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Nazi ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment whose legitimacy did not spring from the government. It desired the subordination of the church to the state.〔Theodore S. Hamerow; On the Road to the Wolf's Lair - German Resistance to Hitler; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1997; ISBN 0-674-63680-5; p. 196〕 To many Nazis, Catholics were suspected of insufficient patriotism, or even of disloyalty to the Fatherland, and of serving the interests of "sinister alien forces".〔Theodore S. Hamerow; On the Road to the Wolf's Lair - German Resistance to Hitler; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; 1997; ISBN 0-674-63680-5; p. 74〕 Nazi radicals also disdained the Semitic origins of Jesus and the Christian religion. Although the broader membership of the Nazi Party after 1933 came to include many Catholics, aggressive anti-Church radicals like Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler saw the ''kirchenkampf'' campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church and anticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.〔Ian Kershaw; Hitler a Biography; 2008 Edn; W.W. Norton & Co; London; pp. 381–82〕 The Hitler regime permitted various persecutions of the Church in the Nazi Empire, though the political relationship between Church and state among Nazi allies was varied. While the Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler's public relationship to Religion in Nazi Germany may be defined as one of opportunism, his personal position on Catholicism and Christianity was one of hostility. Hitler's chosen "deputy", Martin Bormann, an atheist, recorded in Hitler's Table Talk that Nazism was secular, scientific and anti-religious in outlook. Biographer Alan Bullock wrote that, though Hitler was raised as a Catholic, and retained some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure".〔Alan Bullock; ''Hitler: a Study in Tyranny''; HarperPerennial Edition 1991; p218"〕 Bullock wrote that Hitler frequently employed the language of "Providence" in defence of his own myth, but ultimately held a "materialist outlook, based on the nineteenth century rationalists' certainty that the progress of science would destroy all myths and had already proved Christian doctrine to be an absurdity".〔Alan Bullock; ''Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives''; Fontana Press; 1993; pp.412〕 Though he was willing at times to restrain his anticlericalism out of political considerations, and approved the Reich concordat signed between Germany and the Holy See, his long term hope was for a de-Christianised Germany.〔 *Sharkey, (Word for Word/The Case Against the Nazis; How Hitler's Forces Planned To Destroy German Christianity ), New York Times, 13 January 2002 *(The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches ), Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, Winter 2001, publishing evidence compiled by the O.S.S. for the Nuremberg war-crimes trials of 1945 and 1946 *Griffin, Roger ''Fascism's relation to religion'' in Blamires, Cyprian, (World fascism: a historical encyclopedia, Volume 1 ), p. 10, ABC-CLIO, 2006: “There is no doubt that in the long run Nazi leaders such as Hitler and Himmler intended to eradicate Christianity just as ruthlessly as any other rival ideology, even if in the short term they had to be content to make compromises with it.” *Mosse, George Lachmann, (Nazi culture: intellectual, cultural and social life in the Third Reich ), p. 240, Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2003: "Had the Nazis won the war their ecclesiastical policies would have gone beyond those of the German Christians, to the utter destruction of both the Protestant and the Catholic Church." *Shirer, William L., (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany ), p. p 240, Simon and Schuster, 1990: “And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.” *Fischel, Jack R., (Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust ) , p. 123, Scarecrow Press, 2010: “The objective was to either destroy Christianity and restore the German gods of antiquity or to turn Jesus into an Aryan.” *Dill, Marshall, (Germany: a modern history ) , p. 365, University of Michigan Press, 1970: “It seems no exaggeration to insist that the greatest challenge the Nazis had to face was their effort to eradicate Christianity in Germany or at least to subjugate it to their general world outlook.” *Wheaton, Eliot Barculo (The Nazi revolution, 1933–1935: prelude to calamity:with a background survey of the Weimar era ), p. 290, 363, Doubleday 1968: The Nazis sought "to eradicate Christianity in Germany root and branch."〕〔Bendersky, Joseph W., (A concise history of Nazi Germany ), p. 147, Rowman & Littlefield, 2007: “Consequently, it was Hitler’s long range goal to eliminate the churches once he had consolidated control over his European empire.”〕 The 1920 Nazi Party Platform had promised to support freedom of religions with the caveat: "insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the moral sentiments of the Germanic race", and expressed support for so-called "Positive Christianity", a movement which sought to detach Christianity from its Jewish roots, and Apostle's Creed. William Shirer wrote that "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists."〔William L. Shirer; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Secker & Warburg; London; 1960; p. 240〕 Himmer considered the main task of his Schutzstaffel (SS) organisation to be that of acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity. ==Background== Roman Catholicism has ancient roots among Germanic peoples, but The Reformation divided German Christians between Protestantism and Catholicism.〔(Encyclopædia Britannica Online - ''Germany : Religion'' ); web 23 May 2013〕 The Nazi movement arose during the period of the Weimar Republic in the aftermath of the disaster of World War One (1914–1918) and the subsequent political instability and grip of the Great Depression.〔(Encyclopædia Britannica Online - ''Germany : History - Germany from 1918–1945 ); web 23 May 2013.〕 In the 1930s, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Centre Party (''Zentrum'') were major social and political forces in predominantly Protestant Germany. Through the period of the Weimar Republic (1919–33/34) the Centre Party, aligned with both the Social Democrats and the leftist German Democratic Party, had maintained the centre ground against the rise of extremist parties of the left and right.〔(Yad Vashem - ''The German Churches in the Third Reich'' ) by Franklin F. Littell〕 Historically the Centre Party had had the strength to defy Bismark and been a bulwark of the Weimar Republic, yet, according to Bullock, from the summer of 1932, the Party had become "notoriously a Party whose first concern was to make accommodation with any government in power in order to secure the protection of its particular interests".〔〔Alan Bullock; Hitler: a Study in Tyranny; Harper Perennial Edition 1991; pp. 138, 148〕 It remained relatively moderate during the radicalisation of German politics which occurred with the onset of the Great Depression, but the party's deputies ultimately voted for the Enabling Act of March 1933, with which Hitler obtained plenary powers.〔(Centre Party ); Encyclopedia Britannica Online; retrieved 28 September 2013〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nazi views on Catholicism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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