
More than 30 years after Rita Breuer first began collecting Christmas knickknacks, selected objects from the family collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Center in Cologne. The exhibition focuses on how the Nazis misused Christmas for their own foul purposes and tried to turn it into a "Germanic" winter solstice festival.
It seems so strange that they deliberately tried to have a Christmas without Christ, without that little Jewish baby born in a manger. But now everything is so secularized here and globally regarding this very religious holiday, that it no longer really shocks us.
But the legacy of the Nazi Christmas is more long-lasting than might be suspected. The Nazi-era version of the traditional Christmas carol "Es ist für uns eine Zeit angekommen" ("Unto us a time has come") is still sung in Germany today, for example. "The Nazis took out the references to Jesus and made it into a song about walking through the snow," Breuer says.
Politicians of any era are always willing to twist anything to their dogma. Most people will not allow the Christian version of Christmas to be twisted, thus the traditional celebration has survived all these years.
Yet oddly enough, PenniD, the secularization of the holiday begun by the Nazis has continued at an accelerated pace since WWII. You might think the Nazis won, in this case.
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