from adherents.com
Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 film about the Nuremberg Party Rally, Triumph of the Will, is in many ways profoundly religious. The film both makes use of Catholic religious imagery and draws on the Catholic sacramental tradition to give dignity and legitimacy to its construction of Adolf Hitler as the "god" of the Nazi movement... Since the beginning, Catholicism and Nazism had an uncomfortable coexistence. They jarred long before Riefenstahl began filming Hitler's rally in the summer of 1934... The Concordat, along with many other more famous agreements and treaties signed by the Fuehrer, was quickly violated, and the Church was ineffective in protecting Catholics from all manner of religious and cultural harassment. Alfred Rosenberg, the closest Nazism as an ideology ever came to having a philosopher, was consistently and virulently anti-Catholic... Hitler himself was not purely or simply anti-Catholic or anti-Church, and certainly not so before his rise to power. He was a baptized Catholic, as was his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and a number of other prominent members of his administration. Interestingly, though both men rejected their Catholic faith and recognized...
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