A Nazi Christmas Story

The history of Christmas evil in WWII Germany

A Nazi Christmas party attended by Hitler | Hugo Jaeger, LIFE

A shorter version of this post was published on Notes on Christmas Eve.

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Our story begins on Christmas Day in 1921 at a beer hall in Munich known as the Hofbräuhaus, one of Munich’s oldest beer halls, founded in 1589—the same year the warlord Mōri Terumoto founded the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Beer halls have always played an important role in German politics. It was common for candidates to deliver speeches at such places. But they play an especially central role in the story of Adolf Hitler.

Hitler announced the Nazi Party’s 25-point plan at the Hofbräuhaus in 1920. The next year, he was elected Führer of the party at the Hofbräuhaus. In 1923, he and his stormtroopers burst into a political meeting at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall and declared a revolution in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. They marched the next day and were immediately shut down. Police shot 16 Nazis and arrested its leaders, including Hitler, but he used his own trial to gain more publicity and used his time in prison to dictate Mein Kampf.

So it was that in 1921, the would-be Führer gave a Christmas speech at the Hofbräuhaus, standing up in front of a crowd of about 4,000 people and screaming about how the Jews broke Jesus on the cross, violently shaking his fists, spit flying out of his mouth as he worked himself into a froth, hysterical supporters jumping and clapping with sadistic joy as he vowed revenge on the Jewish people. Then they all sang carols.

And so it was that the first Nazi Christmas came and went. But Christmas being the season of peace and goodwill, it seems unthinkable there could be such a thing as a Nazi Christmas, but yes there was, and it was as terrible as you’re probably imagining.

The relationship between the Nazi Party and Christianity was complex. The Nazis at first presented themselves as Christian, but this was likely insincere. Hitler made references to Christian belief in his speeches, but like politicians today, this was probably to curry favor with the public.

But all this Christian posturing went out the window when the Nazis took power in 1933. The first change was the name of the holiday itself, which became Julfest, or the Yule winter festival, because the Nazis were obsessed with their own ethnonationalist conceptualization of themselves and they wanted something German.

Specifically, the didn’t want to celebrate the birth of a Middle Eastern Jew. In 1937, Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm said “real” Germans must remove any trace of “oriental” religion from the holiday and instead honor the pagan Yule, literally taking Christ out of Christmas.

Some elements remained, however, so for example almsgiving was a big part of Nazi Christmas. This may come as a shock, but Nazi Germany had an annual donation drive to help finance charitable work.

The donation drive was known as the Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes, or Winter Relief of the German People, and at its peak much of the nation’s welfare state drew from the coffers of the Winter Relief.

Hitler established the Winterhilfswerk when he came to power, opening the first drive himself, which was “voluntary,” although if Germans didn’t give then their names were printed in the paper the next day and they were reported to their block leaders and often fired from their jobs.

In his 1995 book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, the journalist Milton Mayer explains how otherwise normal Germans were able to go along with Nazi policies, provided their quality of life was high. Programs like the Winterhilfswerk therefore made widespread compliance possible because it kept the average citizen comfortable.

Mayer also explains that Germans were also able to give fat donations to the Winter Relief program as a substitution for joining the Nazi Party.

The Hitler Youth was one of the most prominent collection groups, but the Brown Shirts were probably the most significant of all. In 1939, the journalist Lothrop Stoddard wrote about seeing the Brown Shirts collect Winter Relief money around Christmas time.

Stoddard was a KKK member and his work influenced Nazi philosophy—it was Stoddard who introduced the term Untermensch into Nazi race theory. He was a member of the American Eugenics Society and a co-founder of the American Birth Control League, which later became Planned Parenthood. Here is what he wrote about collections:

Every city, town, and village in the Reich seethes with brown-shirted Storm Troopers carrying red-painted canisters. These are the Winter-Help collection-boxes. The Brown-Shirts go everywhere. You cannot sit in a restaurant or beer-hall but what, sooner or later, a pair of them will work through the place, rattling their canisters ostentatiously in the faces of customers.

The Nazis also claimed Christmas was not originally about Jesus at all, but that it was in fact a celebration of the winter solstice. There is some truth to this, in the sense that Jesus was definitely not born on December 25 or anywhere near that date. Further, the Church may have chosen that day based on existing pagan festivals, such as the winter solstice of December 22. But of course, placing Christmas on the 25th does not mean Christmas itself was not originally about Christ, it just means the date placement may have been related to the solstice.

The Nazis also claimed Santa Claus was a Christian interpretation of the Germanic God Wotan, or Odin in Norse mythology, and again there is a splinter of truth here. Odin was said to lead a great hunting party through the sky during the winter Yule season, during which he gave gifts to children, so you can see the connection to Santa, but the story of Santa itself was not based on Odin.

The Nazis also renamed the Christmas tree as the Jul tree, and instead of a star on top, German citizens placed Nazi crosses. They even had Christmas tree lights in the shape of little Nazi crosses.

In an article by the Independent titled “How the Nazis Stole Christmas,” we learn that they replaced the concept of the coming of Jesus with the notion of the coming of Hitler as the “Savior Führer.”

They even had their own Nazi Christmas carols, the most famous one being the Nazi poet Hans Baumann’s “Exalted Night of the Clear Stars,” about the duty of German women to help propagate the Aryan race.

To this day, the song is still sometimes performed in Germany.

But of course, it wouldn’t be a true Nazi Christmas without plenty of Jew-hatred, and Germans were encouraged to boycott the stores of Jewish families and to engage in antisemitic rhetoric.

So there it is, the story of Nazi Christmas, proving there is really nothing so good that it cannot be turned to garbage in the hands of a couple antisemitic fascists. So as we reflect this Christmas on the ugliest possible way to celebrate the season, let it serve as a reminder of how we ought to celebrate—with warm Christmas cheer and by spreading love and joy to those who celebrate, and to our Jewish brothers and sisters, without whom there would be nothing to celebrate.

Merry Christmas!