Saturday, June 19, 2010

One nice nail in the "German Nazism was Christian" canard









I recently came across this interesting historical tidbit. Apparently, the Hitler Youth Movement had a chant they regularly sang. The lyrics to this chant are posted in various places on the Blogosphere in French.

Here are the lyrics to the chant, translated from the French (which, obviously, must have been translated from the German):

We are the joyous Hitler Youth,

We have no need of your Christian virtues,

for our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler is now our Mediator.
No vile clergyman can prevent us from being the children of Hitler.

It is not Christ whom we follow, but Horst Wessel...

We follow him while singing dressed in Hitlerian raiment,
and only then are we worthy of our ancestors.
I am neither Catholic nor Christian,

I go with the S.S., wherever she flies.
You can take the Church away from me,
the Hooked Cross -- the Swastika -- makes me blessed on Earth:
I will follow it step by step.
Baldur von Schirach, lead me!

Notes:

Re: the two names referenced in the chant: Horst Wessel was a young member of the S.S. who died in 1930 fighting against communists; Baldur von Schirach was leader of the Hitler Youth.


Caveat Lector:

Unfortunately, as with most factoids in the Blogosphere, the documentation is not quite up to snuff. The closest I could get to pinning down the source was from
a blog that notes that the chant was "cited in Hubert Wolf, Le pape et le diable, Paris, éditions du CNRS, 2007, p. 236." This is certainly better than nothing, but reveals once again the poor education, apparently, of bloggers. What requires citation here is a primary source, not a reference to a secondary source. If Hubert Wolf employed any elementary scholarly methodology, then he would have cited the primary source; and if the blogger who cited Wolf actually had his hands on Wolf's book, then he should have also provided the primary source citation which Wolf provided there. Also helpful would have been the German original (which Wolf, again, would have provided if he had employed any elementary scholarly methodology).

1 comment:

Luddite said...

I found a mention of a book by Robert E Conot, Justice at Nuremberg published 1993, which contains a reference to the chant.
"We are the rollicking Hitler Youth, We have no need of Christian truth, No evil old priest these ties can sever, We're Hitler's children now and ever". [Conot, p. 422.]