ABSTRACT
The most significant development in the history of Christian anti-semitism was what is commonly termed the Holocaust. The prime mover for this catastrophe— Hebrew Shoah— was the Christian dictator of Nazi Germany. Numerous images and texts from the Nazi era link the infamous hooked cross of that era to other variants of the Christian cross. These linkages have been neglected by historians, although some specialists in religious history have begun to take notice. The situation in Nazi-controlled territories of Europe was extraordinary by any criterion. Both Christian soldiers and Christian civilians were under enormous external pressures which resulted in a variety of internal psychological processes which went beyond the usual anti-Semitic paranoia by proxy. Adolf Hitler himself was obviously not an “ordinary” Christian, even though he emerged from a background of “ordinary” Roman Catholic anti-Semitism. That background resurfaced occasionally in his political life, but eventually something extraordinarily messianic surfaced as well.
