Please elaborate for me what exactly the “Christian opposition to Hitler” was beyond a few small groups (eg White Rose) that were quickly suppressed, the occasional clergyman (ie Bonhoeffer), and a few individuals, usually low-ranking, in the Wehrmacht who objected to Nazi policy openly (eg Jaegerstatter). A few people, nothing very substantial.

I’m not counting the 1944 plotters around Col Stauffenberg since most – including Stauffenberg – were motivated by a mix of feelings, including upset that Hitler was losing the war, not simply religion.

Some honorable Christians opposed the Nazi regime, some were martyred. But they were never any serious threat to the regime, they were frankly puny and unimportant in any political sense.

I’ve studied this subject for decades; as mentioned, I’m an academic and specialist in Central Europe and the Nazis. What are your credentials?

“… we have to be careful since Christian opposition to Hitler was really quite small, consisting of a few notable individuals, and which has attracted more scholarly and theological attention than it perhaps deserves.”

What’s the source as to why you think this is a true statement?

There’s no doubt that enthusiasm for Nazism among Christians – and there was plenty – existed most strongly among “progressive” Protestants, who were eager to see Christianity “updated” under Hitler. The quasi-substitution of “Aryan” language into Protestantism, while awful, was no worse, and surely no stranger than black nationalist (mis)use of Christianity in later decades (paging Rev Wright), or more recent efforts to homosexualize the faith into a more politically acceptable form.

Moreover, we have to be careful since Christian opposition to Hitler was really quite small, consisting of a few notable individuals, and which has attracted more scholarly and theological attention than it perhaps deserves. Simply put, the vast majority of Germans were at least nominal Christians, and most of them supported Nazism to the very bitter end. The Wehrmacht conquered Europe under the spritual care of Christian chaplains, Catholic and Protestant, and marched under the cross wherever it went.

Nazi policy on Christianity was a convoluted mess, and there was little real persecution of the faith. Indeed, the Nazis posed successfully as defenders of the faith and family values against godless Judeo-Bolshevism and, whatever the actual misgivings about Christianity among Nazi leaders, they were smart enough to talk in generic “God-talk” of a kind easily recognizable to Americans with their dumbed-down Protestant “God-talk” used for public events. The public ate this stuff up in Germany, as in America.

So, I’m afraid the actual issue here is quite complex and it does not lend itself to easy lessons for Christians today. Even Himmler’s SS, the shock troops of the Nazi revolution, rejected atheism – it was banned – preferring a generic non-Christian “theism,” and even SS men were never required to give up church affiliation, whatever Himmler’s odd fascination was Germanic paganism (which never became policy anywhere in Nazi Germany; Hitler thought it odd too). And the SS allowed Christian chaplains in quite a few of their units made up of Belgians, Ukrainians, etc.

I would also end with the caveat that, pretty much everywhere in Eastern Europe, the Orthodox Churches greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators, and with good reason, given the horrors of Bolshevism. Even St Nikolaj Velimirovic, a great theologian who wound up on the wrong side of the Germans and got a short stint in Dachau for his troubles, had some qualified positive things to say about Hitler & Co; certainly they approved of the Nazis’s deep anti-Bolshevism more than they disapproved of any quasi-paganism.

For the record, I’m an Orthodox Christian of Slavic background who’s also a college professor and PhD in history, so I think the facts matter. 🙂