When Hitler tried to redesign Christmas

It's a real contest but if I had to choose Donald Trump's most fatuous claim it would have to be that until he became president "nobody could say Merry Christmas anymore." He made the claim again just the other day and his ecstatic followers practically went into a collective fugue state and began speaking in tongues they were so thrilled. This war on Christmas has been a theme on the right for many, many years but Trump is the first politician to say that he "won" it. It was smart. After all, the war didn't exist in the first place so every time anyone says "Merry Christmas" he gets the credit. Boom! 

I have no doubt that his right-wing evangelical fans are thrilled by all this. This is one of Christianity's most important holidays after all. On the other hand, most of them are also fine with Trump evoking Adolph Hitler's rhetoric so their alleged reverence for Christmas as a religious holiday may be beside the point. 

Hitler wasn't exactly a follower of Jesus but most of his followers were Christians, motivated to support him out of long-standing antisemitism, hostility to the more liberal social and political changes they blamed on the Weimar Republic , anti-communism, rabid nationalism and loathing for the international community. Except for the antisemitism, the followers of Trump aren't much different here in America today. And I think we can safely assume that the only reason they aren't on board with today's antisemitism is because they believe Jews must be in Israel for the rapture to be triggered. 

They're happy to join in Trump's racism and bigotry against his chosen "others" which he recently specifically defined as people from Asia, Africa and South America who are "poisoning the blood" of our country. Trump and his supporters also despise Muslims from anywhere, "radical leftist thugs," LGBTQ people and the media, all of whom the Nazi Party also saw as enemies. Let's just say the historical Nazis shared a whole lot of the same grievances we see in the MAGA movement today. 

Christmas was an issue for Hitler as well but in a different way than Trump. Even though the holiday was always a very popular holiday in Germany, Hitler found it to be an insipid drain on the national will, what with all the "peace on earth" folderol. He didn't want that and he didn't want the German people to want that. But he couldn't just ban it. It would have caused a mass rebellion. So instead, the Nazis set about changing its meaning to “holiday of actual domestic national peace" by which they meant peace after all the enemies had been vanquished. 

Hitler ordered that Christmas be altered in other ways as well. The Christmas tree was originally a German tradition but he really didn't like that star on the top which was just a little bit too reminiscent of the Jewish Star of David or the five-pointed star of the Soviet Union. So they replaced it with a Germanic “sun wheel” or a Sig rune. This was in keeping with the Nazi plan to move Christmas away from a Christian holiday into a more ancient German pagan celebration of the winter solstice, even calling it by a different name: Rauhnacht, the Rough Night (for some reason.) 

They even changed the lyrics to Silent Night to make it a celebration of the Führer. It started off with the usual “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright” but rather than "Round yon Virgin Mother and Child" etc., it took an abrupt turn to, “Only the Chancellor stays on guard, Germany’s future to watch and to ward, guiding our nation aright.” (So much for "sleep in heavenly peace.") People were also encouraged to sing, "Exalted Night of the Clear Stars" which is all about motherhood, renewal, and holiday fires but no Jesus. He was, after all, a Jew. 

Hitler didn't like Santa either. Recall, St. Nicholas was a saint from Turkey (a "sh*thole" country in Donald Trump vernacular) which meant he wasn't Aryan and that was unacceptable. But the people loved him so the Nazi propagandists cleverly turned it around to say that the beloved mythic figure was actually the pagan god Woton which the Christians had appropriated and now the Germans were taking him back. They called him "Solstice Man" and he wore a slouch hat and a mask.

Socialist Unity Party of Germany Handing out Christmas Present in Reinickendorf neighborhood of Berlin, Germany, 1946 (Wikimedia Commons / Deutsche Fotothek, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)Over time all these changes became more and more mandatory and any refusal to go along became a political act. “The apparently banal, everyday decision to sing a particular Christmas carol, or bake a holiday cookie, became either an act of political dissent or an expression of support for national socialism,” writes historian Joe Perry. I think we know what happened to dissenters in Hitler's Germany. 

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Nazi propagandist Wilhelm Beilstein wrote an article in 1939 explaining the true meaning of Christmas:

“When we celebrate a German Christmas, we include in the circle of the family all those who are of German blood, and who affirm their German ethnicity, all those who came before us and who will come after us, all those whom fate did not allow to live within the borders of our Reich, or who are doing their duty in foreign lands amidst foreign peoples.”

That brings Donald Trump to mind for some reason. Hmmm. I'll have to think about why that is. 

The right has accused the left of waging a war on Christmas for years now, which is really just a joke at this point. Nobody's trying to prevent anyone from saying Merry Christmas if they want to. "Happy Holidays" is just a way of including people who may not celebrate the Christian holiday. It's called having manners. But Donald Trump heard about the fake controversy from talk radio and now claims that he fixed the problem that never existed. All of that is silly. 

But you can see where the worship of a demagogue can lead a country. People went along with that absurdity because, whether through desire to please or to avoid intimidation, they did whatever Hitler wanted them to do. He persuaded them that maintaining the purity of "German blood" was of paramount importance and everything and everyone had to submit to that priority. With almost half of Republicans telling pollsters that Trump's rant about immigrants poisoning the blood of America made them more likely to support him, it appears the MAGA movement is headed down that same path.