Hitler as a Minister:
Witnessing Similarities between Nazism and Religion
I am one of those junkies for History Channel shows that talk at all about Hitler, and I feel bad that I don’t know German enough to truly understand what Hitler is saying in the clips of speeches I see on these shows. Because people talk about how people were by Hitler’s words whenever he made a speech. He had an easy time wooing people over when the country had already been suffering economically after World War One. But it may have been more than the state the people were in; it may have been due to the way Hitler spoke, and what he said to get people to follow him like he was a religious icon.
Part I
Indoctrinating German Children
Into Nazi UberBabies
I got to read this little gem in “How children were indoctrinated into the Third Reich”: Hitler, as soon as his Nazi Party came to power in 1933, molded children for his new idea of the German nation. In schools, when children we taught reading, they learned it by hearing and reading stories about the glory of Hitler, and written essays may be about genetically pure people.
Keep in mind that the notion of being genetically superior was taught and believed by people holding real power in the Nazi Party. They searched history looking for any reference to a swastika to prove how the Germans are racially superior. They even traveled to Tibet and measured the heads of some people there, to learn how they may have actually been linked with this culture, with the same heritage.
When it came to schooling, lesson plans were given to teachers by the state, and teachers were forced to teach the Nazi propaganda. Boys learned from their teachings that they should be able to give up their lives for their country, and girls were taught that their goal was for procreation for the Fatherland.
There was even an effort to make sure there were more German children (because they are the better people and the better race, you know). So if a woman was pregnant (and it was proven that the father was Aryan enough for their liking, or better yet, a member of the S.S.), they had a place where she could have prenatal care and any sort of assistance they needed. Granted, some of these women may not have been well off, so they ensured that they would take the child to take care of it. So the mother would lose her connection to the child (and the father was usually a man who did not want to take responsibility for a child), and these children (to get more racially pure Germans in their country) were put in foster homes and adopted, so they could thrive in the Fatherland. Many of these children never even knew how their lives originated, or that there was any reason beyond love or sex that brought them into the world.
You can get more information about this at “Hitler’s Children,” http://www.rickross.com/reference/hate_groups/hategroups164.html - where children, often nine months after a woman’s one-night stand, were born in a “’Lebensborn,’ or ‘Source of Life’ home outside Munich. The home was one of several set up by Heinrich Himmler’s dreaded SS to care for unmarried pregnant women whose racial characteristics, blond hair, blue eyes, no Jewish ancestry, fit the Nazis’ Aryan ideal.”
Okay, sorry, I’m going on about how the Reich taught children and molded them to be good little Nazi soldiers, and you’re probably wondering why. I bring this up in more detail because Hitler went to children when they were very young and indoctrinated them into his beliefs, and if he got them and trained them when they were young, they were his for life. Kind of like religion, isn’t it? I mean, you teach a child this notion at an insanely early age and give them a leader that they cannot touch or deal with directly to rule everything over you, and you just have to blindly trust this leader and you’ll be happy in the afterlife. With Hitler, you were happy to be a cog in his Nazi wheel; with religion, the only thing a “being” not of this world could concretely offer you (other than peace of mind, I suppose) is tangible goods that are (to out it plainly) otherworldly. Religion carries the same weight as people who were caught in the fervor of Adolph Hitler, by having a leader that you cannot touch or see or question; the only difference is that the God is always in existence, and never on Earth to concretely deal with.
Unlike Hitler, with religion and a God, the God cannot falter (and Hitler couldn’t falter, and no one could understand why Germany wasn’t succeeding in the Second World War). When it comes to religion, Gods don’t falter; people question why the God we choose to believe in allows such suffering, etc., but anyone can come up with a counterpoint to explain it because there is no God to explain it for them. Besides, God is supposed to be all knowing and all-powerful, so he must have had a reason), so there is no reason to believe that this ideology has any faults to it.
Part II
Hitler Speeches as a Preacher on the Pulpit
If Hitler was able to indoctrinate children of their role in his world, he was using just one aspect of what any society does in perpetuating any religion. Hitler also used mythological symbols in delivering his message, representing the sun; even the Swastika was something he discovered (which historically originally was a positive symbol) that would lend to higher goals and aspirations for his people. He also learned, from a psychic (who was a stage magician by trade) gestures and ways to have his body that were more theatrical, so that in large theatres he could be easily seen at a distance. He used mythological symbols to give people the idea that Hitler was after only the good for the people of Germany, and he used tricks from a stage magician to make him better present his views and beliefs. So, like an excited minister getting his message across to his church (or on television, to thousands or millions of people at once), Hitler worked to not get people to believe in God, but to believe in Him.
But really, the methods of the two are strikingly similar. The only reason why one failed is that the leader espousing the beliefs was a person, and the rest of the world found to his beliefs bad (abhorrent is more like it, but you get the idea). The convenience of having an intangible God to fall back on as a leader, who cannot be held accountable or made to explain any actions, allows a set of beliefs (like any religion) to flourish.
Now, I’m not saying the set of beliefs surrounding Christianity are wrong (or about Judaism or Islam or Hinduism or Taoism, or even practicing Voodoo, which is a practiced religion). I’m just pointing out the similarities in having two sets of beliefs flourish — even though one was shown faulty because of a faulty leader (well, maybe that wasn’t the only reason, but I’m not going there right now…), the other survived because of an intangible thing as a leader, where children were indoctrinated at an early age to believe in.
The Power of your Upbringing
I knew a man years ago who was extremely intelligent (he was an award-winning civil engineer, actually), but he was a Judeo Christian, because this is what his parents taught him ever since he was born. It didn’t make sense to me that he didn’t question this one aspect of his life; I didn’t understand why he didn’t look at every aspect of his like (especially the philosophical aspect) with the same logical and intelligent mind. I think after years (and years away from his parents) he decided to investigate what he was taught with his own rational eyes, and the then adjusted his beliefs accordingly.
In our times, we don’t see it as any blatant effort to indoctrinate children, but on some levels, this is what religion does.
The way children are raised was just one way to consider how Hitler acted more like he was doing the work of God (you know, versus himself). Watching any recorded speeches form Hitler is another great way to show how he could get people to believe in him the way people are taught to believe in any given religion. His exaggerated gestures and postures in speeches (along with the voluminous changes in his voice for the crowds) strengthened the imperativeness of what he was saying, and wooed audience members to blindly follow him with whatever he was saying. I remember even watching some History Channel show about Hitler once, where a Jewish person crept over to one of his speeches earlier in Hitler’s rise to fame (before all Jews were evacuated) and listened without being disturbed. This Jewish person listened to Hitler speak, and even found himself swept up in the fervor of what Hitler was saying.
And that’s the scary thing. I don’t not know if it was because of the tone or volume of his voice, or the manners he was taught to use from a psychic, but he was getting a Jewish man into his speech.
Think of southern Baptist churches, where rows of black people are working up a sweat singing gospel hymns. It sometimes comes down to presentation.
For that matter, think of the televangelists who perform physical healings in front of large audiences (and television, of course). I won’t get into whether all of these people genuinely had the problems they all complained of, or if they did it was milder than what they said, and I won’t get into whether any belief in the ability of being healed will actually help a person heal on their own. But I want to think about the fervor these people have in these huge meetings where they think the may be saved form their physical problems here on Earth.
Not bad, for a God whom people can’t hold accountable for all of the bad things in the world, and for someone that no one can actually prove the existence of.
But watching the faith healer and watching a Hitler speech is a really good way to notice the similarities. And no, the similarity isn’t that people couldn’t prove the existence of Hitler, the similarity is that in both situations the speaker made claims that no one could truly substantiate. Both leaders would stir their audiences into a fervor, and people would want to blindly listen to him.
You may think I’m silly (or crazy) for making any comparison between Hitler and a preacher, but I’m not making a statement about the validity or invalidity of either Hitler or anyone connection with religion. I was just noticing the striking similarities with how Hitler brought people in. Hitler made statements condemning Jews: I have to say that I honestly don’t remember any references to praising Christianity, but I doubt Christianity was outwardly praised too much. They may not have outwardly paid too much time directly praising God, and I say this because Hitler used ancient practices and symbols to pull people in the way a religion may, and he may not have wanted people dividing their idolism between their God and their Fuhrer. Now, I can’t prove that, but I can say that he used a lot of the same techniques in speeches to pull people into to wanting to dedicate their lives to him, or give their lives for him. He used these ideas from his mannerisms and the way he spoke to the symbols and traditions he adopted to pull people in.
He did everything a religion should. If only he had beliefs, people wouldn’t find morally abhorrent. Good thing that like a God, he couldn’t live forever.
Copyright © 2007 Janet Kuypers.
All rights reserved. No material
may be reprinted without express permission.
|
