All of them except for Jehovah's Witnesses who stood up and said no to Hitler and his demands. Most Christian churches and denominations were silently compliant as they are today with wars legal or otherwise. The Roman Catholic church supported Hitler as did Protestant Europe. Nick Megoran - What About Hitler? Wednesday 20th November 2002 - ChristianCambridge Remembrance Sunday has recently been commemorated in churches throughout this country. What is unusual this year is that it occurs at a time when British and American Christians are showing unprecedented unity against the military plans of their governments. Archbishop of Canterbury elect Rowan Williams' intervention in the British press, in which he expressed strong oppostion to the Blair-Bush war plans, exemplified this. More remarkably still, all the mainstream US Christian denominations (except the ultra-conservative Southern Baptists) have united in the same cause. Even George W. Bush's own church, the United Methodists, has joined the chorus of Christian dissent, radically stating that "war in imcompatable with the teaching and example of Christ." This is not memely a reaction to a current crisis. Rather, it reflects growing move within the church to reassess its post-Constantine sanction of state violence. Konrad Raiser, General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, recently called on Chrisitans to ditch 'just war theory' and return the non-violent witness of the ancient church back to the cnetreo f modern Chrisitan thinking. Clergy and lay alike are increasingly discovering that to be a more authentic understanding of the mission and instruction of the "Prince of Peace". However, the New testament tradition often appears starkly at odds with the reality of evil in the world. Remembrance Sunday focuses this tension with the searching question: "What do you do about people like Hitler?" It is more difficult for Britons to tackle this question that for most people, as our national consciousness has been saturated with highly stylised and simplistic accounts of World War 2, mediated through popular culture. Yet to begin addressing it, it is first necessary to establish when World War 2 began. This is not as easy as it might appear. It is sometimes dated from the German attack on the USSR in 1941 or its seizure of Poland in 1939, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Many historians consider the whole period 1914-1945 as one great 'age of catastrophe', tracing the Second World War back to failures to 'win the peace' with the flawed treaties concluding the 1914-1918 conflict. More sophisticated analyses plot the root of the titantic 1941-1945 struggle back further still, into nineteenth century patterns of expanding and clashing imperial rivalries. While Britain consolidated a massive overseas empire in South Asia and Africa, Russia carved out a vast Asian domain extending from the Bering Straits to the borders of Afghanistan and Turkey, and Japan orverran Korea and wealthly areas of China. The USA, having conquered the territories of native Americans as it expanded to the Pacific coast, treated Latin America as a private fiefdom and also grabbed a huge empire in the Pacific. These states enriched themselves and built up their militaries by exploiting their colonies as preferential economic zones. Germany made a late entrace into this game, the Kaiser famously declasring that it too sought 'a place in the sun', as its leaders felt increasingly threatened by these rival powers. With the best pickings of the 'Third World' already taken, Germany expanding by overrunning neighbouring territories. All of these actions were backed up by extreme violence, legitimised by ideologies of racial prejudice stating that certain peoples were inherently subhuman or inferior, and thus conquest of them was justified. Millions died under the rule of the British, the nation that invented concentration camps in their conquest of the Boer lands. The Russians and then Soviets decimated many Muslim populations under their rule, and the Japanese slaughtered Chinese mercilessly as they overran cities like Nanking. The Americans committed genocide agains native populations, and continued this conquest Westwards: when invading the Philppines in 1898, an extimated half a million Filipinos died. The German violence on mainland Europe between 1938 and 1945 was condensed into a smaller timeframe and more cynically systematic, but was another case of imperial territorial aggrandisement supported by racist ideologies. Throughout this period, alliances between all these states shifted markedly. Thus, during the Napoleonic wars, Britain allied with Germans against France; in 1914-45 it allied wtih France against Germany. In world war 1 Japan joined Britain and the USA against Germany, but by 1941 had allied with Germany against these former allies. In 1812 Britain fought against the USA; by 1916, it was fighting with it. In the Russian Revolution Britain invaded the USSR. By 1941, even though it knew full well that Stalin had killed millions of dissidents, ethnic minorities and Christians, the British government allied with the USSR against Germany. During the 1930s there had been much popular sympathy in the British extablishment for Hitler, as a counterbalance to the USSR. British foreign policy experts avowed that they pursued only a 'balance of power' policy, to prevent any one of their rivals becoming too powerful, with no overriding morality apart from the perceived interests of the British State. If the 1939-45 conflict is seen less as a moral struggle agains the embodiment of evil (although many honest, ordinary soldiers no doubt saw it as this) than as another phase in a great power conflict - a conflict where all sides were guilty of greed, unimaginable cruelty and violent aggression against weaker peoples - the key question becomes less 'what do we do about Hitler?' as 'what we do about the type of human behaviour that allowed Hitler to emerge?' It is here that Christianity, with its rejection of an inordinate love for power and wealth and its radical universal ethic of love for enemies and reconciliation of all peoples, through the cross, into a new nation transcending national boundaries, ought to have had much to say to the world. Yet, tragically, the Christian faith became hopelessly subsumed in the imperial conflict. Firstly, it was used as a justification for warfare, an effective mobilising force for nationalistic fervour. The pagan notion of the 'just war', as refined by Aquinas, conveniently allowed sovereigns to claim divine blessing on their wars - a belief held by Christians in both Axis and Allied powers. Indeed, Stalin only legalised Christianity during World War 2 because he knew he needed the church to bolster his regime in the face of the German assault. Secondly, it was used to ground racist arguments for imperial conquest and colonialism, under the notion that God had imparted to the 'civilising' great powers a manifest destiny of overwhelming inferior peoples for their own good. Indeed, even the ugly anti-semitism of Nazi ideology had its roots in centuries of Christian persecution and demonisation of Jews. Thirdly, the implication of all this was the utter failure of the Christian church to truly be church. The excitement of Paul in his Ephesians letter is palpable as he describes at length a new entity in world history, created by God in Christ, a trans-ethnic people that is a demonstration, to temporal and spiritual powers, of the ultimate victory of God over sin and death. On the contrary, this great imperial clash set Christian against Christian. German and British churches alike prayed for victory, sincerely believing that God was on their side. The Finnish church, loyally backing its stat as it fought alongside Germany, even pronounced the Anglican leadership apostate for uniting with the anti-Christ Soviet Union against protestant Europe! Japanese Christian Kamikaze pilots ploughed into American warships, and Catholic pilots of US bombers, ministered to by Catholic padres, dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a target whose epicentre was a Catholic cathedral at the heart of the largest Christian community in Japan. By 1945, the credibility of the Christian message lay smouldering in the rubble of European and Japanese cities. Yet the most tragic answer to the "what about Hitler?" question is surely provided by contemporary Christian responses to him. Some few high-profile cases notwithstanding, the majority of Christian churches in Germany supported, or at least did not oppose, Hitler. Some well-known Christian dissidents were persecuted by their own churches for taking a 'political' stand against Hitler's militarism. Yet even the most evil tyrant, whether Caesar, Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, ultimately depends upon the consent of his people as well as upon coercion. This was illustrated in protests by Berliners following the internment of Jewish husbands of German women in 1943. Their wives staged a sit-in on Rosenstrasse, and were soon joined by others. Goebbels was too afraid to turn the SS on 'proper' Germans, so capitulated to their demands, setting free the Jewish detainees and transporting many back from the camps. Had the Christian Church truly remained loyal to the New Testament, and urged its members to stand against violence and injustice, Hitler could never have waged World War 2. The argument insisting that Christians have a right or duty to fight dictators by violence is itself at the heart of the reason why the Nazi terror hung over Europe, and Soviet-British-American terror over much of the rest of the world. So, how should we then commemorate Remembrance Sunday? Let us indeed thank God for the freedom we enjoy today, remembering that no nation or state escapes His gracious providential sovereignty. Let us mourn the dead of all wars, of all nations. But let the church lament that it has so failed to be the undivided body of Christ, and resolve that hence forth we will never again preach that our primary loyalty is to Caesar rather than to the Kingdom of God. And, at this time as Britain hovers on the brink of another war against another supposed Hitler, let us joyfully and steadfastly proclaim the "gospel of peace". that alone offers hope to our broken world.

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Support is a strong word. The Catholic Church was trying to walk a fine line. Had they opposed Hitler outright, many more people would have been killed. To look back at those actions now and try to judge that pope for his actions under circumstances that we cannot understand is both disingenuous and dishonest.

Certain elements in the Roman and Uniate Catholic Churches gave support to Nazi Germany, especially Croatia, Slovakia, and Galicia(western Ukraine). In the Netherlands, which recruited over 22,000 men to the Waffen SS, many were encouraged from the pulpit, both Catholic and Protestant, to enter into a crusade to fight the heathen hordes of godless Bolsheviks who were threatening western European civilization, culture and religion.