Within a remarkable short time totalitarian rule had been reimposed on half a continent using a combination of force and fraud. . . Although they wer… - Michael Burleigh

For, despite its egalitarian rhetoric, Nazi Germany eschewed the doctrine of aggressive class war, whatever revolutionist animosities lingered, against the limp bourgeoisie in general.

The Austrian Catholic newspaper Volkswohl even parodied life in a future Nazi state in a manner that seems extraordinarily prescient. Every newborn baby’s hereditary history would be checked by a Racial-Hygienic Institute; the unfit or sickly would be sterilised or killed; dedicated ‘Aryan’ Catholics would be persecuted: ‘The demonic cries out from this movement; masses of the tempted go to their doom under the Satan’s sun. If we Catholics want to save ourselves, then I can never be in a pact with these forces.’

On the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'état, the Orthodox Church claimed a hundred million adherents, two hundred thousand priests and monks, seventy-five thousand churches and chapels, over eleven hundred monasteries, thirty-seven thousand primary schools, fifty-seven seminaries and four university-level academies, not to speak of thousands of hospitals, old people’s homes and orphanages. Within a few years, the intuitional structures were swept away, the churches were desolated, vandalized or put to secular use. Many of the clergy were imprisoned or shot; appropriately enough the first concentration camp of the gulag was opened in a monastery in Artic regions.