Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arra… - Michael Burleigh

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.’

Nazi ideology offered redemption from a national ontological crisis, to which it was attracted like a predatory shark to blood.

Christianity regarded all earthly existence as transient, while the Nazi thought in terms of rendering life eternal through a sort of biological Great Chain of Being. The individual was nothing, but the racial collective would endure through the aeons.