The Dark Side of Church/State Separation

The French Revolution, Nazi Germany, and International Communism

Stephen Strehle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351484145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Dark Side of Church/State Separation analyzes the Enlightenment's attack upon the Judeo-Christian tradition and its impact upon the development of secular regimes in France, Germany, and Russia. Such regimes followed the anti-Semitic/anti-Christian agenda of the French Enlightenment in blaming the Judeo-Christian tradition for all the ills of European society and believing that human beings can develop their own set of values and purposes through rational means, apart from any revelation from God or Scripture. Stephen Strehle's analysis extends our understanding of church/state relations and its history. He confirms the spiritual roots of modern anti-Semitism within the ideology of the Enlightenment and recognizes the intimate relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity. Strehle questions the absolute doctrine of church/state separation, given its background in the bigotries of the philosophes. He notes the nefarious motives of subsequent regimes, which used the French doctrine to replace the religious community with the state and its secular ideology. This detailed historical analysis of original sources and secondary literature is woven together with special appreciation for the philosophical and theological ideas that contributed to the emergence of political institutions. Readers will gain an understanding of the most influential ideas shaping the modern world and present-day culture.

II

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Nazi Germany

6

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The Rise of the Third Reich

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria. When he was young, he wanted to become an artist and moved to Vienna with this goal in mind, after leaving secondary school and floundering a couple years in Linz. He continued to flounder in his new environment, failing to gain admission into the Academy of Fine Arts, but the years in Vienna proved crucial to his later interest in politics, awakening his social consciousness and shaping the course of his political thinking.¹ As a starving artist, he experienced the suffering of the poor and the disparity of wealth in the city, which helped move him toward socialism.² As a German, he experienced the “slavization” of this “giant city,” where Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, and Jews mixed together, “corroding” German culture and creating a “racial desecration”³ He experienced the Jewish question for the first time and developed a vehement hatred for this people as a fundamental source of German social problems, even if they represented a very small segment of the total population. He thought of them as a clandestine group, controlling the press, art, and literature and using these institutions to destroy Germanic culture with a cosmopolitan, egalitarian, and democratic point of view.⁴ Because of this, he “distinguished [them] from the rest of humanity” and “grew sick to [his] stomach” at the very sight and smell of them.⁵ He completely altered his early opinion, which included some sympathy toward the plight of the Jews in the Middle Ages, and embraced the pan-Germanic and anti-Semitic policies of Karl Lueger, the mayor and fiery orator of the Vienna.⁶

After serving in WWI, he joined the German Workers Party in September 1919, a small political group meeting in Munich, which was renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or Nazis the following year.⁷ Hitler decided to join the group after reading My Political Awakenings,⁸ a short book written by one of its leaders, Anton Dexler. The book looks at recent world events in terms of a massive conspiracy theory involving international groups like the Jews, the Freemasons, capitalists, and Communists, who instigate wars and foment revolutions for the sake of their own materialistic advantage.⁹ The author argues that these groups are responsible for the humiliating defeat of Germany in the war, the unjust provisions of Versailles, the suppression of blue-collar workers, and the raping of all cultures.¹⁰ All these groups play a significant role in the plight of Germanic society, but Dexler reserves most of his wrath for the Jews, focusing special attention upon the Jewish question as the most significant matter of concern in society because their tentacles represent the most maniacal and omnipresent force throughout central Europe, controlling the press, literature, politics, and economics.¹¹ He blames their financial dealings and pacifist leanings for leaving his nation unprepared to defend itself in the war.¹² The Jews have no particular loyalty to Germany or any other nation; their only loyalty is to themselves as a supranational people, who spurn cultural identity and dominate all others through international finance.¹³

Hitler became a zealous leader of this ideology, ascending through the ranks to become the Führer of the party within the brief span of a year and eventually the chancellor of the whole nation and its Third Reich just over a decade later.¹⁴ His meteoric rise to power was facilitated in the early days by the financial support and political connections of Dietrich Eckart, who inspired the nascent movement and met his young protégé when Hitler started attending the meetings. Eckart helped nurture the future leader in nationalism, anti-Semitism, and a mystical form of Aryanism, and as a successful playwright and publisher, he possessed the means to promote a political career and manage its public image.¹⁵ Through his help, Hitler became the Führer of the party and drew some wider attention as a fiery orator, but it was not until his Putsch or attempt to seize power from the Bavarian government in Munich that he attracted the interest of the public at large. He embodied much of the people’s frustrations with the Weimar Republic in his unsuccessful coup d’état and gained further sympathy for the cause during the ordeal of the subsequent trial, which he manipulated with great skill. After serving only nine months of a five-year sentence, Hitler and the Nazis began to dominate Weimar politics and grew into such a substantial political force that they gained 6.4 million votes or 18.3 percent of the electorate on September 4, 1930, making them the second largest party on the national scene. This number only increased in the next year and a half until they became the most powerful party, capturing 230 seats when 14 million or 37.3 percent of German voters cast their lot with Hitler on July 31, 1932. A short six months later, the president of the republic asked Hitler to become the chancellor and form a new government, which he quickly transformed into an absolute dictatorship, enslaving all of Germany to his will and power.¹⁶

As chancellor, Hitler was able to implement his anti-Semitic program, which was softened in his campaign rhetoric of 1928, 1930, and 1932 in order to gain popular support. Hitler was willing to bide his time and implement politics in a gradual but escalating manner, as he reconditioned the German people to his more zealous and militant way of thinking. He started with a party-led boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, but the tactic was abandoned after four days when it failed to gain enough popular support at home and abroad. For the next few years, he implemented a series of measures that restricted attendance at universities, membership in organizations, and employment through a plethora of professions and occupations like teachers, lawyers, and doctors. All this was accompanied by continuous harassment from members of the party, paramilitary organizations like the SA (Sturmabteilung) and SS (Schutzstaffel), the Hitler Youth, and a public who was becoming more and more militant and anti-Semitic through the reconditioning of their society, although Hitler was concerned about losing control over unorganized programs and found it necessary to reign in the terror at times. In 1935, the infamous Nuremberg Laws were enacted, stripping the Jews of civil rights as citizens and alienating them socially by proscribing marriage and sexual contact between Aryans and non-Aryans (Rasenschande). On November 9, 1938, a nationwide pogrom was organized, known as Kristallnacht or the “night of the broken glass,” which vandalized Jewish businesses, burned over two hundred synagogues, murdered ninety-one people, and arrested twenty-six thousand, sending most of them to concentration camps for a few months—all purportedly in retaliation for the murder of a German diplomat by Polish Jews. The next few years saw the escalation of numerous laws forbidding everyday conveniences like automobiles, public transportation, shopping, pets, restaurants, and publications, severely restricting and denigrating their lives, making it impossible for many to continue under the present circumstances. Many Jews left Germany in the 1930s, but by the fall of 1941, emigration was banned and most of the ones who remained in Germany were sent to concentration camps and died there. This final solution began on a large scale in Russia with the systematic shooting of somewhere around a million Jews, led by the soulless brutality of the Einsatzgruppen, who followed the German army on the eastern front, and culminated with the industrialized gassing of millions more in Polish death camps.¹⁷

By the time of the Holocaust in 1941, Hitler had conditioned his people to accept and enact such evil. Hitler had devoted much of his energies to education and was able to produce a generation of students willing to carry out an atrocity on this massive scale.¹⁸ Hitler saw education as the domain of the state and a means of inculcating a common set of values.¹⁹ He was able to create an army of executioners by impressing his ideology upon the students, dedicating them to Deutschland über alles, and toughening them up to be thugs like the Nazis through special training in willpower, determination, physical fitness, and military service.²⁰

The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heat and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity…. His whole education and training must be so ordered as to give him the conviction that he is absolutely superior to others. Through his physical strength and dexterity, he must recover his faith in the invincibility of his whole people.²¹

If only we can succeed in inculcating into the German people, and above all into the German youth, both a fanatical team spirit and a fanatical devotion to the Reich, then the German Reich will once again become the most powerful State in Europe, as it was a thousand years after the collapse of the Roman Empire.²²

No program exemplified the lengths to which Hitler and the Nazis went, in their attempts to produce citizen-warriors, more than the organization known as the Hitler Youth. It was founded in 1926 out of previous groups and encompassed the vast majority of German children at the height of the Third Reich when the state mandated participation for ten to eighteen year olds in 1936.²³ The organization was largely successful in its mission to separate the youth from any alien influence in the home, church, and other societies, and to make them godless, obsequious wards of the state and its ideology.²⁴

This brazen purpose is manifest in the Nazi Primer: Official Handbookfor Schooling Hitler Youth, first published in 1937. On the first page of the text, national socialism is proclaimed as the new ideology of “all Germans.” “The Unlikeness of Men” is brought forward as the first and foremost topic of the book since it represents the “foundation of the National Socialist outlook on life” and challenges the dogma of the Western opposition that all men are created equal. The doctrine of human inequality has great significance in understanding the social relationship between the races because it includes decisive features like “mental and spiritual” qualities, not just outward appearances or skin color. The doctrine represents the true, scientific alternative to the teachings of Freemasons, Marxists, Jews, the Christian church, and other groups, who want to bring everyone “who bears the face of man” into an egalitarian fraternity. The fossil record has demonstrated the theory of evolution, which is “associated with the name of Charles Darwin,” and leads any scien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• I France and the Modern État
• II Nazi Germany
• III International Communism
• Postscript
• Index