IN an Easter Sunday sermon warning of the rising tide of atheism in Germany, the Catholic bishop of Augsburg linked the crimes of Nazi and Communist regimes to godlessness.
Bishop Mixa: crap at history
Wherever God is denied or fought against, there people and their dignity will soon be denied and held in disregard.
Walter Mixa also said that “a society without God is hell on earth” and quoted the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky:
If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
He added:
In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice.
Christians and the Church were always the subject of “special persecution” under these systems, he said.
Atheist groups, according to Spiegel Online, reacted with fury and accused Walter Mixa of rewriting history.
The bishop’s claim that humanity automatically arises from religious faith is “totally untenable,” Rudolf Ladwig, president of the Germany-based International League of Non-Religious and Atheists (IBKA), told Spiegel Online.
Mixa’s words, he said, are part of a:
Long-term strategy by the Church to exculpate, in a historically inaccurate way, the history of its own institution as relates to fascism.
A Nazi belt buckle bearing the words 'God with us'
The Nazi dictatorship targeted Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, trade unionists, Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, the disabled and others, Ladwig said. It was by no means the dictatorship of a dedicated atheist movement. Resistance from within the churches came only from individuals.
The philosopher Michael Schmidt-Salomon, head of the humanist non-profit group the Giordano Bruno Foundation, also sharply criticized Mixa.
If you bear in mind that during the Nazi era it was precisely the Jews who were accused of being godless, then one sees how perfidious Mixa’s reasoning is.
He pointed out that freethinker associations were disbanded by the Nazis and avowed atheists were persecuted.
Mixa’s claim that the Nazi regime was “godless” is, he said, was a “massive distortion of history, and he pointed out that Nazi ideology – including its anti-Semitism – was based largely on Christian traditions. Evidence for that can be found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and elsewhere.
The majority of the Nazi elite saw themselves as Christians.
Although the Nazi movement included a wide variety of currents of religious thought, ranging from nihilism to neo-paganism to Teutonic mythology to Hinduism, atheism played no significant political role for the Nazis. Avowed atheists were not welcome in the Nazi party or the SS.
Catholic bishops pictured giving the Nazi salute in honour of Hitler
In a speech* delivered on April 12, 1922, Adolf Hitler said:
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.
In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.
To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
Some atheist, huh?
The relationship of the Catholic Church to the Nazis was also an ambivalent one. Individual members of the clergy openly confronted the regime, which in some cases resulted in their persecution and murder. Others voluntarily collaborated with the dictatorship, while most simply did nothing. A systematic persecution of Christians did not take place in the Third Reich – let alone the “special persecution of Christians and the Church” which Mixa spoke of.
Both the diocese of Augsburg and the German Bishops’ Conference declined to comment on the sermon and the criticism when contacted by Spiegel.
The Easter sermon was not the first time that Mixa has made comparisons to Nazism for rhetorical purposes. In February, the bishop compared the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust with the number of abortions performed over the past decades. Mixa’s spokesman also responded to criticism from Germany’s leading Green Party politician, Claudia Roth, who called the bishop a “crazy über-fundamentalist,” by comparing her words to Nazi propaganda.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, approximately one-third of all Germans do not belong to an organized religion. A 2005 survey conducted by AP-Ipsos showed that only 22 percent of Germans have no doubt about the existence of God, while some 23 percent of Germans identify themselves either as atheists or agnostics.
*The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942 -Norman H Baynes, ed.
HAT TIP: Har Davids.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
April 15th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
oh…those godless atheists, always behind on some disasters! Somehow, I have a feeling, that we are starting to become like the “jews” are for muslims. Were everything that goes wrong..”the joos did’it”
This time.. “the atheists did it!”
April 15th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Yes, bees lack a belief in God, so they can’t possibly form societies or commit acts of altrusism.
Oh, hang on a minute [learns some basic biology, and re-reads chapters in "The Selfish Gene"]…..
Bees don’t just behave in any old fashion after all. They can and do sacrifice themselves for the good of the hive if needbe.
A bishop that’s wrong? Surely not!
April 15th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Either this man is completely ignorant of both German history and the history of Christianity, or he is lying. But given that he is a Catholic bishop he is probably both.
Doesn’t he know how to Google?
A reputable site, like Stephen Jay Gould’s would give him a wealth of verifiable sources…
http://www.stephenjaygould.org.....itler.html
Does he know how to read?
If so I could lend him my copy of ‘Symbolism in Christian Art’ by Edward Hume, 1891. It has a very interesting section on the early use of the cross symbol in emergent Christianity. Apparently the very first cross symbols they used were not the cross we know today but one called a fylfot. This is identical to the swastika used by the Nazi’s.
It was by far the most common christian symbol of the early church. However for some reason most books published after 1945 fail to mention it.
Dunno why!
April 15th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Always amusing how this is presented as a Dostoevsky quote when:
a) Those worse don’t appear in The Brothers Karamazov (from where the quote is allegedly taken).
b) Dostoevsky never said anything of the kind. The closest thing to it would be the general position of Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, but that’s not Dostoevsky, that’s Ivan – an important distinction.
Sadly, that’s just one tiny part of what’s wrong with this imbecile’s lunatic ravings.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Given the role of the Catholic Centre Party in enabling Hitler to establish his dictatorship, in return for a concordat with Rome, and the subsequent respectability that the concordat afforded the Nazi regime, I’m very surprised that Catholic bishops are so ready to raise the subject. Stones and glass houses come to mind.
April 15th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
My late dad was among the first to enter Belsen-Bergen towards the end of WWII and he has told many stories of how the camp guards and officers regarded god. It seems they varied between praying for mercy, praying for forgiveness and wondering why god had not done more to answer the prayers of the fatherland!! Not one German soldier in that camp claimed to be an atheist and many, (the majority according to his recollections) were open and devout Catholics. He even had one say to him when asked by my father’s CO how such atrocities could be carried out that it was gods work in revenge for what the Jews did to Jesus!! Atheists hey? Not from what I heard.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.â€
Dostoevsky? wasn’t he a russian novelist? And wasn’t this just one of his characters speaking? Kind of lacks a little in the credibility department doesn’t it? Or was there another Dostoevsky who was a world-renowned moral philosopher and I just never heard of him? Sort of like quoting a catholic bishop as an expert on world history.
April 15th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
A lot of religious types use this argument against atheism, but I’m not quite sure what they’re trying to get at.
Are they claiming that all atheists do whatever they want all the time, and so are evil people to be avoided?
Or are they claiming that since atheists don’t just go out and murder, rape and pillage that god *has* to exist because there’s no reason for us to not murder, rape and pillage otherwise?
April 15th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
A catholic bishop lying, whatever next!
April 15th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
#Wherever God is denied or fought against,#
Not much of a fighter the God character Eh, s/he/it needs old men in frocks and pointy hats to stick up for it.
If these pricks really believed in heaven, do you think they would tell so many lies?
April 15th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Surely by making this statement Bishop Mixa has breached Godwin’s Law.
Therefore he has already forfeited the argument, as well as being completely wrong on all counts. And an arse.
Twat!
April 15th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Let’s have the facts:
Democide thoughout history on Wikipedia… see the chart… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
What did the archbishop attack? Atheists? no. atheism.
Finally, if nazism and communism were support by Christianity, then why did those regimes brutally supress them?
Your theses make no sense.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
@Facts please
‘Finally, if nazism and communism were support[ed] by Christianity, then why did those regimes brutally supress them?’
First off. Two different regimes. This post ain’t about Stalin.
Second. The Nazi’s were very much a Christian organisation, one could even say they were Christian fanatics very much in the same mould as the Islamic fanaticism that is so popular today.
Thirdly, the Nazi’s never suppressed Christianity. There were some Christians who opposed the Nazi regime, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but he was executed for his attempted assassination plot against Hitler, rather than for his beliefs. Christians don’t seen to be able to tell the difference.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice.
What a brainless tool. People like him need to stop pretending the Nazis, including his own Pope Ratzi, were atheists.
I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 2
I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.
- Adolf Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936
The Catholic Church should not deceive herself: if National Socialism does not succeed in defeating Bolshevism, then Church and Christianity in Europe too are finished. Bolshevism is the mortal enemy of the Church as much as of Fascism. …Man cannot exist without belief in God. The soldier who for three and four days lies under intense bombardment needs a religious prop.
- Adolf Hitler in conversation with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber of Bavaria, November 4, 1936
Etc, Etc, Etc.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Kev –
Good point. Exactly.
When all this Hitler was / wasn’t an atheist shit goes on, it’s always forgotten that Hitler didn’t personally man the camps, oversee deportations, plan the railway logistics & transport, pour the cans of Zyklon B into the ‘showers’… The vast majority of people doing this were xtians.
There’s a chilling (and highly controversial) book by Daniel Goldhagen on the subject: Hitler’s Willing Executioners.
April 15th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Hitler was a big believer in faith schools too.
April 15th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Al Quaeda is Islam carried to its logical conclusion, and Nazism was Catholicism carried to its logical conclusion. Even Catholic bishops are not so insane that they do not know that. Therefore they are self-serving, conscienceless liars protecting their bread and butter.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:10 am
The centuries-long history of the Roman Catholic church and its overwhelming totalitarianism is and was the root cause of European fascism. They are fascism masters, and most definitely entirely self-serving conscienceless liars, yes…and why anyone in this world would continue to fawn over them, support them, and respect them just beggars belief, and human decency in itself.
The RCC is the most foul and stinking edifice on this busted up planet, and it should be shunned and dismantled and told to fuck off out of our lives once and for all and at every turn.
but this will not happen while we continue to have catholic politicians in all parliaments, and believers who really are that dumb enough to carry on supporting its bloated and rotten body…
April 16th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Nazi were a bunch of criminally insane fanatics who worshiped the Superior Race, and found religion useful to indoctrinate masses. Some religious leaders and clergy complied, others did not. Certainly some Nazis called themselves Christians, but so does Michael Phelps. if some crackpot get Jesus’ message all wrong and reads hate where it should read Love, s not Jesus’ fault. That bishop was simplistic and rash. But so is who blames Nationalzocialism on Christianity as a whole. Many Christians weren’t anti-Semites, and refused to comply with Nazis’ criminal folly.
April 16th, 2009 at 11:50 am
Facts please,
“Your theses make no sense.”
Nuff said!
Callisto
“The RCC is the most foul and stinking edifice on this busted up planet”
Actually, I think it comes in at a poor second to islam, though I agree with everything else you say.
“and it should be shunned and dismantled and told to fuck off out of our lives once and for all and at every turn.”
This definitely applies to islam and it should also apply to all other religions too.
Angelo Ventura,
“Nazi were a bunch of criminally insane fanatics who worshiped the Superior Race, and found religion useful to indoctrinate masses.”
This equally applies to religious leaders like the pope and the rest in the vatican who are a bunch of criminally insane fanatics who worship money/power, and find religion useful to indoctrinate the masses.
You can always find exceptions. My father was a catholic who fought against the nazis in WW2, as did his brothers (three were killed). He wasn’t a fascist, as far as he was concerned he was defending his country against them. Still, because of his religious beliefs, he destroyed our family. I knew his mother who was also a religious fanatic and I’m sure that’s where he got his parenting ‘skills’ from.
My oldest brother, a confirmed Atheist who died just recently, raised his children on his own (as I am doing myself) and was close to them all. None of my siblings have any beliefs yet all have better relationships with their children than my catholic father did, and all the children in our families are great kids. Where did his catholicism get him or us? The truth is, we would all have been better off without it, and without it we have all fared better as parents to our own children. I have known others with similar stories.
What we’re mostly talking about here is the religious bodies themselves and the people who represent them, though having said that, there are many ordinary religious believers of every faith who are despicable people BECAUSE of their belief system. The same cannot be said for Atheism.
Atheists do not refer to an ancient and vile book to gain insight into how to lead their lives. We think for ourselves. If some individual who doesn’t believe in god does something immoral, this cannot be held up as an example of Atheism in general because we are all individuals. We do not have a doctrine which we all follow.
On the other hand, muslims murder non muslims because their koran tells them to do it. Jews slaughter Palestinians and steal their land because they believe their god gave them that land. Every religion tells it’s followers that they are following the one true religion and therefore anyone else is fair game. “god told me to do it”
April 16th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
@ Factsplease:
Did you just use WIKIPEDIA as a debating tool?
You did, didn’t you?
April 16th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Am I the only one who thinks that Godwins laws should be made into a rea actual law??
April 16th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I think that this story demonstrates that the Catholic Church are getting desperate and are panicking that atheism is on the increase. In fact all they have to do to stop atheism in its tracks is to provide plausible evidence for the existance of God. If atheists were without exception the vilest people on the planet it would not prove that God exists, only that it would be expedient to encourage people to believe he does.
As for those “Religion isn’t to blame” commentators, there is not one single crime that was committed during the holocaust that could not be fully justified by quoting the Bible. But then you wouldn’t know that would you, not having read it.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Oh, I just despise organized religion. And I have no respect for so called “sacred” books and the people who kills and discriminates citing those books. But humans crave spirituality, and some need believe in it, I think. My stance on religion and atheism is, one can believe or disbelieve anything, provided he respects other rights and freedom, and doesn’t try to impose his values and wiews on others. Christians can be very different from one anither. Albert Schweitzer and Martin Luther Kung were Christians, and they were wonderful human beings.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:33 am
Angelo Ventura
“one can believe or disbelieve anything, provided he respects other rights and freedom, and doesn’t try to impose his values and wiews on others.”
Yes of course. I think this is what most Atheists believe but, although some religiots spout this, we are all under a constant barrage of attacks from religious organisations and their believers to respect their ways and to live the way they want us to regardless of our own beliefs. They want society arranged to suit them and their crazy nonsense with no room for any other viewpoint.
They want to control education, media, governments and local authorities and their budgets. They want to control people’s minds. This is total intolerance on a grand scale and is not acceptable. The have to do this because they know that if they don’t, people will outgrow their outdated and primitive ideas and they, as institutions will die.
It’s all very well sticking up for their right to choose, and this is of course correct. They do have a right to choose, but so does everyone. They are the ones who need to learn respect. What you see here is people who are fed up with their liberties being trampled by mindless morons who have no intention of respecting freedom of speech whilst at the same time using it to force their agenda on everyone else.
Well, they can just fuck off!
April 18th, 2009 at 3:45 am
BRILLIANT Article!!
I have done a lot more research on this topic, -the roman christian christian, the lutheran and the evangelist affiliations to the nazi’s.
There is endless amounts of facts that points to christianity in particular.:
http://www.airnews.info/?tag=holocaust
http://www.airnews.info/?tag=lutheran-holocaust
http://www.airnews.info/?tag=r.....-holocaust
http://www.airnews.info/?tag=islamic-holocaust
I’m still working on this topic, and I will add more articles very soon. The Pope Pius was silent through holocaust, and it wil not surprise me if The Pope was the “Man” who initiated the holocaust to spread christianity and to fight competing religions in Europa. Take a look at Poland. Poland is today a majority of Catholics.. So, The nazi’s lost the battle but the Vatican and The Roman Catholics won the war.
May 15th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Give me a break! The atheist Josef Stalin killed more than 40 MILLION of his own people. go firgure that one out.
May 15th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
I believe the word "zing!" is in order…
May 16th, 2009 at 6:22 am
The idea that Nazis were atheists is not good history, but it is a fact that the communist state was atheist. Remember that Marx said religion was the "opiate of the masses." I'm not saying that atheists are immoral; I don't believe that. I do think that it is not intellectually honest to try to divorce communism from atheism, however.
June 4th, 2009 at 5:27 am
C. S. Lewis on Atheism
"When I was an atheist my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?… Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless. I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."-C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity).