Revolutionary totalitarian regimes have long attempted to make Christmas disappear, or to at least make Christmas into something more to the state’s liking.
The earliest example of this can found with the French revolutionaries. Shortly after the First French Republic was established in 1792, the state imposed a new calendar which established a year of twelve 30-day months divided into three 10-day weeks. This new calendar, which was explicitly anti-Christian, abolished all Christian holidays and saint days and replaced them with days commemorating agricultural tools, trees, grains, and minerals. In revolutionary France, especially during the years of the Terror, from 1793 to 1794, “most of the clergy [was] in hiding, and all of the churches [were] closed.”1 Needless to say, during this period, few celebrated Christmas openly, and Christmas generally disappeared from public view until Bonaparte’s coup in 1799.
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In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union carried out similar efforts to rid the people of their attachment to Christmas. Like the French revolutionaries, the Soviets were explicitly anti-Christian, and attempted to get rid of Sundays, in a way, by abolishing the weekend. Religious holidays were also out. In their place, the Soviets implemented a continuous work week designed to maximize industrial output and to prevent a common “day of rest” which might encourage religious observance or closer ties to family members. Christmas, of course, was in the crosshairs also. The state replaced Christmas with a winter holiday. Father Christmas became “Father Frost” and the Christmas Tree became the “Winter Tree.”
German National Socialists—also known as the “Nazis”—tried a different tactic. Rather than abolish the observance of Christmas altogether, they attempted to redefine Christmas by making it into a day celebrating the German nation and National Socialist values. This was done by a variety of propaganda efforts designed to blur the line between Christianity and German nationalism while superimposing Nazi iconography on traditional Christmas symbols and images.
While it might appear that National Socialists were more tolerant of the Christian holiday than the French revolutionaries or the Soviets, all three regimes shared the same goal. All three sought to rein in or destroy Christmas because it endured as a reminder of a world view and a historical narrative that was in conflict with the regime’s preferred ideology and version of history. In other words, Christmas—and the international Christian religion it helped perpetuate—presented a competing world view that was outside the direct control of the state. This made Christianity a rival that no totalitarian was inclined to tolerate.
Nazi Neo-Paganism and “Positive Christianity”
From the earliest years of National Socialism and the Nazi party (the NSDAP), the party had professed what it called “Positive Christianity” which was a religious movement that mixed together Nazi racial ideology with elements of Christianity. The Nazis who professed to believe in Positive Christianity nonetheless were hostile to established churches in Germany such as the Catholic and Lutheran churches. Most Christian groups, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, did not regard Positive Christianity as Christian at all. For their part, the Positive Christians denied a variety of basic Christian doctrines so as to facilitate a belief system that prioritized racial theories and viewed Adolf Hitler as a type of savior figure.
It remains a matter of debate as to whether the adherents of Positive Christianity had any sincere interest in Christianity, or if Positive Christianity was simply a cynical invention designed to trick German Christians into believing that National Socialism was somehow compatible with Nicene Christianity.
In any case, it is clear that many in the Nazi leadership were more interested in German paganism. Indeed, Samuel Koehne notes that “neither paganism nor the esoteric was excluded from the NSDAP in its early years, despite its nominal advocacy of “positive Christianity.”2 In fact, Koehne concludes that “’positive Christianity’ meant little to the Nazi Party at the very same time it was proclaimed to be a part of their Program.”3 The view of many National Socialists was no doubt reflected in the words of Joseph Goebbels when he concluded there is “an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a heroic-German world view.”
This reflects beliefs that were common among many German intellectuals at the time. Following trends that date back to the early years of German Romanticism, many Germans, by the late nineteenth century had turned to fanciful new narratives about German racial origins and paganism.
Two architects of this movement were Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, both advocates of the German ethnic nationalist Völkisch movement. List is known for inventing the Armanen runes that were later popular among Nazi occultists. Liebenfels, according to Koehne,
supported the notion of Christianity as a “racial cult religion,” interpreting the Bible through a bizarre exegesis that argued the Old Testament taught the dangers of racial admixture, supported Moses as a “Darwinist” and preacher of “racial morality”– rewriting the Ten Commandments as laws for racial purity––and advocated “a dualistic heresy which describes the battling forces of Good and Evil, typified by the Aryan ace men and their savior Frauja, a Gothic name for Jesus, who calls for the sacrificial extermination of the sub-men, the “apelings” and all other racial inferiors.4
It was partly under the influence of religious doctrines such as these that the National Socialists come into being in Germany while professing their new version of Christianity. It is not surprising, then, that from the mid-1930s to the end of the war, the Nazis attempted to inject German neopaganism and Nazi ideology into the Christian religious practices of ordinary Germans.
Christmas specifically became a target for these pagan nationalists who sought to turn the Christian holiday into a specifically German festival. This was helped along by ongoing efforts to discover or invent connections between German Christmas traditions and German paganiams. As historian Joe Perry puts it, articles on the “Germanic legacy” in popular Christmas customs appeared regularly in scholarly publications throughout the Nazi years. Many of these writers “recovered or invented any number of ‘Nordic’ Christmas customs and clarified the links between pagan solstice festivities and the ‘return to light’ rituals favored by the Nazis.”5
Indeed, many Nazi intellectuals went to great pains to obfuscate orthodox Christian Christmas traditions with new definitions of Christmas as a festival for the winter solstice and sun worship. Some local German traditions, of course, may have partly originated in some earlier German pagan rituals, although these were hardly foundational to any actual Christian doctrines which had developed in the Mediterranean more than a thousand years before. Naturally, the National Socialists sought to downplay the Middle Eastern and Jewish origins of Christianity and instead re-invent Christianity as a product of the German volk. From the Nazi perspective, the celebration of Christmas was to be transformed into a celebration of the German nation and not of Christianity which, of course, predated all European states and was hardly founded on ideals that buttressed modern notions of German nationalism.
Christmas, Redefined
What this meant in practice became gradually apparent once the Nazis came to power in the mid 1930s. Perry describes what these new celebrations of “the nation” looked like:
From outdoor decoration to annual Christmas markets … nazification transformed conventional uses of public holiday space and display into unavoidable celebrations of the national community. Official messages of national harmony dominated public decorations in the holiday season. Swastikas adorned the “people’s Christmas trees” and electric light displays set up across Germany. In larger cities, the Nazi obsession with public decoration reached spectacular proportions. In Dresden in 1933, a thirty-foot-high “Christmas nativity scene” was installed on the street outside the main train station. Christian and Nazi iconography merged in three tiers of electric lights. At the bottom, a domestic family scene represented the German people, the foundation of the state. The middle tier featured the holy family around the baby Jesus, and a choir of angels in the top tier recycled a generic holiday motif. A giant swastika and eagle capped the entire display. The conflicted combination of Christian and Nazi motifs was typical of early holiday propaganda and revealed some confusion among party leaders over the correct relationship between church and state; at the same time, the display limned official conceptions of social hierarchy that placed the German folk as well as the Holy Family under the protection—or subordination—of the regime.6
As the Nazi years wore on through the thirties and in to the forties, the hierarchy became clear: the blood and soil ideology of the German Reich was to be regarded as superior to the universalism of Christianity which viewed the incarnation of the non-German Christ in a non-German land as the central event of the Christmas celebration.
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Rather, the National Socialists attempted to make Christmas a festival of national unity above all else. It met with some success, in part because participation in the new German unity cult was essentially mandatory. Although the Christian churches regarded the new German syncretism as heretical and anti-Christian, it was also known that those who complained too much about the regime’s treatment of the Churches met with unfortunate ends. Dissenting clergy saw their church building seized by the state, and vocal dissenters were arrested. Even mild complaints about the “festivities” were not exactly appreciated by the authorities. As one policeman in Essen put it, Germans who were insufficiently enthusiastic about the state’s Christmas programs were “ripe for the concentration camp.”7
In spite of the standing threats and the endless propaganda, the Nazi grip on Christmas eventually began to fade. By late 1943, as the war situation looked increasingly dour, many Germans lost interest in going through the motions of the “people’s Christmas.” In a sense, the National Socialists had, like the French and the Soviets before them, succeeded in making Christmas—at least the real version of Christmas—largely disappear from public life.
This, of course, was what the Nazi state had wanted all along: to subsume all independent Christianity under the new pagan nationalistic doctrines of the German state. Many Germans didn’t see what was happening until it was much too late.
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Image: Joseph Goebbels with Hitler Youth. Via Wikimedia.
1 Shane H. Hockin, “Les Hommes sans Dieu: Atheism, Religion, and Politics during the French Revolution,” 2014, p. 107. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:163989020
2 Samuel Koehne, “Were the National Socialists a “Völkisch” Party? Paganism, Christianity, and the Nazi Christmas,” Central European History 47, No. 4 (December 2014): 763.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 767.
5 Joe Perry, “Nazifying Christmas: Political Culture and Popular Celebration in the Third Reich,” Central European History 38, No. 4 (2005): 577.
6 Ibid., p. 586.
7 Ibid., p. 592.
