Christian Nazis, the Third Reich, and Our Current Political Moment
Brad speaks with historian Ricard Steigmann-Gall, author of the Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919-1945. They discuss how the Nazi party used a Christian social identity as a way to signal who the true and good citizens were, how the melding of religious and national identities was the first step for racism and anti-semitism, and how the USA was an example for Nazi eugenicists. Throughout the conversation both of them make comparisons to the pervasiveness of Christian nationalism in the contemporary United States and how it is feeding fascist instincts, violence, and division.
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AXIS Moondi AXIS Moondi Hello, thanks for listening to Straight White American Jesus today.
Before we get going with our interview with historian Richard Steigman Gall, I just wanted to mention one actionable item for this week.
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Pick a state, Florida or Arizona or one of the others, and get involved.
Texting, calling, writing, etc.
Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Omnishi, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Skidmore College, and I'm thrilled today to be joined by a historian who's just working in an area with incredible contemporary relevance, unfortunately, in some senses.
But I'm joined by Richard Steigman-Gall, and Professor Steigman-Gall is Associate Professor of History at Kent State.
has served as the Director of the Jewish Studies Program there.
His work has appeared in many journals, German History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Revolutions, the Journal of Contemporary History, and his book, which we're going to spend today speaking about, is The Holy Reich, Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919 to 1945, and that is with Cambridge University Press.
It's been translated to several languages, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, And he's currently working on several projects related to historical fascism and contemporary iterations of fascism in the United States and has written for the Huffington Post and Politico and other places.
So, Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Brad, for having me.
Well, your book is, honestly, I've sort of followed you from afar and, you know, on Twitter and other places and been familiar with what you're up to in terms of your work for some time.
And we've reached a place where, honestly, the entanglements of fascism and religion in our country seem to be in the foreground.
I really wanted to just sort of ask you about your work on Nazi Germany.
And I'm sure everyone listening can see where this is going.
I'm eventually going to ask you about making some comparisons or links or analogical sort of relations.
So, we'll get there in a sec.
Let me ask you about the main thesis of your book, The Holy Reich, Nazi Conceptions of Christianity.
And your main thesis is a little startling.
I think both to historians and to people just casually listening, you argue that German National Socialism, the Nazis, We're not anti-Christian, but in many instances either identified as Christian or adopted Christian ideals.
You know, just to sort of help us understand your work and your book, can you tell us, you know, before you wrote the book, what was the dominant kind of scholarly opinion on the relationship between Nazism and Christianity?
Thank you for starting that way.
As historians, of course, you know, phrase it, you're asking a question of historiography, right?
Well, how did the existing literature inform my own agenda?
So I had always been interested in questions of anti-Semitism.
And I mean, that in large measure has to do with the fact that my dad was a refugee from Nazism.
And his own personal history that I came to know very intimately, right, growing up and listening to his stories around the dining room table, very much informed my then scholarly interests once I got into college and grad school.
And so the thing for me that was always a puzzle, and it seemed to me a tension, was two different types of literature that asked the question about the lineages of anti-Semitism, right?
So when you read, or when you used to read, things have changed since the book came out, I dare say, but Before the book, I found that there was a type of literature that said that yes, there were connections between Nazi anti-Semitism and prior Christian antecedents of Jew hatred.
This was a scholarship that was oftentimes then made, written by scholars of anti-Semitism as such, right, who wanted to understand the proverbial road to Auschwitz and where did that road to Auschwitz start, right, when and where.
So that was one body of literature.
Another body of literature seemed to argue pretty forcefully against that argument.
And that was the, for lack of a better word, the churches under Hitler literature that emphasized some sort of individual martyrs against Nazism, most obviously Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a name I'm sure your viewers or listeners are familiar with.
And other pastors and priests in the Third Reich, most obviously Martin Niemöller.
So these were men who were conceived after World War II as being part of the resistance against Hitler, not just a political or on-the-ground resistance, but a spiritual resistance, so-called.
And that literature, the churches under Hitler literature, pretty emphatically insisted that Nazism was not just unrelated to Christianity, but actively anti-Christian.
And by extension, then, that Nazi Jew hatred in its ultra modernity and embrace of racial categories had, they contended, nothing to do with prior religious ideas of the Jew as a deicide figure or, you know, medieval notions of Jews.
responsible for plagues and this kind of thing, right?
So this was a tension between one, the two bodies of work, and that gave me the opportunity to then try to resolve this tension.
And what I did is something that curiously hadn't been done in a lot of prior literature, and that is to look at what the Nazis themselves had to say.
The leadership, not just Hitler, right?
Anyone can do yet another book about one man's personal Thoughts, right?
Especially with the most notoriously great man, quote-unquote, ever in world history, right?
Adolf Hitler.
But his entourage, the people around him, the people who informed what Nazi ideology was to mean, and also would pass judgment on what was, you know, proper Nazi thinking, so to speak, or not.
So that hadn't been done, that kind of work, since a book was published in 1968 by A scholar called John Conway, who's since passed on, and so I wanted to take a look at these actual historical figures and ask, okay, what did they have to say?
And that's where I discovered that, in fact, not just for public consumption right in front of an audience, which you could always say is just propaganda, But behind closed doors, proverbially, that there was a very strong cadre of Nazis who said, yes, we conceive of our own movement as a, in some sense, a Christian one.
Now, against those so-called positive Christians, I describe them as positive Christians, quote-unquote, because there was a A part of the Nazi Party program that said that the Nazi Party upheld a positive Christianity.
This was their phrase.
So I use that as a heuristic device to then investigate what they would have meant by positive Christianity.
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