Kirchenkampf

[5] Some leading Nazis such as Alfred Rosenberg and Martin Bormann were vehemently anti-Christian, and sought to de-Christianize Germany in the long term in favor of a racialized form of Germanic paganism.

Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw wrote of the struggle in terms of an ongoing and escalating conflict between the Nazi state and the Christian churches.

According to Ian Kershaw, in order to achieve this, the Nazis believed they would have to replace class, religious and regional allegiances by a "massively enhanced national self-awareness to mobilize the German people psychologically for the coming struggle and to boost their morale during the inevitable war".

[8] According to Anton Gill, the Nazis disliked universities, intellectuals and the Catholic and Protestant churches, their long term plan being to "de-Christianise Germany after the final victory".

[12] East Prussian Party Gauleiter Erich Koch on the other hand, said that Nazism "had to develop from a basic Prussian-Protestant attitude and from Luther's unfinished Reformation".

Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.Though he was born as a Catholic, Hitler came to reject the Judeo-Christian conception of God and religion.

[15] Though he retained some regard for the organizational power of Catholicism, he had nothing but utter contempt for its teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure".

In fact the party leadership often found itself compelled to respond to pressures from below, stirred up by the Gauleiter playing their own game, or emanating sometimes from radical activists at a local level".

[32] Alfred Rosenberg, an "outspoken pagan", held among offices the title of "the Fuehrer's Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party".

The great majority were not moved to face death or imprisonment for the sake of freedom of worship, being too impressed by Hitler's early foreign policy successes and the restoration of the German economy.

[35] Albeit an investigation led by the Gestapo in 1941 in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's accusation of a Nazi conspiracy "to abolish all existing religions -- Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish alike" and impose a nazified international church established that the creator of the thirty-point program for the future of the German churches was Fritz Bildt, a fanatical Nazi and known troublemaker, rather than Alfred Rosenberg, who in 1937 tried to proclaim the program in the Garrison Church in Stettin shortly before the divine service began, he was forcibly removed from the pulpit and fined RMKS 500, having admitted to being the sole author and distributor of the program.

[45][46] A clearly threatening yet sporadic attacks on Catholic parties, organizations and press followed the Nazi seziure of power, [47] which was done quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism.

[48] Kershaw wrote that the Vatican was anxious to reach agreement with the new government, despite "continuing molestation of Catholic clergy, and other outrages committed by Nazi radicals against the Church and its organisations".

[49] The Concordat was signed at the Vatican on 20 July 1933, by Germany's Deputy Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen, and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII).

In his 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical, Pope Pius XI said that the Holy See had signed the Concordat "In spite of many serious misgivings" and in the hope it might "safeguard the liberty of the church in her mission of salvation in Germany".

Clergy, nuns and lay leaders began to be targeted, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or "immorality".

This task does not consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the German heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense.Himmler saw the main task of his Schutzstaffel (SS) organization to be that of "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a 'Germanic' way of living" in order to prepare for the coming conflict between "humans and subhumans":[63] Longerich wrote that, while the Nazi movement as a whole launched itself against Jews and Communists, "by linking de-Christianization with re-Germanization, Himmler had provided the SS with a goal and purpose all of its own.

The Pope asserted the inviolability of human rights and expressed deep concern at the Nazi regime's flouting of the 1933 Concordat, the Anti-Christian nature of its ideology and its attacks on Christian values.

[25] It accused the government of sowing the "tares of suspicion, discord, hatred, calumny, of secret and open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church" and Pius noted on the horizon the "threatening storm clouds" of religious wars of extermination over Germany.

[26] In March 1938, Nazi Minister of State Adolf Wagner spoke of the need to continue the fight against Political Catholicism and Alfred Rosenberg said that the churches of Germany "as they exist at present, must vanish from the life of our people".

The mob later gathered at the cardinal's residence and the following day stoned the building, broke in and ransacked it – bashing a secretary unconscious, and storming another house of the cathedral curia and throwing its curate out the window.

[69] The American National Catholic Welfare Conference wrote that Pope Pius, "again protested against the violence of the Nazis, in language recalling Nero and Judas the Betrayer, comparing Hitler with Julian the Apostate.

Couched in diplomatic language, Pius endorses Catholic resistance, and states his disapproval of the war, racism, anti-semitism, the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland and the brutal attacks on the churches.

[75] On 26 July 1941, Bishop August Graf von Galen wrote to the government to complain "The Secret Police has continued to rob the property of highly respected German men and women merely because they belonged to Catholic orders".

Catholic presses had been silenced and kindergartens closed and religious instruction in schools nearly stamped out:[80] Dear Members of the diosceses: We Bishops... feel an ever great sorrow about the existence of powers working to dissolve the blessed union between Christ and the German people... the existence of Christianity in Germany is at stake.The following year, on 22 March 1942, the German bishops issued a pastoral letter on "The Struggle against Christianity and the Church":[81] The letter launched a defence of human rights and the rule of law and accused the Reich Government of "unjust oppression and hated struggle against Christianity and the Church", despite the loyalty of German Catholics to the Fatherland, and brave service of Catholics soldiers.

Repeatedly the German bishops have asked the Reich Government to discontinue this fatal struggle; but unfortunately our appeals and our endeavours were without success.The letter outlined serial breaches of the 1933 Concordat, reiterated complaints of the suffocation of Catholic schooling, presses and hospitals and said that the "Catholic faith has been restricted to such a degree that it has disappeared almost entirely from public life" and even worship within churches in Germany "is frequently restricted or oppressed", while in the conquered territories (and even in the Old Reich), churches had been "closed by force and even used for profane purposes".

The Church knows that it will be called to account if the German nation turns its back on Christ without being forewarned".The Nazis response to this synod announcement was to arrest 700 Confessing pastors.

[24] Paul Berben wrote, "A Church envoy was sent to Hitler to protest against the persecutions, the concentration camps, and the activities of the Gestapo, and to demand freedom of speech, particularly in the press.

Hundreds of pastors were arrested, Dr Weissler, a signatory to the memorandum, was killed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the funds of the church were confiscated and collections forbidden.

[86] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another leading spokesman for the Confessing Church, was from the outset a critic of the Hitler regime's racism and became active in the German resistance – calling for Christians to speak out against Nazi atrocities.