Charles, you said “A case could be made that Pope Benedict’s description of this disastrous chapter of history is exactly opposite to the truth — that it was far more enabled by European religious tradition than by the Pope’s atheist boogeyman.”

While I agree about “Germany and Europe’s long, sordid tradition of Christian antisemitism”, the Nazis were in many ways bent on smashing and replacing European religious tradition, rather than being allied with it and enabled by it. The following clip is an excerpt from an hour-long documentary about occultism in the Third Reich.

Note the smashing of a church’s stained glass window at the start of this clip, Hitler Removes Christianity I’m not sure, but I’m guessing the stained glass breakage bit is from Triumph of the Will.

Partial transcript: Nordic myth replaced the Christian Bible as the foundation of the new nazi religion. In a pageant, orchestrated by Rosenberg and captured on film, nazis celebrated their newly conceived version of their aryan culture and history. Rosenberg wrote, Today a new mythos is dawning, the mythos of the blood. … Hitler took Rosenberg’s idea further, when he wrote, the old beliefs will be brought back to honor again. … We will wash off the Christian veneer, and bring out a religion peculiar to our race.