Josef Goebbels

Josef Goebbels on Christianity

The following reveals that not only were all of the top Third Reich Leaders strongly anti-Christian, but that they also rejected Christian 'morals.'

“Goebbels also reveals himself as violently opposed to the Christian churches. He makes it clear, he plans to deal with the churches after the war and reduce them to impotence.”

Editors insertion, Page ix: Communism is not anti-Christian, as is commonly believed. 80 million Bibles printed in China - and counting Link to article from 'Christianity Today.

“Reichsleiter Martin Bormann became Rudolf Hess’s successor as Hitler’s deputy in party matters after Hess's sensational flight to England in 1941. He proved to be one of the most radical and uncompromising Nazis, filled with a hated for the Church.”

Page 99

“American Newspapers claim that Stalin has been preordained to save Christianity.”

Page 108

Roosevelt has thought up a new Christian propaganda for the Easter holidays. He compares the road of the vanquished peoples of Europe to the road to Golgotha, and claims that he of all people has been divinely ordained to protect Christianity against neo-paganism–this, of course, with the aid of the exceptionally Christian Soviets, who have distinguished themselves in the past by their religious fanaticism!”

Page 182

“On the one hand it can’t be denied that certain measures of the Party, especially the decree abut crucifixes, have made it altogether too easy for the bishops to rant against the state.” [The Nazis insisted upon the removal of crucifixes from schools and hospitals] Editors insert

“Göring, too…his whole attitude toward the Christian Churches toward the Christian denominations I quite open and above board. He sees through them, and has no intention whatever of taking them under his protection.”

Page 163, 164

“It’s a dirty, low thing for the Catholic Church to continue its subversive activity in every way possible… Next to the Jews these politico-divines [politisierenden pfaffen] are about the most loathsome riffraff that we are still sheltering in the Reich. The time will come after the war for an over-all solution of this problem.”

Page 168

“Prostitution in Berlin is causing us many a headache these days. During a raid we found that 15 percent of all women arrested had VD, most of them even syphilis. We must certainly do something now about it. In the long run we cannot possibly avoid setting up a ‘red-light district’ in the Reich capital similar to those in Hamburg, Nuremburg, and other large cities. You simply cannot organize and administer a city of four millions in accordance with conceptions of bourgeois morals.”

Page 189

“The Führer spoke very derogatorily abut the arrogance of the higher and lower clergy. The insanity of the Christian doctrine of redemption really doesn’t fit at all into our time. The Führer cited a number of exceptionally drastic and in part even grotesque examples. Whereas the most learned and wisest scientists struggle for a whole lifetime to study but one of the mysterious laws of nature, a little country priest from Bavaria is in a position to decide this matter on the basis of his religious knowledge. One can regard such a disgusting performance only with disdain.”

Page 421

“The Catholic clergy is collaborating with the enemies of our country in a truly treasonable manner. I could burst with rage when I think that we cannot possibly call the guilty ones to account now. We shall save our vengeance until later.”

Page 429

A number of Catholic and Protestant ministers have been sentenced to death. They had offended the German armed forces in a most cowardly manner. I proposed to the Führer that the verdicts, together with the opinion of the court, be published.”

Page 544

"Goebbels once poked fun at the antediluvian moral concepts of the reactionaries and the tractarian spirit of their priggish bedfellows. Hitler seized the cue and whipped himself into one of his furious tirades: ‘I abominate prudishness and moral prying…What has it to do with our struggle? These are outworn notions of reactionary old women like Hugenberg, who can only visualize national rejuvenation in terms of virtuous customs and austerity. ‘League of Virtue’ and ‘Christian-German Table-Companions’, ‘replacing the material losses of the nation with spiritual gains’– and all the rest of that tawdry patriotic mumbo-jumbo. Our uprising has nothing to do with bourgeois virtues. We are an uprising born of our nation’s strength–the strength of its loins as well, if you like. I won’t be a spoilsport to any of my men. If I demand the utmost of them, I must also permit them to let off steam as they please, not as it suits a lot of elderly church-hens. My lads are no angels.

Pages 5 - 6

“By publishing this attack in Der Angriff, the press organ of his own Berlin Gau, Goebbels made himself a champion of progressive sexual morality and the scourge of ‘unnatural people’ whose moral concepts might, in a pinch, govern ‘community life in a nunnery’ but were utterly out of place in a ‘modern civilized State.’ Every inch the enlightened revolutionary, he poured scorn on the moral snoopers who could have liked nothing better than to set up ‘chastity committees’ in town and country and transform the new Germany into a wilderness of carping and hypocrisy. Characterizing this behavior as Bettschnüffelei [bed-sniffing], he went on to accuse those who claimed a lien on morality– ‘the under-endowed’ whose aim it was to supervise the sex-life of Müller and Schulze [Smith and Jones] as well as the morally harmful activities of dancers and stage stars–of contemptible hypocrisy and specious prudishness. No self-respecting German woman should venture forth unescorted, smoke, drink, dress up or wear her hair bobbed: these were rules of decorum advocated b y mean-minded bigots and arrogant arbiters of morality.”

“Wasn’t National Socialism on the side of life, and didn’t it aim to infect the nation with optimism and joie de vivre?”

“This is why we give the worker too, a chance to dress festively on festive occasions. This is why we purvey strength through joy. And this is why we brush aside the agents of prudish hypocrisy and refuse to let them spoil, with their everlasting and spiteful pedantries, the pleasures that are so essential a counterpart to the troubles, cares, and privations of mundane existence for a decent nation which has every reason to draw strength for its arduous fight for survival from ever renewed and deliberate affirmation of life.”

Pages 101-103