Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Note on Translation and Citations
- Introduction
- 1 Positive Christianity
- 2 Above the Confessions
- 3 Blood and Soil
- 4 National Renewal
- 5 Completing the Reformation
- 6 Public Need before Private Greed
- 7 Gottgläubig
- 8 The Holy Reich
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Index
8 - The Holy Reich
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Note on Translation and Citations
- Introduction
- 1 Positive Christianity
- 2 Above the Confessions
- 3 Blood and Soil
- 4 National Renewal
- 5 Completing the Reformation
- 6 Public Need before Private Greed
- 7 Gottgläubig
- 8 The Holy Reich
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Index
Summary
… whoever kills you will think he is offering a service to God.
John 16: 2Looking to the Holocaust as the ultimate expression of Nazi practice, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman suggests that Nazism should not be viewed as the failure of civilization, but rather its product: “We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it) that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar, face we so admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body. What we perhaps fear most, is that each of the two faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin.” Bauman continues by adding that “often we stop just at the threshold of the awesome truth … that every ingredient of the Holocaust – all those things that rendered it possible – was normal.” This study has attempted to interrogate the role of Christian belief as one ingredient of that normalcy. Christianity, in the final analysis, did not constitute a barrier to Nazism. Quite the opposite: For many of the subjects of this study, the battles waged against Germany's enemies constituted a war in the name of Christianity. The dualism Bauman alludes to was itself predicated on a dualistic understanding of human behavior hegemonic in Western, Christian civilizations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Holy ReichNazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945, pp. 261 - 267Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003