"I believe that I am acting in accordance
with the will of the Almighty Creator:
by defending myself against the Jew,
I am fighting for the work of the Lord"
--Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Freethinkers_League
The German Freethinkers League
('Deutsche Freidenkerbund') was an
organisation founded in 1881 by the
philosopher, physiologist and physician
Ludwig Büchner. Its aim was to provide
a public meeting-ground and forum for
materialist and atheist thinkers in Germany.
The first of such organisations to be
founded in that country, the German
Freethinkers League had by 1930 a
membership numbering around 500,000.
The League was closed down, however,
in the Spring of 1933 when Hitler
outlawed all atheistic and freethinking
groups in Germany. 'Freethinkers Hall',
the national headquarters of the League,
was then converted to a bureau advising
to the public in church matters.
Among its Chairmen was Max Sievers,
who was beheaded at the guillotine by the Nazis in 1944.
"On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil.
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country.
To this day, if I hear a distant scream,
it recalls with painful vividness my feelings,
when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the
most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that
some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I
was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate.
I suspected that these moans were from a tortured
slave, for I was told that this was the case in
another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite
to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of
her female slaves.
I have stayed in a house where a
young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled,
beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the
lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old,
struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere)
on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water
not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance
from his master's eye.
These latter cruelties were witnessed
by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said
that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese,
English, or other European nations. I have seen at
Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a
blow directed, as he thought, at his face.
I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point
of separating forever the men, women, and little children
of a large number of families who had long lived together.
I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities
which I authentically heard of;nor would I have mentioned
the above revolting details, had I not met with several
people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the
negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.
Such people have generally visited at the houses of the
upper classes, where the domestic slaves are usually
well treated, and they have not, like myself,
lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask
slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave
must indeed be dull who does not calculate on the chance
of his answer reaching his master's ears.
It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive
cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals,
which are far less likely than degraded slaves to stir
up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument
long since protested against with noble feeling,
and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt.
It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the
state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery
of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature,
but by our institutions, great is our sin;
but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see;
as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended
in one land, by showing that men in another land
suffered from some dreadful disease.
Those who look
tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart
at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the
position of the latter;what a cheerless prospect,
with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself
the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and
your little childrenthose objects which nature
urges even the slave to call his ownbeing torn
from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder!
And these deeds are done and palliated by men
who profess to love their neighbours as themselves,
who believe in God, and pray that His Will be done on earth!
It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble,
to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants,
with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty;
but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a
greater sacrifice than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin." -
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
". . . I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work."
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
- Adolf Hitler, 1933 speech in Berlin
"... I do not merely talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity."
Adolf Hitler, February 15, 1933, speech in Stuttgart
"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity."
Adolf Hitler, August 26, 1934, speech in Koblenz
"This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
"I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man, and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive the blessings of Providence."
Adolf Hitler, 1944
"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people."
-Hitler, April 12, 1922 from a speech at Munich.
