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In a beer garden in Munich in 1921, the new chairman of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, someone Adolf hitler, gave a Christmas speech to a crowd that was going wild.
According to the present German secret police, some 4,000 sympathizers cheered each time the leader condemned “cowardly Jews who crucified the world’s liberator” and vowed “I will not rest until the last Jew falls under the ground.”
After the fierce speech, people sang Christmas carols, traditional Christmas songs, but also nationalist hymns around the decorated fir tree. The attendees even belonged to the working class and received gifts.
Today we know that for Germans of the 1920s and 1930s this combination of festive atmosphere, nationalist propaganda and anti-Semitism was not just foreign.
But as long as the Nazi party grew in number and power and even before it assumed the government of the country, democratically in 1932 and dictatorially since 1933 (after the burning of the Reichstag), the party’s propagandists turned with great care and study to what historians call the “Naziization of Christmas.”
The goal was to give new symbolism to family traditions, hoping to lead followers of National Socialism down new paths.
Given the complete state control of public life, the success of the campaign for its own version of Christmas is no wonder. This is what the citizen of the Third Reich constantly heard on the radio, he also read them in the daily press.
Historians today have no doubt about the impact of Nazi Christmas and its spread on the private lives of citizens. All that remains to be discussed is to what extent this has happened.
In other words, at a time when there were Germans who did not celebrate Third Reich political Christmas in their homes, impressively many embraced their Nazi version, turning the family home into a celebration of hatred …
The redefinition of Christmas
Perhaps the most characteristic element of the Nazi conception of Christmas was its redefinition as a neo-pagan holiday. Origin of northern Europe.
Rather than focus on the holiday’s Christian origins, the Nazi version honored the alleged superiority of the Aryan race.
According to the theorists of the Third Reich, what one deserved to celebrate at Christmas was the winter solstice rituals that the Teutonic tribes used to honor before their arrival. of christianity.
Candles lit on Christmas trees symbolized in Nazi ideology the pagan desire for the “return of light” after the smallest day of the year.
The Nazi conception of Christmas was a “laboratory celebration,” as historians call it, a mixture of pre-Christian rituals and popular myths and prejudices.
The propaganda mechanism of the Third Reich caught fire to transform them Christmas in a celebration of German pagan nationalism.
A really huge machine was installed, always centered on the Propaganda Ministry, to erase from the collective memory of the people the Christian origins of Christmas.
The Nazi attempt is explained on the basis of two main reasons. Hitler and the National Socialists considered the institution of religion to be the absolute enemy of the authoritarian state they wanted to create. And that is why it was convenient to erase the Christian elements of the party.
Although the official celebrations referred to a higher being, they related him to the light and the sun, pressing the pre-Christian traditions of the German nation.
The second reason is already inherent in Hitler’s speech in 1921: Nazi celebrations had to evoke feelings of racial purity and antisemitism. Before taking power in 1932, they managed to turn the attacks on German Jews into an informal holiday feature.
This continued, and after 1933, Nazi Christmas continued to exclude those it deemed “inappropriate.”
The Christmas iconography showed blonde and blue-eyed German families around the Christmas tree, wanting to normalize the ideology of racial purity.
The apparent anti-Semitism of the new Christmas rhetoric was not even hidden from the official agenda. State called for a boycott of Jewish shops during the holiday season.
In a department store catalog for Christmas 1935, which showed a mother holding a gift, there was a note to reassure people: “The store has passed into the hands of Arius!”
In Nazi Germany, even a gift had to spread Jewish hatred. Thus strengthening the official rhetoric of the party for the “social death” of the Jew.
The message was unique and clear: only Aryans could participate in the festivities …
Get Christ out of Christmas
According to the ideologues of National Socialism, names like Alfred Rosenberg In other words, the woman and especially the mother was a decisive factor in strengthening the relationship between intimacy and the “new spirit”, as they called their racist state.
The everyday aspects of Christmas, such as gift wrapping, home decoration, the festive table, were thus associated with women, drawing on elements from the pagan traditions of the North (European).
Nazi propagandists crowned his German mother the Christmas Queen. “Priestess” and “patroness of the house and home” anointed her so that Christmas could get back on track, to “revive the spirit of the German house”, as her rhetoric promoted.
And so the women’s magazines, the Christmas prep guides, even the Nazis carolIt was all a mixture of family traditions and intolerance.
The ideological manipulation was extensive and covered all aspects of everyday life. Mothers and children were encouraged to make home decorations that had their origins in Teutonic and Scandinavian deities.
Ornaments for the tree, such as the “Solar Wheel of Odin”, and cookies in the form of a bow, symbol of fertility in Teutonic traditions.
Even the lit Christmas tree candles were promoted with a new meaning. The Nazis believed it created an atmosphere of “pagan demon magic” that could dethrone the Star of Bethlehem and its birth. Jesus from the heart of the holiday season.
The aim was to deify “Germanism” by covering up all the religious implications of Christmas. Christian extensions, alas.
And here those responsible for Nazi propaganda did their best to perform so many Christmas carols and merry Christmas songs, in order to substitute their neo-pagan rhetoric for Christian themes.
The traditional “Holy Night”, let’s say, was preserved, it just had no reference to God, Christ and Christianity.
The “Night with the Clear Stars”, the most popular Nazi Christmas carols, played constantly and everywhere, from public and radio celebrations to private in every home.
These Christmas carols became so popular and intertwined with Christmas so much that you heard them sing in their homes Germany even in the 1950s. They had gone beyond their Nazi origins, they had become an integral part of the Christmas ritual.
“Night with the Clear Stars” (Hohe Nacht der klaren Sterne) was a demonic work. It had a melody very similar to traditional Christmas carols, but the lyrics negated something Christian. They sang about stars, lights and the “eternal mother”, about a world that would be saved by National Socialism and not by Jesus.
THE Jesus After all, he was entwined in the minds of the Nazis with his Jewish origins. They could not celebrate the birth of the “Jewish Messiah”, as they called him between 1933-1945 …
How all this was accepted by the German people
As with most questions relating to Nazi ideology and the suffering of the Third Reich in Europe, the debate inevitably centers on how people welcomed the deliberate effort of Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler to uproot Christianity from Germany, replacing it with the panspermia of the ancient Teutonic gods.
The historical reality is that we don’t know exactly how many households sang Nazi Christmas carols and baked cookies in honor of Odin. Not many citizens believed the Nazi theorists who said more or less that Christmas had nothing to do with the … birth of Christ.
They argued that the Christian elements of the holidays had been forcibly imposed on the ancient Germanic tribes and that the true meaning of Christmas was the celebration of the winter solstice, the “rebirth of the sun.”
The swastika, they said, was an ancient symbol of the sun and even Santa Claus it was nothing more than a Christian reinvention of Odin. And so the Christmas saint was replaced in Nazi iconography by a bearded Odin, and where the manger once stood they now simply decorated a garden with wooden deer and rabbits.
As to Virgin mary and Jesus, they didn’t disappear, she was just a blue-eyed blonde mother with a baby in her arms.
However, we have testimonies and records of how popular all this has become in much of German society.
From the National Socialist Women’s Union (NSF), for example, which kept minutes of its meetings, we learned that there was great disagreement among some of its members over the redefinition of Christmas.
However, union records show that these objections were dispelled when the Nazi party lobbied hard to sideline Christian vacation extensions.
The only strong resistance the Nazis encountered in their attempt to remove Christ from Christmas came from the German clergy. We know that in Düsseldorf the clergy insisted on adhering to Christian (Catholic) traditions and even threatened to acquit women who wanted to join the NSF.
We also know that in other parts of Germany, devout Christians did not attend Nazi Christmas events or the NSF benefit gala. Historians, however, argue that these were the exceptions rather than the rule.
In gallop Conducted by the regime’s secret police to measure attitudes towards Nazi Christmas, officials always seemed satisfied with the acceptance of their interventions in the world.
It seems that a good part of society accepted the Naziization of Christmas. Even more people welcomed the return to “true German traditions”, which came to boost the national prestige of the Germans.
For others, it was just another symbol of racial purity and white supremacy. Only Aryans could celebrate the new German Christmas.
This was another black Nazi movement to divide society. The simple daily decision about what kind of cookies to bake during the holidays was now an act of resistance or a test of adherence to the ideals of National Socialism.
As I finish all? Simple and practical. Starting in 1944, when the Nazis realized that they were going to lose the war and concentrated all their forces on the army, no one cared which god Kosmakis would sing in their homes.
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