Historian William Sheridan Allen examines the process by which the Nazis isolated each individual in the community. The normal social bonds were either dissolved, or made into Nazi bonds.
Jews were simply excluded from the community at large. At the same time The Nazis undertook their most Herculean task: the atomization of the community at large. Though the methods differed, the result was the same.
Subsequently, “by the summer of 1933 individual” Germans were atomized - turned into isolated individuals, as personal relationships were weakened: families, neighbors, coworkers, sports teams, churches, and hobby groups such as card-playing clubs, gardening clubs, etc. - all such social structures were either turned into quasi-official extensions of the Nazi Party, or simply dissolved. The ordinary Germans
were as cut off from effective intercourse with one another as the Jews had been from the rest of the townspeople. The total reorganization of society was the most important result of the Nazi revolution. Eventually no independent social groups were to exist. Wherever two or three were gathered, the Fuehrer would also be present. Ultimately all society, in terms of human relationships, would cease to exist, or rather would exist in a new framework whereby each individual related not to his fellow men but only to the state and to the Nazi leader who became the personal embodiment of the state.
Some social institutions were relatively easy to co-opt: labor unions and sports clubs, for example, could be reshaped by Nazi leadership. The rules of soccer, after all, didn’t change. Other societal structures were more threatening to the Nazis: the family and the church. Some families, and some churches, could be infiltrated, co-opted, and subverted. Others, however, had a strong internal sense of identity and would not easily succumb to the atomization process. To weaken the churches, which were correctly perceived by the Nazis as a potential source of serious resistance, a propaganda campaign was directed against those churches which would not submit to becoming Nazi churches.
Remembering the official name of the Nazi Party - “The National Socialist German Worker’s Party” - is one key to understanding the party’s goals. ‘Nationalism’ was the goal of making the state, the government, the highest personal value for each citizen; in a nationalist society, individuals willingly surrender personal freedom to help the state achieve its goals, and the state is more important than family or God. ‘Socialist’ meant that the Nazis wanted all economic activity, and all property ownership, to be an extension of the state.
When the Nazis turned their attention to religious matters, they relied in part on their ability to confuse the public. Some churches had been successfully subverted and were churches in name only: instead of a cross in the front of the church, there was a swastika; instead of reading from the Bible, they read from Hitler’s speeches. Other churches had resisted Nazi influence, and paid the price: they met in secret, and were hunted by the Gestapo; if they were caught, they were either sent to prison camps or executed. To the general public, the Nazis decried the Christian faith as a collection of falsehoods and lies. Yet the Nazis understood the Christian faith as a threat, because it would expose the Nazis for what they were: it would be the Christians who formed the underground resistance, who smuggled Jews to safety out of Germany, who would hinder the Nazi military organization, and who would attempt to stop Hitler by assassination.
Martin Bormann, a close associate of Hitler’s, who bore the title Reichsleiter, unleashed the following tirade in 1942:
National Socialist and Christian concepts are incompatible. The Christian Churches build upon the ignorance of men and strive to keep large portions of the people in ignorance because only in this way can the Christian Churches maintain their power. On the other hand, National Socialism is based on scientific foundations. Christianity’s immutable principles, which were laid down almost two thousand years ago, have increasingly stiffened into life-alien dogmas. National Socialism, however, if it wants to fulfill its task further, must always guide itself according to the newest data of scientific researches.
The ongoing irony was, of course, that while accusing the Christian Churches of lying (because they were attempting to reveal the truth about the Nazis), the Bormann was part of the apparatus which was producing propaganda deliberately designed to misinform.
In a revolting and shocking attempt to co-opt the apearance of traditional religion, Nazis used religious vocabulary for their own purposes. Historian George Mosse writes:
Nazi opposition to Christianity took the form of elevating its own world view into a matter of direct religious expression.
Nazism was a religion, and could tolerate no other religions in its presence. If the government and the state were the ultimate values - which is an exact formulation of National Socialism - then there would be no room for a meaningful idea of God.
But however much the Nazis wanted to substitute their world view for Christianity, they were careful to keep the traditional forms intact. Even the language they used in their speeches often employed familiar Christian imagery. Hitler and Goebbels talked about the “miracle of belief" (now meaning the Nazi faith), appealed to “Providence,” and were not loath to call Mein Kampf the “sacred book of National Socialism.” Indeed, the Führer’s closest companions were called his “apostles,” while he himself was often referred to as the “savior.”
Christians in Germany created a number of different ways in which they resisted the Nazis. Different varieties of Christians - Lutherans and Roman Catholics - worked together; this type of cooperation is called ‘ecumenical’ work. In addition to the secret activities of smuggling Jews out of Germany to freedom, sabotaging military activities, and attempting to assassinate Hitler, there were public acts of resistance. The famous ‘White Rose’ student group distributed leaflets to the public, unmasking the corrupt nature of the Nazis. In 1933, a group of scholars met to draft a statement in defense of the Christian Churches and against the Nazi Churches. The document they formulated is called the ‘Bethel Confession’ because it was written in the German town of Bethel; a ‘confession’ in this sense is a public statement of belief. Historian Lowell Green writes:
The Bethel Confession was the first extensive manifesto written to evaluate the goals of the German-Christians in light of Christian doctrine, particularly as taught in the Sacred Scriptures and the Lutheran Confessions. Especially noteworthy was its courageous support of Jews in its discussion of the racial question. No other “confession” surpassed the Bethel Confession in this regard. Its most celebrated authors were Hermann Sasse, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Georg Merz, but they were assisted by several other noted theologians: Hans Fischer, Wilhelm Vischer, and Gerhard Stratenwerth.
While the Bethel Confession was primarily a Lutheran document, Roman Catholic resisters like August Froehlich made equally brave protests, and groups like the White Rose involved both Lutherans and Roman Catholics.
While the effort to erase Christianity’s influence among the people was the Nazi Party’s first big task, its second challenge was to weaken family ties. A party of absolute nationalists cannot tolerate loyalty among family members; the only loyalty should be to the state. Therefore, any action which would blur the identity of the family would solidify the government’s grip on the mind of the individual. To this end, the Nazis took a variety of steps. Young women were allowed, even encouraged, to have children out of wedlock, fathered by young men whom they barely knew and might never see again. These children, along with others, were increasingly placed into programs designed to foster, from the very youngest ages, affection for, and loyalty to, the government in general, the Nazi Party in particular, and Adolf Hitler specifically. Historians are familiar with the children, indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth program, who turned their parents over to authorities because the parents had expressed doubts about the Nazi government. Such cases were not isolated.
The desire to weaken the fabric of society was present from the earliest days of Hitler’s career within the Nazi Party. Hitler’s fellow party members reflected this inclination. Historian William Shirer writes:
An organization, however streamlined and efficient, is made up of erring human beings, and in those years when Hitler was shaping his party to take over Germany’s destiny he had his fill of troubles with his chief lieutenants, who constantly quarreled not only among themselves but with him. He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition - a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him. When he emerged from prison he found not only that they were at each other’s throats but that there was a demand from the more prim and respectable leaders such as Rosenberg and Ludendorff that the criminals and especially the perverts be expelled from the movement. This Hitler frankly refused to do. “I do not consider it to be the task of a political leader,” he wrote in his editorial, “A New Beginning,” in the Voelkischer Beobachter of February 26, 1925, “to attempt to improve upon, or even to fuse together, the human material lying ready to hand.”
The Nazi Party was, then, a group of individuals who understood that the dismantling of society’s core institutions - families and religions - along with the co-option of other social institutions - social clubs, sports teams, labor unions - and the introduction of Nazism as a family and a religion, would be the necessary routes to ensure their lock and grip as a totalitarian dictatorship. Only by weakening society, and offering itself as a replacement for such structuring principles in life, could the Nazi Party eliminate those who would eventually oppose its even darker schemes for the future. It is noteworthy that, although the anti-Semitic nature of Nazism was clear from the beginning, the Nazi government waited until 1938 - the year of the Kristallnacht - to unleash its most loathsome and lethal anti-Jewish activities. From 1933, the year in which the Nazi seized power, until 1938, they first systematically weakened churches and families, so that when their most evil plans emerged into daylight, there were few left with the psychological strength to offer opposition.
