PrintSeptember 13, 2008
Bruce Walker's The Swastika against the Cross
The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity
by Bruce Walker.
The Swastika against the Cross is an important new book. Important because the work uncovers so much hidden history and illuminates how that history may parallel modern societal trends.
Many volumes have been written describing the personalities, the machinery, this battlefield and that battle field, strategies of warfare, campaigns and logistics but the philosophical underpinnings and the social dynamics that resulted in the madness leading up to World War II seem oddly obscure. The commonly held perception of defeated and humiliated Germany after the First World War as explanation for the rise of Nazism and the seemingly instantaneous mass insanity that overtook that country in the 1930s has largely been assumed but always seemed inadequate reasoning. There must be significant philosophical underpinning to a transition to horror of this magnitude, and that transition could not have been instantaneous. Bruce Walker's latest book is by this writer's estimation the most succinct and plausible analysis of this curious and largely unexamined phenomenon.
by Bruce Walker.
The Swastika against the Cross is an important new book. Important because the work uncovers so much hidden history and illuminates how that history may parallel modern societal trends.
Many volumes have been written describing the personalities, the machinery, this battlefield and that battle field, strategies of warfare, campaigns and logistics but the philosophical underpinnings and the social dynamics that resulted in the madness leading up to World War II seem oddly obscure. The commonly held perception of defeated and humiliated Germany after the First World War as explanation for the rise of Nazism and the seemingly instantaneous mass insanity that overtook that country in the 1930s has largely been assumed but always seemed inadequate reasoning. There must be significant philosophical underpinning to a transition to horror of this magnitude, and that transition could not have been instantaneous. Bruce Walker's latest book is by this writer's estimation the most succinct and plausible analysis of this curious and largely unexamined phenomenon.
Historians have almost entirely obscured and denied the Nazi war on Christianity. Germany was considered an historically "Christian" nation, thus it has been implied that the Nazi leadership was Christian. Hitler spoke frequently of "God" and the "Almighty" and he is seen in numerous photographs to be in houses of worship. His early familial relationship with the Catholic Church in Austria is well documented. If you check today on the websites of many militant atheists you will find them often citing religious quotation of Hitler to substantiate that he was a Christian, animated by Christian teaching, and by extrapolation the basis for his hideous ways.
Nazis endeavored mightily to perpetrate the lie of friendly connection between Nazism and Christianity, and those who harbor a hatred of the Christian faith ignore that Hitler and the Nazis were defined by their dishonesty. This book is the most important examination of the reality of the fictions that have been left unexamined. This book explains how in fact, Christianity was the single German societal force that the Nazis could not crush into submission, though they tried mightily, and how church leaders and their flocks comprised the only, nearly singular force in opposition to the evil of racial hatred during the rise of the Nazi movement.
Above all, the scholarship of this book is fascinating. References for this work are many books written in the 1930s, during the period leading up to the Second World War. The authors of these source materials came from many varied backgrounds, political viewpoints, religions, and nationalities and of course, had no idea that as they wrote that a horrific war and the extermination of millions of Jews and many Christians was just over the horizon. Many authors were Nazis themselves. All agreed, that the Nazis were at war with Christians.
Walker explains in context of the abandonment of Christianity how Weimar Germany was a society in moral free-fall. Millions of people officially renounced their Christianity. Rampant premarital sex among high school students and the common place occurrence of abortion, proliferation of pornography, general embracing of hedonism, with the attendant degradation of art and the emergence of atonal music reflected a society without traditional moorings, primed for the rise of the cult of personality which became Hitler worship as replacement of traditional religious expression.
It is little understood how deeply reviled was Christianity to the point that the Nazis groped for an Indo-German belief system, nature worship paganism, occultism, and alliance with Jew and Christian hating Islamists who believed that God wanted adherents to impose their philosophy by force. The Nazi establishment of the "German Faith Movement" was to be a method of changing to the "Church without persons of alien blood". The Nazi seizure of control of church governance to turn the churches into gospel perverting indoctrination instruments of the state is also well documented by Walker.
In his quest for complete power, Hitler and the Nazis could not overcome this singular force in German society. The churches and their clergy openly denounced the racism of the emerging power and suffered the consequences. The Nazis could not cow the Christians and the Christians would be the only force within Germany to publicly oppose the emergent evil.
It seems that this history lesson is particularly prescient with significant modern parallels. The attacks on many fronts to remove any manifestation of Christian life or thought from public life, the aggressive secularization of public education, attacks on civic groups with traditional religious tenants (ACLU v. Boy Scouts), the purposeful rewriting of history to distort the significance of America's heritage, and the list of parallels goes on and on. We cannot predict the future but we must know history to understand human nature and the predilection of fallen man if we are to have any glimpse of what may or could happen.
Nazi dreams of power, domination, and tyranny required the elimination of Christianity. The role of the Christian people in the destruction of Nazism is greatly under valued in this era of "politically incorrect" history but the record, speaking from the writings of over forty authors who observed the horrors first hand is irrefutable....The Swastika was at war with the Cross.
There are many interesting history books. Few are important. This is an important book.
