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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
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This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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The German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) was a religious movement in Nazi Germany that existed between 1933 and 1945, closely associated with University of Tübingen professor Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. The movement sought to move Germany away from Christianity towards a religion that was based on Germanic paganism and Nazi ideas.[1]
In 1933, Germany's population of almost 60 million belonged to either the Catholic Church (20 million members) or a Protestant church (40 million members).[2] Many Christians were initially drawn to supporting Nazism due to the emphasis on "positive Christianity," noted in Article 24 of the 1920 National Socialist Program.[2] However, two distinct Protestant factions emerged as Christians in Germany were divided along political lines. The "German Christians" (Deutsche Christen) emerged from the German Evangelical Church, adhering closely to the nationalistic and racial teachings of the Nazis and ultimately deferring to the Führer's authority. The second faction was the "Confessing Church", which opposed the "German Christians" and swore allegiance to "God and scripture, not a worldly Führer."[2] The Confessing Church moved to counteract the Nazis' grouping of all German people into a singular Protestant church (German Christians) in order to "de-Judaize" Christianity.[3]
Jakob Wilhelm Hauer founded the German Faith Movement in response to the Nazi government's intended indoctrination of children with Christianity and attempting to outlaw all critiques of the faith.[3] He was initially not an obvious supporter of Adolf Hitler and had earlier started the Köngener Bund, a German Protestant youth movement, which attracted many young Germans due to its opposition to Nazism as well as to antisemitism.[3] His allegiance changed however, joining the Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur) in May 1933. Hauer then joined the Hitler Youth later that year, in December. The once liberal anti-nationalist was then inducted into the SS and SD in August 1934.[3] Hauer became the Führer of the German Faith Movement when it was constituted in May 1934.[3] His reign was short-lived, stepping down on April 1, 1936.[3]
Hauer was a critic of traditional Christianity but was compelled to create the German Faith Movement as a way to preserve freedom of conscience.[3]
The movement initially invited various different groups, including religious free-thinkers (at first even including Jews), racialists, and political opponents of the Nazis, to join a group that was seemingly antagonistic to the Nazi Church.[4] However, racialists, including Hauer, did not believe Jews should be included in the movement, thus leaving only racialists and those who had abandoned German Christianity (i.e., the unconventional) to compose the German Faith Movement.[4]
The movement's ceremonies involved sermons, German classical music and political hymns. The movement had around 200,000 followers at its height (less than 0.3% of the population). Following the Nazi accession to power, it obtained rights of civil tolerance from Rudolf Hess, but never the preferential treatment from the Nazi state for which Hauer campaigned. However, in the years that followed Hauer's abdication of his title as Führer of the Movement, the Movement largely served as a NSDAP appendage.[3]
The development of the German Faith Movement revolved around:
Similar movements have remained active in Germany since 1945 outside mainstream educational and social structures.
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The German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) was a religious movement in Nazi Germany that existed between 1933 and 1945, closely associated with University of Tübingen professor Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. The movement sought to move Germany away from Christianity towards a religion that was based on Germanic paganism and Nazi ideas.
Guido Karl Anton List (5 October 1848 – 17 May 1919), better known as Guido von List, was an Austrian occultist, journalist, playwright, and novelist. He expounded a modern Pagan new religious movement known as Wotanism, which he claimed was the revival of the religion of the ancient German race, and which included an inner set of Ariosophical teachings that he termed Armanism. Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Vienna, List claimed that he abandoned his family's Roman Catholic faith in childhood, instead devoting himself to the pre-Christian god Wotan. Spending much time in the Austrian countryside, he engaged in rowing, hiking, and sketching the landscape. From 1877 he began a career as a journalist, primarily authoring articles on the Austrian countryside for nationalist newspapers and magazines. In these he placed a völkisch emphasis on the folk culture and customs of rural people, believing that many of them were survivals of pre-Christian, pagan religion. He published three novels, Carnuntum (1888), Jung Diethers Heimkehr (1894), and Pipara (1895), each set among the German tribes of the Iron Age, as well as authoring several plays. During the 1890s he continued writing völkisch articles, now largely for the nationalist Ostdeutsche Rundschau newspaper, with his works taking on an antisemitic dimension halfway through that decade. In 1893, he co-founded the Literarische Donaugesellschaft literary society, and involved himself in Austria's Pan-German nationalist movement, a milieu which sought the integration of Austria into the German Empire. During an 11-month period of blindness in 1902, List became increasingly interested in occultism, in particular coming under the influence of the Theosophical Society, resulting in an expansion of his Wotanic beliefs to incorporate Runology and the Armanen Futharkh. The popularity of his work among the völkisch and nationalist communities resulted in the establishment of a List Society in 1908; attracting significant middle and upper-class support, the Society published List's writings and included an Ariosophist inner group, the High Armanen Order, over whom List presided as Grand Master. Through these ventures he promoted the millenarian view that modern society was degenerate, but that it would be cleansed through an apocalyptic event resulting in the establishment of a new Pan-German Empire that would embrace Wotanism. After having erroneously prophesied that this empire would be established by victory for the Central Powers in World War I, List died on a visit to Berlin in 1919. During his lifetime, List became a well-known figure among the nationalist and völkisch subcultures of Austria and Germany, influencing the work of many others operating in this milieu. His work, propagated through the List Society, influenced later völkisch groups such as the Reichshammerbund and Germanenorden, and through those exerted an influence on both the burgeoning Nazi Party, the SS and the German Faith Movement. After World War II his work continued to influence an array of Ariosophic and Heathen practitioners in Europe, Australia, and North America.
Positive Christianity (German: positives Christentum) was a religious movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination". The Nazi movement had been hostile to Germany's established churches. The new Nazi idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany's Christian majority by implying that the Nazi movement was not anti-Christian. That said, in 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied; rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said. Hitler's public presentation of Positive Christianity as a traditional Christian faith differed. Despite Hitler's insistence on a unified peace with the Christian churches, to accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to distance themselves from the Jewish origins of Christ and the Christian Bible. Hitler consistently self-identified as a Christian in public, and even on occasion as a Catholic, specifically throughout his entire political career, despite criticising biblical figures. He identified himself as a Christian in a 12 April 1922 speech. However, historians, including Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees, characterise his acceptance of the term "positive Christianity" and his political involvement in religious policy as being driven by opportunism, and pragmatic recognition of the political importance of the Christian churches in Germany. Nevertheless, efforts by the regime to impose a Nazified "positive Christianity" on a state-controlled German Evangelical Church essentially failed, and it resulted in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church, whose members saw great danger to Germany from the "new religion" being imposed on it. In the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, the Catholic Church also denounced that the ideology contained idolatry of race, people, and the state. Official Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg played an important role in the development of "positive Christianity", which he conceived in discord with both Rome and the Protestant churches, whose doctrines he called "negative Christianity". Peculiarly, Eastern Orthodoxy had not been criticised by Rosenberg, and Richard Steigmann-Gall questions whether or not this seemingly specific opposition to Western Christianity made Rosenberg a genuine anti-Christian. Rosenberg conceived of Positive Christianity as a transitional faith to bring Christianity toward Nazi antisemitism, and amid the failure of the regime's efforts to control Protestantism through the agency of the pro-Nazi "German Christians", Rosenberg, along with fellow radicals Robert Ley and Baldur von Schirach, backed the neo-pagan "German Faith Movement", which completely rejected traditional Judeo-Christian conceptions of God from Western thought. During the war, Rosenberg drafted a plan for the future of religion in Germany, which would see a Positive Christian Reich influenced by Germanic paganism conduct the "expulsion of the foreign Christian religions", the replacement of the Bible as the supreme religious authority with Mein Kampf as the holy scripture of Positive Christianity, and the replacement of the Christian cross with the swastika as the universal symbol of European Christianity in Nazified Christian churches.
Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (4 April 1881 in Ditzingen, Württemberg – 18 February 1962 in Tübingen) was a German Indologist and religious studies writer. He was the founder of the German Faith Movement.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
