Hitler said that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on science.[SUP]
[21][/SUP] In a diary entry of 28 December 1939,
Joseph Goebbels wrote that "the Fuhrer passionately rejects any thought of founding a religion. He has no intention of becoming a priest. His sole exclusive role is that of a politician."[SUP]
[22][/SUP] In Hitler's political relations dealing with religion he readily adopted a strategy "that suited his immediate political purposes."[SUP]
[23][/SUP]
Christianity remained the dominant religion in Germany through the Nazi period, and its influence over Germans displeased the Nazi hierarchy.
Evans wrote that Hitler believed that in the long run National Socialism and religion would not be able to co-exist, and stressed repeatedly that Nazism was a secular ideology, founded on modern science: "Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition". Germany could not tolerate the intervention of foreign influences such as the Pope and "Priests, he said, were 'black bugs', 'abortions in black cassocks'".[SUP]
[21][/SUP]
During Hitler's dictatorship, more than 6,000 clergymen, on the charge of treasonable activity, were imprisoned or executed.[SUP]
[24][/SUP] The same measures were taken in the occupied territories, in French
Lorraine, the Nazis forbid religious youth movements, parish meetings, scout meetings, and church assets were taken. Church schools were closed, and teachers in
religious institutes were dismissed. The episcopal seminary was closed, and the SA and SS desecrated churches, religious statutes and pictures. 300 clergy were expelled from the Lorraine region, monks and nuns were deported or forced to renounce their vows.[SUP]
[25][/SUP]
The Nazi leadership made use of indigenous
Germanic pagan imagery and ancient
Roman symbolism in their
propaganda. However, the use of pagan symbolism worried some Protestants.[SUP]
[26][/SUP] Many Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler,[SUP]
[24][/SUP] subscribed either to a mixture of
pseudoscientific theories, particularly
Social Darwinism,[SUP]
[27][/SUP] or to mysticism and occultism, which was especially strong in the SS.[SUP]
[28][/SUP][SUP]
[29][/SUP] Central to both groupings was the belief in Germanic (white
Nordic) racial superiority. The existence of a Ministry of Church Affairs, instituted in 1935 and headed by
Hanns Kerrl, was hardly recognized by ideologists such as
Alfred Rosenberg or by other political decision-makers.[SUP]
[30][/SUP] A relative moderate, Kerrl accused dissident churchmen of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of "Race, blood and soil" and gave the following explanation of the Nazi conception of "Positive Christianity", telling a group of submissive clergy in 1937:[SUP]
[31][/SUP]