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-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
How Hitler And The Nazis Tried To Steal Christmas
2009-11-18
The Nazi Party tried their best to remove Christ from Christmas by paganising carols, producing glittering swastika, iron cross and toy grenade baubles for the fir tree, research for a new exhibition has found.

Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans. The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.

The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.

"I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow," said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer who visited the exhibit told Times. "I didnt realise that Christ had been excised."

The Nazi version, which removed the religious references and replaced them with images of snowy fields, remains in some song books and is sung in many households. The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus.

The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler led the way in de-Christing Christmas.

Their plan was to remove the emotional ties of the Church and merge Christmas into a Julfest, a celebration of winter and light which drew on pagan traditions.

"The most important celebration in the calendar did not match their racist credo so they had to push out the Christian elements," said Judith Breuer, who helped her mother, Rita, pull together the exhibition.

Rita started trawling flea markets in the 1970s in search of her childhood Christmas and turned up boxes of Nazi-era Christmas decorations complete with swastikas and grenades.

"After the Nazis had gone you could still find textbooks on Christmas that use exactly the same phrasing," she told The Times.
I don't recall reading of the Reichsmarine selling Adolf and Eva Christmas tree ornaments, but I could have just missed it.
Ouch. That's going to leave a mark.
Posted by:Besoeker

#3  "Toy grenade baubles for the fir tree" ??

Oh my ....
Posted by: lotp   2009-11-18 18:41  

#2  Does that make the ACLU an idealogical heir of the Nazis?
Posted by: Iblis   2009-11-18 16:26  

#1  Hitler had his sights set on giving the Catholic Church the "final solution" once the war was over.

Had the Nazi regime managed to survive WWII, alot of Germans would have found themselves on the wrong side of a gas chamber.
Posted by: Frozen Al   2009-11-18 15:12  

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