Baumgärtner, Raimund: Weltanschauungskampf im Dritten Reich. Die Auseinandersetzung der Kirchen mit Alfred Rosenberg, Mainz 1977

Raimund Baumgärtner: Weltanschauungskampf im Dritten Reich. Die Auseinandersetzung der Kirchen mit Alfred Rosenberg.

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) bore the title »The Führer’s Representative for the Supervision of the Entire Intellectual and Ideological Training and Education of the NSDAP.« Given the circumstances of its publication and distribution, his Myth of the 20th Century (1930) attests to the highest degree of accordance with Hitler’s views and the political will of the Nazi movement. It is a document of irreconcilable enmity toward Christianity in all its manifestations.

The first section of the present study considers Rosenberg’s special role in the development and enforcement of National Socialism’s ideologial pretensions. The ideological conflict between the churches and Rosenberg, which was carried out with different arguments and conclusions in the respective denominations, is the focus of the book’s second part.

What gives the churches’ confrontation with Rosenberg its special character is the fact that, at a time when public debate everywhere had been silenced, spoken and written words that transcended the narrower limits of the church realm challenged the very ideological foundations of the Hitler regime.