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. 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. On November 4, 1936, the Nazis ordered the removal of crucifixes
from schools in the Oldenburg area on the grounds that these were "symbols of superstition."
This order was rescinded only after Nazis were faced with determined local opposition. Then
despite rescinding the Nazi prohibition of these "symbols of superstition," in December 1936
Nazi bureaucrats simply removed crucifixes anyway 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," and the same year
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, that the hostility
between Nazism and churches began as soon as the Nazis came to power, and that it quickly
became impossible to be a good Catholic and a good Nazi. Some Nazis were overtly and clearly
anti-Christian. Others were simply silent. Hitler, however, 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. 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-Christianize the German people." The response was wholly unsatisfactory, with the Christian
clergy believing that Hitler had accepted honors due only to God."
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 these
beliefs. 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, the lot of German
Jews (some of whom escaped the Holocaust) would have been worse.