Antisemitism In Germany

You look out over the mountains of naked corpses piled outside of the death camps and are hit by the awful stench that rises from them. As you see this terrible, abhorrent sight, you wonder how anyone could be convinced to do something like this to another people. Due to Christianity’s condemnation of them, the Jews have been the biggest victims of oppression and mistreatment over the past two millennia. However, these prejudicial and hatred-based actions came to a peak with the most infamous crime against humanity; the Holocaust. The accomplishment of this act is due in part by the support of the Catholic Church. Catholicism, being the predominant religion in Germany at the time, held extensive sway over the citizens of Germany. By continuing …show more content…
Without the Church challenging the way the Nazis portrayed the Jews, they were able to analogize the false characteristics given to them by religious antisemitism in the past, to new, unsavory characteristics given to them by the party. The book Antisemitism: A History, expounds upon this:
The legacies of older, narrower kinds of antisemitism [such as Christian anti-Judaism] provided points of contact to Nazism’s redemptive brand [of antisemitism] that both borrowed from and fed on them…. The notion that Jews were children of the devil who had betrayed and crucified Jesus prepared the way for the accusation that Jews were perfidious traitors to the fatherland. The image of Jews as enemies of Christianity merged with charges of Jews as the masterminds behind atheist communism. (199) This was one of their many effective strategies to bring down the image of the Jew in the public eye. Through popular religion and long-held prejudices against …show more content…
To the Germans, the Jews were condemned from multiple different perspectives. All of these perspectives stemmed from the views instilled in them by religion. With these things in their minds, they had little issue with accusing the Jews of being the culprits behind all of their hardships. With the aid of the popular morality of the country, they could condemn them with a clear conscience and a feeling of righteousness.
In addition, because of the Nazi Party’s control over the Catholic church in Germany, they practiced “positive Christianity” without backlash. If there was anything that the Nazi Party did not want the people to hear from religion, they could label it as conflicting with German morality or that it was a product of the Jews. This kept the people of Germany indoctrinated and ignorant.
The role played by the Church in the years leading up to the Holocaust was a pivotal one to the success of the Nazi Regime. By reinvigorating and repurposing long-held religious prejudices against the Jews and distorting religious doctrines and teachings to fit their narrative, the Nazi Party used the Catholic Church to gain the support of the German