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I don't agree that Lee is trolling. I think he is mistaken in putting any trust in Hitler's religious propaganda — it was certainly to his benefit to curry fav

I don't agree that Lee is trolling. I think he is mistaken in putting any trust in Hitler's religious propaganda — it was certainly to his benefit to curry favor with Christians — but there's no trolling in quoting the man himself. If you look at the changes Adolf Hitler made in the churches of Germany, it becomes clear that his idea of good religion, or at least useful religion, was far removed from any previously-practiced Christianity, his opinion notwithstanding.

leephillips 8y ago
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I assumed that steve19 probably doesn't understand what "trolling" means, but didn't think it would be useful to debate it. I think we need to make a distinction between Hitler's personal religion, which although he was raised a Christian, was some crazy amalgam that he mixed up himself, and the faith of essentially every SS member and ordinary German citizen who closed their eyes to the brutality visited upon the Jewish minority: they were all Christians. Hitler may not have remained, personally, a Christian, but the Holocaust was only possible because of the way that Christians were trained to think about Jews. In my own lifetime, in the United States, I've heard Christians seethe with hatred against the "Christ killers"; imagine 1930s Germany. Martin Luther, the founder of German protestantism, wrote obsessively about how vile and filthy the Jews were, that their synagogues should be burned, their property seized, and even that they should be slaughtered. The Holocaust was a systematic, literal prosecution of Luther's program for the Jews. Hitler and the top Nazi officials frequently quoted Luther, and Hitler admired him in his autobiography. If the Nazi movement and the Holocaust were not Christian, why were the Jews, then, in particular, the targets?

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I don't agree that Lee is trolling. I think he is mistaken in putting any trust in Hitler's religious propaganda — it was certainly to his benefit to curry fav

by JasonFruit 8y ago

leephillips 8y ago
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I assumed that steve19 probably doesn't understand what "trolling" means, but didn't think it would be useful to debate it. I think we need to make a distinction between Hitler's personal religion, which although he was raised a Christian, was some crazy amalgam that he mixed up himself, and the faith of essentially every SS member and ordinary German citizen who closed their eyes to the brutality visited upon the Jewish minority: they were all Christians. Hitler may not have remained, personally, a Christian, but the Holocaust was only possible because of the way that Christians were trained to think about Jews. In my own lifetime, in the United States, I've heard Christians seethe with hatred against the "Christ killers"; imagine 1930s Germany. Martin Luther, the founder of German protestantism, wrote obsessively about how vile and filthy the Jews were, that their synagogues should be burned, their property seized, and even that they should be slaughtered. The Holocaust was a systematic, literal prosecution of Luther's program for the Jews. Hitler and the top Nazi officials frequently quoted Luther, and Hitler admired him in his autobiography. If the Nazi movement and the Holocaust were not Christian, why were the Jews, then, in particular, the targets?