RELIGION UNDER NAZIS

Timaru Herald, Volume CLIII, Issue 22478, 13 January 1943, Page 4

RELIGION UNDER NAZIS

TN the third of a series of booklets on “Conditions in the Occupied Territories” the Inter-Allied Information Committee of London describes the Axis attacks on religion. Nazism began its career with attacks on the Jewish faith. The Jews were the weakest arid least numerous of the German religious minorities, and hence could be most safely persecuted. As Nazism grew stronger it was able to inflict indignities on the Protestant and Catholic communions in Germany. With the technique thus learned it now' deals with priests, ministers and congregations in conquered lands. The measures taken range from almost subtle discriminations in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, where it suits the Nazi book to go slowly, to torture and murder in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Greece. In France, in Belgium and the Netherlands people of the Jewish faith have been subjected to relentless persecution, as they were in Germany; and Christian organisations, schools, newspapers and social service agencies have been suppressed or venomously assailed. In Norway Nazi attempts to dominate the state church, to which nearly all Norwegians adhere, led to the resignation of practically every pastor. In the other four countries the Axis beast has not even shown physical mercy. Churches have been destroyed and defiled, priests and ministers butchered. The Nazis found churches in “godless Russia”—they polluted them, used them for torture chambers, burned them.

There is no cause for surprise in this. The Nazis cannot survive in a world in which the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount serve as ideals of conduct. Their campaign is, and must be, not merely against common humanity, but. aiso against the divinity toward which mankind has struggled for so many centuries.