Kirchenkampf: National Socialism V.S. Christianity


“Should the subduing talisman, the Cross, break, then will come the roaring forth of wild madness of the old champions… The talisman is brittle, and the day will come when it will pitifully break. The old stone gods will rise… and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes. And Thor, leaping forth with his giant hammer, will crush the Gothic Cathedrals!”

Heinrich Heine, Germany, 1834

"The flesh had become so insolent in this Roman world that Christian discipline was needed to chasten it. After the banquet of a Trimalkion, a hunger-cure, such as Christianity, was required.

"Or did, perhaps, the hoary sensualists seek by scourgings to stimulate the cloyed flesh to renewed capacity for enjoyment? Did aging Rome submit to monkish flagellations in order to discover exquisite pleasure in torture itself, voluptuous bliss in pain?

"Unfortunate excess! it robbed the Roman body-politic of its last energies. Rome was not destroyed by the division into two empires. On the Bosphorus as on the Tiber, Rome was eaten up by the same Judaic spiritualism, and in both Roman history became the record of a slow dying-away, a death agony that lasted for centuries. Did perhaps murdered Judea, by bequeathing its spiritualism to the Romans, seek to avenge itself on the victorious foe, as did the dying centaur, who so cunningly wheedled the son of Jupiter into wearing the deadly vestment poisoned with his own blood? In truth, Rome, the Hercules among nations, was so effectually consumed by the Judaic poison that helm and armour fell from its decaying limbs, and its imperious battle tones degenerated into the prayers of snivelling priests and the trilling of eunuchs.

Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School. (1833)

It's the hydra with a hundred and twenty thousand heads! Siegfried will not return! In the past the people had the perspective of Heaven to give them patience. That really facilitated things. They invested in prayers. The entire world was based on the resignation of the poor “dixit Lammenais.” Now the poor man is no longer resigned. The Christian religion is dead, along with hope and faith. “Everything in this world and immediately!” Whether there be Heaven or not! … like the bourgeois, like the Jew. Go ahead and govern a bit in such conditions! … Ah! It's infernal A horror! I must really admit. Men seem to experience a great fright, absolutely intolerable to find themselves one fine morning quite alone, absolutely alone, before the void.

The most audacious, the most fearless hold on, in spite of everything, to some welcome, classical expreienced worn-out thread that reassures them and connects them to reasonable, accepted things, to the crowd of respecable people. One might say that they are seized by the cold. Thus Drumont and Gobineau hang on wildly to the Mother Church, their most sacred Christianity.

They brandish the cross before the Jew, the authorised attendant of Hell, exorcise him with the cross. What they reproach above and before all in the Yid is the fact of being the murderer of Jesus, the one who sullied the host, the corrupter of the rosary … Let these grievances be vented a little! The cross as an antidote? what a farce!

How badly thought out all that is, lopsided and false, bumbling, whining, timid. The Aryan really succumbs through gullibility. He has caught hold of the religion, the legend woven by the Jews expressly for his fall, his emasculation, his servitude. Propagated to the virile races, to the detested Aryan races, the religion of “Peter and Paul” did its work admirably, it lapsed into liars, into sub-humans from birth, the submissive people, the hordes inebriated with Christian literature launched wildly towards the conquest of the Holy Shroud, the magic hosts, abandoning forever their exalted gods, their religions, their gods of the blood, their gods of the race.

That's not all. Crime of crimes, the Catholic religion was, throughout our history, the great procurer, the great mixer of the noble races, the great procurer for the rotten (with all the holy sacraments), the furious contaminator. The Catholic religion founded by twelve Jews will have proudly played its entire role when we will have disappeared under the waves of the enormous rabble, of the gigantic Afro-Asiatic whorehouse that is being prepared on the horizon.

Thus the sad truth that the Aryan has always been able to love, worship only the god of others, and never had their own religion, any white religion. What he worships, his heart, his faith were provided to him fully by his worst enemies. It's quite normal that he breaks under it, the opposite would be a miracle.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Les Beaux Draps [A Fine Mess] (1941)



Der Reichsführer SS/SS-Hauptamt, Rassenpolitik (Berlin, 1943 [?]). [This is a pamphlet outlining Nazi racial theories.]


The Enemies of the National Socialist Worldview and their Doctrine of the Equality of Humanity

The Churches

The Christian Church taught the equality of humanity from the beginning, and realized it in the areas it dominated. The Jew Paul was above all responsible for the idea, despite his pride in his pure Jewish ancestry. He won the inhabitants of the Roman Empire for the new faith. The Roman Empire experienced considerable racial mixing, which encouraged the rapid spread of the doctrine of racial equality. Anyone could become a Christian, whether Roman, Greek, Jew, Negro, etc. As Christians they were all the same, for the important thing was that they belonged to the Church and accepted its teachings. The only differences that counted were those between believers and unbelievers, and between priests and the laity within the Church. Since all men were created in God’s image, all needed to be won for the Church. The goal is a unified humanity united in an all-encompassing Church led by the priests. The clearest expression of this comes in Pope Pius IX’s statement on 29 July 1938: “One forgets today that the human race is a single, large and catholic race.”
This religious doctrine did not come from the native religion of a race or of a racially pure people. It developed in the Orient during a period of racial chaos from the most varied cultures and found its final form under Byzantine influence.

Being absorbed into the Christian community and receiving Christian education did nothing to change or improve the nature or life styles of the various peoples, however. They were only rendered uncertain of their true nature, meaning that foreign influences interfered in areas where only blood should speak, for example the relations between men and women, spousal selection, the relationship between family and people, indeed in relations to foreign customs and life styles. In over a thousand years, Christianity has not succeeded in raising the cultural level of Negroes or South American Indians. But the Church has built walls where none should exist, for example those between Germans of varying confessions. And it has torn down walls that nature established by blessing marriages between Aryans and Jews, Negroes and Mongols. It took millions of valuable people from their god-ordained roles in the people’s community and put them in monasteries or the priesthood. Its doctrines are responsible for the fall of races, peoples and cultures. The healthy instincts of the German peoples resisted its foreign teaching from the beginning, or at the very least tried to imprint its own stamp onto it should resistance prove futile. [...] Nordic people fought against it for centuries. Meister Eckhard said over 600 years ago: “The divine is in me, I am a part of it; I can recognize God’s will without the help of priests.” Luther told Christians to listen to themselves and act according to their consciences. But the tragedy of the Reformation is that it began as a German revolution, but ended in a battle over dogmas, and Luther finally bound the conscience to the Jewish teachings of the Bible. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and many other scientists began the battle between modern science and Church dogma, The Nordic scientific spirit can only accept as true that is in accord with science and experience. Today even the once immovable Church is asking questions about the equality of humanity. The National Socialist worldview, based on the knowledge of the laws of inheritance and the inequality of the races, will succeed in overcoming this ancient false teaching and return the German people to its native worldview.

"...the worldview the Medieval Church had so successfully built to control people’s minds gradually fell apart over the following centuries. Today’s scientifically-based worldview freed us from the spiritual domination of the priesthood. We owe to it our great advances in technology, the sciences, and economics."

"Of course, this sustained preservation of the racial integrity of our Volk over such a long period of time was only possible due to the fact that, at least until the 19th century, we were an agrarian society, composed predominantly of rural folk instilled with an instinctive concern for the preservation of their own type, manifested in their rejection of alien races and degenerates, in spite of the overwhelming opposing influence of the Christian churches.

"The thinking of our people was too much misled by the ruling powers of the church [...] The Nordic spirit is struggling to free itself from the chains that the Church and the Jews have imposed on Germandom. And it is not only a spiritual battle, for it finds expression in National Socialism’s struggle for power, as well as in the today’s battlefields to the east and west. The coming victory will bring a fundamental change in our view of the world, and opens the way for Nordic mankind to a new and greater future."

"The human soul does not exist independent of the body, as the Church teaches. Body and soul are an inseparable unity; The living body is the manifestation of the soul.”



New Nobility from Blood and Soil (Neuadel aus Blut und Boden) by Reichsleiter Richard Walther Darré (Berlin, 1930).

Excerpt of Chapter I: On the History of the Development of the German Nobility

The conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity, i.e. to the doctrine of the Anointed One, deprived the Germanic nobility of its moral foundations.

Upon their incipient conversion to Christianity, as if to commemorate the occasion of mass proselytization, an unimaginable, near-ubiquitous upheaval of all former moral concepts befell the Teutons shortly thereafter and upended their entire lives; their unguarded laws and customs stood no chance against these forces of decomposition; thus it was that these institutions, a house already in a state of disrepair thanks to years of habitual neglect, were thus relegated to a disadvantagous position which left them more vulnerable and defenseless than ever before from the outset. Beset on all sides yet nevertheless unable to effectively muster the resources needed for launching a wide-spread, coordinated campaign of resistance, these once-timeless, primordial laws bore the lion's share of this frontal assault. Not soon after, the prolonged, asymmetrical attacks severed the roots and began hollowing out the Old World's already crumbling structure. eventually, the wounds sustain under the oppressive, alien yoke of this intrusive, albeit peculiar zeitgeist would eventually prove to be terminal.

In stark contrast to the conception of the hereditary inequality of men, Christianity proclaimed “the random chance of birth,” and raised the proposition of the equality of all that bears a human countenance to the throne of moral ideas. The Germanic nobleman had hitherto regarded himself as the guardian of divine orders, placed in this world by the continuing power of procreation from a divine ancestor. Consequently, he derived his meaning and purpose on this earth, not from the “I,” but from – and in service of – the Volk to which he belonged. With his conversion to Christianity, this moral foundation which once informed his own self-worth and defined his social – and not least also ideological – position among the people had been completely and thoroughly withdrawn from him. In reality, things were turned upside down and an entire social framework was reconfigured to conform with a wholly separate worldview. It was no longer a question of fulfilling worldly tasks in accordance with one's own unique, innate dispositions; now the moral fulfillment of one’s duty had been re-oriented, revolving not around transmuting the eternal into the temporal, so to speak, but rather the temporal toward the hereafter. Formerly, and in congruence with his Pagan faith, the Teuton had cultivated a kind of divine moral law to which he subordinated all of the material things within his terrestrial existence. Instead, all at once, an entire former way of life – robbed of its initial function – was set to completely crumble beneath the Teutonic foot the moment that siphoned energy was diverted towards a salvific quest to reach the Gates of Heaven through a saintly life on this earth. An ego deprived of the ability to prove itself in the eyes of the community by demonstrating allegiance and conformity to a social/moral order that is both uniformly upheld and venerated by the folk is an ego absent in the communal feedback necessary to form an accurate, socially-conscious appraisal of itself. Without that crucial social feedback, the ego was forced into crafting a new identity using signals generated outside of the folk for its assessments and positive affirmations. With the dwindling pervasiveness and primacy of Volkish sentiment and participation – viewed with apathy and indifference – the Teuton now found his inner-worth and social standing hierarchically situated relative to his performance in securing for himself a preferred place in the hereafter through a proper and dutiful (i.e. self-absorbed, epicurean) existence on this world, as that was the only task – categorically and unmistakenly articulated down to the very last detail – which God found pleasing.

And just like that, the value of a noble birth was effectively destroyed in thought, as the nobleman now stood on equal footing with everyone else in the great crusade for the everlasting salvation of the soul in the Heavenly Kingdom – the only real moral task in this world. The supremacy of this thought experiment over all worldly things cleared the way for the domination of the nobles and freemen of the Teutons by non-noble and, eventually – as was the case with the Franks – outright oppressive authorities; for despite the fact that such a dreadful prospect remained practically unthinkable to the heathen Teuton, the wheels were nevertheless set into motion the moment they found themselves dedicated to Christian thought. Hence the conversion of the Teutons to Christianity, north of the Alps, from the Franks onward, was in no place primarily a matter of sincere piety, but simply a politically expedient measure adopted by the kings, who would also find it useful in consolidating their rule.
Now if the sentiments of the Germanic peoples had not been so thoroughly pure, if the real trait of Germanism had not been the instinctive intuition for the order of things, where every “imbalance” in the depths of the soul is at-once perceived with abhorrence, then the consequences of their conversion to Christianity could have easily assumed proportions such as today’s Bolshevism has actually attained. For just as Bolshevism in Russia turned the whole hitherto existing conception of authority and morality flat on its head, so Christianity had done the same beforehand among the Teutons. And it must be said, unfortunately, that Christianity does not differ so much from Bolshevism in the crass tactics employed in pursuit of its goals. In this question, however, a sharp distinction must be made between the theoretical Christianity as a message of salvation and the practical Christianity as a suitable means for certain rulers – assisted with the unifying force of its singular, universal moral doctrine – to selfishly amass and centralize tremendous power.

Experience has shown that it is generally difficult for the German of today to realize the full extent of the effect of the conversion of the Germanic tribes. For it has been so hammered into our heads that the conversion of the Teutons to Christianity was a step forward on the path of the general development of mankind, and that it was done for the good of the Teutons, that we are scarcely able to grasp the thought that the conversion of the Teutons to Christianity was primarily a measure of political expediency on the part of ambitious kings, and not a matter of inner-conversion to a higher knowledge of God.



Preface to the 3rd Edition of Alfred Rosenerg's Myth of the 20th Century.

Concerning the Third Edition


The publication of this work immediately called forth the most violent arguments. Owing to my deliberate questions and sharpened outlines, attacks were to be expected. But if I am to be completely honest, then I must say that I am astounded (but also overjoyed) at the concentrated hate I have encountered along with the unscrupulous distortion of what I have written, by the manner in which these attacks appeared as if by command. In particular, the wild unrestrained abuse by Roman churchish circles has shown how deeply justified the assessment of the Roman Syrian dogma in fact is in the present work. According to old established methods, certain conclusions and assertions were, of course, taken out of context from this extensive book, and the “blasphemy,” the “atheism,” the “Wotanism” of the author were held out before the credible reader in the German Roman press and in pamphlets. The falsifiers omitted that I even went so far as to postulate Wagner’s assertion that a work of art is the living representation of religion and the starting point for the whole of Germanic art and its foundation. The great respect which is shown the founder of Christianity in the work was overlooked. It was deliberately concealed that my religious observations have the clear intention of viewing his great personality without the eternal distortions by various churches. It was omitted that I rendered Wotanism as a dead religious form (but naturally have respect for the Germanic character which gave birth to Wotan as well as Faust) and, in an unscrupulous manner, the fantasy was concocted that I wished to reintroduce the “pagan cult of Wotan.” In short, there was nothing which was not distorted and falsified; and what appeared correctly expressed in a literal sense received a completely different coloring by being taken out of context. The Roman churchish press omitted entirely all historical—because unassailable—factual affirmations; all thought processes which led to a definite outlook were thoroughly distorted, and the bases of the requirements presented were deliberately overlooked. The prelates and cardinals mobilized the “faithful masses,” and Rome, along with atheistic Marxism, that is, with the political support of the sub-humans, conducted a war of annihilation against Germany, to the total sacrifice of the German Catholics, and yet had the effrontery to suddenly chatter about a “Kulturkampf.” The context of this work, which according to form and content certainly stands above those of the everyday level, were not made into an objective, and therefore, to be welcomed, critique, but were utilized for the most desolate everyday conflicts. Not against myself alone— that would have left me indifferent—but also against the National Socialist Movement to which I have belonged since its inception. Despite the fact that, in the introduction and in the work itself, I expressly declared that a political movement which includes diverse religious denominations could not solve questions of a religious or artistic philosophical nature; that consequently my world outlook as a creed was a personal one—in spite of all this—the obscurantists did everything in their power to divert attention from their political crimes against the German Folk, and once again to lament about “religion endangered;” although true religion is endangered by nothing so much as by the systematic cultivation of Marxism by the Centre Party under direction of the Roman prelates. The National Socialist Movement is not concerned with exerting religious dogmatism, neither for nor against a particular denomination, but the fact that a man in the forefront of political life must claim the right to represent a religious conviction which runs contrary to that of Rome, reveals to what degree spiritual gagging has already been successful.

The admissibility of activity in the national camp is measured by its value to the Roman dogmatism, instead of such a presumption being seen as impossible from the start. An undoubtedly serious attempt to cleanse the personality of Christ from the non-Christian Pauline, Augustine and other additions, has as a consequence brought forth a one sided fury among the ruling utilizers of the distortion of the spiritual figure of Jesus; not because high religious values were touched upon, but because a position of political power attained through the spiritual anguish of millions is threatened by a potential proud awakening. Things are now such that the Roman Church feels no fear before Darwinism and Liberalism, because, especially in the latter, it saw only intellectual attempts without a strength capable of shaping communities. But the nationalistic rebirth of German man, from whom the entanglements of the old values had fallen away through the upheaval of 1914–1918, appears as so dangerous because from it a power, capable of forming Types, threatens to arise. The ruling priest caste only senses this from afar, and particularly it sees that this awakening makes efforts to strengthen everything noble and strong. Therefore its alliance with the Red sub-humanity has to be close. This will only alter when the German Front proves itself victorious; at that hour, Rome will attempt as “friend” to achieve what it could not attain as enemy.

However, to pursue these possibilities does not lie within the scope of this book; it is concerned with the chiseling out of the actual spiritual Types, hence about the man seeking to become self-conscious; an awakening of the feeling of value and the steeling of the character; of resistance in the face of all hostile enticements.

The uproar about my writings was all the more typical, since not a word was uttered to express my disassociation from the slandering of great Germans, such as has for long been the literary preoccupation of the Jesuits and their associates. The slandering was quietly furthered, of Goethe, Schiller, Kant, etc., and no objections were raised when the pacemakers of Rome saw their religious task in the hindrance of the formation of a German National State; when at Catholic pacifist gatherings it was demanded that German soldiers be refused a salute; when Catholic clergy dared to publicly deny the truth about the actions of the Belgian Franc tireurs and to accuse German soldiers of murdering their comrades in order to have an excuse for the persecution of Belgians; when the German Folk’s Army was wrongly accused in French propaganda of desecration of altars and the host committed in Belgian churches. No bishops and cardinals have protested against this deliberate slander of what is German, of its fallen and living defenders; but there certainly followed on the part of these same bishops and cardinals' attack after attack upon German nationalism. And if the latter were pilloried, it shows that the Roman political and religious groups were advancing their own national feeling.

The Roman Church in Germany cannot dispute its full responsibility for the Folkish destructive work of its numerous pacifist clergy, since in other cases where honorable Catholic priests found words of true German national will, they were excluded without further ado from free speech. Thus there exists a proven systematic politically ideological attempt to rob the German Folk of its pride in the defenders of the homeland of 1914, to desecrate their memory, and to drag into the muck the fiery will to protect Folk and Fatherland. To establish this requires the simplest truthfulness, and how the faithful come to terms with their church authority is a matter of conscience. Things are not such that in order to silence awakening struggles they can pass off these undeniable facts as mere aberrations, but courage is particularly necessary for defense against the politics of the highest church authorities. Whether those so awakening discern the entire ideological contrast or not must remain their own affair. What is important is that the serious will awakens to defend German national honor, not only against Marxists but equally so, indeed even more sharply, against the center and its church allies as the massive breeders of Marxism. An evasion of this point would merely reveal an un-German disposition.

I will not mention all the individual hostile voices. But the typically unscrupulous methods may be singled out in which the Jesuit Jakob Notges has the effrontery to assert that the protection of the mother tongue belongs to the “Catholic order,” although his order in particular has been the most bloody opponent of the right to the mother tongue; that the love for Folk and Fatherland is demanded by “all great moral theologians,” in which respect his order in particular fights forever against German Nationalism! The Christian neighborly love of this gentleman finally unloads itself in the words: “This Balt is a culture fighter, in the manner of a boxer. The poor man suffers from an incurable fear of St Peter’s Square, which finds its expression in raging and shouting.” Then Hitler is advised to put me in a “strait-jacket” since putting me on ice is no longer of use “because he has experienced the Russian winter too often.” The furious unreasoned hatred by this Jesuit whose Roman sunstroke passes beyond every boundary is enlarged by other colleagues of his order in the contrasting manner of combat. The Jesuit Koch, for example, tries to speak of a German racial soul, calls the experience of life as this resounds from the Myth serious and honorable, in order in conclusion to celebrate Boniface as the greatest German! This form of one hundred percent falsification is something we will often meet in the future where there is the realization that incitement no longer helps; therefore, such “Germanic” attempts must also be treated with caution. The destruction of the German soul is always seen as the goal both of the apostles of incitement as well as of the handyman artisans of the Societas Jesu and its fellow protagonists—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. My book has also called forth a violent upheaval in Evangelical (Protestant) circles. Countless articles in newspapers and journals prove that it clearly touched upon very sensitive spots. At Evangelical synods, at congresses of the Evangelical league, the Myth often stood at the center point of debate, and many pamphlets of protestant theologians give evidence that a struggle of values has become renewed and deep in the midst of Lutheranism. My prediction that the Evangelical church would behave in an anxious manner toward the new religious feeling—similar to Rome with its dogmatic base towards the Reformation—has unfortunately been confirmed. The theologians and professors fulminating against my work made it easy for them to be seen as being in full possession of “Evangelical truth;” they simply confirmed the heretical nature of my assertions, praised “national feeling” (without obligation), and were delighted to be able to establish (apparent) inaccuracies, and then to reject these.

It was reported to me that at one of these synods after just such a report, an honest white haired clergyman stood up and declared that he could not acknowledge what had been said. It was hats off before this honorable man! Irrespective of whether his search reveals the same conclusions as mine, every genuine fighter will show respect to the searching opponent, but not to the old guardians of dogma who believe that they must at all costs hang on to their tenuous positions.

In discussion with learned theologians, I was further able to establish the following: they conceded to me that the evaluation of ancient history from the racial soul aspect was correct. But when I drew the conclusion that the Jews must then necessarily also have their own completely determined character— their blood linked idea of God—that consequently this Syrian life and spiritual form did not concern us in the least, then the Old Testament dogma arose like The Great Wall Of China between us; suddenly, the Jews appeared as an exception among Folks. In all seriousness, the Cosmic God was said to be identical with the dubious spiritual assertions of the Old Testament! Hebrew polytheism was elevated to a model of monotheism, and no deeper a knowledge had come to Lutheran theology from the original magnificent Aryan Persian idea of the world and the cosmic comprehension of God. In addition there appeared the revering of Paul, an arch sin of Protestantism, against which Lagarde, as is known, attacked by the entire official theology of his day, fought in vain.

The protestant theologians everywhere submit, with universal agreement, to the anti-folkish view of the world; the arrogant assertion of the Roman Church that the racial evaluation of Folks signifies un-Christian “idolatry.” These gentlemen overlook, however, that the exceptional position which they attribute to the Jews, represents nothing other than idolatry of the parasitic Judaic manipulators, always hostile to us. Also typical is the answer which David Strathmann made in a leaflet to the criticism, that the churches should concern themselves with the German Folk, and, in view of the latter’s impoverishment, not bother about negro missions: “as if that were their task! For the sake of the racial cult they are to deny the humanitarian task of the missions!” The race and soul of the negroes is regarded—along with the good Jews—as being more important than the nation to which one has the honor to belong. This appears to them as self-evident, just as they likewise prefer to overlook that this glorification of Jewry together with the unleashing of Jewish impulses has caused the impoverishment of our culture and our politics, against which the present direction of Protestantism has proven itself incapable of successfully fighting, particularly owing to the idolatry of Jewish ways.

It is disconcerting if the present representatives of Evangelical theology are so un-Lutheran as to represent the views in which Luther was understandingly still caught up as permanently fixed dogmas. Luther’s great deed was, in the first instance, the smashing of the exotic priestly idea, and secondly, the Germanizing of Christianity. The awakening of Germany, however, also led after Luther to Goethe, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Lagarde, and today approaches its full flowering with powerful strides. When David Kremers, a leader of the Evangelical League, declares in an article that the Myth is “swallowed” by academic youth, then he shows that he is aware how a powerfully new life is already active in the young protestant generation. Is it not more important now to promote this spiritual folkishly rooted life than to hang on inwardly to long fallen dogmatic idols? This young generation nevertheless wishes nothing more than to see the cosmic personality of the founder of Christianity in its actual greatness, without those falsifying additions with which Jewish zealots like Matthew, materialistic rabbis like Paul, African jurists like Tertullianus, or unprincipled crossbreeds like Augustinus, have presented to us as the most frightful spiritual ballast. The young wish to grasp the world and Christianity from their own essence, from Germanic values; to assert their self-apparent right to this world, but which (especially today) must be regained with hard struggle.

If the ruling church orthodoxy is unable to grasp all this, it will nevertheless not alter the course of things; at most, only be able to make them hesitant. A great era would have then once more encountered a petty, self-righteous generation. However, this coming time affirms both the Strasburg cathedral as well as the Wartburg, and denies the arrogant Roman Centre just as it does the Jerusalem Old Testament. It draws more strength from the roots of Germanic drama, its architecture and music, than from the comfortless tales of the Jewish people. It recognizes much deep Folkish symbolism within the Catholic Church, and links the latter with the truthfulness of what is truly Lutheran. It unites with a great encompassing of racial soul world outlook all that is individualistic to the full blooded organism of a German essence.

The young Evangelical priest must move forward since a training, crippling of the soul, does shackle him, as with Catholic priests, until the time ripens when, from the latter also, Germanic rebels arise, and the work of the monks Roger Bacon and Eckehart lead to the freedom of practical life, just as the other great martyrs of the west also lived, suffered and fought in the past.

On the part of “National” circles, the Myth was greeted with deadly silence out of fear of the Catholic Centre Party. Only a few risked joining themselves to its train of thought. The negative judgment from this camp, however, always consisted of claiming that I wished to be a “founder of a new religion,” but that in this respect I had failed. In the chapter on the Folkish Church, however, I have rejected this allegation in advance; what I am really concerned with, along with the foundation of the racial study of history, is to place in antithesis to one another the values of soul and character of the different races and Folks and systems of thought; to establish the organic order of rank of these values for what is German, and to pursue the Germanic will in all domains. The problem is thus: To introduce an orientation of soul and spirit against chaotic confusion; to reveal the prerequisites of a general rebirth. The value of my work is to be measured by this act of will and by criticism of what I have not undertaken to carry out, which will be the task of a reformer who will arise from the longings of a clearly adjusted generation.

Voices in other countries are throughout more objective than the echoes from circles needing reform in Germany. But more important than all this are the countless expressions of agreement from all countries of the world, above all from those Germans who have become conscious of the present great spiritual hour of destiny for both Germany and the western Folks. The questions which confront us, also confront other nations, and only a very grave destiny compels us to a more honest account, drives us to step out upon a new path because, otherwise, with political collapse, spiritual catastrophe must also appear, and the German Folk as a real Folk will vanish from history. However, true rebirth is never a matter of political power, even less than a matter of “economic reorganization,” as empty Marxist heads arrogantly assert, but it signifies a central experience of the soul, the recognition of a highest value. If this experience is continued million fold from man to man, finally, if the united strength of the Folk places itself before this inward transformation, then no power in the world will be able to prevent the resurrection of Germany.

The democratic Marxist camp had at first attempted by dead silence to deny the appearance of this work. However, it was then forced into declaring its attitude. These people have now attacked the “fake socialism,” such as was apparently taught in my work to the detriment of the workers. The “true” socialism of social democracy clearly surfaces in that there is an untroubled continuation of the literal enslavement of an entire Folk over many decades through continuation of the pawning of all still existing values with their subjugation under the dictates of international finance. True “socialism” further consists in that the decent creative German Folk are delivered into the hands of degenerate theatre and film propaganda, which knows only three heroic types: the prostitute, the pimp, and the criminal. The “true” socialism of the Marxist leadership, in effect, consists in that the little man is flung into jail for a small misdemeanor, whereas the big swindler walks away free, just as hitherto this had been the cultivated view of the most influential circles around democracy and social democracy. The whole of Marxism has revealed itself, as was unavoidable, as disintegrating of every organic community in favor of alien nomadic instincts. It must therefore regard a new foundation and the taking root of such Folkishly socialistic, style forming, feeling as an attack upon its existence.

Marxism and liberalism today find themselves along the entire front in a disorderly rearguard action. For many decades it was regarded as particularly progressive to speak only of humanity, to be world citizens, and to reject the racial question as retrogressive. Now all these illusions are not only politically disposed of, but the ideology upon which they are based has become brittle, and it will not be long until it collapses completely in the souls of those who, although misled, are still to some degree healthy. Closely pressed, nothing is left to “scientific Marxism” other than to attempt the proof that Karl Marx also expressly recognized the influence of Folk and race on world events! This mission to incorporate the blood awakening of the German worker, which can no longer be stemmed, into Marxist orthodoxy, which for decades has furiously fought the “racial delusion,” was undertaken, among others, by “socialistic education”—an attempt which in itself characterizes the inward catastrophic spiritual collapse even if after the admission, with gnashed teeth, of the justification of the racial standpoint, is the general assertion that Marx rejected “racial fetishism.” What is self-evident, is that otherwise he would have had to depart for Syria as a teacher—where he rightly belongs. To recognize this and to uproot Marxist materialism and financial capitalist backing from German life as an alien Syrian Jewish plant, is the great mission of the new German Workers’ Movement which as a result will win the right to the leadership of their own future.

We on our side do not deny very diverse influences: landscape and climate and political tradition; but all this is outweighed by blood and the blood linked character. Things evolve around the reconquest of this order of rank.

To reestablish the ingeniousness of healthy blood, is perhaps the greatest task upon which man can set himself today. At the same time, this affirmation gives evidence of the sad situation of the body and the spirit, that such a deed has become a vital necessity. A contribution to this great coming act of liberation of the 20th century is what the present book intends to be. Not only the shaking up of many awakening men, but also of opponents, is the desired result. I hope that the confrontation between a newly arising world and the old forces will take on more and more offshoots, penetrate into all domains of life, always fructifying anew, producing more blood linked pride, until the day when we can stand on the threshold of the fulfilment of our longing for a German life, until the hour when all well-springs will unite into one great river of a Nordic German rebirth.

That is a dream worth being taught and lived. And this experience and this life alone are the reflections of a presaged eternity—the mysterious mission of this world into which we were placed in order to become what we are.


SECRET REPORT OF THE SECURITY SERVICE OF THE REICHSFÜHRER SS

The Churches’ Attempts to Undermine Anti-Jewish Sentiments in the Populace

Background: First circulated on 24 November 1941 as “Versuche der Kirchen, die judengegnerische Haltung der Bevölkerung durch die konfessionelle Gegenarbeit zu untergraben.” First published in Meldungen aus dem Reich 1938–1945. Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, edited by Heinz Boberach (Herrsching: Pawlak Verlag, 1984), 8: 3020–23.


The police ordinance issued by the Reich Ministry of the Interior on 1 September 1941, which forbids Jews from appearing anywhere in public without visibly displaying the Jewish star in the upper left-hand corner of the outermost piece of clothing they are wearing, has taken not only the population of large cities, where there are a large number of Jews living, by surprise, it has also attracted the attention of church members, who point to the countless numbers of converted Jews who regularly attend Sunday services.

Complaints were lodged with local clergy by church members attending services in the Sundays directly following the issuance of the ordinance. They demanded that Jews no longer be permitted to attend services and that they could not be expected to receive Holy Communion while standing in the same line as a Jew.

The attitude of the clergy of the confessional persuasion is characterized by a flyer drafted by the local vicar in Breslau and distributed throughout various regions of the Reich:

The Christian duty is to refrain from excluding them [the Jews] from services based on their identification [through the Jewish star]. They are entitled to the same right of domicile in the church as are the remaining members of the congregation and are particularly in need of the comfort provided by God’s word.

The congregation is at risk of being misled by elements that are not truly Christian, it is at risk of endangering the Christian church through behaviors that are not Christian. Pastoral care must be provided here, perhaps with reference to Luke 10:25–37 (“And who is my neighbor?”) or to Matthew 25:40 (“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”).

At the same time, practical advice is offered for solving the problem:

It might be worth considering whether or not church officials, pastors, etc. ought not attend to those members of the congregation identified [by the Jewish star] as a special group and, if necessary, set aside special seats for them; special seats could be set aside before each service in order to guarantee that they will not be ousted by unchristian elements.

However, in order to ensure that this not be seen as a form of segregation that is not evangelical, it is necessary that trusted members of the congregation (e.g., members of the church council, of the women’s counsellorship, of the rectory) also take their seats in these pews, sitting beside and amongst the non-Aryan Christians. We should also consider whether or not to have these Christians identified [by the Jewish star] picked up from their homes by members of the congregation to attend services.

The Evangelical Lutheran Consistory of the church province of Silesia has since been forced by negative reactions on the part of the populace and the official party position to distance itself from this statement, which was allegedly distributed without its prior approval. Similar determinations concerning the “treatment of Jewish Christians” has not yet been forthcoming in other areas of the Reich.

In the Catholic parishes in larger cities, a plan has surfaced whereby Jewish Catholics would be brought together in a separate Jewish Christian congregation with its own services in order to avoid any burden to the rest of the Catholics. This solution, suggested by certain sectors of the population as well as by several individual clerics, prompted the archbishop of Breslau and president of the Fulda Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Bertram, to comment explicitly on the subject of Jews’ presence in churches and church facilities as well as in a newsletter (17 September 1941):

The ramifications of the police ordinance concerning the conduct of Catholics in response to Catholics of Jewish descent present at mass are bound to differ from place to place, specifically contingent on the greater or lesser influence of attitudes that are widespread in the general populace.

  1. It is therefore imperative that hastily formulated policies that may be seen as offensive to Jewish Catholics be avoided, such as introducing special pews for Jews only, segregation in the dispensation of Holy Communion, the introduction of segregated mass services for Jews only.
  1. The officially sanctioned segregation and special handling of non-Aryans violates the notion of Christian brotherly love. It is therefore to be avoided for as long as possible. Pastors are to recommend that these Catholics seek to attend the early mass if at all possible.
  1. Reminders concerning brotherly love and avoiding every form of denigrating treatment of any Catholic non-Aryan marked by the star are to be issued [to members of the congregation attending mass] only when and if disturbances arise.
  1. Only if and when more substantial difficulties arise (if civil servants, party members, and others begin staying home or ostentatiously leaving mass in protest) should the step be taken of suggesting to Catholic non-Aryans that special Jewishonly masses be held.
  1. If a reminder should prove necessary, the following text may be used:

In light of the difficulties that have arisen for Jews living in Germany as a result of the police ordinance of 1 September 1941, all Catholics are hereby reminded to demonstrate toward Christians of Jewish descent the same degree of consideration due every Christian according to the principles outlined by St. Paul: no one who believes in Christ shall be put to shame. For there is no difference between the Jews and the Greek; for the same Lord over all is rich unto all who call upon him.

For all of you who have been baptized into Christ have assumed the mantel of Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, for you are all one in Jesus Christ.

[Theodor] Cardinal Innitzer, archbishop of Vienna, addressed the clergy of the Ostmark [Austria] along similar lines. He too rejects identifying markers for Jews, even though this corresponds to medieval Christian tradition, just as he rejects grouping together Jewish Catholics into special Jewish Christian congregations with their own churches and church services, because that measure could be interpreted to be a concession to the National Socialist racial doctrine. Any calls made by the faithful to the offices of the clergy requesting that the Jews be removed are to be strictly dismissed, and the petitioners are to be instructed that the church cannot make racial distinctions in matters pertaining to worship services. At the same time, making reference to the deportation campaign, the cardinal called on all priests to pray for their Jewish comrades in faith who will soon be forced to leave Vienna. Accordingly, despite the fact that the number of Jews flocking to the church at the moment is very great, as if they were dispatched in the manner of a delegation, apparently in the attempt to arouse pity among churchgoers, based on the opinions issued by these two cardinals, it is not likely that the church will go along with a segregation of the Jews in worship services or in the administration and receipt of the Blessed Eucharist.


Theses on the Worldview

Background: First published as “Weltanschauliche Thesen,” 12 July 1941, in Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs aus den Jahren 1934/34 und 1939/40, edited by Dr. Hans-Günther Seraphim (Göttingen: Musterschmidt Verlag, 1956), 197–212. By Alfred Rosengerg


I:

Worldview: a certain way of viewing the world. Worldview is therefore a position, not a dogma.

A position with respect to the world: that is, to the outer limits of destiny and to the instincts of the soul.

A position can either be brave or cowardly, proud or subservient, the position of a freedman or that of a slave.

The brave man acts in accordance with the species of his own conscience, the coward responds to potential dangers; the proud man confronts his destiny head-on, the subservient man does the bidding of destiny’s command; the freedman follows his own nature, while the slave waits for orders from above.

To invoke courage and pride and freedom is to educate in the ancient Germanic-German tradition; to teach subservience and to inspire fear is the basic educational principle of the Christian churches. A worldview encompasses religion, science, and art. These primeval human occupations are the fountain of all the remaining tributaries of human influence in the world. Harmony between Volk and life can then be established only when religion, science, and art assume the same position and when all their forms of expression are determined from that same point of view.

We have witnesses, Jewish-Asiatic denominations fraudulently going by the name of religion. We have witnessed science raped by biblical dogma. We saw the way art was permissible only in glorification of the Bible and the Roman Catholic Church. Germanic man has exploded the bounds of these forms. He has established a standard for the epitome of beauty equal only to himself; today it has become the conscious ideal of every German. Europe struggled hard against biblical dogma to pursue freedom of research into nature [Naturerforschung]. Europe today is purging itself, first and foremost among the German Volk, bidding good riddance to the Syrian-Jewish ecclesiastical dogma and its oriental ceremonies.

Perfecting the alignment, in position and in expression, of a Germanic unity of religion, science, and art will become the very essence of the ideological shift in worldview of the twentieth century.

II:

Religion and denomination have since become distinct categories of their own.

Religion: the bounds of the human soul or the soul of a Volk toward a divine being presiding over this life. Religion, then, is one component of the overall ideological position of a worldview. A confession of faith is inherent in any belief in God or in any deity, just as it is for any belief in prophecies. And this confession of faith is an essential component of religion.

The term denomination, though, refers to the sum of compulsory doctrines (dogmas) issued by the authority of a certain church.

One of these denominations demands belief in the Bible, in enduring ecclesiastical traditions, in the infallibility of the pope, in the so-called sacraments, in a racially homogenous universal humanity, in the power of priests in the afterlife. The other denomination demands belief in the Bible, in the so-called one and only revelation as outlined in the New Testament, in the doctrine of Martin Luther or Calvin.

But since there are two major denominations—and hundreds of sects in Germany—they no longer represent the overall religious foundation of the whole German nation. Christianity was once an absolute power, but with the emergence of these many denominations, it has become fragmented and localized.

The once absolute power collapsed because its effects were anti-Germanic and became increasingly anti-German. A new, Germanic-German position could not be attained by any sort of new Protestant interpretation to render the Bible binding.

Therefore, for anyone who strives to assume a unified religious position for all Germans, the prerequisite is necessarily that the existing denominations are overcome. For thousands of years, despite protestations from Rome, man set out in search of the “doctrinal purity of the gospel.” And yet even to this day, not a trace of it has been found, so it either never existed, or simply cannot be recovered, or, perhaps, if it does exist somewhere, it is simply not conducive to producing any great awakening in the essential nature of Germanic man.

And this is why the New Testament can no longer serve as a decisive foundation for sustaining the formation of a new soul for the community. To attempt once again today, after a thousand years of unsuccessful efforts [to find this trace of purity], would be to recommence with a fruitless task.

Evaluating the stories of the New Testament is a purely personal matter. Researching these stories and examining this epoch no longer have anything to do with religion today, but have since become the concern of historical research instead. The New Testament is not a thing of the present but rather the matter of a dying past. This past is honorable by virtue of its duration. The only nobility due any spiritual power of the past is that determined by whether or not Germans have believed in it. It does not matter whether the object of a great faith was worth thousands of years of human investment; what is decisive is the strength of the faith that facilitated and fueled that investment The contemporary absence of such faith, though, is the real reason for the internal, and to some extent for the onset of the external, collapse of all churches today. The renunciation of will at the very appearance of will is the profoundest cause of death for the churches today.

Any culture, any religion, is only as strong as the will of its proponents to defend it. At a decisive historical moment, Christianity failed to come through with enough life-giving force.

Throughout the world, it crumbled before Judaism and Marxism: in Moscow, in Berlin, in Budapest, in Rome, and in Madrid . . . the churches do not have the prayers of their priests nor the courage of their bishops to thank for the fact that the churches still exist—only the triumphant sacrifices of newly emerging worldviews.

Christianity itself was a revolution, later it became a European power; today it has been reduced to a bone-dry reactionary reflex. [ . . . ] Whoever strives to pursue the noblest of causes fulfills a metaphysical, religious purpose.

His sense of purpose in life is attached to the most exalted phenomena in the world of existence and not ecclesiastical/man-made organizations, dogmas, and ideologies. The untiring service to the most exalted causes is the mark of a genuinely Germanic religious genius. Religion is not a matter of renouncing the will but rather the development of will in the service of the intrinsically noble species of soul. And this realization puts an end to the influence of all previously existing religions of the Orient. The chaos of denominational divisions has provided the fertile ground from which a German religion could be born.

We could not possibly submit to the spiritual and psychological leadership of anyone on the planet who has betrayed the German Volk to its enemies. We vehemently reject the possibility that the soldiers of the Volk fighting for their honor could possibly appear in the “afterlife” as the defendants while these priestly race traitors, on the other hand, appear as judges.

Anyone who engages in racial or national treason here on earth certainly is in no position to govern in heaven. [ . . . ] Religion is the tie that binds to some divinity—but also to human beings whose traditional values must find expression and stand the test of time. The new national community of the Volk (National Socialism) is predestined, prefigured, but not yet formed. In order to assume form, vast, all-encompassing form, kith and kin from many different families will have to extend their hands to one another.

The first inklings of this new way of life were apparent in the voluntary willingness to sacrifice seen in the simple SA man, in the stalwart demeanor of the National Socialist woman, in the passionate enthusiasm of the Adolf Hitler Youth, in the highly developed visionary scope of our revolution’s early pioneers. We cannot today underestimate the Führer’s will and his visionary strength if we hope to participate in the same. The integrity of the pronounced instinctive will to sacrifice is what generated the integrity of our worldview and, with a firm grasp on the future, conquered the fragmentation of the old denominations.

Future generations will march in droves paying homage to the graves of the fallen from this Great War and our movement, just as the people made pilgrimages to the graves of Christian saints. Not bent over in shamefaced contrition but bursting with pride at the products of its exalted, noble soul.

The Eternal Guard [Ewige Wache, on the Königsplatz in Munich] is the parabolic example of all graves. Here beneath the open sky, the bronze-cast sarcophagi of those comrades tragically doomed to fall in our first grasp for power lie in wait for the final reveille like an ancient megalithic grave. Every year, during the annual journey to the Eternal Guard on 9 November, the names resound of all those who did not lose faith in Germany’s heart and soul in one of her darkest hours, those who refused to throw in with traitors and their Christian associates. Some day, the other soldiers will be lying in their graves too, but their life’s work will be a reminder to the future to be eternally prepared, at any hour of day or night, to come to the defense of the Reich these men fought so hard to secure, of the perspectives on life and destiny they fought so hard to advance, and to defend it as valiantly as they did.

Communities can be sustained only as genuine reflections of the soul. Faith can be established only when the human representatives of this hard-won community prove themselves worthy of its founders. Values that are not embodied by leaders’ actions will not be upheld by community either. That is the ironclad law of selection as it applies to moral-religious life. [ . . . ] The Oriental view of labor as a curse has been replaced by a view of labor as an honor. The new work ethic is a revolt against the monastic ideals of the Roman Catholic Church. The raised spade of the German Labor Service has vanquished the Rosary. The greatest danger for a new worldview is often not presented by the residual traces of the old ideologies but rather by sectarian members of the new movement. The sectarian is rigidly focused on but one element that leaves him hypnotized; he places this at the center, and his equilibrium of discernment is thrown off balance by unfettered imagination. He overdraws his arguments, exaggerates, flies into a rage over any sign of rebuff, poses as a stark-raving unacknowledged genius—and if a movement is lacking in stable and reliable, hardened men, then the growth of a grand idea can be thwarted for centuries by a bunch of unrestrained sectarians running around. The political sectarians are to be reined in and kept from espousing ideology, and this is the task of all political leaders; pandering to flamboyant sectarians for fear of hindering the development of some potential genius is the product of the same subaltern subservience as the worshiping of ancient idols just because they are old. Death is not the price we have to pay for our sins. Death is not the opposite of life in any way; it is, rather, subordinate to life. Individuals are born and die, not life itself. Birth and death are but features of life itself.

The person who can muster faith in the fact that his death is an instrument in the service of life, a transition into a form of life that we cannot know in this life—that person could be said to be deeply religious. But the prerequisite to this kind of faith is that the Christian doctrine of hell intrinsic to all denominations be vanquished; all the fear-mongering methods that have been used for centuries to artificially inseminate dread in the imagination must be abandoned. [ . . . ] Tolerance was never basic to Christianity. Religious tolerance is an ancient Germanic-European position. It was only able to prevail in a thousand-year struggle against the Christian churches. And the Protestant pastors are just as intolerant as the Catholic priests, the only difference being that they are lacking the format and the power to assert themselves.

When the Christian churches invoke the notion of tolerance, they are praying to an ancient Germanic entity to look kindly upon them at a time when things are beginning to go badly for them as a result of their own doings. Christianity has forfeited the right to tolerance by virtue of its own dogmas and deeds. Tolerance on our part is an undeserved gift granted by a noble revolution to an opponent that has made the extermination of the entire Germanic essence into its purpose in life.

We practice religious tolerance not out of respect for the churches but rather out of respect for the Germans who still believe in the teachings of their priests. The right that we reserve for ourselves is one we also grant them. But we certainly cannot expect our youth to sit piously at the feet of those who betrayed the German Volk at its darkest hour or those who still today endeavor to present the parasitic Jewish race as standard-bearers for an exalted concept of God.

We are one Volk, and the whole must rule over its parts; “public need goes before private greed” must be the religion that presides over all denominations, just as the nation presides over all professions, classes, and tribes. Our revolution will never allow the education of our youth toward the whole to be wrenched from our hands. We view the religious beliefs of all Germans with tolerance, and we will continue to defend traditional Germanic values in this life ruthlessly and without restraint as long as they remain untainted. [ . . . ] True religion cannot be proved by discoveries in nature, nor can it be toppled by them.

Religion is the result of inner experience, not the consequence of some arbitrary scientific evidence of God or some legend of resurrection; it has absolutely nothing to do with miracles and magic tricks.

The more someone believes in miracles, the less religious he is. That is why the Jew is absolutely irreligious; and the Jewified Christian conceals his religious poverty with a wealth of tales from the Old Testament and magical legends from the New Testament.

The real miracle is the fundamental laws of the universe. The existence [Da-Sein] of matter is as incomprehensible as the existence [Da-Sein] of life. The exploration and representation of these universal laws constitute the very essence of Germanic science, following the noble commands of the soul the very essence of Germanic religion.


The Christian Churches and Jewry: The Pioneers of Jewish World Domination

Excerpt from Theodor Fritsch’s „Handbuch der Judenfrage” [“Handbook of the Jewish Question”] (1944)


If one wants to subject the position of the church, of Christianity, to Judaism, to the Jewish question, to an in-depth examination today, it hardly seems appropriate to make a distinction between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches and their various groupings. For although there may be some differences in dogmatic position, the fundamental and practical attitude toward Judaism and the Jewish question is the same in the orthodox directions of the two great confessions. And it is the same and must be the same, because the root is the same, because the Jewish origin as the Kem and the substance of the churches is the same in both.

The national revolution of 1933 left no area of public life untouched, not even the religious one. The years since this revolution have been marked by the development of the people, and this development of the people should and could only take place through the elimination of all alien beings that had nested in our national life for a thousand years. Of course, the revolutionary wave could not stop at the churches, which were and are most deeply and closely connected with alien beings and which are the most important spiritual power, which have always striven and will continue to strive to bring to our people the alien spirit, guarded as a sanctuary, as a spiritual remedy. And even if the religious revolution is still deep in its beginnings and carries with it all kinds of immaturities and half-measures, i.e. still needs clarification and maturity, the whole traditional substance of the church system was questioned overnight, so to speak. And this substance was the Jewish root and the Jewish content of the doctrine as well as of the cult.

In defense of this substance, the various churches, including the Reich Bishops’ Church, stand in one front. And if we look even closer, we find that this substance of Jewish origin is that above all which has caused and continues to cause so innumerable officials and pastors of the churches to adopt a hostile attitude against the National Socialist state. Have we not seen that all opposition to the new state came almost exclusively from the side of the churches, that they alone attracted unpleasant attention by a more or less clear opposition, even if only religiously disguised. This fact makes one think. In reality, things are in such a way that the substance of Judaism, which is the same in all churches, virtually causes this hostility to the state. Whenever and wherever opposing voices are raised from the ranks of the church, wherever one finds a “witness for the truth” against the demands of the time and of the National Socialist state, it is a confession of that Jewish substance of church life. This substance becomes today the antithesis of the völkisch thought!

From all this one can see the immense doom of the “religious alienism” to which our people was, and partly still is, addicted. This religious foreign property leads to refusal of obedience to the state, even to highly treasonous tendencies, because one must obey “God”, the Jewish-Christian “God” Yahweh, more than the people. The political-national revolution, however, would have to remain only a piecemeal work if it were not completed and supplemented by the religious revolution. This cannot and will not be allowed to take place through the rape of conscience, but only through long and unceasing enlightenment and education of the German people and especially of the youth.

Thus, although there may be various individual deviations from the general church attitude toward Judaism, the attitude of the churches toward the Jewish question is essentially a unified one, and it can be summed up in the following main denominator in the words of a resolution of the General Assembly of Catholics of Scotland:

“The General Assembly would like to conclude by pointing out once again the profound significance of the fact that the divine Savior in whom it believes in joy is, according to the flesh, descended from the Jewish race. She finds that this thought gives the Hebrew nation a special place in world history, in that all who love the Lord Jesus Christ must also love the race from which He sprang. (p. 43 of the pamphlet published in Lucerne in 1935: “Die Gefährdung des Christentums durch Rassenwahn und Judenverfolgung”).

These words, which already hint at the Jewish substance of the church faith, are “classically Christian”, they can be and certainly are recognized by all Christianities of the world (apart from individual weak German directions). The words of that General Assembly are, moreover, directed against the new Germany, from which it can be seen that the effectiveness of Judaism as Judaism against Germanism is not the only opposition that Judaism has produced; greater and more powerful is the Jewish front in ecclesiasticism, and it is more dangerous because it addresses itself to the soul of man.

The churches today want to save their substance, but we have to save ourselves from this substance! This is the situation.

It is true that the churches consider themselves the continuation of Judaism. If Judaism is the seed, Christianity is the fruit that developed from this seed. This is also how the so-called Saint Augustine interprets Christianity in his commentary on Psalm 75 (“Known is God in Judea, great is His name in Israel”). He says:

“The enemies of our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘the well-known Jews’, use to boast on the basis of this psalm and to revile the Christian people, as if God is not known to them: to them alone, they say, God is known, which the prophet himself confirms with the words: ‘Known is God in Judea’, elsewhere he is unknown. In truth, God is known in Judea, but it is necessary to know what is meant by Judea. God is really known only in Judea, we also say this, and if someone is not in Judea, then God cannot be known to him. But what does the apostle say? ‘A Jew,’ he writes, ‘is he who is so inwardly, and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, according to the spirit, not according to the letter’ (Rom. 2:29). So there are Jews who circumcise the flesh, and there are Jews who circumcise the spirit. Many of our holy fathers had both circumcision of the flesh, which was to them a badge of faith, and circumcision of the heart because of their faith itself. But those who now boast of the name, and have lost the dead, struck out from the manner of their fathers, and though they remained Jews in the flesh, they are Gentiles in spirit. Jews, in fact, are those who descended from Abraham, whose son Isaac begat Jacob, from whom descended the twelve prophets, to whom all the people of the Jews descend. But they were called Jews mostly because Judah was one of the twelve sons of Jacob, he was as it were the patriarch among the twelve and from his tribe the kingship should come to the Jews ...

At first, of course, the people were given Saul as king from another tribe (Saul was from the tribe of Benjamin), but he was rejected as a bad king. Afterwards it received David from the tribe of Judah as king, and from him, thus from the tribe of Judah, the kings came. The prophet Jacob had already prophesied this when he blessed his sons: ‘The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the commander from his loins, until he comes who is to be sent’ (Gen. 49:10). But from the tribe - never Judah came our Lord Jesus Christ, for he is, as the Scriptures testify, of the family of David, born of Mary. However, as far as the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned, in which He is equal to the Father, He is not only before the Jews, but even before Abraham (Jn. 8:5), and not only before Abraham, but also before Adam, and not only before Adam, but also before heaven and earth and before all time, because: ‘All things came to be through Him, and without Him nothing came to be’ (Jn. 1:3). But because it is said in prophecy, ‘Not shall the scepter depart from Judah, nor the captain of the host from his loins, until he come that is to be sent,’ let us go through the former times. There we find that the Jews always had kings from the tribe of Judah, which is why they were called Jews. They had no foreign king before the time of Herod, who reigned when Christ was born (Luke 3:1). The foreign kings began with Herod. Before Herod, all were from the tribe of Judah, just until the one who was to be sent came. But when the Lord Jesus Christ came, the kingdom of the Jews was destroyed and taken away from the Jews. Now they no longer have a king, because they did not want to acknowledge the true king.

See then if they are to be called Jews. You already see that this is not the case. They themselves have already renounced this name with a loud voice and declared themselves unworthy to be called Jews, except according to the flesh. When did they renounce this name? At that time, when they spoke against Christ and raged against him, that is, against the offspring of Judah, against the offspring of David. Pilate said to them, ‘Your king shall I crucify?’ And they said, ‘We have no king but Caesar’“ (Job 19:15).

O you who call yourselves Jews but are not: if you have no king but Caesar, then the scepter has already departed from Judah, and he who is to be sent has come. It is much truer to say that the Jews are those who have converted from Judaism to Christianity: the rest of the Jews, who do not believe in Christ, have themselves deserved to lose the name. True Judaism is therefore the Church of Christ that believes in the King who came from the tribe of Judah through the Virgin Mary, who believes in the One of whom the Apostle says in his letter to Timothy: “Remember that the Lord Jesus Christ, the offspring of David, has risen from the dead. For from Judah came David, and from David came the Lord Jesus Christ. We who believe in Jesus Christ belong to Judea, and we have recognized Christ, who have not seen Him with our eyes, but hold fast to Him in faith.

Let the Jews then, who are no longer Jews, cease to revile us, for it is they who have declared: ‘We have no king but Caesar’. If, then, God, who in Christ reconciled the world to Himself, revealed Himself to them (the Jews) and they crucified Him because they did not recognize the God hidden in the flesh, then that Judea, which is so called but is not, must step back. Let the true Judea come near, to whom it is said, ‘Come near to him, and you will be enlightened, and your face will not be ashamed,’ for this heard and believed, and the church became the true Judea, where Christ is known, who as man is of the family of David, but as God is above David.”

(Translation from the “Eucharistic League of Nations” published by the Jesuits, 8th volume, no. 6.)

This view is therefore that of the Roman Church as well as that of Orthodox Protestantism. Therefore, when the Reich Bishop Müller declared to a representative of the press (“Süddeutsche Zeitung” No. 282, 1933): “Christianity was not born out of Judaism, but arose in the struggle against Judaism,” the pastor von Löwenich (Confession Front) was able to express accurately in the “Fränkische Wacht” (Dec. 1, 1933) as the general opinion of his direction:

“Luther translated the Old Testament with hot effort. He composed the image of the fortress after an Old Testament psalm (46). He liked to pray the Psalms at all and thereby ‘looked into the heart of all the saints’. Our Lord Jesus Christ, however, said of the Law of Moses that he came not to abolish it but to fulfill it, and that not one iota of the Law should be lost until it was fulfilled. Among His last words on the cross are two words of Psalm, and He Himself interpreted His sacrifice on the cross to His disciples in the light of Old Testament prophecy.”

From this it results probably with all clarity, what wants to be understood here by the term of the substance. Christianity is the logical fulfillment of Judaism.

This can also be clearly seen from the Roman liturgy. The Missale Romanum, the missal used for reading the Roman mass, which contains the prescribed prayers, also includes one that contains a petition to God (namely, the Jewish God Jehovah) to let all peoples and people become Jews:

“God, Your ancient wonders we still see shining in our time; for what You did with a mighty hand to the one people when You rescued them from the persecuting Egyptians, You still work today for the salvation of all Gentile nations through the water of regeneration: grant now that to the adoption of Abraham as a child and to the dignity of the people of Israel the whole world and humanity may enter.”

This prayer is prescribed on Holy Saturday. On Good Friday, however, the Roman Church prays for the faithless Jews to be converted back to salvation.

When a Roman bishop receives his consecration and the mitre (the bishop’s hat) is placed on his head as a sign of his dignity, the consecrating archbishop says the following prayer.

“We put, O Lord, on the head of this church leader and Your champion the helmet of firmness and salvation, so that by his face adorned with it and by his head armed with the horns of the two Testaments he may appear fearsome to the opponents of truth, and under the loan of Your grace he may be an energetic fighter of the opponents. Thou hast adorned the face of Thy servant Moses by a conversation with Thee, and then distinguished it by its strong shining horns of Thy clarity and truth. Thou hast commanded to put on Aron, Thy high priest, the high priestly hat, through Christ our Lord. “

At the marriage ceremony, the Roman priest prays at the bridal Mass:

“Fix, O God, what You have wrought in us, from Your holy temple which is in Jerusalem. Send help to the bride and groom from the sanctuary, and from Zion protect them. “

These examples could be multiplied at will. Without this substance no Christian church can exist, but this substance is, as already said, what makes the churches the spiritual counter-power in today’s state and so dangerous for the people’s education. Moreover, endowed with this spirit, from which they cannot break away, the churches must become hoards of political reaction.

The judgment of the ancient church on the Jews, which Hamack (“Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums”, 1. Bd.) reproduces in the following words, has probably been completely overcome today: “The Jews are the worst, most godless and most godforsaken people among all peoples, the real devil’s people, the synagogue of Satan, the comradeship of the Hypocrites.” This judgment shows that for many centuries, despite the substance, the opposition to Judaism was very harsh, i.e. the ecclesiastical attitude was subject to constant change. But until 1918, in the Roman canon law, the exceptional laws against the Jews were still formally binding for Christians, even if their observance was no longer emphasized.

The ecclesiastical code in force until 1918 (Codex juris canonici) established the following principles regarding the treatment of Jews:

  1. The Jews may live in the bosom of the Christian nations with free religious practice. The freedom of their religious practice must be protected, but in return they must refrain from anything that might offend the religious feelings of Christianity.
  1. The settlement of the Jews must be limited and they must be made to live together if possible. If they are scattered among the people, they have more opportunity for illicit acquisition and usury. The canon law justified this by saying: “The worst agitators for freedom of movement were the Jews. They have nested in all the prosperous cities in order to suck the wealthy dry.”
  1. Christians are not to use Jews either as physicians or as nurses, except in case of need. For: “The Church holds in honor the body of Christians, sanctified by the reception of the sacraments, which she will not give into the treatment of Jewish physicians.” In other words, treatment by Jewish doctors is a desecration!
  1. The Jew may not hold any public office, especially a judicial, governmental or teaching office, except in Jewish schools. For: “It is against the dignity of Christians to sit at the feet of a Jewish teacher, to be judged by a Jewish judge. It is against the principles of the Church, against the good of the nations, that Jews should have the same civil rights as Christians, therefore they must not be allowed to rise. Innocent III calls it an absurd thought that a blasphemer of Christ should exercise authority against a Christian.”
  1. The Christian may not serve the Jew as a domestic servant. Violations may be punished by excommunication. In justification of this, canon law mentioned with disgust that among the Jews the custom prevailed of pouring the milk of the wet-nurses for three days “in latrinam” when they went to the table of the Lord at Easter. Since such abominations still occurred in many ways among them, a Christian servant must fear divine wrath if he earned his bread in such a house. If, however, the Jews refused to dismiss their Christian servants and nurses, they were forbidden by ecclesiastical law to have any intercourse with Christians.
  1. Jewish gainful and commercial life is to be subjected to strict control in order to protect the Christian peoples from proliferation.
  1. Marriages between Christians and Jews are strictly forbidden because of “disparias cultus.” So, because of difference of religion (not because of difference of confession within the community of the baptized) these marriages are forbidden. Therefore, even Protestants were forbidden by church law to enter into marriages with Jews. From this separating obstacle to marriage, the church can never obtain a dispensation for the initiation of a Jewish-Christian mixed marriage.

No one can deny that these ecclesiastical regulations for the protection of the people were very wise and prudent. And they were valid (at least formally) until 1918. On May 19, 1918, the new canon law came into force. And what did it contain of all these well-thought-out provisions, tried and tested through centuries? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Not even the word “Jew” appears in the new Codex juris canonici. If the former canon law still had a special section “de judaeis”, such a thing is completely missing in the new canon law. Admittedly, this only cleared the air, because in practice these ecclesiastical protective provisions had not been applied for decades before. Not only were marriages between Jews and Christians permitted without further ado if an appropriate dispensation tax was paid to Rome, but in all other areas, too, it was no longer objectionable if Christian servants served Jews, or if someone allowed himself to be healed by Jewish doctors, and in general, it was no longer objectionable if Jews held public office, which they were able to do more and more in all European countries in the course of the last century. In 1918, the conclusion was drawn from this situation and the relevant provisions concerning Jews in church law were deleted. Even Jewish-Catholic mixed marriages are now readily permitted under certain conditions.

The disappearance of the Jewish question from canon law is undoubtedly of symbolic significance and marks the increasingly clear coming together of Judaism and the Catholic Church. This coming together takes place logically on the basis of the Jewish substance in the face of changed external and political conditions compared to the past. One must also love the race from which Jesus Christ came!

In line with this tone was the particularly significant founding in Rome in 1926 of the “Society of the Friends of Israel” (Amici d’Israele), whose Secretary General, Monsignor van Asseldonk, chosen by the Pope, commented on the Society as follows:

“It is a purely religious movement of love for God’s people Israel, by no means an ecclesiastical missionary society. Through sermons, lectures, newspaper articles and conferences, the Catholic world is to be reminded that our common God the Father has irrevocably chosen the people of Israel, which has also been confirmed by Christ and his disciples. It follows that anti-Semitism directly contradicts the doctrine of God. An appeal to the Catholic clergy of the whole world will go out already in the next days. The Jews will do well not to distrust us, but to show us goodwill. “

These statements were made to a representative of the Jewish telegraph agency in Zurich (see, among others, the journal of the “Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten,” “Schild,” No. 17, 1926). Some time later, Prelate van Asseldonk was also received in audience by the Pope, whereby the latter declared, among other things, that it was against the Catholic principle to persecute the Jews, that the Jews were, after all, the chosen people of God. Further, the pope said, “I and some cardinals are friends of the Jews, and we support the ‘Society of Friends of Israel’ and the fight against anti-Semitism.” (“Reichswart,” August 7, 1926.)

The founding and development of the “Society of the Friends of Israel” is particularly instructive and revealing for illuminating the question of Rome and Judaism.

The founding assembly took place under the presidency of the late Cardinal van Rossum. “What bliss for the Savior,” the cardinal exclaimed in his address, “if his heart could win this people. Therefore we welcome, love and bless with joy this excellent apostolic missionary work.” (Thus reports the Roman reporter of the Catholic “Deutsches Volksblatt” No. 178, 1926.)

But not enough! Cardinal van Rossum had even more need to clearly state the position of the Catholic Church towards Judaism. He declared to the “Jewish Telegraph Agency” in Zurich: “The Catholic Church strives for reconciliation and brotherhood of peoples and condemns anti-Semitism most strictly and with all the force of its authority. Any attempt to disturb a dignified and tranquil existence of the Jewish people is strongly disapproved by the Catholic Church as contrary to the spirit of her teaching. Between the Catholic and Jewish religions there are three main principles in common: belief in one God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the washing clean of sins committed through atonement.” (“Völkischer Beobachter,” July 27, 1926.)

Nevertheless, by decree of March 25, 1928, the Society was dissolved. It is not uninteresting to reproduce parts of this decree, which explicitly recognizes the previous position of the Church toward Judaism (“Acta Apostolicae Sedis” No. 4, 1928):

“The Catholic Church has never ceased to pray for the Jewish people, who until the coming of Jesus were the keepers of the divine promises, notwithstanding the delusion into which they subsequently fell, precisely so that the grace of God might triumph over their hardness and enlighten them and call them back to the true faith. The Holy See, impelled by this same love, protected this people against unjust oppressions and condemned the systematic hatred against the people once chosen by God, a hatred designated by the name of anti-Semitism. “ - “But,” the decree continues, “within the Association of the Friends of Israel, a way of acting and speaking has begun to be introduced which departs from the understanding of the Church and from the spirit of the holy Fathers, and also from the sacred liturgy. Consequently, at a plenary session of the Congregation on March 21, the Cardinals belonging to the Holy Office, having previously obtained the vote of the Consultors, declared the Association “Amici d’Israele” dissolved and ordered that in the future no one may write or publish books or written works which in any way favor such erroneous currents.”

This was the end of an action that was overflowing with love for Judaism. This action made concessions to Judaism and allowed it liberties, so that not only the purpose of the Society, but even the ecclesiastical tradition seemed endangered. According to the “Deutsches Volksblatt” (April 13, 1928), the Society adopted customs and formulas of a liturgical nature, through which the Society took on the character of a lodge!!! The Roman Phariseeism could not tolerate the Jewish one, therefore Rome intervened: a proof how jealously Rome watches over its traditions and even with all the hot love for Judaism, which is expressed a hundred times elsewhere, did not let itself be dissuaded from it.

A few weeks later, on May 19, 1928, an article appeared in the Jesuit magazine “Civiltä cattolica”, whose articles were subject to the personal approval of the Pope himself: “The Jewish danger and the Amici d’Israelei, which stated, among other things:

“The Jewish danger threatens the whole world by pernicious Jewish influences or detestable interferences, especially among the Christian peoples and still more among the Catholic and Latin, where the blindness of the old liberalism has particularly favored the Jews, while persecuting the Catholics and especially the, orders. The danger is increasing day by day ... Although we are not inclined, as some are, to lay all the blame on the Jews for the evils which have afflicted modern society, especially Europe, we have nevertheless tried, for example, in the question of Bolshevism, to make it clear what blame and what predominant influence the misguided people of the Jews bear in the Russian Revolution, as they did in the French and, more recently, in the Hungarian Revolution, with all its evils, cruelties, and savage horrors.... The Jewish propaganda is partly in the closest connection with the Masonic and Bolshevik propaganda. One does not understand how it can still be protected by governments which, after all, show that they resolutely fight Freemasonry and any other liberal, socialist or communist propaganda. It has already led, in less than a century, from the state of full toleration or even favoritism, that is, more than simple freedom or equality, granted to the Jews, to their hegemony in many parts of public life, especially in business and industry, not to mention high finance, where they have been granted almost dictatorial supremacy, which can give laws to states and governments, even in matters pertaining to politics, of course, even more so in financial matters, without concern for rivalry, as occurred during the war. This fact, truly a strange phenomenon, cannot be explained, much less justified, by the number of Jews residing in the countries concerned. It has rather its reason in the secret Jewish interference, which has led in such a way to a power which does not belong to them, which is in no relation at all to their number, and moreover contradicts reason and the general welfare. “After the magazine has explained the minority relations of the Jews in the individual countries with some figures, it remarks: “And with all this they hold the leading positions in big industry, in high finance, in diplomacy and even more in secret societies, so that they can work towards their world hegemony ... But what is most distressing is not only that the peoples find themselves in this condition, but that they still accept it agreeably and favor it, just as, by the way, the so-called League of Nations also favors secret Jewish interference. “

One could hardly expect more insight in these circles. Is this not a brilliant justification of the attitude of National Socialist Germany? But one must not overestimate the importance of this article. With it Rome only drew the line under the incursion with the “Society of the Friends of Israel.” Nothing more. One will never be allowed to conclude from this that Rome will now open the fight against the deplored Jewish phenomena. Rome will beware, because despite this attack Rome needs Judaism.

After all, such omissions have no small significance with regard to Rome’s fierce struggle against Germany, for if anti-Judaism is “unchristian,” then of course so is the occasional “anti-Judaism” of the Vatican or the Jesuits!

In this regard, a Roman document dealing with the issue of Jewish ritual murder weighs particularly heavily. In 1930, the documents from the diplomatic correspondence of the Tsarist ministers appeared in a special volume. Here are also letters exchanged between Russian Foreign Minister Sassonov and D. Gelildov, the Russian plenipotentiary to the Vatican, in 1913. They follow up on a letter addressed to the Pope by Lord Rothschild (London). This referred to the Beihs ritual murder trial then taking place in Russia and reminded the Vatican that in two old papal bulls there was a clear statement that the Pope believed in the existence of the ritual murder custom among the Jews. These two documents, Rothschild wrote, were now being played off against the Jews by the Russian cleric Pranaitis, and the Vatican was even being asked to prevent such methods by all appropriate means. To this letter the papal secretary-general at that time, Cardinal Merry del Val replied to Lord Rothschild that he could say no more about this than that the documents which speak of a belief in Jewish ritual murder were really written by popes and are in the Vatican library in their original form.

Thereupon the Russian foreign minister had his ambassador ask the Vatican whether the Rothschild statement was to be understood in such a way that the Pope no longer stood by the old bulls, but did not deny their existence, or whether, in the Vatican’s view, an infallible ruling had already been issued in this matter, in the sense that ritual murders belonged to Jewish customs, and that therefore nothing more could be added to these pronouncements.

The Vatican’s response after the Russian ambassador’s report was:

“The confirmation of the authenticity of a copy means anything rather than the denial of its contents. On the contrary, it is to be regarded as proven that it is an old Jewish custom to murder Christian children at Easter.” This document bears the date of November 18, 1913. (Cf. “Völkischer Beobachter,” July 29, 1930.)

However, when in 1934/35 a Catholic opponent of the Jews in Austria asserted and spread the fact of the ritual murder custom in a special writing, the Catholic papers indignantly moved away from him, and the writing was even generally discredited because the view expressed in it was unchristian!

However, one must not overestimate the importance of the above Vatican document. It is contrasted with such an overwhelming abundance of pro-Jewish “religious Catholic” manifestations that it would be a delusion to believe that Rome would draw the necessary conclusions for its own sphere from the occasionally admitted dangerousness of Judaism for all peoples. We give below some examples of the practical effects of the Jewish-Roman spiritual affinity: The Catholic professor Dr. Englert wrote in the “Beobachter am Main” in 1924 essays “Vom katholischen Frühling in Neudeutschland.” There it said among other things (according to “Reichswart”, November 8, 1929):

“No religion is as close to Judaism in its roots and in the way, it has been carried out as the Catholic religion, and no other religion has such a fundamental value for the church as the synagogue and its holy scriptures .... This is precisely the struggle of the (Catholic) Church today: its enemies see in Catholic Christianity nothing but perfected Judaism. The cause of the Church and the cause of Judaism have merged into one. The Church stands for the divinity of the Old Testament as absolutely as for that of the New. The Church is the Judaism not of some arbitrary race ... , but the people of the Messiah the Prophet of revealed truth and the Apostle of Messianic grace to all nations ... It is based on this prehistorically anchored community of dispute and suffering, which today has become more topical than ever, that the church and the synagogue are drawing closer to each other. One is not mistaken in assuming that intellectual Judaism is becoming well aware of these connections and is adapting to them by seeking more intimate spiritual contact. In the present time of the most degenerating nationalisms in Europe, there is no better reassurance for Judaism than with the Church, which can never abandon it to the materialistic racial swamp of an insane fashionable theory; with the Church which, on the contrary, restores it to the ideal of its consecration and dignity in the history of salvation and raises it to the bright heights of the religion of revelation; with the Church whose children see in every pious Jew a worshipper of the true God and witness of the hope of the Messiah, and are therefore inclined to show him not only tolerance but also a kind of religious timidity. "

In the “Schöner Zukunft” of March 3, 1933, the following could be read:

“In 1912, in Washington, Miss Rosalie Maria Levy converted to Catholicism. The convert is a well-known writer and a very active member of the ‘Prayer Brotherhood for the Conversion of Israel’. She has penned, among many other works: ‘Life in Heaven’, ‘Why the Jews Become Catholics’ and ‘Judaism and Catholicism’. According to a report in the ‘Osservatore Romano’ of February 3, 1933, Miss Levy took the announcement of the Holy Year as an opportunity to address an urgent appeal to the Jews of the whole world. It says, among other things:

“How opportune is the moment for the Jews of the whole world to study attentively for once the life and teachings of Jesus Christ! We must be proud of Jesus Christ because he is one of our race. Never before has a mortal lived who lived such a holy life and taught such holy commandments as Jesus of Nazareth did. We should be the first to accept his teachings and follow him. However, strangely enough, the very people of his flesh and blood refuse to recognize him as the Savior promised by the prophets of the Old Covenant, although during his life and in his death he fulfilled all their prophecies.... The works of Christ testify that he was not only man but also God, as he himself declared. After his death and resurrection, the apostles preached Jesus crucified: they were all Jews. Would they have done this if they had not been convinced of his divinity? They had, humanly speaking, nothing to gain. They suffered martyrdom for the faith they professed. In the centuries that followed, numerous Jews who took the trouble to study in depth and conscientiously the life and teachings of Christ as they are set forth in the New Testament, had to come to the recognition of his divinity and to desire baptism in the Church he founded, the Catholic Church. Christ did not come to abolish the law of the Old Covenant, but to fulfill it. Just as the Jews who listened to the prophet Isaiah did not have to reject anything they had learned from Moses, so also the converts from Judaism, when they listen to the revelations of Christ, do not have to abandon anything of what is laid down in the Old Testament. On the contrary, they find in the New Testament the full fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament.”

Bishop Heylen of Namur, according to the “More Beautiful Future” (No. 22, 1933), ordered that February 19, 1933, be celebrated as a petition Sunday for the conversion of the Jews. In a pastoral letter, the bishop states that it would be wrong to think that working and praying for the conversion of the Jews would be futile and pointless, pointing out that the reigning pope was particularly concerned about the conversion of the Jews, as can be seen from passages in the papal letter introducing the feast of Christ the King. Furthermore, the bishop explains that the interpretation of relevant passages of Holy Scripture, according to which the conversion of the Jews will be immediately followed by the end of the world, is completely false; according to the interpretation of the Holy Father and the theological experts, the conversion of the Jews will usher in an age of peace and prosperity.

“Der christliche Pilger,” the Catholic diocesan bulletin of Speyer, carried (on February 17, 1935) an article “Synagogue and Primitive Church,” which concludes with the words:

“But we know that the fate of the Jews, even in the political world, cannot be understood from the political sphere, but only from the revelation in Scripture. As Christians, we recognize the folly of modern thinking to imagine that a decision of God, such as is the election of Israel, could be corrected by so-called history. Israel is our thorn in the flesh against which we cannot strike out, we who, to use the Pauline language of the Letter to the Romans, are the adopted (adoptivi) in relation to them, the legitimate (legitimi). We do not know when this will be, that the prodigal son will find his way back to the Father’s house, but we know the joy of the Father, the one who is always waiting for this homecoming, and that, as then, so also now, we can only do the one thing, to acknowledge the mystery of the Church of Jews and Gentiles as the one mystery of the one divine mercy.”

This view shows how hopeless it is to argue with certain Christians about the Jewish question.

“An outstanding Catholic scholar,” Dr. theol. C. M. Kaufmann in Frankfurt a. M., dealt with the position of Roman Catholics toward the Jews in the “C.V.- Zeitung” (monthly issue February 1927):

“It is noteworthy that the Catholics and the Church itself, on the whole, got along better with the Jews than with the Christians who had fallen away from Catholicism.... The pleasant relationship that exists in many places between the episcopal authorities and the chief rabbinates is well known. This phenomenon has its deeper reasons probably in the feeling of common religious traditions and, on the other hand, in an aversion (aversion) to apostate friars, which is too obvious to me. “

In truth, the pleasant relationship comes from the common ground of essence. This also proves the following:

The Prague Catholic Congress in July 1934 concluded with a letter of thanks to the Prague Jewish community. The letter addressed to the Chief Rabbinate of Prague reads as follows:

“To the Venerable Chief Rabbinate of the Jewish Community in Prague. Dear Sirs, you were kind enough to greet the National Congress of Catholics with the biblical greeting of peace, which recurs in numerous forms in the books of the Old and New Testaments. From the depth of our soul we thank you for this message and return your greeting most cordially.

Fiat pax in virtute tua. The words of the psalm you quote form part of the daily prayers of the Catholic Church. We are certainly of the same opinion as you, dear Sirs, that mankind today is grouped into only two camps, the camp of those who proclaim faith in (the Jewish) God and the camp of those who oppose God, and that the common value of creeds and customs should protect all without distinction who build on the sacred truth of God’s revelation.

The high commandment of love for God and neighbor, already contained in the Old Testament, is the common foundation of what is sacred to Jews and Catholics.

The message of peace proclaimed by the all-state Catholic Congress applies to all people without distinction, because every single human soul has infinite value before God. You have greeted the Congress with the words of the Lord’s Psalmist. Allow us to respond to you with the words of the High Priestly Blessing, with the sublime words Jeverecho Adonaj verjischinerecho, which we refer to all humanity of the whole world without distinction: May God bless you and protect you, may the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. As the Lord turns his face to you and gives you peace: ‘Vojosem lecho shalom’.

Msgr. Dr. Leopold Precan, Archbishop of Ohnutz, Metropolitan of Moravia, Chairman of the Congress; Msgr. Dr. Karel Kaspar, Archbishop of Prague, Primate of Bohemia, Ordinary loci of the Congress; Dr. Johann Georg Rückl, Real Papal Chamberlain, Executive Chairman of the Congress. “ (“Prager Tagblatt,” July 2, 1935.)

Already at the Austrian Catholic Congress in 1923, the Capuchin Father Kröpf! (according to the “Deutsch-öster-reichische Abendzeitung” of July 4, 1923, No. 181):

“The Jews are destined to accomplish even greater things within the Catholic Church than David and Solomon. It would therefore be an advantage for Catholics to cooperate with Judaism, not only for the Catholic Church, but also justified because of the carnal kinship with Christ.”

F. Murawski (“Katholische Kirche und Judentum”, Berlin 1924, p. 25) expresses himself more cautiously:

“The Church recognizes Judaism as its root and considers it a divine institution that was to introduce the Savior into the world. But she now rejects it as an independent phenomenon because it has been overtaken by her, absorbed into her; she regards it as imperfect. Judaism has a part of the truth, the Church the whole truth; Judaism has the law, the Church grace as the crown of the law; Judaism leads to Christ, the Church is Christ. “

Most significant and striking in recent times was the defense of Judaism (though initially only Old Testament Judaism) by Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich in his well-known Advent sermons in December 1933. The first sermon was entitled “The Old Testament and Its Fulfillment in Christianity” (December 3, 1933) and a later one: “The Moral Values of the Old Testament and Their Revaluation in the Gospel” (December 10, 1933).

It would go too far to go into the content of these “religious” lectures in more detail; it is sufficient to note the echo on the Jewish side in order to understand the nature, the meaning and the effect of these sermons. Apart from the fact that these sermons found the strongest and most enthusiastic echo in the anti-German foreign countries (Italian and French translations appeared, the latter with clear anti-German intent!), apart from the fact that they even earned the Cardinal a special honor from the North American Jewry by being ranked among the 10 Christian friends of the Jewish people of the present day, second only to the wife of President Roosevelt (“Westdeutscher Beobachter”, November 24, 1934), the well-known “C.V.-Zeitung” of the German citizens of Jewish faith also took up the sermons with enthusiasm and gave the Cardinal the best mark that a Christian could ever receive from Judaism. Rabbi Dr. Bärwald (Munich) wrote then in the “C.V.-Zeitung” (January 4, 1934) under the headline: “New enthusiasm for our Holy Scriptures”:

“At the end of the last sermon, too, the admonition to read the Bible in depth is repeated: ‘The precedence over all books, however, remains with the book of books...A storm is roaring through our country, which shall sweep away the holy scriptures from German soil, because they are books for the Jews. I have the conviction that this storm will rather kindle a holy fire of new enthusiasm for the holy books in all confessions.’

We can only mention these words (of Faulhaber) with gratitude and satisfaction, but above all as an admonition which, as has already been said once in this place, deserves to be taken to heart also and especially in our midst. Let us read the Bible and let no one surpass us in this! The study of the passages quoted in the Faulhaber sermons alone would offer immeasurable profit and - we are sure of it - would stimulate further research in the Bible. If then the thoughts contained in it work in us, it will become, to speak in its own language, a ‘tree of life’. We are strengthened in the awareness that we also have a religion of life in our religion. It is, after all, the constant task to bring religion and life into harmony or at least into connection. How this is done elsewhere is shown in an exemplary way in the sermons discussed.

If we look for Judaism, we will not find it in doctrines, philosophical themes, theoretical discussions and programmatic declarations. In the living voice of the Bible, in its wonderful reality, it sounds loudest and purest.

Here it also becomes practically effective, here religion becomes life, if it leads to a sanctification of our life. This may be enough for us today, when it is almost impossible for us and our religion to work in public. All the more sustainable we can deal with ourselves. Only in this way, in the living grasp of religious values, can a religious, a Jewish renaissance begin, which is necessary. Here, in truth, we meet our Jewish heritage, which, cultivated with understanding, can develop it further, the neglect of which must lead to signs of decay. Religious consciousness will always remain the measure of the value of Jewish consciousness.

Once again, let us quote Cardinal Faulhaber: ‘People of Israel, this is not grown up as your planting in your garden.’ No, truly, ‘it is God’s planting’. But He has planted it in our garden and called us gardeners to wait on its fruits and share them with the world. We have the humble pride that revelation has been given to the world through us. Let us carry it within us and before us with the feeling of being elevated, of being obliged, of being chosen, but also - and this is nothing else - with the feeling of responsibility that one has towards every difficult task.”

Faulhaber’s Advent sermons thus had the effect that Judaism was also strengthened in its awareness of being chosen; it feels more than ever as “God’s planting.” Indirectly, Faulhaber also promoted the “Jewish Renaissance.”

But if you listen to the cardinal today, everything referred only to the Old Testament Judaism, and in all his sermons there is supposedly no glorification of the Judaism of the present! After all, foreign countries have enthusiastically taken up these sermons. As the cardinal’s private secretary wrote to the author, the French translation of the sermons was also done with the cardinal’s knowledge and will; it appeared under the spiteful title: “Juifs et Chretiens devant le racisme” (Edition du Monde Catholique) with the imprimatur of the archbishop of Versailles!!! Even if the Cardinal denies any responsibility for the title, he is fully responsible for the spiteful exploitation of his homilies against the National Socialist State. Is what Cardinal Faulhaber wrote in favor of Judaism anything other than what was communicated above as the decision of the General Assembly of the Scottish Church, namely, that all “who love the Lord Jesus Christ must also love the race from which He sprang?”

No doubt, the Roman Catholics love this race, especially today in the völkisch state, where both - Jews and Catholics - have discovered and affirmed the mutual affinity of spirit in the opposition to this state more than ever. Let all hope be abandoned: The Christian, to say nothing of the Roman Catholic, will never be or come into serious opposition to Judaism on denominational grounds. Friedrich Nietzsche has written the most appropriate word about this in his “Antichrist”:

“The Jews are, precisely with this, the most fateful people in the history of the world: in their aftermath they have made humanity so wrong that even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without seeing himself as the last Jewish consequence. “

Christian opponents of the Jews are like those natives who pretend to be white when they drape themselves in European rags of clothing; they remain colored people nevertheless, only that they give away their own kind.

Is it not “the last Jewish consequence when the Jesuit Bangha wrote the following about Judaism and Catholicism in the “Beautiful Future” (May 28, 1933):

“For as great and essential as the contrasts between the two religions are, we must not overlook the fact that they are, after all, linked by important moments of kinship, especially if by Jewish religion we understand not the shallow enlightenment of many modern Jews, nor the theology of the Talmud, but simply adherence to the Old Testament, and likewise equate Christianity with Catholicism. The latter is justified not only because Catholicism is the historically only legitimate continuation of the early church, but also because it stands as the only firm, clearly delineated, definite and easily determinable doctrinal structure of the Christian faith.

Catholicism and Old Testament Judaism - that is the core of the matter - are not mutually exclusive, but mutually complementary moments. This is the first thought that should bring a believing Jew closer to Catholicism. Old Testament Judaism and Catholicism relate to each other like the root to the stem, like the bud to the blossom, like infancy to maturity, like promise to fulfillment. Catholicism considers itself the lawful heir, the legitimate continuation of the old Jewish religion, the completion of the Old Testament, the crowning and realization of the revelation that first became the Jews. Judaism is faith in the coming one, Christianity is faith in the Messiah who has come. According to us this means

Christianity did not break with the Old Testament, did not turn away from the pre-Christian revelation, but affirmed the realization that had taken place, while Judaism remained with the formulas of promise, even when the promises became reality, the hopes for the future became the blessed present and reality.... It is wrong to say that Judaism as a whole turned its back on Jesus; no, Judaism split, and only a part, though the larger one, turned away from Jesus, while the other part, also considerable, formed the first Christian community. Of course, today we call only the first of the two groups and their descendants ‘Jews’, that fraction of Judaism that had fallen into the following of the Pharisees and under their leadership rejected Christ. Many a Jew would be surprised to learn that the Catholic theologian studies the Old Testament far more thoroughly than the average Jew, and that, for example, the Catholic priests pray the entire Jewish Psalter in the breviary every week, which surely very few Jews do.

From the just described relationship between Judaism and Catholicism arise first of all the similarities and affinities between both schools of thought and religions. First of all, besides the basic thesis of absolute monotheism, there is the common root of both religions: the Old Testament revelation and its repository: the Old Testament Holy Scriptures. The books of the Jewish Holy Scriptures are holy scriptures also for us Catholics, and no one in the course of the last 50 years has fought so hotly and faithfully, with the expenditure of so much science and energy for the authenticity and the historical character of the Old Testament books against the decomposing criticism as Catholic theology. If the honor of the old Holy Scripture is restored today, for Jews and Christians, the believing Jews also owe it mostly to the Catholic scholars. This Holy Scripture of the Jews is still used today in the Catholic cult life in an incessant, devotional way. The liturgy of the Mass is full of expositions from the Old Testament; even Jewish words are found in our liturgy: Sabaoth, Alleluia, Hosanna, etc., just as the phrase Kingdom of Heaven instead of Kingdom of God or Church is a Hebraism. The Catholic Church, whether Christmas or Easter, Good Friday or Pentecost, prays with the words of the Jewish patriarchs and prophets, whom it also considers saints and heroes. The founder of Christianity himself repeatedly invoked Moses and the prophets and justified his Messiahship from their sayings. So the New Testament is completely based on the Old, Christianity and Judaism originate from the same root! The Jew would have to consistently think the Old Testament further and he would already be a Christian; nothing prepares for Christ more than the penetration of the spirit with the teachings of the Old Testament!”

Then, the Jesuit speaks about the common ethical basic attitude of Judaism and Christianity. The ethics of the Old Testament are inferior in clarity and sublimity to those of the New, but the Jewish religion is a thoroughly ethically colored religion. The theocratic thought (God’s rule thought) itself is ethical to a high degree:

“Christianity only had to take up this idea and transform it, especially in the Sermon on the Mount, into the spiritual theocracy of the invisible and visible Kingdom of God. As in many other points, also here Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity. It would be ungrateful and foolish to misjudge this and to portray the Jewry of antiquity as the curse and corruption of humanity. “

But the highest and noblest point of contact between Judaism and Christianity is the messianic thought!

All this, of course, will not prevent many a clear-sighted Catholic from occasionally seeing the Jewish question as the “Staatslexikon” of the Catholic Görres Society sees it in its latest edition (“Schönere Zukunft”, November 29, 1931):

“In the whole field of German literature, the Jews are a great power, on some points even the superior power. In literary criticism the Jews occupy a virtually dominant position ... It is in the restless, stirring, revolutionary, adaptive sense of Jewry that Jewish literary men eagerly serve every new literary fashion without feeling particularly inhibited by aesthetic-artistic or even ethical considerations ... Jewish literary products promote a pessimistic and anti-Christian view of life ... Probably even more than literature, Judaism dominates the press. In the journalism imbued with the Jewish spirit lies a climax of Jewish power.... The press serves the Jews not only for the support or enforcement of their economic and political endeavors, but the greatest cultural danger lies in the fact that from the press they influence the character of the people and work on the uprooting of the ideals of the people.... In the theater, the Jews often hold the leading positions; they continue to act as authors of mostly light theatrical material that flatters the senses and serves the fashion of the day. In many cases the Jews exercise their power through the industrialization of the theater ... The character of most of the film plays filled with sensuality and depiction of crime on the European continent is in many cases to be put down to the Jewish supremacy in the film business ... Today, the Jewish musical spirit is essentially expressed in the production of light and mostly shallow operetta music, where business spirit, addiction to pop novelties, popularization of ‘new music’ join hands. In accordance with their dominance in the entire realm of fashion, the Jews also set the tone in the modern metropolitan entertainment business. The liberal Jews, with their activity in the cultural field, serve to a large extent only entertainment in addition to business; thus they create and spread in many cases a metropolitan culture and a business morality which is to be rejected from the Christian point of view.”

The logical conclusions, which would result from these statements, can of course never be drawn by the Roman church because of the known spiritual affinity with Judaism. And so it is not surprising that the well-known Roman encyclopedia of Herder in its latest 1st volume under “anti-Semitism” knows how to say the following, which clearly and unambiguously reflects the church position:

“Anti-Semitism is to be rejected from the Christian point of view if it fights the Jews for the sake of their foreignness of blood, or if it uses unchristian means in the struggle against them. The Catholic Church has therefore always rejected anti-Semitism as such ... What is permitted is the defense against the actually harmful influence of liberal-Jewish circles in certain areas by legal and moral means, preferably by superior, positive achievements ... “

Racial anti-Judaism is therefore forbidden by the Church under all circumstances, and yet the Jewish question can never be understood and never be solved if it is regarded only as a religious question and if it is not seen that the special religion of the Jews, hostile to all other peoples, grows out of blood.

But people who want to Christianize even the concept of race in order to make it harmless for church and denomination will always, whether they like it or not, have the

To be the stirrup holder of Judaism. According to the opinion of certain Roman circles, the “German race” alone has the task of being “cultural fertilizer for the rest of mankind, as Professor Dr. Erhard Schlund, O.F.M. explained at the 6th Association Day of the Academic Bonifatius Association (cf. “AugsburgerPostzeitung”, September 23, 1932).

Thus the true Roman aims are revealed. For this purpose, however, the German people has not awakened to its racial consciousness, so that it once again becomes, as in the last 1000 years, the lansquenet of Europe and the cultural fertilizer of the other peoples. Here the supranational Roman thinking and the German National Socialist thinking are separated. The supranational, Roman thinking can of course only assign a supranational task, a supra-popular one, to the German being and the German kind with their unfortunately all too often historically observed foreignness, as also the Roman theology professor Dr. E. Krebs did in the Jesuit “Stimmen der Zeit” (129. vol., 8. issue), by rejecting not only of course a religion of one’s own kind, but also a Christianity of one’s own kind:

“If the races and peoples serve the total life in the spirit of love, they all have to send their own kind influx into the great life stream of the church. Only the arrogant claim to transform the supernatural essence of Christianity according to the natural peculiarity of a people has a destructive effect, a destructive effect on this exalting people. But the loving member achievement has an enriching, constructive, unifying effect.

The Christianity of one’s own kind in the sense that each people reshapes the doctrine, the custom, the worship, the constitution of the Christian religion according to its own peculiarity, that is the greatest and sharpest contrast to the supernatural, therefore supra-popular, supra-cultural, supra-temporal, God-grounded essence of the Christian religion.”

We, however, believe in the sharpest contrast to this in our national task, which we can only fulfill if we become completely “ourselves.” But Rome and all churches prevent us from this more than ever. The struggle which they are waging against the thought of the völkisch will being too much proves that all of them, whether they confess it or not, see in the German people hardly more than a “cultural fertilizer” and for this reason alone must strive for the preservation of the whole Yahweh-Christianity, which offers the best guarantee that all völkisch will will be bent into the supranational!

That every Christianity is a mortal enemy to the national thought is proved by numerous voices from the Jewish camp itself, where Christianity is regarded only as something thoroughly intrinsic.

Heinrich Lhotzky, the contemplative and popular writer and genuinely German cultural philosopher, once reported in his book “The Planet and I” (Hans Lhotzky Verlag Ludwigshafen am Bodensee), in which he describes his own life, about that strange encounter with the Russian Jew Rabinowitsch, a genuine Talmudist. Lhotzky studied the Jewish question with this Jew, with whom he had been in close contact for many years; through this Jew, his view of the Jewish question sharpened. And so Lhotzky reports on p. 107 f. about this Rabinowitsch, among others:

“So he stood and considered and reckoned, and at last found that the Christians had stolen everything from the Jews, and withheld from them their rightful inheritance. For where did the Christians get it from a Jew? Since the nations had Jesus to the Jews, since then there had been a change with them, and since the Jews had let Jesus be taken from them, since then they had been so tormented and impoverished. So give the Jews Jesus, then give them wealth, education, honor, power, freedom, then the Jewish question is solved. Conversely, political possessions follow Jesus. “

So Jesus was only the means to an end. And Rabinowitsch even founded his own “church” on the basis of these thoughts. Let us listen to what Lhotzky further reports:

“Now who was Jesus, whom his people so detested? In the end, he had just wanted and sought the best of his people, and they had only misunderstood him! Also the twelve disciples, according to the report of the gospels, have thought nothing else than Jewish world domination under the leadership of Jesus.... Jewish world domination is still the dream of all Jews today ... Only they want their Jewish empire without Jesus; Rabinowitsch wanted the same with Jesus, because he considered it more promising. From somewhere he got the life story of Jesus, and from this he heard the people’s comrade.

When a Jew reads the Bible of the Old Testament or even of the New Testament, he does not study religion at first, but the people’s consciousness seizes him. The Jew hears the Jew and feels the blood relationship. Paul in particular captivated him. Paul has never been able to deny the rabbinical trait. This was the spark in Rabinowitsch. This jumping around with the Old Testament, which is difficult for us to understand and which the great apostle occasionally practiced, was exactly what inspired the old Talmudist. Whoever can read the Bible in this way holds the key to the progress of the people. Paul and Jesus are the great liberators of the people, and these the Jews have lost. Hence the national calamity! We must win them back for the Jews. Only in this way will we win “world domination.”

And so Rabinowitsch founded his “synagogue of the new covenant” in order to give Jesus and Paul back to his people and in this way to gain world domination more easily.

Therefore, the well-known Jewish mystic Dr. Martin Buber rightly says:

“It is a peculiar phenomenon of Galutpsychology that we have tolerated, even contributed to the fact that this important period of our intellectual history (namely Christianity) was torn out of it. It was Jewish land in which this spiritual revolution broke out; it was Jewish men who carried it into the country. We must overcome the superstitious horror we harbor of the Nazarene movement and place it where it belongs: in the intellectual history of Judaism” (“Three Speeches on Judaism”).

One of the spokesmen of world Jewry, the American Rabbi Stephen Wise, who also hurled his threats against Germany at that Jewish Congress in Basel in 1934, at which Cardinal Faulhaber was honored with special honors (he later refused them!), is also one of the spokesmen of those efforts who want to reintegrate Jesus into Jewish spirituality and regard this as a self-evident national task. According to Wise, the ethics taught by Jesus (Faulhaber also claimed this!) grew out of the Jewish views. Because of this opinion Wise was fiercely attacked from his own ranks. To this Wise replied (“Deutsche Zeitung”, January 21, 1926):

“I do not understand this agitation. No one who has listened to me can dare to say that I have asked the Jews to leave their faith and accept Jesus’ teaching. But the question remains why a Jew should not be allowed to speak objectively about the teaching of a Galilean Jew, when it is necessary to admonish those peoples who have accepted his dogma that they show an unchristian behavior towards the Jews. It is sad that a Jew should not be allowed to speak about Jesus, who lived in a completely Jewish environment and from Jewish teaching created his ethics for his time and for all times, This ethics of Christ is, after all, our weapon against all the hostilities and persecutions that we have to suffer at the hands of the Christian peoples. “

Christianity as a weapon! Indeed, that is how it is. The Jew has a full right to be respected and protected by the Christians who are in the service of Yahweh, also their God! Oskar Levy in the preface to his book “The World Significance of the Russian Revolution”, published in 1920, confesses quite correctly:

“Judaism has conquered the universe through Christianity, which, as Disraeli showed long ago, is nothing but Judaism for the people” (“Judaism for the people”).

H. J. Schoeps, editor of “Der Deutsche Vortrupp, Blätter einer Gefolgschaft deutscher Juden,” writes in issue 5 of August 1934:

“Tendency to chaos and will to order are two original positions of man, which confront each other as paganism and Judaism again and again - even today. And Christianity, which here has formed a pagan-Jewish amalgam, is always, when it strives to become institutional, completely on the Jewish line. For whether the medieval sacred church charges the German emperor with the service of the sword for the empire, whether Luther acts da tertio usu legis with regard to the sovereigns of his time, or whether Calvin’s ‘Institatio Vitae ehristionae’ has to serve for the constitution of the Geneva city republic, it has still always been a question in Christian occidental history of the adoption and realization of the Old Testament state constitution and Jewish social legislation.”

From the Christian side this is still strongly underlined, as far as the knowledge of God is concerned. In the “Blättern für Deutsches Christentum - Auf der Wacht”, published by students of Professor Börnhausen, Breslau, it says in an essay “Schluss mit der Semitologie!”: “And Brunner (meaning the Swiss professor of theology) even has the courage, after he has declared the Greek language to be much more obstructive for the understanding of salvation than the Hebrew, to assert in the most praiseworthily known, now defunct magazine ‘Zwischen den Zeiten’. One must be an Israelite to know God. - (“Mitteilungen der Deutschen Glaubensbegegung” No. 11, 1934.)

Christian anti-Judaism in this or that form can therefore only be regarded as ridiculousness. Rather it is to be regarded only as a logical consequence of the preceding when the London Jewish newspaper “The Jewish Chronicle” of April 26, 1935 writes:

“Christianity and Judaism, being thus attacked in their foundations, must stand or fall together. If Judaism were to be destroyed, Christianity would be greatly weakened. There is, in fact, no danger of such complete catastrophe. The Jews have the assurance of their immortality if they remain true to themselves. The Christians know that their truths have survived the torture chamber, the arena and the stake. But neither Christianity nor Judaism is required to wait passively until calamity befalls them and the world. They both have the weapon of the word. They must use it together in their common cause, separately for their own different truths, if these are held to be fundamental.” (Der “Stürmer” No. 28, 1935.)

Let us take another brief look at contemporary Protestantism in Germany. It, which decades ago wanted to be seen more or less as the national religion of the Germans, has been deeply shaken by the political upheaval. The struggle for the alleged “new form” is not yet over, but one thing can already be said: Protestantism will not get away from Yahweh and Judaism either. It is a pitiful picture of ambivalence that Protestantism presents. There are diseases which one may fight with all means, one does not get rid of them until the diseased limb is eliminated, or else they perish with the body which they have attacked and then ruined. The innumerable attempts to eliminate Judaism from Christianity have been disastrous. The years 1933 to 1935 have proved sufficiently in Germany that this is a futile endeavor, however honest and good the individual advocates of such views (such as the “German Church”) may certainly mean it. One may only point out one thing: Christianity lives from sin, from making the world, the people, sinful. And this is even more true of evangelical Christianity than of Roman Christianity! The inheritance of Augustine has been faithfully planted by the Augustinian monk from Wittenberg. That is why Christianity begins in its doctrine with the theology of original sin developed by Augustine and Paul. The consequences and punishments of original sin are removed by means of baptism! But what if Christianity is freed from all Judaism? Logically then also the baptism would have to fall as senseless, because the human being has only one original sin, that is the one which can lie in his approximately corrupted blood and in his degeneracy. None of the purifiers of Christianity, however, will ever be even quietly willing to drop the doctrine of original sin and baptism, but with this the Jewish foundation is already given. But the whole doctrine of salvation is based on original sin. What is the use of the indisputable knowledge that Jesus knew nothing about original sin and therefore also about infant baptism, that rather the children appeared to him to be absolutely pure and not in need of a new ritual purification measure. Never and nowhere did he order infant baptism, not even according to the certainly very doubtful Bible reports, in order to bring young people to a spiritual perfection of which they had hitherto been lacking. From this one fact already results the impossibility of all Germanization and de-Jewification measures against Christianity.

But many of the Verdeutscher of the Christianity thought and think also not at all about it. In the “Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement”, as they were first drawn up by Dr. Wieneke, it is expressly emphasized that there is no thought of shaking the basic confessions of the Protestant Church. Rather, these confessional foundations are to be preserved in their entirety forever. At the first Reichstagung of the “German Christians”, the church minister at that time, Dr. Werner, admittedly also demanded purification:

“The coming Reich Church will therefore have to make a clear confession of the Gospel, to take an unambiguous stand on the Old Testament and all those passages of the Bible which do not present themselves as a revelation of our Savior” (Der “Reichsbote,” April 5, 1933).

But here it was only the opinion of one person; the following time has made it completely clear that a separation of Christianity from Judaism is simply practically impossible. The struggle of the Protestant directions among themselves and against each other ended more or less with a victory of Judaism in the Christianity of Protestantism, about this there can no longer be the slightest doubt, even if the imperial bishop Müller (see above) did not want Christianity to be born out of Judaism, but as “originated in the struggle against Judaism.” Could one stand up more clearly for Judaism and its “values” handed down to us through the Old Testament than the German-Christian regional bishop of Hesse, Dr. Dietrich, did in October 1934? At the autumn meeting of the Hessian regional association of the Evangelical Reich Women’s Aid, he justified the Old Testament as follows:

‘‘Contrary to the reproaches against the Old Testament, which are often taken over also by the German Christians, that it was born from Jewish spirit and was unacceptable for the Germanic national feeling, because it preached an ‘inferior ethics’ and only maintained the unbearable claim of the Jews to be the ‘chosen people’, he holds on to the importance and indispensability of the Old Testament for Christianity and especially also for German Christianity. The criticism of the Old Testament is nothing new. The consciousness of election was ‘a healthy phenomenon’ among the Jewish people, especially since the prophets had always pointed out the responsibility connected with this election. In conclusion, Dr. Dietrich emphasized the far-reaching effect and great importance of the Old Testament also for our German culture, from which it would be unthinkable to do without it, as well as from school and church.” (“Deutsches Volksblatt,” October 25.)

One wonders, however, what difference there might be between the German-Christian bishop and Cardinal Faulhaber. None at all!

In any case, the sentences written by Friedrich Karl Feigel in the “Christliche Welt” (No. 13, 1935, p. 600) characterize not only the ecclesiastical situation of Protestantism, but also each of the individual church-political groups fighting each other, the Orthodox as well as the Liberals and German Christians:

“It remains: the ‘Old Testament’ - and I count to it basically, as said above, also the historical Jesus and his proclamation is the classical document of the highest revelations of God, which have been granted to mankind until now. Here is the firm fortress of our faith, from which we may confidently dare our German struggle! If anything is appropriate to the German, whose religious prehistory has been darkened by the shadow of faith in destiny, then it is the masculine-tapering faith in God of the Old Testament and of Jesus.”

Don’t people who write such things judge themselves?

In the “Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt für München” (March 31, 1935), however, there is an attack against all opponents of the Old Testament who rejected it out of a justified sense of purity, and this book is even ranked among the greatest poems in the history of mankind:

“Strange. Enemies and critics’ of the Old Testament usually know themselves best in the ‘offensive stories’ of this book. They know them, they know exactly where to find them. Do they also find the good things in the Old Testament so nimbly? Of course, this ‘knowing’ has desperately little to do with real knowledge of the Bible. But even a superficial connoisseur of the Old Testament should know that sin is never and nowhere glorified or even presented as tempting. On the contrary, sin is ruthlessly condemned, but the penitent sinner is shown the way to God’s mercy. What Goethe once said of the works of the great English poet Shakespeare is also true of the Old Testament: deadly poison is shown to us in a sealed, clearly cut bottle, so that we can get to know it safely and beware of it. The offensive stories all bear above them the inscription: ‘Sin is the Teute’s undoing.’ In this respect the Old Testament stands beside the greatest poems of the Greek Sophocles, who also occasionally shows ‘objectionable stories,’ but immediately also the terribly destructive effect of injustice, in order, as another great Greek (Aristotle) says, ‘to purify the spectator from these passions by fear and pity.’ “

As we all know, there is no accounting for taste.

Another Orthodox paper, “Unsere Kirche”, Evangelisches Gemeindeblatt in Breslau (June 2, 1935), even makes the Old Testament the promoter of Nordic spiritual life! It writes:

“The history of German intellectual life is an undreamed-of polyphonic testimony to the unique significance of the Old Testament. The common basis on which we place both is German intellectual life.

I could go on like this for pages to demonstrate: The Protestant Church, which does not abandon the Old Testament, does not prove itself to be a narrow-minded, Judaized assassin of our native kind before the judgment seat of Northern intellectual life, but it is in the best of company. Would not all attackers of the Old Testament first have to come to grips thoroughly with this fact?”

One could continue the series of such testimonies of unnaturalness and degeneration at will. Indeed, the substance remains Jewish, and where it is abandoned, everything falls, that is quite clear.

What is and was the whole struggle in the Protestant Church about, as it started with the turn of the national revolution? Only and only about the validity of the Jewish documents! Nothing else. The völkisch thought has eaten into the church, it must be eliminated by emphasizing the maintenance of the totality of the Jewish origin and the Jewish rootedness. In all this the terrible tragedy of German history is revealed. German people, with the best of intentions, without knowing it and without wanting it, march in foreign pay, march against their own people and rebel against the complete reorganization of the German nationhood. And their action is service to the highest religion! Can the confusion go any higher?


Roman Protestant Pilgrims: The Treason of Luther

*(Protestantische Rompilger: Der Verrat an Luther) By Alfred Rosenberg


The Doctrine of Inferiority (Excerpt of Chapter 3)


The great German rebirth took place in an invocation of all Germanic values. In the midst of a shameful self-abasement of the November revolutionaries, the new movement preached self-respect, pride in German nationality. In the midst of confessional and social disunity, National Socialism taught to understand the unity of the nation. In the midst of the despair of all the weak good people, the banner of a great hope was raised. Against dishonor, national honor was taught as the highest value. And against cowardice, the brave struggle for freedom, accompanied by innumerable sacrifices, appeared as the awakening of all those who had once fought for all that was noble and great in Germanism.

Without the exclamation of the values of honor and freedom, Germany would have perished in Bolshevism under the silence of the churches trembling before Marxism. But hardly had the first intoxication of joy over Germany’s rebirth faded away, when the now secured “church” came forward and - complained, because its values of original sin, humility and submission to the “revelation” were allegedly disregarded. For three years now the Germans have been stunned by the fact that their order of character values, which saved Germany, has been insulted in the name of Christianity, has been made out to be “heathen” in the name of Martin Luther.

Lured also by the “myth of the 20th century”, the “confessing church” has turned its hitherto often unknown interior outward and shouts its demand for the dogmatic declaration of the inferiority of Germanness to the whole world.
In times of peace, all issues are treated with a carefree nonchalance. In reality, the neighbor does not know his neighbor. Only when fate demands decisions do old acquaintances suddenly find themselves hostile to each other.

In times of upheaval, the deeper backgrounds of the individual come to light, and then it becomes apparent how strongly a thousand years of ecclesiastical discipline rest on the natural instinct; many a person is then astonished to discover that his old neighbor is basically a complete stranger. And this can be seen even today in the ecclesiastical sphere. Even those who know the devastation caused by the dogmatics of the Old Testament, for example, are astonished by statements of the church that often lack any understanding of the people from whom their leaders come. Yes, who condemn this understanding as pagan, idolatrous, as if they themselves were Jewish prophets of the “Old Covenant” on European soil. Some examples shall show how far this mental self-exposure has already progressed.

In a fierce polemic against the leader’s views on the harmful ropes of missionary work, Walter Braun declares the creation of the world is no longer pure: “What we have before us is a fallen creation.” The purity of the blood cannot save us from the “original state of sin”; the “Old Testament” is “indispensable” to us, the “marvel of God’s ways” is that he has made “just the Jewish people” his instrument. The highest Germanic people, however, belong “to a fallen humanity”, we all stand “in the community of guilt of sin”.

In a widely read paper, a contribution draws the clear consequence of these views. It says:
So bankruptcy. Incidentally, the “Reichsbote” (19. 1. 36) reported: “In Thule, the northernmost trading center of Greenland, as is only now becoming known, the last Greenlandic heath, a young hunter, was lusted at Pentecost.”

Congratulations.

“Is it not also very significant that in all the literature of the nations we nowhere find even a hint of the fact that the existence of the different nations is not á priori willed by God, but rather a curse? The world of nations is under the curse of God, who has confused the languages of men, who do not recognize God as their Lord, but wanted to ‘make a name’ for themselves, so that no one understands the other’s language. The Christian must see this curse; he must therefore know that he is also guilty of this curse (original sin!).”

We see the great guilt in the bastardization, but the opponents see the original sin in the people in general. The fronts are clear.

The “confessional” bishop Marahrens wrote a preface to the mentioned book of Walter Künneth; Künneth is considered today as the official answer of “the church” to my fought work. Künneth declares that the nation does not carry eternity in itself, claims officially in the church that “honor and freedom do not grow out of the soil of the racial soul.” The German “Faustian man” is the “unredeemed, transient man”. We are inescapably intertwined with sin, the Faustian fate does not deserve to be “marveled at” at all, because it is “a life of entanglement in guilt” that needs redemption.

Where does the German take the strength for loyalty and obedience in a later time of betrayal and bondage? “We know,” Künneth continues, “how many Germans at that time (i.e., 1918) lost their faith in Germany, in the Nordic soul. For the Christian, such mental collapse is impossible.”

One sees: this leader of the “Apologetic Center” has gone to school with the Jesuits! So the faith in Germany has been restored by the doctrine of sin of the church? Today, under the protection of the Reich, one dares to twist things in such a way. The incontrovertible truth is that the churches did not experience the “spiritual collapse” of the German people - because they were uninvolved spectators. They came alive again only after the victory of Germanism, when their failing dogmas were looked at with doubting eyes. And with raised forefinger they began - to make us realize our inferiority.
Beside Künneth a pastor Rudolf Homann in a thicker book, introduced by the president Koch, has taken special care about this Kamps. His whole work applies to the “swamp plant from the soil of the people’s religion”. In revealing some monstrosities of Jewish history, he interprets them as consequences of the principle of a national religion in general and makes no distinction between the Jews and the values of the Germanic being. For him, too, the “days of the Occident” are “numbered according to human judgment” (here the effort to take away our faith in ourselves works again).

According to Homann, it is “not our kind and our blood, not our I, nor our people,” but “the grace of God alone” that leads to a “real rebirth” (p. 193). And this grace, indissolubly assumed with the glorification of the Old Testament, he sees as standing in sharpest contrast to all that has ever been thought great and noble in Germany. After Homann has cast off Schiller from the high vantage point of Yahweh, he finally stoops to the significant determination “that the myth as the old-new doctrine of a species-own religion with its prophets Eckehart and Goethe, Kant and Schopenhauer, Lagarde and Nietzsche, Chamberlain and Wagner represents the permanent sin of the German man!” (S. 183).

With this a decisive word has fallen. All those whom the German people venerate as the greatest of its history, all of them with their striving and shaping mark the “permanent”, i.e. lasting symbols of the sin of the German humanity. The greatest Germans are thus in their noblest creations also the greatest sinners. I.e. still more clearly expressed: the theological narrowness feels so divorced from the spiritual source of German being that it is able to vent its felt inferiority only with the reproach of the permanent sinfulness of the all ingeniously superior.

When Homann in the same book calls the story of the first large grain usurer of the world history, Joseph in Egypt, “one of the most glorious monuments of the mercy and justice of God” and with other similar confessors puts Joseph himself as “the morally noblest figure of the Genesis”, then one realizes only what the so-called Old Testament has carried in mental decomposition into the German people. The pimp Abraham “a prophet” (p. 164), the Eckehart and Goethe permanent sin symbols of our existence!

But to fully understand the danger of this attitude, it is necessary to consider the following:

During the war, the Entente conducted its propaganda against Germany primarily with the help of the war guilt lie. Apart from the inciting effect in the neutral countries, they speculated on the well-known sense of objectivity and justice of the Germans themselves. It was said that if wide circles in Germany could be made to believe that the Reich government, and thus the German people themselves, were to blame for the outbreak of the World War, then the feeling of injustice would paralyze the forces of resistance. The objective Germans would no longer have the conviction to fight for a just cause, and the conditions for reparation would be given. One defends a cause with ultimate passion only if one considers it worthy of a sacrificial defense. And so, not only did traitors fight against the Reich government of 1914, but millions of harmless Germans had been robbed of a faith, which made them victims of the traitors.

What must be realized now is that the contemptuousness of the great ones of the German people by “confessing” pastors is much worse and more dangerous than the war guilt lie of the Entente. The latter had defamed a political leadership in the midst of a world war as an enemy of the German people, at worst tried to burden a generation with guilt, but Homann and comrades badly sully the most beautiful substance of Germanness, symbolized for centuries in the greatest of the nation. If it were really possible to convince the German people that their geniuses and their striving are nothing but “permanent sin,” then not only the belief in the deeds of one generation would be shaken, but also the belief in the value of the German creative powers in general. But this would not only demonize the great past, but also paralyze any soaring into a great future. And that is obviously the intention of these gentlemen! We shall no longer believe in our own value, shall no longer be allowed to venerate our greatest, but shall afflict ourselves with the mark of Cain of permanent sin, feel our best existence itself as a disgrace. That would then be the spiritual condition which would make us ripe for the “revelation” of Abraham and Isaac, Zephaniah, Habakkuk and Jeremiah, in order to “penitently” let the vengeance psalms from the mouth of the “court and cathedral preachers” come over us.

One might think that these omissions, equal to the Jesuit invectives, represent the depth. But the fame of Künneth and Homann is surpassed by others.

In his writing mentioned at the beginning, Pastor Peter Bockemühl writes:

“In essence, the myth has correctly recognized Christianity. He has recognized it as a faith which, however, has sin and grace, inferiority of man and vicarious dying of the Lamb of God as its content. He has noticed that this faith, however, is unbearable to the sense of self of the unbroken man who believes in the goodness and divinity of his blood” (p. 11).

And elsewhere:

“To an Amis brother who, as usual, said: ‘As long as I can still preach the gospel undisturbed . . . was answered: ‘If you can preach the gospel undisturbed, you are not preaching the gospel .... (!) Most certainly we are not to throw blocks of stone in man’s way, much less burden him, but woe to the church if its message is no longer experienced by the good, noble, natural man as an attack on his whole being!” (p. 19, blocking by me. A. R.).

With these words, first of all, the world record of self-sanctification has been set. And strange is the inner legality, which results from the once recognized cursedness of the body, of man in general. In former times the “saints” of Rome rolled in excrement and dust, congealed in dirt and ate vermin; today, in the sign of the awakened European, this is possible only in places, instead the preachers of original sin degrade themselves morally, openly proclaim as the essence of the Gospel to break the upright man, to make the noble ignoble, to degenerate the natural, in order to then praise the vaunted “grace” to a great army of broken existences. Which, of course, can only be conveyed through the priests [...].

From these fundamental views the official “evangelical” side then also drew the practical conclusion quite blatantly. Professor Sasse had written in the “Kirchliches Jahrbuch für 1932” (p. 65, 66) the following, which is necessary for all Germans to know:

“The NSDAP. was very fortunate that no theologian was involved in its founding. But this great luck turned out to be a misfortune in the case of Article 24. For this article makes any discussion with a church impossible. One can forgive National Socialism all its theological sins, this Article 24 excludes any discussion with the Church, Protestant and Catholic. Rosenberg’s “myth of the 20th century” with all its blasphemies and with its world- and religion-historical stylistic flowers, the whole theology of the swastika and the messianic leader cult are forgivable harmlessness compared to this article. Protestant theology can discuss all points of the party program with the National Socialists, even the Jewish question and the doctrine of race, it can perhaps recognize the whole rest of the program, but about this article not even a discussion is possible. It would have to demand the unconditional withdrawal of this article as a condition of a discussion. For the Protestant Church would have to begin a conversation about it with the open confession that its doctrine is a deliberate and permanent insult to the “morals and morality of the Germanic race” and that accordingly it has no claim to toleration in the Third Reich. Since the leadership of the party is mainly in Catholic hands, and since the Protestant party members, even in so far as they have enjoyed the normal theological education, generally have no clear conception of this, let it be said here that the Protestant doctrine of original sin - unlike the Catholic doctrine - does not leave open the possibility, that the Germanic or Nordic or any other race is by nature capable of fearing and loving God and of doing His will, but that the newborn child of noblest Germanic descent with the best racial characteristics, both spiritual and physical, is just as doomed to eternal damnation as the mixed blood of two decadent races which is heavily burdened by heredity. We have further to confess that the doctrine of the justification of the sinner sola gratia, sola fida, is the end of Germanic morality as it is the end of all human morality; and we take the liberty of asserting, which is again a grave insult to the Nordic race, that the Jews had crucified Jesus Christ for the sake of this doctrine, which overthrows all morality, in the name of the German people and of the Nordic race at the same time. We are of the opinion that not only the Jewish-materialistic, but also the German-idealistic spirit in and outside of us must be fought, as our confession does when it excludes the great German mysticism from the church as false doctrine. We are also of the opinion that a lasting recovery of the German people cannot take place on the basis of mysticism from the church as false doctrine. We are also of the opinion that a lasting recovery of the German people cannot take place on the basis of any ethical proposition, not even on the basis of the proposition recognized by us: ‘Common good comes before self-interest’.

Finally, we deny that a party can represent the point of view of Christianity, further that there is a positive Christianity which one can represent ‘without binding oneself to a certain confession’. We further declare that we have no great interest in what is here called ‘Christianity’, but that we are all interested in Christ the Lord present in Word and Sacrament, in His Gospel and in His Church. We do not want to know whether the party is in favor of Christianity, but we want to know whether or not, even in the Third Reich, the Church will be allowed to proclaim the Gospel freely and unhindered, whether or not, in other words, we will be allowed to continue our insults to Germanic or Germanistic morals unhindered, as we intend to do with God’s help, or whether restrictions will be imposed on us - for example, that we will no longer be allowed to do it in school - and who has the right to impose the restrictions on us.”

It is quite clear here that this struggle is no longer an attack against my personal religious-philosophical convictions, but a unified attempt to decompose the spiritual-emotional foundations of the National Socialist world of thought and the German rebirth.

The National Socialist world view rests uncompromisingly on the self-respect of the German people, on the natural values perceived as noble; we are firmly convinced that the German people are not hereditarily sinful, but hereditarily noble. If we had not had this conviction, if this belief had not meant living life from the Führer down to the smallest SA. man, Germany would never have been able to make those sacrifices, never would we have been able to wrestle Marxism to the ground.

The “religious” attempts to present the becoming of a nation as such not as an order of God, but as the great fall of mankind, are just as dangerous as the preaching of racial emasculation, i.e. of racial chaos by Bolshevism.

Even more dangerous, because this attempt wants to poison the roots of the human being at all, i.e. excludes a hope from recovery in principle. Bolshevism stands in the sign of an openly anti-people movement, aims with its teachings at a future that does not yet exist, can therefore still be rejected, overcome, even in terms of faith. The teachings of the “confessionally faithful” religious atavists, however, want to rob us not only of the poisoning of the original source of all creative powers, but also of the high values that are still active in the present by using terms like “idolatry of the people,” “Babylonian tower-building,” “pagan godlessness.

I hope that these lines of a person who had the honor to be active in the work of National Socialism since the first days of the German struggle for freedom may have made some Germans concerned about Luther and Protestantism think. Not everyone is aware of what he is doing with one, but all decisive affirmation. The direction once taken leads just to a goal lying from this direction. In times of clear spiritual confrontation, the consequences become apparent.

None of us is an iconoclast, no one thinks of wanting to eradicate traditional emotional values. Christianity, too, has already been ennobled by the fact that Germanic people believed in its teachings. Whoever drives through the villages of Germany with an alert awareness of history first sees the church tower rising up as a centuries-old sign of a community spirit that once prevailed. Next to the church is the cemetery, in the earth of which rest the families of the farmers of this village. The reverence for these ancestors is combined with the respect for the building that last saw their coffins. In the chests of the houses lies the old Luther Bible. The names of the old owners are inscribed in it; the present generation reads it with the consciousness that the eyes of the ancients rested faithfully on the same leaves. No responsible German will want to touch these beautiful feelings impiously, but one thing our time of struggle calls out to all preservers of venerable traditions: The Luther Bible, which today is tradition, it was after all once - revolution! The man who wrote it announced to a 1000 years old tradition a fight that shook the whole world. A fight, which the attacked church felt as approaching the end of the world, as the end of all religion. And the forefathers of those who today venerate Luther’s Bible, they joined the ranks of the Protestant uprising out of inner necessity, i.e. they felt their attitude as ‘duty’ towards their time and had the courage - to be themselves! And the consciousness of an inner inability to be different is what moves the generation of our time, too. Former revolution became strengthening tradition, tradition became ossification, this ossification has now become hostility to life. And our time demands again - to be ourselves. It demands, with all honoring of the traditions from the time of the fathers, that honoring of the traditions from the time of the fathers, that these old teachings do not contradict the preservation of our life or even oppose this life with allegedly eternal dogmas and “revelations” in a hostile and condemning way. The law of every truly great epoch is also alive in us; we have so far proved ourselves worthy of it, we will continue to fight worthy of it.


Voices of our Ancestor (1935)

By Wulf Sorenson [Attributed to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler]


There they hang on the wall, one hundred ninety-six little plaques in oval, gilded frames. And there are still far fewer than there ought to have been. All the frames in the upper rows show only a name with a couple of dates on white paper.
But in the lower rows they become alive. The portraits begin about the time of the Thirty Years War. They are fine miniatures, carefully painted with a pointed brush on ivory, which has long since yellowed.

One cannot but think of the difficulty the artist must have had in capturing those stern, proud features with his soft, marten-hair brush. All of the white ruffled collars, the lace, the puffed sleeves and on the “gentlemen”, the jabots have a frivolous effect on these portraits dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century. “Ladies”? “Gentlemen”? No, indeed! In spite of the velvet and silk there is not a “lady” nor a “gentleman” among them. They are all women and men – and that says far more than the “gentleman” of today.

For they, there on the wall, living again in their portraits – were free! This is what we have come to, that we must banish our ancestors to pictures or vital statistics on the wall in order to give them a faint presence in our dim memories. Ancestors? People today do not even know the birth dates and death dates of their own parents. Of course, they are written down somewhere. It is a wonder if one knows even a little about his grandfather, not to mention his great-grandfather.

As for great-great-grandfather, one does not think about him at all, as if he had never existed. Earlier – much earlier – things were different. That was before words had become but mere merchandise, used to concoct lies, when a man still lived by his word; then it was not necessary to write down and record one’s ancestors. That was a time when the living flow of blood from son to father, from father to grandfather and great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather still had not been choked off. It had not yet sunk, as it has today, so deep beneath all of the alien values within mind and soul, that most of us can no longer hear its rustle, even in the stillest hour. Once the whole past dwelt in the hearts of the living. And from this past the present and the future grew upward like the strong limbs of a healthy tree. And today? They laugh at the fables of our Folk, they do not even understand them. Nevertheless, that which remains with us from the “Once upon a time” of our fables, serves as a reminder, a finger showing us the way back into the millennia of our great past.

You believe that we have no use for what is past and gone? Nonsense! The man in whose breast the “Once upon a time” of his race is no longer awake – has no future which truly belongs to him. How timely would be the appearance of a man who would teach us again the meaning of our fables, and show us that our struggle for the freedom of the earth which has borne us was, also, the struggle of our ancestors a hundred and a thousand years ago!

Did you know that when you read about Snow White and the Wicked Queen who came over the mountains, that those mountains she had to cross each time she came to kill Snow White were the Alps, and that the Queen came from Rome, the deadly enemy of everything Nordic? Think about the Queen’s Daily query: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” When you think of this saying think about Rome, which could not rest until everything Nordic, bright and joyful was exterminated, and only darkness remained – dark like the Wicked queen in the fairy tale, so that she could be the fairest in all the land, after everything white was dead.

That which came over the southern mountains to us tolerated no peers. Everything had to kneel before it and kiss its feet. When the queen came over the Alps the first time, dressed as a peddler from a distant land, she offered Snow White a bewitched corset – bewitched because it was alien. Then she pulled the laces so tight that Snow White fainted and fell. The emissaries of Rome bound the Nordic spirit in the suffocating bonds of alien concepts and deceitful words.
But the queen’s ruinous plan did not succeed. The dwarves – the good spirits of the Folk – came and freed Snow White. The Frisians crushed the Roman emissaries who tried to break the strength of our people with their doctrines of misery and servitude. For nearly a thousand years the Nordic tribes struggled against the poison from Sinai, which gradually fouled their blood.

And when the vain queen again asked her mirror, the answer was: “... but Snow White, over the seven mountains with the seven dwarves is a thousand times fairer than you.” Driven by her restless jealousy, the queen came over the snowy wall of the Alps with a new deception. She offered Snow White a magnificent glittering Comb, the most exotic thing she had ever seen. The “Holy Roman Empire” diverted the Nordic will-of-action away from its natural course; one after another, Nordic leaders have gone off to Rome and the consequence has been turmoil and Roman law in our land, which has enchained our Nordic pride. It began with Karl, the eternally cursed Frank, murderer of Saxons. From Aller to Verdun, the blood of the most noble or our people is on his hands. In recognition for his deeds, the Roman priests bestowed upon Karl the title of “The Great.”
Silent forever are the lips of our Folk who named this wretched Frank, “Karl the Saxon slayer”!
Despite this, the Nordic spirit remained unbroken; the Wicked queen still was not the fairest in the land. And so, for a third visit she came and presented Snow White with a rosy-cheeked, but poisoned apple. The first bite stuck in Snow White’s throat and caused her to faint as if dead. This apple symbolized the rejection of our own nature, the abandonment of tribal ways. “As if dead,” the fairy tale says, acknowledges the enormous strength which slumbers in our people, recognizing that one day will come the great hour, when that strength will mightily throw off the chains of Sinai. Has it yet come, this long-awaited hour?
“Snow White” is but one of the hundreds and hundreds of age-old Nordic tales which remind us, with as many different images, of the difficulties, the oppression and the deep wisdom of our ancestors.

And as Rome cracked its whip over our land, mercilessly annihilating every genuine manifestation of our own nature, our wise forebears wove into these tales, using colourful symbols and allegory, a legacy of our heritage. But Rome’s influence extended over our tales and sagas, falsifying them, giving them new meaning and made advantageous to Roman domination. Thus, it was that our people no longer could understand the voice of our ancestors, that we went astray these many centuries, becoming more and more alienated from our own ways and enslaved to Rome, and thus to Judah. Only he who bears his own soul, living and burning in his breast, is an individual – a master.

And he who abandons his own kind is a slave. The key to freedom lies within us! Now we must hearken again to the voice of our ancestors and protect our essence from alien influences, protect that which wants to grow out of our own souls. Stronger than any army is the man who wields the power which resides within him!
Reflectively, I look over the long rows of my ancestors. The last members reach so far back that hardly more than a name and a date on a sheet of paper remain. Yet their voices come alive in my blood, because their blood is my blood.

I think of how the French-speaking monks came from Switzerland to convert our forefathers, the Goths and the Vandals. Even their deadly enemies, the Romans said: “Where the Goths are, there virtue rules. And where the Vandals are, there even the Romans become chaste.”
And to such men the commandments from Sinai were offered as guiding lights for their lives! Can one understand why these men laughed when they heard those commandments, which demanded that they not commit acts they never would have dreamed of committing?

Can one understand that they raised their swords in wrath when the monks told them that they were “born in sin” – these best of the Goths, whose very name means “The Good Ones”?

Cannot one understand the unspeakable contempt with which these noble men regarded those who promised them a reward in heaven for abstaining from doing things which, according to their own nature, were beneath the dignity even of animals?

To such men the commandments were brought; men infinitely superior in human dignity and morality than the monks who brought them. For countless generations they had lived far above the moral plateau on which the commandments from Sinai then operated. Thousands of years before the time of the “Christ” the monks claimed to represent, our ancestors had sown the seeds of culture and civilization throughout the world on their fruitful voyages and wanderings.

When I contemplate the small portraits and see in their firmly composed faces the expressions of my ancestors, which compel no more notice of these times, it seems as if we have descended from a high, high ladder – a ladder which we must yet again climb. Nowadays, it is seldom that we can even appear to be like they were. They were on intimate terms with Allfather and did not need to call on halo-wearing intermediaries when they wished to speak to him. And even then, they did not know how to beg; they were too strong, too proud and too healthy for supplication.

Blessings prayed for are not true blessings! They wanted nothing of gifts; either they already had everything they wanted or, if they lacked something, they got it for themselves. Their creed was a saying as brief as a wink and as clear and deep as a mountain stream: “DO RIGHT AND FEAR NO ONE!”

As for their religion, there was no necessity to put it into words, which suited a people who were naturally frugal with their words anyway. They carried their spiritual consciousness deep within their souls; it served them like a compass needle which always steers a ship on its proper course.

Was that not a better religion than one which must be written down in a thick book, lest it be forgotten – and which one cannot properly understand until a priest comes and interprets what is written there? And even then, an act of faith is required to believe that this intricate interpretation is correct.

In their day, faith grew from the blood and it was knowledge. Today it must be learned, for it is an alien faith, unable to strike roots in our blood. It is dogma and doctrine which none can know and which most of us silently renounce, because it is contrary to nature and reason. Tell me – have we become better since taking on this new religion? A great wordless sorrow resides in the breast of most of us, a boundless sense of homelessness, because the way of our ancestors lives on eternally in our Nordic blood like a dream.

We want, once again, to be free of sin – like our ancestors were. We are tired of being humble and small and weak and all the other things demanded of us by a god who despises his own creations and looks on the world as a den of corruption. We want to be proud again, and great and strong, and to do things for ourselves!

How different are those faces there on the wall from the faces of today! Only if one looks very closely does one still find a trace of that clarity of the features in the present generation.

What lived so dominantly in our ancestors that it showed in their faces has disappeared back into our blood to dream. That is why faces so often deceive us today. Many a person whose hair colour and eye colour come from the south, still have the greatest part of their blood from Nordic fathers. And many who appear forgotten by the last two thousand years bear their bright hair and grey or blue eyes only as a deceptive mask, for their blood bears no trace of their fathers from the Northland. The one has only the appearance of the alien and retains his Nordic blood. The other has taken the blood of the alien and retains his Nordic face as an illusory mask. Which is better?

Today, one must look into a person’s eyes and see whether or not they are still firm, shining and keen.

The soul is illuminated through the eyes and it does not deceive. There were many a rebel among those there on the wall, and men who left home; many had refused to bend to those with power. They could not go crooked, these fellows. They preferred poverty abroad over submission at home. But they did not stay poor for long. Those who went abroad followed the restless stream of their blood, which gave them no rest until they had found themselves; rejecting that which was foreign to them and flowing into the bloodstream of their fathers, and so became conscious links in the chain of ancestors, closing the great kindred circle.
When one of these came home again – and they all came home – he had become a calm, complete man. It is hard to describe this quality of completeness. If others are babbling in confusion, and such a man utters softly only a couple of words, then all the others will understand and become quiet and attentive. And such a man does not ask questions; others ask him! Look at their eyes; just as they mastered life, so they stood on intimate terms with death.

To them death was life’s trusted companion. Those same eyes show up among them even in the most recent generations. There is one of them; Erik was his name and he fell at Kemmel. The steel helmet on his head seems to be a part of him. His mouth is a hard, straight line. But in his twenty-year-old eyes twinkles a silent laugh. And with this laugh, foreign to his mouth, and a wink, saluting with his fist against his breast, beckoning as he steps past, Erik greeted death. I cannot imagine this Erik, with bent knee and plaintive voice, begging some god up in the clouds for mercy and help.

This is the way I picture him: leaping up from a crouch and with a fierce shout, plunging his great sword into a charging enemy – then, still in the same leap, being struck by an arrow and collapsing back to the ground with his final thought, “I gave my best for Germany!”

Erik seized the bitter cup with a proud laugh and drank it down in a single draught without a grimace. And he likely rapped the cup with a fingernail, so that all could hear it was empty.
He did not pray, “Father, let this cup pass from me.” He reached out and seized it for it himself, for he knew... everything necessary is good! Beneath Erik’s portrait is his motto, written in his own firm, clear hand: “Let a man be noble, benevolent, loyal and good.” Does that not say far more than those commandments Moses had issued to the depraved rabble in the desert, in order to make that horde grasp the rudiments of humanity?

The Commandments were appropriate for that Hebraic bunch. Even the Egyptians had driven them out of their lands. Even as slaves the Hebrews were too wicked and infected Egyptian life. The Hebrews – the chosen people of god! It is ludicrous that anyone take it seriously. A commandment presupposes a transgression. One can recognize from the mere necessity for such commandments (which demand nothing more than the barest behaviour required to claim the designation “human beings”) to what kind of creatures they had been given, creatures truly entitled to claim no more than a resemblance to human beings.

To the men of the North these commandments were a slander, an unforgivable insult to their sacred blood.

So, there rose out of the burning indignation of the Nordic blood a Wittekind[1], who returned again and again to lead his people into battle against the doctrines from Sinai. For these teachings are a deadly poison to our blood. You ask – when will Wittekind return no more? Hearken: Wittekind will die only with the last Northman! So long as a single Aryan lives, Wittekind is alive and the world is not safe from him!

Seventy million Aryans on this glorious earth are more than enough for anything that comes from Sinai. The last remnant who are still pure will still be poised when swords resound on shields and the bugles sound for the last, great battle of this wretched millennium.

He who slumbers still, whose blood is dull and sour, no glory for him! He will be thoughtlessly trampled underfoot by the valiant who rush into battle down every street of Aryan homelands.
An ancient custom among our kind has remained alive even to the present day in most parts of our Northland. There was a time when it seemed that this practice, handed down to us from our forefathers, would die out. But it has been revived – and the time is at hand when all our great and beautiful people will again recognize the significance of this custom and be made sound by it.

Our ancestors gave to each child a powerful name, full of joy and vital energy. Actually, they only lent him this name. And it became a shining hope for the child, far ahead of him on his life’s course.

The child bore this name in his soul like his most precious treasure, for it was to him both a goal and a sacred responsibility.

This name strengthened the child’s soul as he developed into a conscious, mature individual.
When the child had become a youth, the elders of the kindred gathered for a celebration, at which they decided whether or not the developed character of the young man suited the name which had been given to him. If the man and the name were found to be in harmony, then his name was given to him for life. Otherwise, the young man chose a suitable name for himself one which characterized his nature. So, it came to be that our ancestors were like their names and their names like them. And so, their name carried weight like a rune-carved sword, like their word and a handshake, like yea and nay.

In Christian times our ancestors were compelled by the new law from abroad to adopt still another name; it was written down in the church register, primarily for the benefit of the census taker. The authorities were obliged to write the living heathen name of a man beside his characterless Christian name in his register, lest it become nothing but a list of phantoms.
In those times the most upright men and the proudest women sprung forth from our race.
I step closer to the rows of pictures and read the names. The oldest are: Helge, Fromund, Meinrad, Markward, Ran, Waltari, Eigel, Asmus, Bjoern. Peculiar names, are they not? They are names born from the great language of our people. There is nothing foreign in them, no spurious sound. They ring true to the ear. These names taste of the salty sea, of the heavy, fruitful earth, of air and sunshine – and of the homeland. Do you notice that?

A few will notice – but all too few. Their own language has become foreign to them and has nothing more to say to them. After these first rows our ancestors began to name their sons Gottlieb, Christian, Farchgott, Leberecht, Christoph (which mean: God-lover, Christ-worshipper, God-fearer, Righteous-liver, Christ-carrier)... Still later came the names Paulus, Johannes, Petrus, Christophorus, Korbinianus, Stephanus, Karolus. By those times our forefathers had no other names. Do you feel how something has been broken in these men, how they have become alienated from their own nature? Do you feel how steeply the ladder descends?

A destiny is locked up in the transformation of these names. It is not the destiny of an individual or of a clan, but of a whole people – our Folk. But then something strange happened. Those who had been named Karolus and Paulus by their fathers suddenly regarded these names as annoying, alien, unsuitable, ridiculous. And now comes the generation that went into the Great War. The names with little iron crosses behind the dates on which they fell – a mere 20 or even fewer years from their birth dates, read: Jochen, Dieter, Asmus, Erwin, Walter. Roland, Georg... These are the names we still have today.

And what are the names of our youngest, those who carry their names into the third millennium after the time of Nordic self-forgiveness? Gerhardt, Hartmut, Deitrich, Ingo, Dagwin, Guenther, Hellmut, Gernot, Dagmar, Ingeborg, Helga... Has the Great War done this? The names tell the story.

A few men wear priestly garments. But the painter has given us a clue. And whoever is able to find this clue can see how little or how much the strong heart of the man is darkened by the shadow of the black robes he wears.
The paintings are all bust portraits, nevertheless in one of them the artist shows a hand. It is a strong, sinewy hand, of the sort which could steer a ship through a storm.

The black book in his hand looks like a frivolous toy. Such a hand does not bless an enemy; it crushes him. His name is Frith. That is a strange name for a priest. “Frith” means “peace robber.” Another portrait shows a man with grey, windswept hair. He has a hawkish nose and in his eyes one perceives unlimited vision. Did Ran really bow his head in remorse, repentance and humility? Did he really despise the world and place his confidence in a power other than his own?

I know why fate ordained that these men must wear the black robes; had it not been for them, there would be far fewer heathens in the North today; without them there would be many more who would have exchanged their own image of God for an alien one and would have grown weary of their own strength and the world; and many more would have been seduced by the alien doctrine into becoming its slaves and forgetting their own blood.

They are true saints, for they have preserved their healthy inner selves. despite the priests cassocks. They fought the enemy with his own weapon. People called them “HEATHENS”. A few were so proud of this title that they incorporated it into their names, as one might don a precious jewel. For the heathen is one who remains true to himself and his kind, whose blood flows pure in his veins. And this pure blood regards the world with neither the hateful sneer of Sinai or the weak knees of Nazareth. It bears divinity, pure, clear and beautiful in its red stream, so long as the race endures. None of these men has ever sought God. One does not seek that which dwells in one’s own soul.
None of these men has ever been torn with doubt about the divine. Only he who betrays the divinity in himself and offers his soul to an alien god knows such doubt. Doubt is eternal where there is the eternal alien, and thereby the eternal unknown.

The Christian is an eternal doubter.
Can any man be loyal, who is disloyal to himself? Can any man be great, who is consumed with a longing to return to dust? Can any man be strong, who loves weakness? Can any man be proud, who wanders along in humility? Can any man be pure, who regards himself born in sin? Can any man be happy in this world, who despises the world? And can any man bear the Creator in his soul, who despises divine Creation?

What a strange god you Christians have, who created you upright, but who commands you to crawl to him on your knees!

We heathens do not beg to our Creator; it would be an insult to the divinity in our souls.

Nor do we heathens come to the Creator to complain. We do not proclaim our failures to the world and least of all not to the Creator. We seek to overcome our faults and to grow!

Our way is not complaining, but anger – and first of all anger against ourselves. Nor do we repent, we heathens, because we cannot be cowardly; we have the courage to stand by our deeds.
Why have you Christians made the name “Heathen” an insult? You should not peddle your pettiness in the streets, for it permits people to see that the love you are commanded to display is bound up with hate, and that the forgiveness your religion requires of you is burdened with your desire for vengeance. Only the envious stoop to insults. We see your envy and are ashamed for you, since many of you are still brothers of our blood.

There was a time when it was a disgrace to be a Christian. But then you began to conquer the masses and so you were able to turn the tables and make virtue a disgrace. Then you labelled us the “strange” ones and called us heathens. We have remained “strange”, despite your insults. We will never be a mass or a herd. Do you know that there are, also, many among you who are “strange” as we are? Why do you not throw away the beggar’s rags which cover the noble garments of your manhood?

Are you ashamed to be “strange”? Afraid to be called heathens? When you Christians have finished burying your god in the sky – come to us; we heathens will again show you the Creator. And do not think we have settled accounts with you Christians. We weigh silently – but we do not weigh with false weights.

We do not deceive the God in us, since we do not deceive ourselves. And as we have weighed justly, so have we calculated, so we would be reckoned with justly by God for our souls. You see, we do not repent, since we have nothing to repent. Our value lacks nothing. We retained and preserved our whole worth. And now you weigh! And when you have weighed. calculated and evaluated, ask your envious spirit how much you have lost. He who has lost nothing of his worth is without envy – and without hatred for us heathens.

The petty man hates whatever is superior to him, while the great man admires it. The petty man pities whatever is beneath him, while the great man scorns it, if it merits his scorn, or he helps it up. There in his cradle lies my son, reaching, reaching gleefully toward his ancestors’ portraits on the wall.

This tiny, laughing bundle of life is the next step of the future of my race. I was the last step. He is the next. And behind me I see the path of my race passing back through the distant millennia until it is dimmed by the mist of time – for the generations which came before the earliest on the wall are, also, real. My race’s entire path through time I do not know – but, I do know that I live and that I am only a link in the chain in which no link must fail, so long as my people live. Otherwise, I never would have been. For generations a parchment-bound book has been passed down through our family. I open it and inscribe a yellowed page for my son: “Your life is not of this day and not of tomorrow. It is of the thousand years which came before you and the thousand years to come after you. During the thousand years before you, your blood was purely preserved, so that you would be who you are. Now you must preserve your blood, so that all of the generations of the next thousand years will honour you and thank you.”

That is the meaning of life, that divinity awakens in the blood. But only in pure blood does it live!
Of whom have I spoken? Of my ancestors? They are only a symbol of the Folk of which I am a living part.

To whom have I spoken? To my son? My son is only a part of my Folk. The wisdom of a thousand generations slumbers in you. Waken it and you have found the key which will open the doors of your truest aspirations. Only he who esteems himself is worthy of being a man.
Only he is a man who bears the living past and future in himself, for only he is able to stand above the present hour. And only he who is master of the present is successful; he alone is fulfilled. As only in fulfilment is divinity. Thus, sayeth the Voice of our Ancestors…

[1] Wittekind was Saxon Chief who lead resistance against Charlemagne, King of the Holy Roman Empire, who forced Christianity on the German people. Wittekind was symbolic of Northern Paganism and all out resistance against domination.

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Pub: 19 Jul 2021 00:50 UTC
Edit: 25 Sep 2022 01:46 UTC
Views: 453