Surprise surprise…well, you do have company…found this online. Just an excerpt from an article on churches or individuals and groups in Nazi Germany who “de-Nazified” the Bible and tried to re-cast Jesus in a fashion that they found palatable. This relates more to the final paragraph of your comment above — that is, about “certain German theologians…” etc…
This has little to do with the overall topic here. You could say that “some” theologians put personal bigotry before biblical teaching or nationalism before the Biblical instruction on conduct and life. Both are possible and we do it today…just in different venues. We are dropping Mervin’s issue here but that only means that I have said my piece. It really is unfair to just label “one” side of the political spectrum as somehow willing to attach to dictators. The individuals who tried to “de-Judaize” the Bible in their day are doing no different than what we so easily do in our day when it does not suit…including some moral issues… Not a right wing thing — or exclusively from the left either!!
Below is from di0.creation.com…hope I got the site correct. Article is titled “Did Nazis Rewrite the Bible?” by Russell Griggs…and is a product of Creation.com
Find it online and read the whole of it…I just copied and pasted something here to be scandalous. (It’s what I do.)
“The institute shifted Christian attention from
the humanity of God to the divinity of man: Hitler
as an individual Christ, the German Volk as a
collective Christ, and Christ as Judaism’s deadly
opponent” (pp. 164–165).
Reaction of the Nazis
The Institute’s perverse attempt to marry Christianity
to Nazism was not reciprocated by the Nazis, who were
deeply suspicious of all things Christian,2 [this is something I pointed out elsewhere…Nazism sought state religion or Germanic deities not Christianity]
and prohibited
the display of Nazi regalia inside churches. The Nazis
tolerated the Institute, “though its efforts were at times
mocked” (p. 148), and they kept it under secret surveillance
by the intelligence arm of the SS (p. 149).3
In March 1943,
they confirmed their lack of sympathy for Grundmann by
drafting him into military service on the dreaded Eastern
Front (p. 161).
At the end of the war, Grundmann was captured and
was incarcerated in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. He was
released on medical grounds in October 1945, and was
among the first to return home. The Thuringian church
closed the Institute that year (pp. 249–250).
Grundmann then campaigned for rehabilitation, mostly
by soliciting letters of personal testimony in his favour from
previous like-minded pro-Nazi ‘Christians’, who continued
to support each other after the war. He disingenuously
“presented himself as an objective scholar who had fallen
victim to Nazi attacks as a result of his efforts on behalf
of Christianity and his scholarship” (p. 253). In the 1950s,
having gone through a ‘soft’ de-Nazification (i.e. without
being held to account), he was appointed rector of the
Thuringian seminary in Eisenach, which was now part of
East Germany. From 1956 he served the communists as a
secret informer for Stasi (the State Security Service of East
Germany), supplying information about his opponents in
the Confessing Church (pp. 256 ff.)…
Grundmann, Darwinism, and Mein Kampf
The Germany that Grundmann grew up in was
impregnated with Darwinism. Translations of Darwin’s
Origin of Species had been published in Germany in 1860,
1863, 1867, 1876 and 1916, and his Descent of Man in
1875. Also, Darwinism had become enormously popular
in educated German circles due inter alia to the writings
of Ernst Haeckel, famous (or rather infamous) for his
forged embryo drawings.4,5
Hitler imbibed this Darwinist
philosophy of the strong eliminating the weak, and
regurgitated it in his autobiography, Mein Kampf (meaning
‘My Struggle’). For example, Hitler wrote,
“He who does not wish to fight in this world,
where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not
the right to exist.”6
“The stronger must dominate and not mate with
the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of
its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can
look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so
it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and
narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the
process of evolution then the higher development
of organic life would not be conceivable at all
[Emphasis added].”7
“If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals
should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less
that a superior race should intermingle with an
inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts,
throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to
establish an evolutionary higher stage of being [i.e.
referring to recent human evolution], may thus be
rendered futile [Emphasis added].”8
As a passionate pro-Nazi, who regarded Hitler as
‘God’s agent’, Grundmann undoubtedly would have read
Mein Kampf, as some 6 million copies had been sold by
1940. He would therefore have been aware that Hitler’s aim
of eliminating everything Jewish from Germany, including
the Jewish population, was an outworking of the theory
of evolution, aka social Darwinism. Way back in 1941,
Grundmann may or may not have thought his way through
to the ultimate truth that the atheistic, long-age theory