Hitler hated 'Hitler's Pope'

If “Hitler’s Pope” were kidnapped by Hitler, here was the plan … [ht: CMR]

Goebbels Redux

A name you may want to remember, David Axelrod.

And why his Goebbels-like methods are so effective.

Hitler's Protestants

From the news feed at Gen's Real Clear Religion comes an eye opener: Protestant collusion with Nazi Germany. If you doubt this, take a glance at this.

By the by, the site Roman Christendom is beautiful addition to my links of note.

Indy Jones, Nazis, & Textual Criticism

Earlier, I posted Cache Questions Koran Cohesion from an article in the Wall Street Journal. It dealt with a secret stash of photographic evidence that calls into question the unity of the Koran that is staple in the belief system of Islam. Really cool stuff.

Now, more information has become available and, in the words of a friend, "No one could make this stuff up!"

Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. "I hate those guys!" as Indiana Jones said.

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God's self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, "The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? Read more ….

(First posted 1/16/08)

Swastika & Scimitar - Part 8

Edward Cline posts Jihad by the Numbers at Family Security Matters.

In his masterful second volume study of Hitler, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis, Ian Kershaw discusses a phenomenon called "working towards the Führer," in which every Nazi Party organization, member and office automatically, with little or no prompting or prodding by Hitler or his inner circle, worked to realize the ends and policies articulated by Hitler before and after he rose to power in 1933. It was automatic, because to disagree with or have reservations about a single, even minor aspect of Nazi ideology was to court reprimand, censure, dismissal, or even death. Agreement with those ends and policies was nearly a secondary motivation behind any Party member's actions. He was compelled to act, regardless of the consequences. The ideology commanded it, and the Führer's will and vision were irresistible, because there was little or no self to resist them.

As Party members who disagreed or expressed reservations were dismissed, or abandoned the Party, fled, committed suicide, or were murdered, monsters of the first rank filled the vacuum to formulate and enact policies that more completely "worked towards the Führer," monsters such as Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Joseph Goebbels. When all the checks within the Party against total irrationality in domestic and foreign policies were removed or fell into disrepute, total irrationality took over totally.

But the average Party member strived to satisfy Hitler, regardless of how minor or major the action and regardless if it stood to be acknowledged or rewarded. To be a true, loyal, above-suspicion Nazi meant the near total surrender of one's ego, mind and self, and to substitute them with Hitler's own.

Read all …

The Ninth Day

Brother D'Artagnan notified me of this "Man For All Seasons" sort of film based on the true story of a priest at Dachau, The Ninth Day (2004). Looks worth checking out.

Pius XII & Adolf

John Zmirak at Taki's Magazine posts a fine piece, Hitler’s Deadliest Enemy: Pius XII.

I spent much of winter 2006 butting heads with a cantankerous nun. Thankfully, it happened via email, and in no way resembled the battles with hirsute radical feminists in stretch jeans that ate up most of my high school years. No, I contended with a solidly orthodox battle-ax who is still the most distinguished biographer of Pope Pius XII. We had no differences of principle--unless you count “My every word is sacred even when it’s completely disorganized and redundant” as a principle. And it ended badly--when the publisher backed me up on my insistence that the book be readable, she yanked it and gave it to a more compliant house. I’m sure some people have bought it. For a penance, some of them may have read it.

But I learned a lot from the exercise--especially about Pope Pius XII. Because that wet, shaggy dog of an MS contained an amazing quantity of facts about the events of World War II. They combine with what I’ve learned from other sources to offer an excellent answer to Richard Spencer’s blog of yesterday. In his blog, Richard makes the excellent point that my own reasons for celebrating the utter and complete extirpation of the satanic National Socialist regime, and the presence of U.S. forces to prevent an equally evil Stalin from swallowing the Mother Continent, were not those that motivated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No doubt this is true. I’m not a Roosevelt biographer, or even an admirer. His own bias toward mild socialism no doubt made him found the Soviet system less repulsive than the Nazi. (His vice president, after all was Henry Wallace, not Joseph Kennedy.)

It was not Franklin Roosevelt who saw the real issues at stake in the confrontation between Hitler and Stalin, over the supine bodies of the crumbling democracies of Europe. It was Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII. Keep reading …

Swastika & Scimitar - Part 7

"It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of one figure—Hitler’s mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the viciously anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Muslim fundamentalists in Palestine, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust."

Read all of "Hitler’s Mufti" (FIRST THINGS) by David G. Dalin. David G. Dalin is a professor of history and political science at Ave Maria University. This article is adapted from his book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope.

Swastika & Scimitar - Part 6

Swastika & Scimitar - Part 5

Andrew G. Bostom continues his fruitful investigation into swastika and scimitar studies aptly connecting the dots in "Islamofascism? Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam."

Swastika & Scimitar - Part 4

With a hat tip to Pam Geller, Andy Bostom pieces together yet more evidence of the connection between Swastika and the Scimitar.

Indy Jones, Nazis, & Textual Criticism

Earlier, I posted Cache Questions Koran Cohesion from an article in the Wall Street Journal. It dealt with a secret stash of photographic evidence that calls into question the unity of the Koran that is staple in the belief system of Islam. Really cool stuff.

Now, more information has become available and, in the words of a friend, "No one could make this stuff up!"

Islam watchers blogged all weekend about news that a secret archive of ancient Islamic texts had surfaced after 60 years of suppression. Andrew Higgins' Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. "I hate those guys!" as Indiana Jones said.

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God's self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, "The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ." The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? Read more ….

Cache Questions Koran Cohesion - WSJ

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God's word. The wartime destruction made the project "outright impossible," Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars -- and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

[ ... ]

Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran "didn't just fall from heaven" but "has a history." When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. "Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents," read one letter to the Yemen Times. "Allah, help us against our enemies."

Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.

Around 1990, Ms. Neuwirth met Mr. Spitaler, her old professor, in Berlin. He was in his 80s and growing frail, but remained sharp mentally. He "got sentimental about the old times," recalls Ms. Neuwirth. As they talked, he casually mentioned that he still had the photo archive. He offered to give it to her. "I had heard it didn't exist," she says. She later sent two of her students to Munich to collect the photo cache and bring it to Berlin.

The news didn't spread beyond a small circle of scholars. When Mr. Spitaler died in 2003, Paul Kunitizsch, a fellow Munich Arabist, wrote an obituary recounting how the archive had been lost, torpedoing the Quran project. Such a venture, he wrote, "now appears totally out of the question" because of "the attitude of the Islamic world to such a project." [h/t: IBA]

For the Record

An archival find that will knock the kaflooey out of the naysayers and smearers: Catholic Protest Against Nazis — Nov. 16, 1938. [HT: Creative Minority Report]