Do people really believe that it was only a "small minority" of Germans who joined and supported the Nazi party?
I wish my uncle's father was around to talk to you about how many hard core nazi's were around in Berlin (he was a local post office official) and who had turned out to the parades and meetings in droves, had participated in the lootings of the homes of jews around in his neighborhood, had been all too willing informants on anyone they thought a threat to the nazi party and in general had been proud supporters of the war. Berlin falls, and he said the vast majority of them burned their party papers, any uniforms they had and threw away their medals and awards and if asked by the occupying soldiers: they hated the nazis, always had, were so thankful that Hitler had finally been ousted, etc.
This very topic has been documented in several well researched history books, the notion that the vast majority of German citizens were not in support of Hitler and the Nazi's is complete and utter BS! Most of them were in fact complicit in what happened in their country and to their fellow citizens. For the most part those who actually weren't, were themselves victims of the concentration camps (members of Jehovah's Witnesses and 7th Day Adventists are examples of that), in prison or had fled the country when Hitler came to power. The claim it was only a small minority is pretty much based solely on the narrative that the former party members and supporters put forth once they were under ally control. (To quote Sgt Schultz, the typical German claimed: I know nothing, nothing!)
As for Hitler:
"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty
Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work." [Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a
fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded
by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and
summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest
not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian
and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord
at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the
Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight
against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with
deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact
that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As
a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have
the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice
And if there is
anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is
the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty
to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and
work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only
for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning
and see these men standing in their queues and look into their
pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very
devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two
thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people
are plundered and exposed." - Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922
"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator."
"And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his
estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove
those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God."
"What we have to fight for
is the freedom and independence of the
fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission
assigned to it by the Creator." - Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf
"Christianity could not content itself with building up its own
altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the
heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its
apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute
presupposition." - Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf Vol II
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost
duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It
will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation
has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our
national morality, and the family as the basis of national life" Adolf Hitler public speech Berlin Feb 3, 1933
"Today Christians
stand at the head of [this country]
I pledge
that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy
Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian
spirit
We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in
literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to
burn out the *poison of immorality* which has entered into our whole
life and culture as a result of *liberal excess* during the past
(few) years." - Adolf Hitler (collected speeches Oxford University Press)
Those are a minuscule smattering of Hitler's speeches and writings were he invokes God and tells the German people that they are doing "God's work" by rousting the Jew and bringing back "morality" to the German society.
