"In
traveling about the city that day, William A. Dodd, US Ambassador to Berlin in
1933 was struck anew by the “extraordinary” German penchant for Christmas
display. He saw Christmas trees everywhere, in every public square and every
window. “One might think,” he wrote, “the Germans believed in Jesus or
practiced his teachings!”
- Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
·
"It
is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that
the whole of the German Folk should have thus become exposed to the whole of
this Jewish mumbo jumbo... As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that
German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by
Jewish filth and priestly twaddle, that they were little different from the
howling dervish of the Turks and the negroes, at whom we laugh so scornfully.
It angers one to think that, while in other parts of the globe religious
teaching like that of Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed offers an undeniably broad
basis for the religious-minded, Germans should have been duped by a theological
exposition devoid of all honest depth." - Adolf Hitler
·
"I
promise you that if I wanted to I could destroy the Church in just a few years.
It is hollow, it is rotten and false through and through. One push and the
whole structure would collapse. We should trap the preachers by their notorious
greed and self-indulgence. We shall thus be able to settle everything with them
in perfect peace and harmony. I shall give them a few years’ reprieve. Why
should we quarrel? They will swallow anything in order to keep their material
advantage. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves; they will betray
their God for us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable
jobs and incomes.” - Adolf Hitler
·
"This
pride of race is a quality which the German, fundamentally, does not possess.
The reason for this is that for these last three centuries the country has been
torn by internal dissension and religious wars and has been subjected to a
variety of foreign influences, to the influence, for example, of
Christianity—for Christianity is not a natural religion for the Germans, but a
religion that has been imported and which strikes no responsive chord in their
hearts and is foreign to the inherent genius of the race." - Adolf Hitler,
13 February 1945
·
"But
for the coming of Christianity, who knows how the history of Europe would have
developed? Rome would have conquered all Europe, and the onrush of the Huns
would have been broken on the legions. It was Christianity that brought about
the fall of Rome—not the Germans or the Huns. What Bolshevism is achieving
to-day on the materialist and technical level, Christianity had achieved on the
metaphysical level. When the Crown sees the throne totter, it needs the support
of the masses." - Adolf Hitler
·
"As
soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world
was bound to collapse." ~Adolf Hitler
·
From
1918 to 1931, 2.4 million Evangelical Christians formally renounced their faith
as well as almost half a million Catholics.
·
In Prussia,
only 21% of the population took communion and in Hamburg only 5% of the
population took communion.
·
Before
Hitler, German religious leaders were publicly condemning the rise of moral
relativism and decline of traditional religious values. Weimar Germany, for
example, largely had abandoned Christianity and increasingly was embracing
hedonism, Marxism and paganism.
·
In
1932, Hitler said, “We are not against the hundred and one different kinds of
Christianity, but against Christianity itself.”
·
In
the 1938 book, "The War Against God," by Sidney Dark and R.S. Essex,
describes pre-Nazi antipathy toward Christianity by noting that churches had
lost all their vitality and that their services were lifeless.
·
Edgar
Ansel Mower, in his 1938 book, "Germany Puts the Clock Back," wrote
that by 1920, God and Christianity had been in steady decline, a process that
had begun in 1860.
·
Mower
talks about a culture not so much casual as vicious about sexuality. He writes
of art sickened into atonal music, about the absence of any sense of sin, about
entire graduating classes in high school turning up for birth control devices,
and about the commonplace occurrence of abortion. This hostility or
indifference toward Christianity in Europe, and especially in Germany, led
naturally to a profound anti-Christian sentiment in Nazi Germany. Nazis, more
than most Germans, were indifferent or hostile to Christianity.
·
Germany Puts Back the Clock, describes how
freedom was crushed by intimidation and bribery throughout Germany,
noting: “All freedom of all sort disappeared. Nowhere was any
resistance, except in the religious field.”
·
Within
a year of taking power, Hitler was saying: "Christianity was incapable of
uniting Germans, and that only an entirely new world-theory was capable of
doing so."
·
By
1934, "The Twenty-Five Theses of the German Religion," a conscious
modeling of the twenty-five points of the Nazi program, was published in
Germany.
·
Thesis
XV of that Nazi publication states: "The Ethic of the German Religion
condemns all belief in inherited sin, as well as the Jewish-Christian teaching
of a fallen world. Such a teaching is not only non-Germanic and non-German, it
is immoral and nonreligious. Whoever preaches this menaces the morality of the
people."
·
Heinreich
Himmler had been involved in developing his idea of a "Germanic
religion" and wanted SS members to leave the church.
·
Hitler
did nothing to stop the drumbeat of pagan propaganda within the Nazi Party,
which included Heinrich Himmler, Baldur von Schirach, Alfred Rosenberg, Dr
Frick and many others, some of whom formally renounced their Christianity.
·
Karl
Haushoffer, the mentor of many early Nazi leaders, preached non-Christian
beliefs, and Nazi metaphysics included organisations like the Thule Society,
whose members greatly admired the Japanese Black Dragon Society.
The Thule Society practiced occultism, alchemy and Islamic mysticism.
·
Julius
Streicher, a notorious defamer of Jews, is, perhaps, the best example of
absolute repudiation of Christianity where even nominal Christianity was
contorted into something grotesquely different than any professed
Christianity.
·
Streicher
said: "It is only on one or two exceptional points that Christ and
Hitler stand comparison, for Hitler is far too big a man to be compared with
one so petty." Christ, to Nazis, was a nebbish. Hitler was
their Christ.
·
Alfred
Rosenberg’s ponderous tome, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," not only
called for banning crucifixes from churches, but also from village streets, and
also for banning medieval images of Christ as the Lamb of God."
·
Rosenberg,
Nazi theoretician, said that there was no place in the Third Reich for
Christianity in any form.
·
Preaching
from the pulpit against Rosenberg's racial theories was forbidden by the Nazis
and Law 130 threatened penalties against any priest who preached "against
the interest of the state."
·
Hermann
Göring ordered that the Hitler Gruss (the Hitler salute), which he and Himmler
believed had originated with ancient gatherings of Germanic peoples and was
brought by them to the Romans, was the only religious gesture allowed.
·
Just
as Nazi propaganda made odious caricatures of lecherous Jewish preying on young
German maidens, Nazi propaganda made identical caricatures of lecherous priests
preying on young German maidens.
·
Children
were taught to pray to Hitler instead of to God.
·
Grace
before meals given to poor children by the Nazi Welfare Committee ended: ‘For
this food, my Fuehrer, my thanks I render.'
·
Another
official child's prayer ended: ‘My Fuehrer, by Fuehrer, my faith and my light,
Heil my Fuehrer.’”
·
Christian
ceremonies surrounding births, marriages, deaths and other solemnities ceased
to be performed by Christian clergy.
·
Martin
Bormann hated Christianity even more than most Nazi leaders.
·
Josef
Goebbels frequently made fun of Christian morality.
·
Nazis
in general considered Christianity a "soul malady,"
"foreign" and "unnatural."
·
Heinrich
Himmler despised Christianity.
·
Members
of the SS had to formally renounce their Christian faith and formally become
agnostic in order to become a member of the Schutzstaffel.
·
Erich
Ludendorff, the earliest and most important political figure in Germany to
support the Nazis, said: "The Jews are not our enemies because of their
race, but because one of their subtlest rabbis, that man called Saint Paul,
distilled the poison of the Christ myth out of the life of the story of Jesus
of Nazareth. The Jews are enemies of the Nordic race because they produced
Christianity, which has been the poison that has destroyed the vitality of the
Aryan people."
·
Matilde
von Kemnitz, the wife of Ludendorff, promoted an unchristian neo-Teutonic cult
that called, among other things, for the destruction of all churches and the
creation of forest temples as places of sacrifice to pagan deities. Not only
were Christians particularly hated by Nazis, but Jews were hated because
Christianity came out of Judaism.
·
Members
of the Hitler Youth were forbidden to join church organisations and membership
in the Hitler Youth was more or less compulsory.
·
Members
of the Hitler Youth were forbidden to join church organisations and membership
in the Hitler Youth was more or less compulsory.
·
Hitler
Youth meetings were deliberately scheduled to coincide with Sunday church
services.
·
Hitler
Youth were taught to be rebellious against their parents, contemptuous of
religion and to use crude and offensive language.
·
The
Nazis even forbade parents to give their children Christian names and ordered
babies instead to be given names like Dietrich, Otto or Siegfried.
·
The
teaching of Christianity by parents in the home was forbidden.
·
Churches
were not allowed to collect funds for charitable work.
·
The
Nazis transferred Catholic clergy to Protestant areas and Protestant clergy to
Catholic areas.
·
Nazis
smeared excrement on church altars and church doors, desecrated shrines, and
threw statutes of saints into dung piles; and when synagogues were not
available to attack and loot, churches were the target with Nazis
yelling: "Down with Christians and Jews!"
·
In
many places, historic church feast days and holidays were banned and even the
display of religious flags and banners was outlawed; often Nazis cordoned off
areas necessary for church pilgrimages and offered free beer and sausages for
secular events that deliberately coincided with church festivals.
·
Nazis
hated and mocked Christianity. Most particularly, Nazis loathed the ideas that
faith, not race, was critical and that Christians had a duty to love all
people, including Jews.
·
Christian
clergymen were harassed, dismissed, arrested, tortured and murdered for
defending their beliefs and Jews. It is hard to see how less robust Christian
faith would have made the lot of Jews easier in Nazi Germany. It is impossible
not to see that, except for brave Christians like Bonhoffer and Neimoller, the
lot of German Jews (some of whom escaped the Holocaust) would have been worse.
·
Jacob
Marcus in his 1934 book by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations notes
that "Though his parents were both Catholics, Hitler himself has
apparently no interest in any organised religion." Marcus also has an
entire section in his book about Nazi "anti-Christian anti-Semitism."
·
University
Nazis in Keil wrote in 1935: "We Germans are heathens and want no more
Jewish religion in our Germany. We no longer believe in the Holy Ghost; we
believe in the Holy Blood."
·
In
August 1935, the bishops of Germany presented at Fulda a pastoral letter
warning of the Nazi "campaign of annihilation against Christianity"
and a year after that Bishop Bornewasser publicly spoke about the Christian men
and women who were persecuted by the Nazis because of their faith.
·
In
the spring of 1936, Rinehard Heydrich left the Catholic Church. He not only
felt he could no longer be a member, but came to consider the political power
(and influence) of the church a danger to the state.
·
The
Confessional groups of Christians --Protestants who had refused to join the
"German Christian" movement -- sent Hitler a letter in May 1936
asking whether he intended to "de-Christianise the German people."
The response was wholly unsatisfactory, with the Christian clergy believing
that Hitler had accepted honors due only to God."
·
On
4 November 1936, the Nazis ordered the removal of crucifixes from schools in
the Oldenburg area on the grounds that these were "symbols of
superstition."
·
In
December 1936, Nazi bureaucrats simply removed crucifixes in Munsterland. When
Christians replaced them in some schools, they were arrested by the Nazis.
·
Nordland,
a Nazi magazine, called the Sermon on the Mount "the first Bolshevist
manifesto."
·
The
principle of the National Socialist state, Hitler told an audience in 1937 was
"not in Christianity nor in social theory, but in the unified people's community."
·
In
February 1937 Hanns Kerrl, Minister of Religion in the Third Reich, said:
"The question of the divinity of Christ is ridiculous and inessential. A
new answer has arisen as to what Christ and Christianity are: Adolph
Hitler."
·
John
Heinberg in 1937 textbook, “Comparative European Governments,” informed
college students that the first mass organized opposition group to the Nazis
when the Nazis gained power, the Pastors Emergency Committee, doubled its
membership when the Nazis tried to keep Jews out of churches.
·
In
his 1937 book, "The Third Reich," Professor Henri Lichtenberger
describes the religious life of the Weimar Republic as a place in which the
large cities were "spiritual cemeteries" with almost no believers at
all, except for those who were members of the clergy.
·
The
middle class went through the motions, but lacked all living faith. The
workers, influenced by socialism, were suspicious of the church.
·
Even
in the countryside, preachers had little influence on the people.
·
Micklem’s
1937 book, “The Third Reich” reveals that the pagan anti-Christian Nazi leader
Alfred Rosenberg's movement "might easily ally itself with the
anti-Christianity of Moscow." Of course, it did just that.
·
In
1937, Heinreich Himmler banned all Confessing Church seminaries and instruction
and he closed all private religious schools two years later.
·
In
1937, Stephen H. Roberts wrote in his book, "The House That Hitler
Built”: “Almost from the beginning, National Socialism found itself at
variance with the churches” and that quickly became impossible to be a good
Catholic and a good Nazi.
·
As
early as 1937, death notices in Germany stated that the decedent “died in the
faith of Adolph Hitler.”
·
In
1938, Herman Rauschning wrote: "The purpose of the National Socialism
fight against Christianity is the same: the total destruction of the last and
most deep-rooted support of the forces of conservation. The destruction of the
spirit of Christianity in Germany is certainly more far-reaching than appears
on the surface...Such vestiges of living Christianity as remain are steadily
degenerating in the direction of a superficial and unthinking deism" and
that ultimate goal as "...the total abolition of Christianity, which is
not a mere philosophical fad of the National Socialists but an iron necessity
of their system."
·
Dorothy
Thompson, at the time the greatest female journalist in the world, wrote in her
1938 "Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide" that Nazism and communism
were both forms of collectivism and that although a great many people believed
that there was a war going on between the two, the idea of such a war was
invented by Nazis and Bolsheviks.
·
Thompson
wrote on 17 October 1938 that National Socialism, like Communism, was a secular
religion and, until that was understood, nothing about Nazism and Communism
made sense. She then noted that both violated the First Commandment, "Thou
shalt have no other gods before Me."
·
Thompson
stated that this is why the most formidable opposition to both these
totalitarianism movements came from people of faith; and that while it may be
possible to unite Communism or National Socialism with some economic theory or
political system or sociology, it is absolutely impossible to harmonise either
with the Bible.
·
In
1938, Henrik van Loon in his book, “Our Battle,” which was intended to
be a Christian response to “Mein Kampf,” wrote: “He [Hitler]
denounced the Sermon on the Mount as maudlin ravings of an itinerant Jewish
carpenter.”
·
Van
Loon, one of the best-selling authors in the 1930s, argued that Hitler has
deprived the society of the only foundation on which true civilisation and
world peace can be grounded, Christianity, and for that he leaves Hitler to the
judgment of God.
·
Richard
Overy, in his 1938 book, "The Dictators," observes that Hitler's
attitude toward religion and Christianity was identical to that of the
Bolsheviks.
·
A.S.
Duncan-Jones, in his 1938 book The Struggle for Religious Freedom in Germany,
also quoted Hitler describing his attitude toward Christianity before gaining
power: “I insist on the certainty that sooner or later, once we hold power,
Christianity will be overcome. Of course, I myself am a heathen to the bone.”
·
In
1938, Professor Micklem at Oxford noted that "All political questions are
at bottom theological. The clash between National Socialism and the Christian
church rests upon the incompatibility of two views of the world, two
‘anthropologies.' In National Socialism there are no ultimate, universal
standards. Right is defined as that which accords with the demands of the
people's souls.... The Church in Germany is of no mere ephemeral interest. It
raises in an acute form an issue which both National Socialism and Bolshevism
present to every country. What is to be the foundation of European
civilization?"
·
In
1938, in her book “School for Barbarians,” Erica Mann noted that the three
enemies constantly cited by Nazis were Judaism, Freemasonry and Christianity;
and that the remedy proposed by the Nazis to solve the enemy of Christianity
was to take Christian children, whose parents insisted on teaching them
Christian virtues, away from their parents (much like the Bolsheviks would take
Christian children away from their parents).
·
Mann
wrote that the fanatic war of National Socialism against the Church is fought
on so large a field that the contest results only in battles won by one side
and then the other, but that one thing is clear: "the stake of the war is
the souls of the children. Both sides are battling for their future."
·
Mann
noted the common war waged by Bolsheviks and Nazis against God and family, and
wrote: “Again, all we have to do is replace ‘Bolshevism’ with ‘National
Socialism’ to get a fairly exact picture.”
·
Justice
William H. Black, in his 1938 book “If I Were a Jew,” wrote: “It is
apparent on all sides that since his rise to power there has been a persistent
and deliberate effort to de-Christianize Germany.”
·
In
1938, John Gunther wrote of Nazi Germany in his book “Inside Europe Today”:
“Germany continued its implacable hostility to the Protestant Church and to
Roman Catholicism also.”
·
Jacques
Maritain wrote in his 1939 book “Anti-Semitism” about a great madness
and “anti-Christianity” that was “ravaging German hearts.”
·
In
1939, Charles Shulman wrote the same year in “Europe’s Conscience in
Decline”: “The Christian Cross, symbolic of mercy, goodness, peace and
justice, is being torn from the steeples of churches to be replaced by the
hooked cross, the swastika, symbol of intolerance and hate.”
·
A
Nazi magazine commented on the Golden Rule in 1939: ‘This fundamental law of
Christianity completely contradicts our moral conscience, contradicts above all
our warrior-like nature peculiar to the soul of our race.'
·
Sir
Arnold Lunn wrote in his 1939 book “Communism and Socialism”: “The quarrel
between Communists and Nazis or between Stalin’s Communists and Trotsky’s Communists
is not an economic controversy, but a struggle for the spoils of office.
·
Herman
Rauschning, the Danzig Nazi leader who later repudiated Nazism, wrote in his
1939 book "The Revolution of Nihilism": “It is in the nature of
things that the planning and methods of work of the Soviet State and the
Fascist and the National Socialist States should be growing more and more
similar.”
·
In
his 1939 book, "Days of Our Lives” (a #1 bestseller in the US), Pierre van
Paassen wrote that Germany was farther on the road to dechristiansation than
the Soviet Union and that in place of God, Nazis had placed the almighty state,
which demanded everything from man.
·
In
1939, Ernest Hambloch wrote that because the Roman Catholic Church had been
opposing the Nazis as pagan, the Nazis accused the Vatican of being in league
with Communism.
·
The
same year Frederic A. Ogg wrote in “European Government and Politics” that from
the Nazi viewpoint Christianity was part of the common value systems which the
Nazis most vigorously opposed, that the Nazis specifically objected to values
of "a common European origin" and that Nazism opposed reason as a
workable guide to social action."
·
Ernest
Hambloch in his 1939 book, “Germany Rampant,” wrote “It is not mere
accidence that an anti-Christian movement should have coincided with brutal
anti-Jewish persecution…Not by the most ingenious sophisms could persecution be
justified by Christian tenets and the Nazis have not attempted it.”
·
Hambloch
wrote: "Modern democracy is the child of Christianity, and both were
therefore anathema to Gobineau [the racial theorist who gave rise to much of
Nazi racial "science."] Nietzsche proclaimed he was Antichrist.
Gobineau was far more anti-social. He was anti-Christian."
·
In
1939, Ronald Kain stated in his textbook, ‘Europe: Versailles to Warsaw’:
“The Nazi treatment of Jews seemed to devout Protestants and Christians to be
downright unchristian.”
·
Salwyn
Schapiro, a prominent Jewish history wrote in 1940 textbook, “Modern and
Contemporary European History”: “In their ruthless coordination the
Nazis encountered only one opposition, that of the Protestant and Catholic
clergymen who bravely upheld their principles despite persecution.”
·
Joseph
Harsch in his 1941, “Patterns of Conquest,” wrote: “Nazism is profoundly
anti-Christian and profoundly hostile to a civilization based upon
Christianity.”
·
Albert
Parry, in his 1941 book, “Riddle of the Reich,” observed that the Nazis
have prevented every single Papal letter for the prior three years from being
read by any Catholic bishop in Germany.
·
M.W.
Fodor, in his “The Revolution is On!,” recorded: “National
Socialism also revived the persecution of churches, surpassing all other
revolutions in its anti-clerical attitude … In Germany not only Christians, but
also Christianity itself is persecuted.”
·
Fodor,
who personally knew Russian Bolsheviks and followed closely the Bolshevik
Revolution as well as the National Socialist revolution and the Fascist regime,
noted in his 1940 book that the Nazis surpassed all other totalitarian systems
in its persecution of churches, finding even the Soviet Union less hateful
toward Christianity than the Nazis, who persecuted not only Christians, but
Christianity itself.
·
After
the defeat of France, Fodor wrote that he pitied the appeasers in the democracies
who believed that Nazi Germany would be a bulwark against the Soviet Union, not
knowing that both regimes were children of the same ideas.
·
In
1941, in "The Conservative Revolution," Herman Rauschning noted that
Marxism itself was part of a single great revolutionary movement that included
Marxist socialism, Nazism, communist Bolshevism, fascism, and nihilism.
·
In
1941, Jewish German emigrant Konrad Heiden wrote in “The New Inquisition”
that Christianity preached salvation to men of good will, then added: “But that
is not National Socialism. It only makes the young men and the S.S. laugh. They
know all such holy talk — priest and the Jew, it’s all the same.”
·
Count
Carlo Sforsa, an Italian diplomat who fled Italy after Mussolini came to power,
noted in 1941 that the slogan spread by the dictators to the workers in the
democracies was “Socialism, or National-Socialism, against Plutocracy.”
·
Lowenstein
in 1941 wrote that in the Hitler Youth the neo-pagan cult began to fill the gap
which was the result of a conscious erosion of Christianity.
·
Gustavus
Myers noted this as well in his posthumously published History of Bigotry in
the United States (1943): “Early in the Nazi movement Hitler had avowed his
scorn for Christianity.”
·
Max
I. Dimont, a highly respected historian of Jewish history, observed in his 1962
book “Jews, God and History” that Nazi propaganda had been
anti-Christian since 1919.
·
These
were not obscure books. Days of Our Lives was the number one
bestseller non-fiction book in 1939. Henrick van Loon was the best
selling non-fiction writer of the 1930s. The journalist Dorothy Thompson
at the time was considered more influential than Eleanor Roosevelt.
Heinberg and Kain were writing college textbooks. What these men and
women wrote, the whole Western world knew. It was no secret and it was
not questioned. And those authors are only a few of many writers who
reported blow by blow the Nazis battle between Christians and the Third Reich
as it happened - between Christians with their conscience, their bodies, their
voices and Nazis with their concentration camps, their show trials of
clergymen, and their raping of nuns.
·
Hitler
spoke publicly of wanting to enter the Vatican and "pack up that whole
whoring rabble."
·
It
has long been known that at one point Hitler planned to kidnap the Pope and
imprison him. And, as several scholars have noted, Pius XII knew that the
Nazis had a plan to kidnap him. In addition to minutes from a meeting on
26 July 26 1943, in which Hitler openly discussed invading the Vatican, Ernst
von Weizsacker, the German Ambassador to the Vatican, has written that he heard
of Hitler's plan to kidnap Pius XII, and that he regularly warned the Pope and
Vatican officials against provoking Berlin. So, too, the Nazi Ambassador
to Italy, Rudolf Rahn, has described the kidnapping plot and attempts by Rahn
and other Nazi diplomats to prevent it.
· "What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel." Joseph Goebbels, 16 October 1928
· "What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel." Joseph Goebbels, 16 October 1928
Five Stages of Kirchenkampf
The Kirchenkampf can be divided into five stages.
First (spring to fall 1933):
* Hitler makes efforts to assimilate the churches into the culture of National Socialism.
* The Reichskonkordat was an outcome of this stage.
* The preparation to create a unified single Reichskirche from the 28 regional Protestant churches , the Ludwig Müller controversy, and the beginning of the rise of the Confessing Church
Second (fall 1933 – fall 1934):
* The regime attempted to bring the churches under the control of the Nazi state
* Opposition to these efforts led to the emergence of the Confessing Church
* The regime breaches various portions of the Concordat
Third (fall 1934 – February 1937):
* The regime tried to bring the Protestant churches under its control by taking charge of church finances and governance structures.
Fourth (February 1937 – 1939):
* More open conflict based on "Nazism itself and its anti-Christian worldviews"
* The regime increased its imprisonment of resistant clergy, such as Martin Niemöller
Fifth stage (1939–1945)
* More clergy were imprisoned
* Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and executed
* Clergy were drafted into the military
* Church publications were censored or banned
* Services and functions restricted or banned
"[Nazism was] completely incompatible with Christianity."
- Martin Bormann, memo to the Gauleiters in 1942
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