This kind of view also explains why the [Fascists] included large‐font inserts in their official newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, which stated, “it is not confession, but rather the race of a person that determines his actions […] a Jew always remains a Jew [because] baptismal water cannot wash way the in‐born blood.” This was in line with [the Fascist] view that “Jewish Christians” were always still “jewified by blood.”

[…]

While Christians around the world gather to celebrate Easter as the major festival of the church year, they do so in an understanding that this is the fundamental point of their religion: marking the death of Jesus Christ and his resurrection, for the forgiveness of sins.

When Der Stürmer covered Easter, the paper often included images that depicted Jesus’s crucifixion but offered radically different interpretations of what this meant. Most often, it drew a comparison between a supposedly “Aryan” Jesus and an “Aryan” Germany, having “Germania” take the place of Christ in 1927 in a cartoon entitled “Ecce Germania.”

In comparable manner, its cover in April 1928 had Germania replace the figure of Jesus, standing with Barabbas in front of what was called a “Jewish rabble” crying, “Crucify!” The accompanying text argued Jesus had been a kind of “folk‐hero” who called “farmers and fisherman” to “fight” against the Jews, and had been crucified as a result.

This marked out the manner in which the paper also generally measured religion by a “racial yardstick.” While the paper was openly anti‐Christian by 1936, arguing that both Christianity and Communism came from “the Jews,” it had earlier advocated a variety of views, including the belief that Christianity had to be antisemitic because Jesus was supposedly antisemitic.

Hence, one of more famous images from an Easter period (March 1929) was entitled “Resurrection!” and depicted columns of men marching past and saluting Jesus on the cross. The main article alongside this dealt with “the blood libel,” while the poem inside entitled “Easter Battle‐Cry” argued that Christians had to be “antisemites” because Jesus had driven the moneychangers from the Temple (Matthew 21:12), described as a “Jewish brood” by the poet, and that Germans would achieve “resurrection” if they turned to a new saviour: “From Hitler alone comes your salvation!”

In 1927, this viewpoint had been just as strongly emphasised, with parallel images of Christ being crucified and Germania being crucified accompanying text that argued “the Galilean Jesus Christ” had been a “deadly enemy of the Jews.” What was also startlingly clear in this issue was the notion of a kind of “[Fascist] Jesus,” as the paper argued Christ sought “the freeing of a long‐established peasant Volk from the slavery of interest and the domination through blood of the racially foreign Jew” — both of which referred to [German Fascism] and their Programme (Points 4 and 11). An accompanying poem made the concept of an “Aryan” Jesus explicit:

“He was a hero of German blood
born of an Aryan woman.”

A later publication continued this theme of “racial defilement” (April 1934) by condemning the churches for opposing a marriage between “Aryans” of different Christian confessions, but allowing “a baptised Jew” to marry a “German woman.”

The kind of racial anxiety, essential paranoia and bizarre conspiracist nature of [Fascism] can certainly be found in these depictions, but not a great deal of the Christian message of Easter.

One can also certainly see the concern that drove Fritsch: if there was such a thing as an “Aryan” spirituality or “racial soul,” then how on earth did a religion deriving from Judaism become the dominant faith in Germany? Fritsch answered this by arguing the Jews stole earlier pagan “Aryan” religious teachings.

(The irony here is palpable.)

One writer in Der Stürmer resolved it through circularity, by arguing that Jesus must have been opposed to the Jews (in order to be crucified) and that “a teaching, which does not come out of Nordic blood and doesn’t carry a Nordic spirit in it, cannot spread among Nordic peoples.”

Ridiculous as they may seem to many people, these views were also taken seriously by the [Fascists] and have to be taken seriously by historians, in analysing this period of history. Ultimately, what is clear from [Fascist] depictions of long‐established religious festivals like Easter and Christmas is that the dominant concern was not Christianity as a religion, but racial ideology and what would be “appropriate” for the German race.