Contemporaries and historians have found it difficult to interpret the ambiguous relationship
between National Socialism and Christianity. Both the Catholic and Protestant Churches tended
to agree with National Socialists in their authoritarianism their attacks on socialism and
communism and their campaign against the Versailles Treaty but the doctrinal position of the
Churches could not be reconciled with the principle of racism a foreign policy of unlimited
aggressive warfare or a domestic agenda involving the complete subservience of Church to
State. Important sections of the Nazi Party sought the complete extirpation of Christianity and
its substitution by a purely racial religion but considerations of expediency made it
impossible for the National Socialist leadership to adopt this radical anti-Christian stance as
official policy. The Kulturkampf Newsletters which have not appeared in English since the
1930s were produced by German Catholic exiles in France. They scrupulously document the
tensions between various strands of Nazi policy and the nature of the policy eventually
adopted: this was to reduce the Churches' influence in all areas of public life through the use
of every available means yet without provoking the difficulties - diplomatic as well as
domestic - which an openly declared war of extermination might have caused.
