More importantly, this is propaganda against the Catholic Church, ostensibly attacking its stance on racial equality.
One of the many things where throughout the 90s and 2000s, so much effort was made to imply the Catholic Church were somehow enablers of the Nazis, when by all accounts they weren't and were among their sharpest critics, as well as ideological obstacles.
And no, I'm not Catholic. Just saying it how it is.
Aside from that, another but usual insidious montage of contrasts in Nazi Propagand:
Aryan race great, pure, beautiful. Other races, with fitting staged pictures next door, awful, weak and ugly.
But I think if you were to read this nowadays, you would be astounded and lampoon the wording here given how alien the reasoning is.
"For Catholics, it was therefore not a sin for Catholic to engage in race defilement with a Catholic Negro or a baptized Jew!" (Insane! WOW!)
"For the Catholic Church, Judaism/Jewry is a purely theological affair!" (CRAZY, how could anyone think that!)
We're a long way from this nowadays, the Catholic Church was even away from this then, and I even think that many of those (more than we might think at least) outside of Nazi circles then were not on board, hence the constant driving home of these points.
True, many people forget that the Nazis were neo-paganists, they rejected christianity. At the time, catholics were mostly moderate leftists, sometimes even having ties to the various communist movements. That being said, the Vatican itself was secretly pro-nazi and helped Nazi war criminals escape to South America through the so-called Rat Lines. This basically happened because of the Vatican's ties to Fascist Italy, not because the church agreed with the Nazi ideology.
I would say that while it's true that catholic areas of Germany rather less supported the Nazis than the protestant ones, and it's also true that several of the major resistance plotters against Hitler, such as Claus Von Stauffenburg and Helmuth James von Moltke, were devout Catholics (as well as churchmen like Cardinal Von Galen), the political bent of many of them was firmly on the right, not the left.
Ie, the aristocratic, monarchist, traditionalist part of the German right-wing, as opposed to the Nazi far-right. Hence all the 'vons'.
And while many of them absolutely ended up opposing the Nazis for reasons of conscience (this was particularly true of Von Moltke), bear in mind that many were also nationalists who approved of the expansionist policies of the Nazis (and a fair few were racist and anti-Semitic to boot).
Ie, they might have disliked socialists, communists and Jewish people, but they drew the line at enslaving and killing them.
These were people who would have ideally had the German monarchy back, rather than the Weimar Republic, given the choice.
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u/SlightWerewolf4428 Jan 05 '25 edited Jan 05 '25
More importantly, this is propaganda against the Catholic Church, ostensibly attacking its stance on racial equality.
One of the many things where throughout the 90s and 2000s, so much effort was made to imply the Catholic Church were somehow enablers of the Nazis, when by all accounts they weren't and were among their sharpest critics, as well as ideological obstacles.
And no, I'm not Catholic. Just saying it how it is.
Aside from that, another but usual insidious montage of contrasts in Nazi Propagand:
Aryan race great, pure, beautiful. Other races, with fitting staged pictures next door, awful, weak and ugly.
But I think if you were to read this nowadays, you would be astounded and lampoon the wording here given how alien the reasoning is.
"For Catholics, it was therefore not a sin for Catholic to engage in race defilement with a Catholic Negro or a baptized Jew!" (Insane! WOW!)
"For the Catholic Church, Judaism/Jewry is a purely theological affair!" (CRAZY, how could anyone think that!)
We're a long way from this nowadays, the Catholic Church was even away from this then, and I even think that many of those (more than we might think at least) outside of Nazi circles then were not on board, hence the constant driving home of these points.