April 4, 2009

Bruce Walker's The Swastika Against the Cross

By Herbert E. Meyer

For more than a year now, Bruce Walker has been publishing essays at American Thinker that read like Bach preludes -- tiny compositions that are so simple, and so perfect, that they could be composed only by a genius.

If you (as I) were wondering what Walker could do with a bit more elbowroom, get your hands on a copy of The Swastika Against the Cross. In this tightly focused, exceptionally powerful book Walker fills a gap left by virtually every historian of Nazi Germany. More precisely, Walker shows - proves, really - that Hitler's war against the Jews was merely a prelude to the war he planned to wage against Christianity. And he neatly demolishes the current myth that Christians, and in particular Catholics, stood by while Hitler and his Nazi Stormtroopers embarked on their ghastly plans to rid Germany, and Europe itself, of its Jews:

"The religion of the Nazis was much close to Islam or Hinduism than it was to Christianity. The Nazis hated Christianity and were fairly open about that fact. Part of the reason that the Nazis hated Jews so much was because Jews were supposed to have "tricked" Aryans into accepting Christianity.....and there is no doubt that Christianity itself would have faced a Nazi holocaust had the Nazis not been defeated in war....Christians also resisted the Nazis and these Christians paid a terrible price for their defiance."

Throughout The Swastika Against the Cross, Walker cites an astonishing number of books and essays published in the 1930s that make precisely this point. For instance, in Nazism versus Religion Raymond Freely writes bluntly that "Nazism will seek to exterminate Christianity if Nazism dominates Europe." In his 1939 book entitled Religion in the Reich Michael Power writes that "There has probably been no more curious persecution in history than the attack made by National-Socialism upon the Christian churches." In 1938 the American journalist Dorothy Thompson - who was herself kicked out of Germany - warned that National Socialism, like communism, simply couldn't be understood until one grasped that these are secular religions that could tolerate no rivals.

Walker's point is to demonstrate that at the time serious people inside and outside Germany understood that the Nazi attack on the Jews was merely the opening shot. In other words, the slaughter that Hitler had in mind for Europe after he'd won the war would have been even more ghastly than the Holocaust itself.

In fact, the Nazis' attack on Christianity started even before World War II broke out. For example, as early as 1934 they ordered the Prussian secret police to break into the homes of members of the Pastors Emergency Fund, and then sent one pastor to a concentration camp. In 1935, the Nazis arrested or put under house arrest 700 pastors for having read to their congregations the manifesto of the Provisional Church, which denounced Nazi racism. Walker's calm, almost clinical listing of these and other such incidents will come as a surprise to those who've been under the mistaken impression that Christians in Nazi Germany were a protected species while the Jews were rounded up.

In The Swastika Against the Cross, Bruce Walker skillfully pulls together a huge amount of evidence to illuminate the great lesson of the twentieth century: Crazy, vicious people sometimes get political power, and when they tell you what they're going to do with that power - believe them. Today, as North Korea fuels that missile on its launch pad and as the lunatics in Iran build nuclear bombs, it's a lesson we need to learn - fast.

Herbert E. Meyer is author of The Cure for Poverty.