.
I asked my AP World History teacher why in my previous history studies Stalin's crimes were scarcely mentioned while people glossed over Hitler's like he was the Babe Ruth of genociders (yeah, I know, a little dorky).  My teacher looked at me and laughed, then she responded: "I really have no idea.  Frankly, I would love for every American schoolchild to know what he did."
Admittedly, I myself wondered, as someone who is part German and part Irish, why American History teachers talked about the Know Nothing Movement, probably one of the few American political movements that got the closest to all out fascism, was talked about for like five minutes while we spent 7 months on slavery (for the record, I am not at all denying the horribleness of slavery.  Slavery was extremely horrible and no amount of repenting from Americans will ever make it right.  Even if we gave every African American $7 million it still wouldn't make things right.  Just thought there was a little too much focus.  Sure, more focus should go to it than say a temporary thing like the Know Nothing Movement that was nowhere as oppressive or bad, but I would've appreciated more than an index card factsheet quiz over it with statements like "the Know Nothing Movement was opposed to immigration").  Or why learning about Andrew Jackson was so goddamn important but Grover Cleveland was just "that President who was elected to non-consecutive terms and thus made the Presidential Portrait room look really weird!" or William Howard Taft was known simply as "His Royal Fatassness".
I've come to learn that history is mostly what people make of it, and considering that most of the population is like "Oh my gawd!  Who needs to know about the past!?  That is like so lame!  I think I'll go over to my friends house and play the new gay Halo game/paint my nails (gender neutral mockery)"!  Which is really a shame because if you don't know your history you are doomed to repeat it.  I mean holy hell Batman, under Bush (and now Obama) people are scoffing at privacy rights, DESPITE THE FACT THAT PRIVACY RIGHTS HAVE BEEN VIOLATED MULTIPLE TIMES IN AMERICAN HISTORY.  People want to tell themselves "well, we'll never become Nazis so History is not important."
But as you have pointed out, people don't have to be Nazis in order to be evil.  Evil is something that any person of any nationality of any race of any religion of any creed of any economic class is capable of.  Those who believe otherwise are incredibly naive.  Sure, the idea that the American government would kill millions of it's own citizens may seem absurd to more than a few of us one here due to lack of history education, but how many Germans in 1912 do you think thought it was possible that their government would actively seek out and attempt to exterminate various ethnic/religious/whatever groups?  Hell man, how many Germans in 1928 were thinking "oh my god, the government is so close to wanting to just go out and kill millions!"
So sure, you might say that America is a constitutional nation, a nation of civil rights and liberties and nowhere near the weakness of state as Weimar Germany.  Granted, but that doesn't mean "KAPOOF!" we are safe from all evil and corrupt politicians.
I guess the best explanation I can come up with is that some subjects in history just sound a lot sexier than others (yes I know that invites some screams of "OMG YOU BIGOT!" but hey, it's just a theory).  Or that Hitler and the Nazis were just so out there, just so OMG COMIC BOOK VILLIANRY! that people in the education industry tend to put more of a heavy emphasis on them because they had bitching eyepatches or whatev as opposed to the Soviets who wore like boring corduroy green army outfits and furry hats that had the red Texaco star thing on them or something.

But now I'm just flat out f***ing ranting here.  I'm sure I was about to make a point or what not, but I guess I got too caught up in my utter disgust at the average American high school/college student's disgust of history.  God, those ingrates just really piss me off!

As for your last comment, understandably a lot of people will probably get pissed off reading that.  But I do get the context of what you're saying there.  There will probably be seven or eight more people who are like "OMG!" before this post is sent to the thread, which will probably be a shame.  I for one don't have a disdain for African Americans, but I can understand how anti-(insert ethnicity here) bigotry can be strong with a person due to previous experiences.  This is a pretty widely accepted psychological truth here.  It's not a very popular truth, and I might get brownie points taken away because of pointing it out, but there is some truth that a lot of racial/ethnic resentment stems from a perceived injustice from the other group.  I guess it's easy for me, coming from a family of White Southerners, to relate to situational circumstances that might make racism attractive to some.  Again, for those who might take that statement out of context, I DO NOT SUPPORT RACISM, I just can understand how one can develop racist ideas out of life experiences.
But yeah, obviously there are a lot of evil dicks out there who have killed as much if not more than the Nazis did.  And yes, it's really bizarre that a lot of teachers ignore the crimes of these other people.  Yes, if I were a history teacher I would put a bunch of focus on evil dicks of all stripes.  And yes, American education makes me cry like a little 8 year old girl sometimes.

Oh god, I spent like an hour writing this out and I have an Advanced Federal Income Taxation test tomorrow at nine.  God, I'll never graduate with this kind of slackery.

too long; but since I'm the mod for this board, did read

As for why Know Nothingism gets short shrift in U.S. History classes, I suspect that being one of the precursors of the Republican Party may have something to do with it.  Indeed, the paramilitary Wide Awakes the Know Nothings had in 1856 had by 1860 considerably expanded into the Wide Awakes of the Republican Party.  The Wide Awakes were to some degree comparable to the Nazi SA, complete with their own torchlight parades.

()

Of course, you can draw comparisons out too much, and the Republicans were far from the only party organization in 1860 to have a paramilitary element attached to it.

 

Meh, that is very true.  I've become like a rant machine today for some reason.  I don't really remember what my motivation was for posting all of that BS anyway.  Maybe boredom or acceptance that I'll never graduate with a 3.0 GPA?

Very true.
Both parties benefitted a great deal from paramilitary like organizations to rally the party faithful to the voting booths or what not.

Quite fascinating really.

But the question was not whether he was a member of the church, but whether he considered himself a Catholic. And Hitler did not think of himself as Catholic - or even Christian. He was highly negative to the entire Christian cultural heritage of Europe, which he saw as leading to weakness.
The leading Nazis where basically either neo-pagan romantics or atheists.

To Ingemann:
It is a bit ironic that you as a Dane equals membership of an established church with selfidentifying as a Christian. Given that more than 80% of Denmarks population are members of the established Lutheran church most of them simply because their families have always been church members and only half of them believing in God. The number of Danes that are church members without considering themselves Christian is very substantial.

And by "the leading Nazis" you mean Heinrich Himmler, right?  The actual proportion of people with Himmler's silly neo-pagan views in the leadership of the Nazi Party is grossly overstated by people who like to downplay the widespread collaboration of the Christian Churches (both Protestant and Catholic) with the regime, especially Hitler's advocacy of a "Positive Christianity" that celebrated an Aryanized version of the faith and the coordination (Gleichschaltung) of the Protestant Churches in Germany under the German Christian movement.  Even the Catholic hierarchy didn't raise a fuss as Germany plowed into Poland and systematically wiped out Polish Catholic clergy.  The National Socialist regime was compatible with the desires of many Catholics and Protestants alike to end the immorality and left politics of Weimar and restore Germany to military greatness and morals, while outside of a few brave souls (Niemoller, for example), the clergy went right along with him to war.  The myth of large-scale resistance from the Catholic and Protestant Churches derives mostly from the postwar CDU, as the CDU needed to assert its legitimacy as a party centered in Catholic tradition, by making the Nazis seem irreligious and the Churches as a paragon of moral resistance.

Nah, I suppose it's your assertation that German Catholics were at risk from a Nazi-mandated genocide.

He was one of them, but certainly not the only one.

The point is most top Nazi leaders where basically anti-Christian including Hitler. Ruling a predominantly Christian nation he of course tried to co-opt the Christian churches and was very successful in doing so. But that doesn't make him a Christian.

Rather, the intellectual pedigree of Nazism is deeply steeped in 'silly neo-Paganism' and bizarre mysticism. Surely, enough New Ageish books have been written about the Thule society's links to the early (NS)DAP and so on for that to be not much of a controversial statement. In a broader sense, I think it's fair to say that fascism's , and certainly National-Socialism's, unconcious is in a profound way rooted in a Neo-Pagan ethos.

Whether or not catholic and protestant German churches 'collaborated' with the Nazis has nothing to do with the question about the mental landscape of Nazism. Nazism is not an ideology especially inspired by any form of Christian rhetoric of thought.

Just in defense of my fello heathens Hitler and the Nazi state was against atheism.

"Today they say that Christianity is in danger, that the Catholic faith is threatened. My reply to them is: for the time being, Christians and not international atheists are now standing at Germany’s fore. I am not merely talking about Christianity; I confess that I will never ally myself with the parties which aim to destroy Christianity. Fourteen years they have gone arm in arm with atheism. At no time was greater damage ever done to Christianity than in those years when the Christian parties ruled side by side with those who denied the very existence of God. Germany's entire cultural life was shattered and contaminated in this period. It shall be our task to burn out these manifestations of degeneracy in literature, theater, schools, and the press—that is, in our entire culture—and to eliminate the poison which has been permeating every facet of our lives for these past fourteen years." - Adolf Hitler 1933.

Hitler defended Christianity in public and ordered Goering and Goebbels to remain in their churches. The reason is pretty obvious. Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation and he didn't think a new party religion such as the SS myth or Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century could adequately replace it.

But the diaries of Albert Speer and published notes from his private secretary Martin Bormann proves that he personally was very anti-Christian. Which is only logical given the ethos of Nazism.

Bormann's notes are published in English as "Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944" by Farrar, Straus and Young (1953) or "Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944" from Oxford University Press.

"National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (p 6 & 7)
 
"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". (p 43)

"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State". (p 49-52)
 
"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity".
 
"Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism, the destroyer.... The decisive falsification of Jesus' doctrine was the work of St.Paul. He gave himself to this work... for the purposes of personal exploitation.... Didn't the world see, carried on right into the Middle Ages, the same old system of martyrs, tortures, f****ts? Of old, it was in the name of Christianity. Today, it's in the name of Bolshevism. Yesterday the instigator was Saul: the instigator today, Mardochai. Saul was changed into St.Paul, and Mardochai into Karl Marx. By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea". (p 63-65)
 
"Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery.... .... When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease". (p 118 & 119)
 
"Kerrl, with noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don't believe the thing's possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself.... Pure Christianity-- the Christianity of the catacombs-- is concerned with translating Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely wholehearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics". (p 119 & 120)
 
"It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field. I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors-- but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.... My regret will have been that I couldn't... behold" ." (p 278)
 
In his memoirs "Inside the Third Reich" Albert Speer quotes Hitler for saying:

"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japaneses, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness"

It is ironic that Hitler actually said, that Germany would have been better off if Islam had conquered Europe after the battle of Tours, and that Germany had the misfortune of having the wrong religion. Neo-nazis do not like that quote!

Basically Hitler had a purely instrumental view of religion. If it furthered his agenda it was a good religion, if it didn't it was bad. There is no indication that he had any real religious beliefs himself. But plenty that he hated Christianity "the faith of the meek".

This might be asomething I should edit into my previous post, but what also seems important to keep in mind about nazism is its essential eclecticism. Fascism isn't the culmination of one tradition of thinking in the West, it has many contributive factors: romanticism and nationalism, side by side with mysticist tendencies, strains of Darwinian thought and the sort of anti-Semitism that for centuries was the dark flipside of Catholicism. Perhaps most deeply of all, it's characterised by a profound irrationalism, an anti-modernism.

Fascism, no matter how loosely or strictly one chooses to understand that term,  in short is the only ideology that could unite people as diverse as Leon Degrelle and Julius Evola, Rosenberg and Franco.

What we're reacting to is the way Jersey and politicus are trying to turn the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi atrocities into victims and potential victims of said atrocities.  According to the 1939 census, only 3% of Germany was atheist and only 2% were members of "neopagan" cults.  The German nation, an overwhelmingly Christian nation, enthusiastically participated or turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities and war crimes.  Trying to shift the blame onto only Hitler, or only Hitler's inner circle, or only the SS is propagandistic whitewashing of the first order.

I guess I must've had a way different interpretation of Jersey's posts or something.

I thought he was saying how unfair an image German people get because of the Holocaust, not trying to remove the German equation from Hitler's rise to power.

So did I ;)

There is no reason, no reason whatsoever, to believe that any group that was not already subject to systematic persecution would have become the victims of outright genocide in the event of a Nazi victory. Claiming otherwise is a clear attempt to minimise the significance of the genocide that actually happened, and so is (interestingly enough) quite appropriate for a thread with this title.

This is a non-negotiable position, by the way. Anyone who argues otherwise basically disqualifies themselves from speaking about the subject.

When it comes to awareness of genocide and other atrocities things are quite clear as well; I refer any doubters to Martin Broszat's Bavaria Project (and will point out when it was done) and will leave it at that.

The issue of non-Germans getting their hands bloody has been raised, I think. It's true that this did happen (look up what happened to the Lithuanian Jews if you want nightmares) and that this has had less attention than is exactly desirable, especially in the countries in question. But this does not actually make the actions of Germans better in any meaningful way.

The Nazism and religion thing is less important by an almost infinite degree (except to morons), but has a very simple answer: most leading Nazis were not religious by any sane definition of the word, but they generally kept up their church memberships for the reasons that most other Germans did (and most West Germans do), and this included the mustachioed country member himself. Which means that he was a Catholic by any reasonable definition. If you aren't happy about this fact, try to remember that plenty of other murderous despots were quite openly atheistic. Personally I can't think of anything that matters less than the religious affiliation of mass murderers, but the internet is a strange place filled with strange people.

And how on earth did I do that?

Nobody did that!

I am quite shocked that you can read my posts in this light! During the discussion of the subject of this thread the question came up whether Hitler (and related to that the rest of the Nazi elite) where Christians. I was simply pointing out that Hitler can not by any meaningfull standard be considered a Christian since he despised the Christian faith and its influence on European culture (obviously also including the influence of the Catholic church as the main Christian church).

You owe me an apology. There is a limit to what you can accuse other posters of without a shred of evidence.

Since Judeo-Christian ethics (with its idea of compassion for the weak/poor) is fundamental to Western culture the Nazi elites contempt for this tradition is highly relevant in a debate of holocaust. Basically Hitler wanted to break with the entire foundation of Western culture and replace it with a new ethic where might is always right and being strong and ruthless was idealised in an extreme way. The breach with Christian based culture (not religion) is fundamental to understanding the holocaust.

I disagree.  He was a power mad nationalist who hated "lessers" so much he was willing to kill them, got the means to do so, and then did.  I see no reason to believe he would one day, had he managed to achieve peace somehow*, start rounding up German Christians (or specifically Catholics) to do the same thing.



*which would have been really hard to do at any point in time for a Nazi lead Germany, once certain dominoes had fallen, there was no looking back.  The best case scenario for Germany after Sep '39 was a forever war, or, MAYBE if they built nukes before, say, 43 and was able to make peace with the Commonwealth/US (setting up a Cold War) freeing them up to rid eastern Europe of Slavs, Roma and other undesirables.

With whom? Jersey? Please specify when you are commenting below a post with a different topic. No reason to add to the confusion in this thread.

Neither do I.

I disagree with most everything you said in your post above mine.I disagree with this.  It might be in The Book, but it clearly isn't followed all that well, then or now.  I wish it were, but it's not.  Humans are selfish (just like ALL animals) and religion might try to correct that, but it's almost always a losing fight.I'll grant that he may have wanted that, but he knew he couldn't achieve it.  Maybe plant the seeds.  Maybe alter it a bit in his image, but he was smart enough to know he couldn't wash it down the drain.  That was his power base.  It would be like a current important GOP politician saying "ya know what, this religion thing is stupid and we should use logic, reason and science to affect change in government."  It ain't going to happen now, and it wasn't going to happen then.Christians, historically as a group, have had no problem hating "others".  European Christians had their Jews (and other "browns"), American Christians had their black slaves (and Catholics and Jews).  Of course there are always exceptions.  Even some Nazi's helped Jews to escape, but Hitler and the Nazi's didn't have to (and didn't) "breach with Christianity" to convince the Germans (and, to be fair, French, Norwegians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, etc) to round up the Jews (and others).

Somebody has already pointed this out, but exterminating the Catholics would've been a hell of a task for Hitler.  Before World War II, the Catholic population was 33% of Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Germany).  That's like a third of the population of the country he is in charge of, something I'm pretty sure would be hard for even an evil genius like Hitler to get away with.

Killing the Catholics off throughout Europe would've made killing off the Jews look like a piece of crumb cake.

Why the bizarre hypotheticals?

I was just addressing how impractical it would've been for Hitler to kill the Catholics.

I apologize if that point seems "bizarre".

I must say that this is the first time I've come across anything as insane as the suggestion that Hitler was actively scheming to exterminate or even persecute in any way the Catholic population of Western Europe. I can't even see how anyone could have that idea.

I'm honestly curious to hear holocaust deniers explain where 6 million Jews mysteriously vanished to.

To be fair, there were Catholics killed in the Holocaust.  However, I wouldn't really call it an "extermination" of Catholics or that Hitler was planning on killing them all.
A lot of the Catholics that were killed in the Holocaust were mostly clergymen, bishops, and laypeople who voiced opposition to the Nazi regime.  And of course those who happened to have a fraction Jewish blood (like a lot of other groups).
There are some people in the Nazi Government who favored shutting down the Catholic Hierarchy, like in 1941 when authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in the Third Reich (many of which were already occupied and secularized by SS authorities), however Hitler himself ended that decree on July 30th, 1941, fearing that the increasing protests of the Catholic population of Germany would result in passive rebellions that would harm the war effort on the Eastern Front.
Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs were arguably not Catholic, but I wouldn't go as far as to say he was an atheist or a neo-paganist.  Instead I would say that he had his own religion that brought in elements from pretty much everywhere that was crafted into the Nazi Party.  A religion that he wanted taught in every Protestant and Catholic Christian Church in the Third Reich.  In other words, Hitler was for the consolidation of Church and State, a principle that is wholly at odds with the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution.

I think it would be most accurate to say that Hitler wanted to subvert the Roman Catholic Church.

That is one way of looking at it, but given that the German nation and the supremacy of the Aryan race was what Hitler ultimately worshipped (with himself as "high priest"). I think it is more accurate to say he was an atheist with a political faith, worldview and mythology. But unlike Himmler or Rosenberg he never wanted that faith articulated in a religious language or mythology. And God certainly didn't play any part in his wordview, but then again there are religions without a God and extreme Nationalism does have some pseudo-religious traits.

That's what I meant when I said he had an instrumental view of religion. It was a tool to serve his ideological goals.

You seem to have a little bit of an anti-organized-religion chip on your shoulder, as most people who try to claim that Hitler or most of his followers were Christians at all usually do.  They were very outspoken against organized religion and professed atheism.  That's a historical fact...

It wasn't just Jews in the Holocaust. Most of the victims were Jewish, but there were millions of non-Jews. People don't give the non-Jews attention.

There were ofc gypsies\communists\slavs\homosexual and such, but as a portion of the holocaust (death camps and organized slaughter) they were a minority to Jews. many more died across the German controlled territories sporadically. That's what sets up apart the victims of the holocaust and the general victims of Nazi rule

...no.

The term Holocaust refers specifically to the genocide against Jews, and anyways nobody's ever denied that the Germans shot people in Eastern Europe during Hitler's reign there. (though the term is not limited to those killed in the death camps - the six million figure includes very many whose murders were not at all of a different quality from so many of the Nazis' other murders. Exterminations of whole Serbian or Belorussian villages in retaliation for partisan attacks, say.)
Of course, when we say 'Holocaust denier', we include those who obsessively relativize the Holocaust, foolishly and against the overwhelming bulk of the evidence still try to quibble about the exact numbers, etc. Or just show glee at pointing out the bits of the story rarely told (like the despite mutual mistrust often reasonably good working relationships between Nazi authorities and Zionists - Ahmadinejad's Holocaust conference was mostly about this sort of stuff). Especially when we have reason to suspect an antisemitic animus.

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Anybody who pretends that Hitler was anything but a Roman Catholic or that anything short of a vast majority of his henchmen were Conservative Christians - and primarily Protestants - has rosary beads for brains. That Hitler would have liked the Pope and his Bishops to be even more subservient than he really was - as subservient as the German Lutheran Bishops actually were - ; that fringe parts of the SS endulged in Neo-Pagan rituals and the whole organization liked to use symbols ripped from Germanic pagan traditions; that there were some Nazis (not entirely fringe) who quit the Church and defined themselves as gottgläubig ("theists"? Though the God referred to is explicitly the Abrahamic God. In Germany these people largely rejoined in the early 50s, though in exile, Adolf Eichmann called himself gottgläubig when on trial in Israel), are all true but do not affect the fundamental character of the movement and never reached the ears of the majority of the German people.

No it doesn't.  The only reason more Jews died at the hands of the Nazis than did Romani is that they had more Jews to kill.  The Nazis wanted to exterminate both groups.

The one group was a pressing problem (after the collapse of Poland and the near-collapse-and-then-not of the Soviet Union and after everything the Germans had already done, that is), the other wasn't. For that reason the Romani genocide, though entirely identical in motivation and in parts also in method, was less systematic - Germany never took any steps to get the Hungarian and Romanian Roma murdered (unlike their Jews.)

I included Romani with the Jews as victims of the holocaust...we can assume that with more gypsies the Nazis might have had a final solution especially for them but that will be after all a speculation

Might?  MIGHT!?!  They did!  There's no need to speculate.  There are parts of Europe where the Romani were so completely exterminated that any Romani there today are immigrants from elsewhere.  The Brown Triangle was just as much a part of the Holocaust as the Yellow Star.

The Nazis wanted, and were doing their best, to exterminate the Romani people. One may argue Hitler was more obsessed with the Jews (he most certainly was), but playing the score here, like trying to suggest the tragedy of one group is somehow less deserving the same attention as tragedy of the other (especially since both were a victims of the very same genocide) is plainly insulting. I'm saying this as a person who under Nazi racial policy would go straight to gas chamber for having a contaminated, Jewish blood.   

Nah, half and quarter Jews with Aryan spouses were not deported to the East. (If you'd be German.)