Did you know Hitler's propaganda machine tried to commandeer Christmas?
November 17, 2009 by Patrick Madrid
Filed under Patrick's Blog
Neither did I. And that’s why this article in today’s Daily Mail online caught my eye and raised my eyebrows.
Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, ‘Germanic’ cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown.
The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler’s Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition.
Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments.
She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.
Selected objects from the family’s enormous collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.
‘Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis – after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,’ Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. ‘The most important celebration in the year didn’t fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.’
The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals.
The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin.
The symbol that posed a particular problem for the Nazis was the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees. . . . (continue reading)
Yes, I did know. I would hope most people would know that.
"Gott mit uns" was a holdover from the Prussian and then Imperial German state mottoes. It was held on to by the German army because Hitler didn't want to annoy the officer corps unnecessarily. (The Waffen SS notably used the motto Meine Ehre heißt Treue – My Honour is Loyalty.) Hitler, at Goebels suggestion, referred in his speeches not to God but to Providence; religious sounding but with no real content. In terms of a single transcendent God, which is what western culture takes "God" to mean, the Nazis were in fact atheists. That they held to a bastardised form of transcendence is neither here nor there.
I don't think the Nazis were atheists at all. After all the belt buckles of the German soldiers had the inscription "Gott mit uns", "God with us". Hitler frequently spoke of God in his speeches, how he (Hitler) was sent by God to save his (German) people. The Nazis were infatuated with everything "aryan" so the Nordic mythology was very interesting to them, but "pagan" does not equal "atheist." They still believe in the supernatural, they're just not Christian. The Swastica is a religious symbol, a pagan one indeed but definitely a religious symbol nonetheless.
I can very well imagine them trying to bring Christmas back to the pagan roots (I'm a Christian myself and I celebrate Christmas, but there's no denying that pagan's did celebrate "Yule" when light conquered darkness), simply because they preferred all things Nordic and Aryan.
So, a very interesting historical fact that one doesn't hear much about, the Nazis tried to steal Christmas!
But they weren't atheists, that was just what I wanted to say.
Happy soon coming Christmas! 😀
Nationalsozialismus is the pinnacle of egocentrical humanism.
The Nazi regime tried to suppress Christianiti (and especially Catholicism, of which Hitler was higly critical) create the so-called 'Positive Christianity': a form of Christianity that followed the Nazi ideology and was basically the opposit of orthodox Catholic or Protestant Christianity.
Hitler als stated that those who preached love and tollerance were slaves of false religions.
As E. Davidson (a historian) stated that the dogma of Nazi 'religion' were radically anti-religious.
Some scholars believe Hitler was a woman.