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Dr. Rosenberg is not entirely unreligious. Indeed out of his revised history and his Nordic mythology he has erected a pagan worship which substitutes Odin for Moses, Siegfried for Saul, and 2,000,000 World War heroes for Christianity's company of saints. His pale eyes glowing, Dr. Rosenberg shouts: "The new mythology cannot be downed!" And throughout Germany strange little pagan cults pop up like autumn crocuses. Latest of them is the Nordic Religious Community, founded last week, which is pantheistic and rejects the doctrine of atonement. The pagan cultists are genuinely, if boisterously and truculently pious, and in their ranks are not a few Herr Doktors brandishing dissertations and theses.
Last winter a Manchester Guardian correspondent attended a Berlin meeting of the German People's Church. He reported it noisy, enthusiastic, a theological free-for-all. Its members sang the Horst Wessel song, interrupted the speakers with shouts of gleeful agreement. When a Dr. Krause made the usual reference to "pimps and cattle-dealers." they cried "Filth! Laute Schweinereien! Loud swinishness!" When another speaker advocated that preachers of the teaching of "Rabbi" (Saint) Paul should be thrown out, they cried "to Oranienburg!" — Germany's most famed concentration camp. When the same speaker dubbed the doctrine of atonement, "racially alien," his hearers again shouted "Oranienburg."
"There must," cried Dr. Krause, "be an end to the state of affairs in which the most objectionable race on earth, the Jews, are represented as The Chosen People. The 'Aryan Clause' must be applied finally and rigorously. Pastors of Jewish origin ought to go where they belong, to the synagogue! (Loud cheers.)
"The lives and utterances of great Germans must be considered equal to the Bible as revelations. . . . Man is the child of God, a part of God, and does not face God with those feelings of inferiority proclaimed by the Rabbi Paul. This is the German faith, everything else is a mere watering down in Pauline fashion."
Hitler. Protestant and Catholic journals in Germany last week were apprehensive as to the spread of the pagan movement. Undoubtedly confined at present to the wild fringe of the Realmleaders followers, it nonetheless caused churchmen to wonder if Hitler can and will make good his promise to protect "the two great Christian confessions." Possibly he feels that by its very nature and because he refrains from abetting it, paganism will not spread dangerously far. In any case he did not deign to mention it in his Coblenz speech (see p. 20). Repeating his promises and explaining that all he had done so far was to take politics out of religion, Hitler said: "Our work is certainly not one which is unblessed by God."