Mr Southwood (who he?) goes blah...

Some person called "Southwood" has bust a gut because I pointed out that it was the Protestant areas of Germany that voted for Hitler and not the Catholic areas and that it was the Protestant "German Christian" movement and the Protestant Reich Bishop, Ludwig Muller, who supported Hitler and not the Roman Catholic Church.

The German Catholic bishops condemned Nazism time and again.

Mr Southwood can't face this.

The truth upsets him.

Where does Mr Southwood get his information?

You guessed it folks - from books that are written by anti-Catholics and fanatics.

But just to give you a flavour of where Mr Southwood is coming from, here are some of his views:

- the SS were Roman Catholics (yep, really!);

- Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich, Hess were all fully paid-up, practising and devout Roman Catholics, apparently (hmm, excuse me, Mr Himmler, I don't think I saw you at mass last Sunday...oh, I see, you were in the garden worshipping Wotan, were you? That famous Christian god....).

- Not one Protestant nation became Nazi (err, right, Germany would be a Catholic nation, then, would it? Tell that to Martin Luther!).

- Do not include Germany because it was "in the hands of the RCs" (oh, right. So anything bad is, by definition, RC, is it? Even when it isn't? Oh, of course, logical, logical...)

- But this was because "Lutheranism in Germany was an apostate body in large part" (oh, well then of course it must have been RC, by definition - see above: everything bad = RC.)

- Austria was a Fascist nation under Dollfuss (oh, right. Err... then why did the Nazis murder him, I wonder...?)

- Cornwell says that Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope" so therefore he must have been (no possibility that Cornwell was wrong, of course. But hang on...Cornwell was brought up RC, wasn't he? So he must be bad and so cannot be believed, right? Oh, I see. RCs who agree with Mr Southwood are OK but not those that don't? Yes, of course, logical, logical...)

- Serbs were massacred in RC Croatia (but let's just forget about Croats murdered by Orthodox Serbs. That would be inconvenient to our thesis that only RCs are the bad guys).

And so on and so on, with more ill-informed bigotry.

Norweigan Nazi collaborationist Minister-President, Vidkun Quisling, was the son of a Protestant pastor

Where, one might suppose, does Vidkun Quisling fit into this picture, the son of a Protestant pastor of the Lutheran evangelical Church of Norway. Quisling, who had been awarded the CBE by the (Protestant) British government became an ardent friend of the Nazis and served as Minister-President of the Norweigan collaborationist government.

Whoops.

And what about Martin Luther himself, that great Protestant anti-semite?

Martin Luther, founder of Protestantism and author of On the Jews and their Lies (1543)

Well, make up your own mind, folks.

Here are extracts from the works of the founder of Protestantism about the Jews in a book called On the Jews and their Lies of 1543:

"[they are a] base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."

"[they are] full of the devil's faeces ... which they wallow in like swine"

"[the synagogue is an] incorrigible whore and an evil slut".

He argued that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these "poisonous envenomed worms" should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. He also seems to advocate their murder, writing "[w]e are at fault in not slaying them".

Paul Johnson writes:

"Luther was not content with verbal abuse. Even before he wrote his anti-Semitic pamphlet, he got Jews expelled from Saxony in 1537, and in the 1540s he drove them from many German towns; he tried unsuccessfully to get the elector to expel them from Brandenburg in 1543".
(A History of the Jews p. 242)

Well, Mr Southwood, bang goes your theory about the virtuous Protestants who were not Fascist or anti-semitic, eh?


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