If faith and hope were integral to National Socialism, so too, surprisingly enough, was charity. This ceased to be an uncomplicated reflection of hum… - Michael Burleigh

In 1920 the British philosopher Bertrand Russell spent five weeks in Bolshevik Russia as a member of a Labour Party delegation. The group hoped to discover a promised land, breaking into spontaneous choruses of the Internationale and Red Flag on spying the first Red banners across the border. After twenty-four hours Russell realized that there was not much to sing about.

Some of the most eminent Catholic theologians, such as Engelbert Krebs, Wilhelm Neuss, Karl Rahner and Romano Guardini, lost their university teaching posts under the Nazis. Krebs not only published articles reflecting his positive view of Judaism, but was denounced in August 1934 for saying at a private gathering in his brother’s house, “We are being governed by robbers, murderers and criminals’ a remark that resulted in several years of harassment, the loss of his job, a trial and imprisonment.

In Poland, which was crucified between two thieves, both the Communists and the Nazis sought to extirpate Christianity, although only the Nazis attempted to reduce the Poles to helotry in the remnants of their former state. White Europeans were treated ‘like the blacks in the colonies’, as the metropolitan of Lwów put it. Six million Poles were killed, half of them Christians, half of them Jews.