From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THINKING THINGS OVER
Christians, Jews and Wotan
What we still need to learn from Nazism.
Holy Week is by no means all sweetness and light. This Friday Christians mark the crucifixion, a terrible event redeemed by the resurrection three days later. The Jews gather on Thursday for Passover, celebrating the Exodus from slavery as the angel of death skipped Jewish homes during Egypt's tenth plague, the killing of the firstborn.
So perhaps it's not an inappropriate time to discuss another terrible topic, the Holocaust, and in particular the divisive issue of Christian culpability in the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It is not the purpose here to dismiss the long history of anti-Semitism in Christian lands. By now most Christians agree this was a sin, and its legacy surely played an important role in laying a groundwork for the Nazis and in muting opposition to the "final solution."
It is the purpose, however, to stress one point that seldom receives due emphasis. To wit, the Nazi leaders and ideologues were not Christians. They were pagan, some quite explicitly. For the rest, the ancient myths celebrated in Wagner became a pillar of their doctrine of Teutonic racial superiority.
Nazism was itself a "political religion," Cardiff University historian Michael Burleigh stresses in his magisterial "The Third Reich: A New History." It sought to displace the traditional church and command spiritual authority as well as temporal. Its special animus toward Jews was not religious but racial, and it "had one foot in the dark irrationalist world of Teutonic myth, where heroic doom was regarded positively, and where the stakes were all or nothing--national and racial redemption or perdition."
The Nazi attack on Christianity was widely understood at the end of World War II. William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" recounts the Nazi plan for the Christian churches: It included an intention to "exterminate irrevocably . . . the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800." Current denominations would be replaced by the National Church. Its altars would have only a copy of "Mein Kampf," with a sword to the left. The Christian Cross would be removed, replaced "by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika."
The Nazi's aggressive paganism is far less understood today. At one presidential prayer breakfast, Bill Clinton offered the opinion that "Adolf Hitler preached a perverted form of Christianity." I remember a night with my own rabbi on matters Jewish, Seth Lipsky, then editor of the Forward and now embarked on the audacious enterprise of launching a new daily newspaper in New York. When I read Shirer's description, he exclaimed, "You'd better get that scoop in the newspaper."
Too, the Nuremberg Project of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Opinion made some headlines by publishing a 1945 document prepared by William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services, "The Nazi Master Plan: the Persecution of the Christian Churches." (You can find it here.) Papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times thought it news that the Nazis had sought to suppress Christianity.
Among scholars, by contrast, the pagan roots are not controversial. In 1998, the Vatican issued a seminal statement, "We Remember: Reflections on the Shoah." It asserted, "The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime. Its anti-Semitism had its roots outside of Christianity and, in pursuing its aims, it did not hesitate to oppose the Church and persecute her members also." The World Jewish Congress response affirmed this assertion, "It is true that the National Socialist regime adopted a pagan ideology which rejected the Church."
In the WJC response this is a passing comment amid complaints that the Vatican had not adequately addressed its statement's next sentence: "But it may be asked whether the Nazi persecution of the Jews was not made easier by the anti-Jewish prejudices imbedded in some Christian minds and hearts. Did anti-Jewish sentiment among Christians make them less sensitive, or even indifferent, to the persecutions . . . ?"
Reading these two documents, I come away with the impression that the WJC complaints score points on the margin; the Vatican did not need to say that "many" Christians offered help to Jews, for example. But as a whole the Vatican statement is forthcoming, and surely the church is entitled to cite some of the sermons and statements responding to Nazism by condemning racism and affirming the church teaching of the unity of the human race.
I came to an interest in this issue via a circuitous route. Dow Jones & Co. is controlled by a family we call the Bancrofts, and one of its most interesting members was Mary Bancroft, who recorded her wartime adventures in a book, "Autobiography of a Spy." She spent the war in Switzerland as assistant to and mistress of OSS chief Allen Dulles. ("We can let the work cover the romanceĀand the romance cover the work," he told her.) She was also a patient of psychoanalytic pioneer Carl Gustav Jung, who published a 1936 article on the Nazis entitled "Wotan."
Jung believed in a collective unconscious, citing the similar symbols and motifs in mythologies around the world and their appearance in dreams. This position was instrumental in his split with Sigmund Freud. In the Nazis Jung saw an upwelling of the German collective unconscious, the resurgence of pagan gods. He saw the advent of the Nazis as powerful evidence on his side of the dispute with Freud. Because of this, his biographer Frank McLynn held, "Jung sometimes wrote about the upsurge of Wotan from the unconscious in triumphalist terms." This, along with cranky right-wing aristocratic views, left him with the image of a Nazi sympathizer.
One does not have to accept Jung's psychological apparatus, let alone his political views, to recognize that the Nazis represented something inescapably primitive at work in the heart of Europe. The Cambodian killing fields and Rwandan genocide show that the beast is still at large elsewhere in the world, and on the fringes of Europe "ethnic cleansing" has reappeared. Unarguably the Jewish Holocaust remains uniquely horrible, but if we fail to understand its pagan roots, we may miss what it teaches about the nature of us all.
Mr. Bartley is editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Mondays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
