Hitler’s Christmas party: Rare photographs capture leading Nazis celebrating in 1941

DATELINE ZERO - They don’t look to cheery in these pictures. Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich, so he replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas with the Norse god Odin and urged Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the ‘winter solstice’, rather than Christmas.

It’s always funny (in a horrid, WTF sotra’ way) when the blessed and almighty State stops looking at mainstream religion as a tool to persuade, and starts looking at it as some sort of obstacle. Reading about Nazi Germany makes me think of France’s radical Revolution, when they began drowning priests and celebrating the so-called “Cult of the Supreme Being.”

Three years after those pictures were taken, the Nazis tried to reinvent Christmas once again as a day to commemorate the dead. There was a particular focus on fallen soldiers, because by that time Germany had lost almost four million men in the war. Continue reading, from the full post at Dateline Zero.