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Many are unaware that the roots to Hitler's anti-Semitism are to be found in Martin Luther's rabid anti-Semitism. In fact many of the passages in Mein Kampf will be familiar to those who read the following words from Luther:
From Martin Luther's "On the Jews and their Lies" 1543:
Therefore be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practiced most maliciously and veheming his eyes on them.
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Moreover, they are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury. Thus they live from day to day, together with wife and child, by theft and robbery, as arch-thieves and robbers, in the most impenitent security.
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However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath.
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If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies-- that is, longer than two thousand years.
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...Christ and his word can hardly be recognized because of the great vermin of human ordinances. However, let this suffice for the time being on their lies against doctrine or faith.
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Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts?
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Alas, it cannot be anything but the terrible wrath of God which permits anyone to sink into such abysmal, devilish, hellish, insane baseness, envy, and arrogance. If I were to avenge myself on the devil himself I should be unable to wish him such evil and misfortune as God's wrath inflicts on the Jews, compelling them to lie and to blaspheme so monstrously, in violation of their own conscience. Anyway, they have their reward for constantly giving God the lie.
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No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.
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...but then eject them forever from this country. For, as we have heard, God's anger with them is so intense that gentle mercy will only tend to make them worse and worse, while sharp mercy will reform them but little. Therefore, in any case, away with them!
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Over and above that we let them get rich on our sweat and blood, while we remain poor and they such the marrow from our bones.
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I brief, dear princes and lords, those of you who have Jews under your rule-- if my counsel does not please your, find better advice, so that you and we all can be rid of the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews, lest we become guilty sharers before God in the lies, blasphemy, the defamation, and the curses which the mad Jews indulge in so freely and wantonly against the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, this dear mother, all hristians, all authority, and ourselves. Do not grant them protection, safe-conduct, or communion with us....
Hitler and his Pope
THE most important Catholic nation in Europe in the period of the First World War, even with its Protestant majority, was Germany, and in 1917, shortly after his consecration as bishop, Pacelli went to Munich as papal nuncio. Cornwell writes that his "principal task in Germany was now nothing less than the imposition, through the 1917 Code of Canon Law, of supreme papal authority over the Catholic bishops, clergy and faithful." To that end he set out to renegotiate existing concordats with the German regional states. Ultimately he hoped for a concordat with the German nation itself, one that would solidify Vatican authority, especially in the matter of the appointment of bishops. The anti-Catholic suspicions of Protestants and Weimar liberals were not the only obstacle to the new definition of Church authority. Germany's Catholic bishops were accustomed to holding sway in their own sphere, and the Catholic Center Party -- a political organization that dated back to the nineteenth century, when it was formed to resist Otto von Bismarck's anti-Catholic Kulturkampf -- was one of the most powerful institutions in Weimar. In 1919 the Center Party drew six million votes, second only to the Social Democrats. The Center Party, occupying the crucial middle ground in the mounting chaos of the Weimar era, would provide five chancellors in the ten governments that came and went from 1919 to 1933. Catholic leaders of the party consistently rejected Pacelli's -- and the Pope's -- "urgings," in Cornwell's word, to stay out of coalitions with the left-wing Social Democrats. Once it was imposed on German Catholics, with the approbation of the German state, the new Code of Canon Law would end such defiance. That is the fateful background to what followed the rise of Adolf Hitler. Cornwell writes,
The acquiescence of the German people in the face of Nazism cannot be understood in its entirety without taking into account the long path, beginning as early as 1920, to the Reich Concordat of 1933; and Pacelli's crucial role in it; and Hitler's reasons for signing it. The negotiations were conducted exclusively by Pacelli on behalf of the Pope over the heads of the faithful, the clergy, and the German bishops.
The record compiled by Cornwell establishes, for example, that Pacelli "patently lied" to Cardinal Michael Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich, to keep him in ignorance. "When Hitler became Pacelli's partner in negotiations," Cornwell observes, "the concordat thus became the supreme act of two authoritarians, while the supposed beneficiaries were correspondingly weakened, undermined, and neutralized." The Atlantic
In 1933 the Vatican signed a Concordat with Germany making
Roman Catholicism the only recognized religion in that country:
Signing the Concordat is Cardinal Pacelli (later to become Pope Pius XII). By 1933, he was the Vatican Secretary of State. Seated second from his left is Franz von Papen who was the Papal Nuncio to Germany. Standing at the far right can be seen the little known Vatican prelate, Montini, later to become Pope Paul VI.
Above and below: Little Dollfuss (Dictator of Austria) with
Cardinal Innitzer on the right, witnessing the proclamation of
the new Clerical-Fascist Constitution in 1934.
The Spanish Catholic Hierarchy giving the Fascist salute at Santiago de Compostela in 1937.
Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, papal nuncio to Germany, talks with Hitler ( himself a Roman Catholic) at a formal reception in Berlin in Jan. 1936.
Eva Braun as a young girl at Simbach Convent.
Deutche Kristen (German Christian) clergy with SS escort
1936 John Heartfield poster depicting how the German clergymen had embraced nazism.