I realize it is pointless to discuss a letter printed under the "Reader's Forum," but Walter Noblitt's assertions are so "way out there" that it induced me to take the time to do so.

It is with a great deal of wonder how someone can assert that Hitler wished to build something called a "Atheist Pagan Europe" (if one is atheist (lacks belief in all of the Gods), one is generally incapable of being a Pagan (reveres Goddesses and/or Gods). Just how Mister Boblitt thinks Hitler could have done such a thing by his, Hitler's, appealing to Jesus as God is a mystery; just how Hitler was to convince the hundreds of millions of Christians in Europe to become an "atheist Pagan" is an even greater mystery.

Was Hitler a Christian? Yes and no. It depends one one's definition of "Christian." He certainly embraced Aryan mythology, but he mixed it with Christian mythology, and came up with his own brand of Christianity. If one claims that Hitler only used the words, phrases, and language of Christianity for political reasons, one is left to wonder how anyone other than a God, let alone the claimant, knows? Does Marion "Pat" Robertson also merely use Christianity as a political tool? How about Jerry Falwell? If one says "No, they are sincere," how can one then claim that Hitler was not also sincere?

One can look at what Hitler had to say on the subject, and judge for oneself. Hitler denies his use of Christianity as merely a political ploy:

"Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them. These insolent liars, it is true, proclaim their creed in a stentorian voice to the whole world for other sinners to hear; but their intention is not, if necessary, to die for it, but to live better. For a single political swindle, provided it brings in enough, they are willing to sell the heart of a whole religion; for ten parliamentary mandates they would ally themselves with the Marxistic enemies of all religions -- and for a minister's chair they would even enter into a marriage with the devil, unless the devil were deterred by a remnant of decency." -- Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, trans. Ralph Mannheim

Sounds a lot like the Christian Coalition.

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"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: _by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord._ [orig. ital.] _Mein Kampf_, trans. Ralph Mannheimo

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"The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated.

"For God's will gave men their form, their essence, and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will. Therefore, let every man be active, each in his own denomination if you please, and let every man take it as his first and most sacred duty to oppose anyone who in his activity by word or deed steps outside the confines of his religious community and tries to butt into the other."

Adolf Hitler, from Mein Kampf, translation by Ralph Mannheim.

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"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

"In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.

"Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

"As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice...

"And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.

"When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited."

Adolph Hitler, in a speech delivered April 12, 1922 Published in "My New Order" Quoted in "Freethought Today" April 1990

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"The decision taken, the Fuehrer made it known to those entrusted with the Final Solution that the killings should be done as humanely as possible. This was in line with his conviction that he was observing God's injunction to cleanse the world of vermin. Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy ("I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"), he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God - so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty."

from _Adolph Hitler_, by John Toland, copyright Doubleday Books 1976 pg 703.

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One can also examine the German culture at the time that gave rise to Nazism and fueled the ovens. After all, Hitler did nothing that Popes before him had already done.

For century after century after century, the Christian church had designated the people to be despised: the religious believers called Jews the "Christ killers," the "enemies of God." All the religious massacres of 900 years--- by Crusaders pursuing infidels, by inquisitors hunting backsliders, by superstitious mobs fearing tales of well-poisoning--- branded Jews as accursed. When popes ordered Jews to wear badges and live in ghettos--- or when they were expelled entirely--- it told the populace that these pariahs were unfit to live among decent folk. Passion plays depicting Jews as cruel mockers of Christ, and cathedral paintings of the evil non-Christians, fanned hatred of those the church called "the perfidious Jews."

Thus, when Adolf Hitler needed a scapegoat group to rally the discontented majority to his cause and catapult himself to power, natural victims clearly marked by the church were at his disposal. The Christian public, not only in Germany but also throughout Europe, was predisposed to receive the Nazi message of Jew-hatred.

That is from James A. Haught's "Holly Horrors," pg. 157-158. Also from that book we read:

"The Holocaust was, of course, the bitter fruit of long centuries of Christian teaching about the Jewish people." (Dr. Franklin Littell, Temple University.)

As well as

". . . centuries of Christian hostility to Jews prepared the way for the Holocaust. The Nazis are inconcievable apart from this Christian tradition. Hitler's pongrom, for all its distinctiveness, is the zenith of a long Christian heritage of teaching and practive against Jews." (Theologian Clark Williamson, Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis.)

And

"The isolation of Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books, and finally the burning of the people--- Hitler learned it all from the Church. However, the Church burned Jewish women and children alive, while Hitler granted them a quicker death, choking them first with gas." "The clergymen don't tell you whom to kill; they just tell you whom to hate." (Dr. Dagobert Runes, Historian, child of a Holocaust victim.)

After the truth of what Nazi Germany had done was disclosed, some 15 years after the events, Pope John XXIII was agast at what had been done to the Jews in the name of God and Jesus. He wrote a prayer and addressed it to the Christian world:

"The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews."

While his heart was in the right place, surely it is not his god's place to forgive Christians and Christianity, but the place of the victims (Jews, the insane, the elderly, Gypsies, homosexuals, Russians, Poles, and Allied Forces) to do so.

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David Michael Rice
The world's second biggest glutton! (Next to Godzilla)