beso
//Hitler was not an atheist. He hated Jews.
Perhaps you would like to comment on why the Catholic church did not excommunicate him or any of his henchmen. //
Hitler hated anyone who did not conform to his idealogy of blue eyed Aryans. Coloured people, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill and anyone who did not obey the Nazi regime. I have members in my family who were Polish, and catholics, but they were subjected to concentration camps. Fortunately they managed to escape and got to England.
Hitler is quoted as justifying his intolerance of the Jews by saying: “I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic church had adopted for 1500 years.” Other dictators since Hitler have used brainwashing and mental and physical torture in their fight against ideological “heretics.”
Also, Hitler boasted that “the National Socialist Reich will endure a thousand years.” He thereby put himself into competition with the Messiah about whom the Bible speaks, for Jesus Christ had promised a government that would rule the earth for a thousand years.
As to why he was not excommunicated is because in 1933 a concordat between Germany and the Vatican was signed by Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (who later became Pope Pius XII) and Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen. This concordat granted the Catholic Church in Germany certain rights and favors in exchange for certain concessions made by the Church to the government. In 1957 the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the concordat was still binding under present German law.
I am surprised you did not know this. On the Yesterday Channel over the past couple of years there have been numerous programmes regarding Hitler and the rise of Nazism. I was even taught it in school.