Dakota Beacon

The Nazi Party was founded on January 5, 1919 as the German Workers' Party. In February, 1920 the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) to attract workers away from rival left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD). Also, a “25-point Program of the NSDAP” was publicly proclaimed by Adolph Hitler, who assumed control of the organization.

A definition that describes the intent of the word “National” being added is “relating to, or being a coalition government formed by most or all major political parties”.

A definition that describes the intent of the word “Socialist” being added is “one who advocates for a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism.

From these definitions, we can surmise that the change in party name anticipated consolidation of power to form a one-party state that embraced the 25-point Program, as summarized below:

The 25-point Program of the NSDAP

1. Union of all Germans to form a Greater Germany

2. Abolition of the Peace Treaty of Versailles and St. Germain (from after WWI)

3. Acquisition of other lands as colonies for Germans

4. None but Germans to be granted citizenship, Jews to be rejected for citizenship

5. Non-citizens to be treated as guests subject to foreign laws

6. Only citizens may vote or become government employees

7. The state is first responsible for citizens and has the right to exclude non-citizens

8. Immigration of non-Germans prohibited; expulsion of non-Germans in country since August 1914

9. All citizens granted equal rights as well as obligations

10. Obligation of every citizen to work mentally or physically for the common good

11. Abolition of unearned incomes and breaking of “debt slavery” (usurious interest)

12. War profiteering illegal with confiscation as the remedy

13. Nationalization of all large businesses (companies or “trusts”)

14. Profit sharing of all wholesale trade profits

15. Expansion of “Old Age Welfare”

16. Communalization of large warehouses toward leasing to small businesses

17. Expropriation of land (without payment) to public use; abolition of land taxes and speculation

18. Death penalty for all crimes, usery (high interest on borrowed money) and profiteering

19. German Common Law to replace Roman Law

20. Free public education for all with emphasis on the role of the state

21. State sponsored health care with emphasis on mother-child, physical fitness and no child labor

22. Abolition of all mercenary (privately paid) troops and establishment of a national army

23. All press employees to be German; no foreign ownership of German press; foreign press may not print in German; censorship of publications and artistic & literary expression

24. National advocacy of a “Positive Christianity” that is not bound to any one denomination, to combat materialism

25. Strong central power of the state

The Nazi party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, but not an outright majority. Because none of the parties was able or willing to put together a majority coalition government, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. Traditional conservative nationalists believed they could control him and his party. Through the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg and a change in the Weimar Constitution allowing the cabinet to rule by direct decree, the Nazis soon established a one-party state.

As can be seen from the content of the 25-point Program of the NSDAP, it reads much more similar to the Communist Manifesto than our Declaration of Independence or Constitution. So the idea that Nazi Germany was a “right wing” state is an affront to logic. It was initially named in accordance with the manifesto i.e. “workers of the world... unite” and renamed to attract more socialists and communists to the party. In liberal democracies, the political right opposes socialism. Hitler may well have been unable to personally steer the socialist/communist movement in Germany in his early years… so chose instead to call it by a different name so he could personally build a power structure that he could control. Does our biased media call Hitler a “right winger” in an attempt to associate him with Republicans? Despite Senator Joeseph McCarthy's being 100% correct regarding communist infiltration of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s, our biased media still and often uses the term “McCarthyism” to describe “witch hunts”; why don't they refer to the Russia Hoax as “McCarthyism?

Positive Christianity?

Let's examine the call for “Positive Christianity” of point number 24 above to discern its similarity to the state sponsored atheism dictated within Marxism.

Hitler and his minions were careful not to attack Catholics or Protestants in Germany as such. It was one of their subtle and successful propaganda ploys to represent themselves as not concerned about religion or, at most, as representatives of a purer, Aryan, “positive” Christianity. But there is no question that their ultimate aims toward Christians were, if not physical genocide, then spiritual genocide and total extinction of the traditional faiths through ever-expanding restrictions and terror. Shortly after taking power, Hitler explained to some of his closest collaborators in the Reich Chancellery that, like Mussolini, he would make a formal peace with the churches. Hitler explained:

            “Why not? That will not prevent me from totally uprooting Christianity and eliminating it lock, stock, and barrel. It is, however, decisive for our people whether they have the Judeo-Christian faith and its flabby morality of sympathy, or a strong, heroic faith in god in nature, in god in one's own people, in god in one's own fate, in one's own blood… One is either a Christian or a German. One can't be both.”

Instead of direct attack, Hitler planned and carried out a program of pretending that the Christians he arrested and executed were not being eliminated because of their religion, but because of illegal political activities or crimes. In private, however, he made it clear that he adopted this ruse only because he understood the power of an institution that had survived many regimes over two millenia. But he also expressed his intention to “crush the [Catholic & Protestant] church like a toad.” Hitler prepared a shrewd strategy in the unlikely event that Christians tried to challenge him:

            “If they do… I'm certainly not going to make martyrs out of them. I'll stamp them as stupid criminals.”

And that is exactly what he tried to do to his many Christian opponents in Germany and its occupied lands, sometimes with horrendous success…

In 1932, just prior to the Nazi rise to power, there were about twenty-one thousand Catholic priests in Germany. Of these, more than a third (over eight thousand) clashed with the Reich and several hundred have been documented as having perished at Nazi hands. No doubt many others, who will remain unknown, were eliminated as well.

Heroic Resistance

One of the most remarkable and stunningly heroic voices was that of the German Jesuit Rupert Mayer. At a Communist meeting in 1919, Mayer bumped into Hitler, who was then merely a political agitator. The priest rose to refute various points of the Communist speakers. Hitler stood up next and remarked that the priest had criticized Communism from a religious point of view; he, Hitler, wanted to do so from a political standpoint. Mayer was in and out of prison throughout Hitler's attempts to break the hold of the church on the German people until, after World War II broke out, he was sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. After authorities there were unsuccessful in dealing with Mayer, they freed him to the monastery at Ettal where he was prohibited from all public activity. When allied forces liberated the monastery, Mayer returned to his active life but died shortly thereafter in the midst of a sermon. In 1948, when his body was transferred to its current resting place, thirty-five thousand people came to pay tribute to a man they admired.

The Dachau concentration camp (a labor camp with a crematorium for workers who perished due to harsh treatment, not an extermination camp), which was, for some unknown reason, the Gestapo's favorite camp for clergy (though priests were imprisoned in all the Reich's concentration camps) held, at one point or another, 2,670 priests from Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Yugoslavia,  and other countries. Clergy from Poland numbered 1,780 of the 2,670. About 600 priests died in the camp and another 325 died during so-called “transport of invalids” to other sites, a euphemism for secret execution. Two bishops, from Poland and France, also perished in Dachau.

To better comprehend the level of Christian martyrdom in Nazi Germany, may I suggest reading Chapter 6, “The Nazi Juggernaut” of Robert Royal's book “The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century” copyrighted in year 2000, available at Catholic.com for a modest donation.

If readers, especially the youthful among them, come to understand that totalitarian monsters gravitate to whatever political vehicle is available to them, efforts to expose the truth will go a long way toward preventing history from repeating itself in this contentious 21^st century. The old saying “Believe nothing you read and only half of what you see” is very good advice. Totalitarians of every stripe have a way of twisting the meaning of words in the dictionary as well as the teachings of the Bible. Beware of false witness.