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Hitler, loudly proclaimed his Christianity in the bulk of his speeches and boasted about stamping out atheism.
Of course he did. That's campaign rhetoric for you. The Nazi leadership were peerless demagogues, adept at pandering and utterly insincere. After all, they called themselves Socialists, too, for populist appeal. And Nationalists, to run the Patriot con.
I'm well aware of their pronouncements. I also know what they did.
Hitler, Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Walther Darre...they played every angle. Every ego had a take on it, even Himmler with his Wotanism.
None of them were Christians. Some of them, like Alfred Rosenberg, even wanted an explicit campaign to purge Germany of all Christian influence. But the pragmatists- Hitler,Goebbels, Goring- stifled that project, or anyway set it aside,, because they realized the importance of keeping the Christian masses of Germany (so to speak) conned and lulled into complicity. They were having pretty good short-term political success by confabulating their own version of Christianity- "Aryan Teutonic Christianity", you might call it. I can imagine Goring laughing about the very idea now, loaded to the gills.
His soldiers had belt-buckles adorned with the maxim "Gott mit uns"
Well, yeah. The idea is to never miss a trick.
and the policy he instituted with regards to genocide targetted people specifically according to what religion they belonged to.
No, no...the Nazis paid minimal attention to the Jew as religionist. They concentrated on the Jew as ethnic other, interloper on the Homeland, outsider...biological inferior. A sociobiological pitch, to "the locals"- the "pre-immigrant, indigenous Northern-Middle European" German- a category that is in actuality delineated by language rather than "ethnic purity"...but why let that get in the way of a good scam?
Yet you proclaim he was a secularist.
I wouldn't say that I made a "proclamation" of my opinion. I would have put more swank into it, if I wanted to proclaim something.
fwiw, this is the first time I've ever encountered the term "secularist', much less employing it to describe Adolf Hitler. I have studied his life and career, and I don't think he viewed religion as anything but a means to an end for his will to power- something that could be invoked, exploited, withdrawn, and even disparaged at will.
At any rate, my earlier characterization of "secular" was directed not at Adolf Hitler, but at the political movement known as Nazism itself- due to its obviously materialist precepts, which owed overwhelmingly more to certain monomaniacal notions of animal husbandry than on Christian ethics and priciples.
You know, that is the thing about Christians I have noticed, you guys do love lying for your Jesus.
If that statement gives a fair indication, you consider Christians to be so monolithic a group in terms of their character, that describing them in terms of common disparagement doesn't constitute ignorant and willful stereotyping.
I can only reply that I don't consider all secular people to share the same character.
