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

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?