<<Then why would [Hitler] say, "Christianity is an invention of sick brains...," "The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death." ?>>
Good question. I never heard that quote before but it seems to be all over the net. Not with any really authoritative source so far, but I'll admit it's something he COULD have said. Because the ideas of Christianity (love your enemies, turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth) are kind of sick. If you ever get a chance to read Nietzsche's "The Genealogy of Morals," he claims that Christianity is the invention of the Jews who were physically inferior to the Aryans and so could defeat them only by scheming to sell them on a "transvaluation of all values."
What Nietzsche meant was that each "race" became subject to a leader or leaders and the leaders imposed their particular values on the race that they led. For example, a tribe might fall under the leadership of a warrior. His values would become their values. The tribe would come to value strength, brutality, good looks (because the leader and his lieutenants would simply grab the best-looking women of the tribe for themselves, so successive generations of warrior leaders would become better and better looking.) They don't have very highly developed legal systems because if they want something they take it and it's theirs as of right. (Of course if they misjudge the strength of the warrior who already has what they want to take, this could easily have fatal consequences.) The warrior tribes par excellence happened to be the Germans. Women like Heidi Klum. Men like Ahnold.
Other tribes fell under the leadership of priests. Priests are weaklings who aren't going to distinguish themselves in battle, so they are smart enough to hone their other skills - - "cleverness" as Nietzsche puts it. They aren't any good at war or hunting, but they're smart enough to figure out how things work, like calendars and crop planting and eclipses and stuff, and too smart to explain their knowledge to others except as mysterious communications from gods which only they can talk to. They manage to convince the dumb schmucks in the rest of the tribe that they are all at the mercy of some very angry gods and that only they, the priests know how to cool them out before any serious damage is done. They aren't as virile as the warrior class, so they don't get the real babes in the tribe, so over time the successive generations of priests become smarter and ever more devious but also weaker and uglier. They do however have highly developed legal systems because they'll spend hours and days arguing about who has the "right" to a property or a crop or a woman or a child because nobody has the balls to actually just get up and kill the owner and take what he wants by force. The priestly tribe par excellence just happened to be the Jews.
According to Nietzsche, the warriors are capable of feeling anger while the priests are capable only of resentment. That is to say, you fuck with an Aryan and he explodes and smites thee and then feels bad about it for the rest of his dumb fucking life, whereas you fuck with the Jew, who of course lacks the physical power to stand up and smite anyone, but he will nurse his "resentment" for a long time, brooding about it and scheming till his "cleverness" shows him some diabolical way to really fuck up his enemy without having to actually do battle with him. Well the Jews being full of resentment about the Germans couldn't physically do anything about it till one day some genius figured out the transvaluation of all values.
What do the warrior tribes value? Strength, pride, good looks, power, sex, fun. What do the priestly tribes value? Homeliness, modesty, "cleverness," meekness, studying books of religious gibberish. This is why good-looking babes in the Bible are usually evil sluts who cause the downfall of good men, like Delilah or Jezebel or Potiphar's wife. WHAT IF . . . what if those dumb fucking Aryans could be TRICKED into accepting all the values of their exact opposites, the Jews? They'd lose their racial pride and start fucking untermenschen - - sub-humans like Polacks, Slavs, blacks, Jews, etc. The Aryan race in one or two generations would lose all its fighting spirit, physical strength and blonde good looks, which of course would delight the "priestly" races, none more so than the Jews.
That was where Christianity came in. A made-to-order religion, not for the Jews who created it, but for their arch-enemies, the Aryans. Hey, here's a religion that tells ya to turn the other cheek, love your enemies, accept everyone as a member of your own family, quit looking at beautiful women (better to rip out your own eye . . . ) etc. But there was only one problem - - what Aryan in his right mind couldn't see that all this bullshit was coming from a bunch of sick, demented, wretched untermenschen, the Jews? Who would buy into anything they were selling? So of course, Jesus had to be crucified and the Jews had to be the ones who made it happen. Now NOBODY could claim this "new" religion was just more Jewish BS. They crucified him for Christ sake. How could this be their religion?
According to Nietzsche, the Aryans fell for it hook, line and sinker, bought the religion, abandoned their old Norse gods of thunder and sex and magic and lost all their racial pride. Soon they were having sex with all kinds of inferior races and polluting their own bloodstream for the next thousand years. In Germany, the blond Aryan uebermensch (superman) was already a thing of the past. The guiding philosophy of the Nazis certainly owed a lot more to Darwin and Nietzsche than it did to Jesus. Hitler's comment on "sick minds" might just have been some Nietzschean fragment surfacing in his consciousness at one particular moment in time.
Now I don't know how much of a Nietzschean Hitler really was, but the ideas of Nietzsche certainly infused some of the philosophers who influenced or even contributed to the development of the Nazi ideology. He obviously wouldn't have been too thrilled that Christianity had Jewish origins, whether or not he actually saw it as the Jewish plot that Nietzsche believed it to be.
But the photos are very interesting. Obviously whatever Hitler really felt about Christianity (and I believe he must have despised it for its "weakness" and its Jewish origins) he had no problem making friends with them and they had no problem making friends with him. For the most part. And to be completely fair about this, while most of the Christian churches and their leaders supported Hitler and his campaigns (the Pope held a special Mass to pray for the success of Hitler's armies at the beginning of the Russian campaign) there were plenty of priests and ministers at the lower levels who risked their lives to save Jews from the Holocaust. So I'd certainly never say that Christianity was ALL bad. But a lot of it was. And that's just a fact.
