A Clean Break

fucking based…why didn’t we listen?

“However, other voices in the movement argued a quite different position. Not only did they suggest that Christian dogma was unrelated to Nazism; they went one step further, suggesting the Nazism actually opposed such dogma. In its place, they argued for a ‘pagan’ faith based on a return to the Nordic mysticism of the past. According to some scholars, this ersatz religion was also predicated on a Nietzschean rejection of Christian ethics…

It was during this time that Ludendorff, like Dinter, attempted to turn Nazism into an explicitly religious movement. While Dinter attempted a ‘reform’ of Christianity, however, Ludendorff’s religious agenda was anti-Christian and pagan. Indeed, Ludendorff proclaimed a divorce from Christianity—a position that Dinter would have rejected utterly. According to Ludendorff’s adjunct Wilhelm Breucker, in 1924 ‘Ludendorff charged Hitler with having expressly based the party on positive Christianity in his program and sought to demonstrate to him with biblical quotation that Christianity was and by nature had to be the sharpest opponent of every volkisch movement.’ Ludendorff’ anti-Christian ideology was strongly influenced by his second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz. The daughter of a theologian, von Kemnitz came to hate everything associated with Christianity, creating in its place a philosophy she called Deutsche Gotterkenntnis (‘German-conception of God’)…

Two years later Hitler expelled Ludendorff from the NSDAP. He additionally forbade members of the Nazi Party to enter the Tannenberg League. Undeterred, the Ludendorffs continued along their religious path. In 1931, Mathilde wrote a book titled Erlosung von Jesu Christo (‘Redemption from Jesus Christ’), which sought to replace Jesus with a pantheistic adoration of nature. In it, and in her other writings of the period, Jesus was not the heroic Aryan leader, but an alcoholic Jew who did not even die on the cross. In this account, the Bible was a Jewish fraud that destroyed every volkisch impulse. 

Christians, often innocently unaware of the consequences, were propagating a faith that would lead to the destruction of Germany. The search for God was not to lead to Christ, but rather to the German countryside, to a divine ‘blood and soil’: ‘Because the entire world is permeated with God’s soul, the German plants and animals are not soulless, like the servants of Yahweh.’ Here was a literal deification of Germany, the search for a replacement for Christianity.”

-excerpted from Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 by Richard Steigmann-Gall (2003)