In his Easter sermon, Bishop Mixa of Augsburg lays the blame for mass murder by the Nazis and Stalin at the feet of "atheists". A summary of the sermon is still posted on the bishop's Web site:
seine Würde geleugnet und missachtet. Eine Gesellschaft ohne Gott ist
die Hölle auf Erden“, sagte Mixa bei seiner Predigt am Sonntag in der
Augsburger Marienkathedrale. (Whereever God is denied or attacked, then so also will human beings be denied and abused. A society without God is hell on earth," said Mixa in his Sunday sermon in the Augsburg Cathedral.)
„Die Unmenschlichkeit des praktizierten Atheismus haben im vergangenen
Jahrhundert die gottlosen Regime des Nationalsozialismus und des
Kommunismus mit ihren Straflagern, ihrer Geheimpolizei und ihren
Massenmorden in grausamer Weise bewiesen“, sagte der Augsburger
Bischof. Immer seien in diesen Systemen die Christen und die Kirche
besonders verfolgt worden. (The inhumanity of atheism in practice proved itself in a most brutal way in the last century with the godless regimes of National Socialism and Communism and their prison camps, secret polic and mass murder," said the Bishop of Augsburg. Systems like these always single out Christians and the Church for special persecution.)
The problem with Mixa's analysis is that in Nazi Germany Christians were not singled out for prosecution and most Nazi's considered themselve devout Christians. Hitler was a practicing Catholic who, in Mein Kampf wrote that he would finish the mission that Jesus Christ was not able to ( "Die Aufgabe, mit der Christus begann, die er aber nicht zu Ende führte, werde ich vollenden.“ ) Individual Catholics and Protestants, such as Die weisse Rose student protest group, were motivated by their faith to resist the tyranny and paid the ultimate price. But the mainstream Christian churches – both Catholic and Protestant – carried on with tacit and overt support of the regime. In an earlier post I mentioned Doris Bergen's book Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Mixa deliberately distorts history by blaming atheists for the terrible course of German history in the last century and shows that the Roman Catholic Church still has a long way to go with its Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
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We have to fight these people, who are always trying to reconstruct history in their favor.