Is there a Reason?

[Murray]

Martin Sommer , i strongly suggest reading this short little article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sommer

nothing like looking at history during a welding lecture

[PaulSacramento]

Martin Sommer , i strongly suggest reading this short little article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sommer

nothing like looking at history during a welding lecture

Nice guy.

One of the less talked about things in terms of religious persecution by the nazi's is how many Christians were also killed by them.
Nothing on the scale of the Jews of course, far from it, but considering that there was no official issues against Christians, it is quite striking that they were persecuted and killed a much as they were:

Nazi Germany

Hitler and the Nazis had widespread support from traditional Christian communities, mainly due to a common cause against the anti-religious German Bolsheviks. Once in power, the Nazis moved to consolidate their power over the German churches and bring them in line with Nazi ideals. Many historians say that Hitler had a general covert plan, which some say existed even before the Nazis' rise to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich, which was to be accomplished through control and subversion of the churches and to be completed after the war.[107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114][115]

The Third Reich founded their own version of Christianity called Positive Christianity which made major changes in its interpretation of the Bible which said that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but was not a Jew and claimed that Christ despised Jews, and that the Jews were the ones solely responsible for Christ's death. Thus, the Nazi government consolidated religious power, using allies to consolidate Protestant churches into the Protestant Reich Church. The syncretist project of Positive Christianity was abandoned by 1940.

Dissenting Christians went underground and formed the Confessing Church, which was persecuted as a subversive group by the Nazi government. Many of its leaders were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and left the underground mostly leaderless. Church members continued to engage in various forms of resistance, including hiding Jews during the Holocaust and various attempts, largely unsuccessful, to prod the Christian community to speak out on the part of the Jews.[citation needed]

The Catholic Church was suppressed in Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members, 18% of the Polish clergy,[67] were murdered; 1,992 of which died in concentration camps. In the annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland, it was even harsher than elsewhere. Churches were systematically closed, and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government. The Germans also closed seminaries and convents persecuting monks and nuns throughout Poland. In Pomerania, all but 20 of the 650 priests were shot or sent to concentration camps. 80% of the Catholic clergy and five of the bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939. In the city of Breslau (Wrocław), 49% of its Catholic priests were killed, and in Chełmno, 48%. 108 of them are regarded as blessed martyrs.[67] Among them, Maximilian Kolbe was canonized as a saint.

Not only were Polish Christians persecuted by the Nazis, in the Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were killed.[67] Outside mainstream Christianity, Jehovah's Witnesses were direct targets of the Holocaust, for their refusal to swear allegiance to the Nazi government. Many Jehovah's Witnesses were given the chance to deny their faith and swear allegiance to the state, but few agreed. Over 12,000 Witnesses were sent to the concentration camps, and estimated 2,500–5,000 died in the Holocaust.[citation needed]

In the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi authorities repressed the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church which had given aid to the assassins.[citation needed]

After the war ended, captured Nazi documents indicated that in the event of a Nazi victory against the United Kingdom, German authorities would have outlawed the Church of England and decimated its clergy.[citation needed][clarification needed]

[Murray]

That was a good bit paul. was not aware of the persecution of polish clergy to that extent.

[PaulSacramento]

Christian persecution is still going on today, it is just viewed as acceptable.

[Dudeacus97]

I just met some atheists on XBOX Live that deny the Holodomor. Yes, like some people deny the Holocaust. They also denied the Khemr Rogue and Chinese Cultural Revolution.

i'm surprised they've even heard of it. amazing what history books forget.

They did when I told them about it. They also said "Atheists are compassionate, Christians have no soul", so I'm pretty sure they were just trolling. Their only argument regarding any scientific issue was telling me I "didn't understand it" over and over again (probably because I kept on asking rhetorical questions like "how does the law of gravity form" and "where did this matter come from") and one of them seemed to think that the writers of the Gospels never knew Jesus, so their intelligence is questionable.

I'm very passionate about the issue of people knowing about these things. When we learned about the Holocaust in school, I had to correct the teacher that it wasn't the biggest mass-murder in the history of mankind. It doesn't even come close to the Purges and Chinese Cultural Revolution.

[Dudeacus97]

Now that I think about it, I think we don't learn about it because it gets clumped in with the rest of Stalin's purges. That's probably why.

[Murray]

Now that I think about it, I think we don't learn about it because it gets clumped in with the rest of Stalin's purges. That's probably why.

I remember spending about half a day in ib history learning about stalins purges, never did we see pictures of, or hear the word holodomor. And then I remember spending near a month in 2 different classes (english,and history) and 3 different grade levels learning about the holocaust (i'm not playing down the holocaust, just using it as comparison).