Odin Go Home

Christmas Eve

Source

Hugo Jaeger, one of Hitler's personal photographers, took pictures of the Fuhrer, his generals, and a herd of Nazi thugs at a Christmas-time gala for SS officer cadets in Munich on December 18, 1941. Jaeger buried the images in glass jars on the outskirts of Munich; later he sold them to Life Magazine, which published many of them this week.

The mass murderers are not having a good time of it, judging by their dispirited scowls in the color prints. Small wonder, as the Russians had been knocking them about the eastern front pretty well.

The photos are interesting on multiple levels, one of them being that they help demonstrate how much the Nazis really hated Christianity.

From the article:

* Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich. He replaced the Christian figure of St. Nicholas with the Norse god Odin. He directed Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the "winter solstice."

* The angel atop the Christmas tree in one photo has been replaced with a swastika. Many of the tree's ornaments carried runic symbols and iron cross motifs.

* A few years later, in 1944-1945, the Nazis tried to reinvent Christmas as a day to commemorate the war dead.

Points to ponder the next time someone trots out the calumny that the Third Reich was the consequence of centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.