In an interview plagued by mediocre English, selective memory, and confused politics, Hilmar von Kampe — who was a youth in Nazi Germany — tells Focus on the Family:
- Conservative Christians were somehow distinct, more moral, than other German conservatives who observed anti-Semitism and did nothing to stop it. How were they different? He does not say.
- He and his family somehow didn’t know about the Holocaust, even though millions of Jews were vanishing.
- He didn’t know the West was fighting the Nazis. He thought they were fighting Germany, and the Nazis just happened to be in charge at the time.
- The Nazis were socialists, which are assumed to be always bad. But what are fascists? von Kampe does not say.
- America is becoming like Nazi Germany because of the separation of church and state.
The interview — what it says, and its numerous convenient omissions — is worth dissecting point-by-point, if someone has time….
The relationship of Christians to the Nazis is a complicated one and one that historians are still analyzing. Lutherans as members of the state church did not as a whole stand up to Hitler.
However, you are right that this young man has a confused politics and sense of history. He is basically repeating what his father (a member of the noblity supposedly) told him. So it would not be unusual for a person of his father’s generation to say that he had no idea the death camps were in operation and perhaps, only perhaps, to exagerate his own persecution under, and resistance to, Hitler.
The White Rose group, and others, paid for their open resistance to Hitler with their deaths — his father did not.
Whether modern completely secular states will in the long run lead to a destruction of the human spirit remains to be seen. It is certainly the view put forth by the Vatican. But a major difference remains between modern secular liberal states, such as today’s Germany, and the Hitlerreich, and that is that overt coercion, complete crushing of disent, perversion of the justice system, and death camps, do not characterize liberal societies.
I see this young man as a dupe of Focus on the Family, and of his father. More to be pitied than feared. The real responsibility for distortion of the truth is with Focus since it has decided to publish his naive statements.
The question of what they “knew” is a complicated one.
I have known an ex concentration camp prisoner who said that she did not really “know” until after the Germans invaded Holland, where she had moved in her early 20ies.
I also have a booklet, translated and published in Sweden in early 1934, by a Social Democratic Member of the German Parliament, about his time in the very first, primitive, concentration camps in 1933.
They were put in the cellar of a brewery and had to build berths and everything. A short time after they were moved to the countryside, he managed to run away when they were marching from the quarry.
I know for certain that my grandparent knew and did things from very early in the 1930ies, but I have also met Swedes whom I respect, who said they didn’t know until well into the war.
It may also be a question of generations.
Although my grandparents did know very early, the did not say anything to their daughters (born 1925 and 1927).
My mother only realized something was very wrong, when she had been assigned a German pen pal in school and it turned that the girl was a Junge Mäderl, or whatever.
Finding out, my grandfather was so upset and angry that the walls of that room reeked decades later…
His description of the Sudetenland is the usual propaganda of the day:
“Sudetenland — which was part of Austria, then after World War I was given to the Czechs, and in 1938, Sudetenland came back to Germany”.
But the Sudet mountains are locted in Bohemia and have always been part of that Kingdom. Bohemia itself was in a personal union with first Hungary and later also with Austria.
So there is no way the Sudetenland could have “come back” to Germany ;=)
His concept of socialist and fascist is a bit blurred. Both are collective, of course, and reactions to modernism/industrialism, but resemblances stop there.
Fascism, or organic democracy as the Franqistas liked to say, views society as one body with one head. It’s a continuation of the ancient dictatorial model: Society as Household.
Only the Husband/Leader is a political subject.
Post industralism/modernism it is anti-modern, nationalistic and backwards looking (Blut und Boden).
Socialism of course rejects the very idea of an organic society. It takes industrialism as given, not as the enemy.
So it is a collective modernism, of sorts.
Goran,
Thanks for your posts. Very informative
I’ll also say thanks to Göran, and welcome.As mentioned by Puddy — and as the Focus piece reads should you care to assemble the actual outcomes for the von Kampe family — “Christians” per se were not persecuted in Nazi Germany.Christian leaders who attempted to oppose the political and social power of the Nazi’s most certainly were. As was anyone who challenged them for power. Christian churches, leaders, and their flocks continued to operate all through 1933-1945; and generally without any horrific bother (other than perhaps redecorating with a few pictures of Hitler and a swastika flag.)This is very different to the wholesale persecution, and slaughter, of groups of people — Jews, Romany, those with intellectual disabilities… And, yes, homosexuals.Although Focus is attempting to show that conservative Christians cannot be compared to Nazi’s — because the Nazi’s are presented as having persecuted them — let’s consider the facts of the von Kampe family:they were conservative Christians, and remained so.the mother reportadly expressed anti-Nazi sentiments, to Nazi’snevertheless the father was appointed, and obviously by Nazi’s, from official posts in Germany to one in the Sudentenland (the spin: apparently these were “good Nazi’s” pfft, yeah right.)The arriving Soviets seemed to have a clear opinion about what the father wasHilmar was accepted into various Nazi organisations, which is NOT what happened to those who actually opposed the regimeWhatever next from Focus?We’re going to be told that being a conservative Christian in America is just like being a persecuted minority in Nazi Germany?Oh, what? You say that lie is already well and truly underway… how predictable.For some saddening news about a current neo-Nazi, this just in. I’d like to see Focus address that reality, instead of inventing history to serve today’s politics.
Yes, neo Nazi youngsters are a dangerous breed…and I remember not long ago, Focus on the Family used a mass shooting at a church to turn it into a hate action against Christians.
That was one of the first times I remember catching them in a blatant lie.
The incident took place in Texas, on or around a day set aside when Baptists try to convert JEWS to Christianity.
The man who did the shooting, and ultimately killed himself in that incident, was angry that the church would bring Jews into the SB church and dirty it.
The shootings were actually motivated by ANTI SEMITISM, NOT anti Christianism.
But FOTF left that out of their newsletter.
That was one of several that I took to the Museum of Tolerance for their archives.
FOTF isn’t above lying to suit their political ends, as stated here.
Not even lying about horrible tragedies in America and who the real intended victims are or usually always have been.
When the FRC, FOTF or the TVC continue to say that gays and lesbians are pedophiles, a blight on society, unproductive and a menace to families and traditional values, what do they expect will happen and then why do they act like it won’t?