1. GRAFFITI ON A WALL OF SHAME
NAZISM, MARXISM, CAPITALISM
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2. THE BERLIN WALL
• The Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev tried to
turn back the surge of East Germans fleeing to
West Berlin. When travel restrictions did not
work he erected a twenty six miles of barbed wire
and concrete across the city.
• On the east side of the wall of Berlin stood
Communism, with it gospel of an earthly utopia
in some future classless society. On the West
were shops and movies, with an endless search
for wealth and happiness now.
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3. POST CHRISTIAN GODS FOR THE
MASSES
• There are three post Christian ideologies that
replaced the space religion had in the lives of
people. Nationalism, communism, and
individualism. Each of these became the faith of a
large part of society.
• The totalitarian government which is always led
by some dictator, who commands a political
police force, by using a sophisticated,
psychological methods the rulers are able to
direct the minds and emotions of the people
against the regime.
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4. WORLD WAR I
• The new religion of the early twentieth century
Europe was nationalism. Pan-Germanism and
Pan-Slavism brought the great powers of Europe
into conflict in the Balkans. The spark to ignite it
came on June 28, 1914, when a young student
inspired by Serbian nationalism assassinated the
Crown Prince of Austria Hungary.
• By August Germany and Austria were arrayed
against France, Russia, and Britain. Before the
war was over twenty seven nations were caught
up in the conflict ranging from Tokyo to Ottawa.
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5. THE RISE OF NAZISM
• The Nazis were a right wing version of dictatorial
rule. They were the definition of totalitarianism.
Today we call it fascism, such governments
counter personal frustration and alienation. As
well as social and economic tensions by stressing
class unity.
• After World War I German National Socialism
better known as Nazism began to rule. The
protestant church in the hands of Luther lost
millions of people to this new political religion.
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6. THE NAZI’S DOCTRINE
• Nazi theoreticians developed a barbaric doctrine
of anti-Semitism. To regain the lost innocence of
the past, Germany they argued had to purge the
present of it impurities. The Jews served as the
scapegoats.
• Hitler declared that even the Christian faith was a
Jewish plot. Bolshevism is Christianity’s
illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.
• In 1940 the Nazis designed a new type of camp
for their final solution, the extermination of the
entire Jewish population of Europe. The largest
was Auschwitz in Poland.
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7. CHRISTIANS UNDER HITLER
• Christians and Jews were under the same
persecution in the Nazi world. Hitler was born
and reared Catholic, he completely forgot God
and all Christian principles.
• Hitler tricked the churches to receive their
support by emphasizing national pride and
pretending to favor the churches role in the state.
• Hitler and the Pope signed an agreement in 1933
to allow Catholics the freedom to practice the
religion which he did not keep. A new form of
Christianity arose among Protestants called
German Christianity aimed at having closer ties
with the Nazi’s.
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8. THE COUNTER CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT
• To counter the German Christians movement a
group of ministers led by Martin Niemoller
formed the Pastor’s Emergency League and set
up and alternative church government known as
the Confessing Church.
• In May 1934 the Confessing Church spelled out its
theological convictions in the Barmen
Declaration, written by Karl Barth. The church
planned no campaign of resistance to Nazism. It
was mainly directed against the heretical
distortions of the German Christians, and in fact
the church continually confessed it loyalty to
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9. THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
• Meanwhile through the same troubled twenties and
thirties the Russian Bolsheviks (or Communists)
created another totalitarian system.
• Communist ideology emphasized the working class,
revolution as a means of social change, and the
utopian ideal of the classless society. The mastermind
of the Russian Revolution Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-
1924). We call him Lenin, and exiled socialist leader.
• The chief weapon of Marxism was violence. And he
took nothing for granted to destroy capitalism. Joseph
Stalin succeeded Lenin in power and ruthlessness. He
used secret police terror and labor camps to suppress
any potential rivals.
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10. COMMUNISM AND ATHEISM
• Communism is based on atheism. The Marxist
Leninist theory claimed that religion is false
consciousness, and illusory reflection of the
world resulting from class divisions. When society
is restored to a normal state then religion will die.
• For centuries the Russian Orthodox Church had
been the state church. When they took from the
people the right to teach their own children,
violence erupted. Patriarch Tikhon declared war
on the state. The first six years of the Revolution
twenty eight bishops and over one thousand
priest were killed.
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11. SOVIET CONSTITUTION
• In 1936 the new Soviet Constitution restored the
voting rights to the clergy, but the servants of
religion continued to be second class citizens.
• By 1939 the atheistic propaganda, the rigid
antireligion laws, and the Stalinist terror brought
the Russian Orthodox Church to the brink of
disintegration. The Lutherans were almost wiped
out, and Baptists and Evangelical Christian
denominations were ravaged.
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12. THE IMPACT OF WORLD WAR II
• World War II broke out in 1939 when German forces
invaded Poland. Hitler had made common cause with
Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy and a militaristic
clique ruling in Japan.
• In the occupied areas of eastern Europe priests and
pastors, along with devout laymen were treated as
common criminals. Thousands were executed or sent
to concentration camps.
• The situation in wartime Soviet Russia was a striking
contrast. Stalin realized the value of the churches
contribution to public morale in the war, and how it
could help integrate the territories acquired during the
war and promote later Soviet foreign policy.
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