How the Nazis Tried to Remake Christmas Without Christ

Christmas posed a real problem for the Nazi regime. It was the best-loved festival in Germany, yet at its heart was the birth of a Jewish child and a message of peace on earth. Unable to abolish it, the Nazis tried to take it over. Between 1933 and the end of the war, party ideologues rebranded Christmas as a Germanic midwinter festival, rewrote carols, swapped Christian symbols for swastikas and sun wheels, and turned the holiday into a vehicle for loyalty to the state.

The effort was loud and well funded, but it never fully succeeded. Most German families kept celebrating in church and at home much as before. This is the story of what the Nazis changed, what people actually did, and what the surviving photographs show.

Why Christmas troubled the Nazi movement

Germany in the 1930s was an overwhelmingly Christian country, and many of the customs the world now links with Christmas grew up there. The decorated evergreen tree is first recorded in the sixteenth century in the Upper Rhine region, in what is now Alsace and south-western Germany, and carols such as "Stille Nacht" ("Silent Night") came from the German-speaking world.

For a movement built on racial ideology, the Jewish origins of Jesus were awkward, and Christian ideals of charity to all and peace among nations sat badly with plans for war and persecution. Nazi leaders also saw organised churches as rivals for people's loyalty. Yet the holiday was popular and useful. As early as 1921, Hitler gave a Christmas speech in a Munich beer hall, where, according to police reports, about 4,000 supporters sang carols around a tree after an antisemitic address.

The solution was not to cancel Christmas but to redefine it. Historian Joe Perry, who has written the standard study of Christmas in modern Germany, describes how the Propaganda Ministry worked to make a Nazified version dominate public life.

From Christmas to "Julfest"

Party writers argued that the real roots of the festival lay in pre-Christian Germanic midwinter rites, which the church had borrowed. In official language, Christmas became Julfest, or Yule, a celebration of the winter solstice and the "return of light". Candles on the tree were explained as solstice fire, and Christmas Eve was presented as the night of the sun's rebirth.

The gift-bringer was recast too. Nazi ideologists described the Weihnachtsmann, the German Father Christmas, as a Christianised version of the god Wotan (Odin), and some posters showed a "solstice man" bringing presents. Nativity scenes were discouraged in favour of gardens with wooden deer and rabbits, and images of mother and child were presented as an idealised blonde German family rather than Mary and Jesus.

At the height of this campaign, some propaganda went further and drew parallels between the coming of Christ and the arrival of a "saviour" Führer, an idea that offended many believers.

Carols with the faith taken out

Music was one of the most effective tools. Party songbooks printed versions of "Silent Night" stripped of references to God, Christ and religion. Another traditional song, "Es ist für uns eine Zeit angekommen", was reworked and, notably, the altered version stayed in use after the war.

The most promoted new song was "Hohe Nacht der klaren Sterne" ("Exalted Night of the Clear Stars"), written by Hans Baumann in 1936. It sounded like a gentle carol but replaced the Christian story with themes of blood, soil and motherhood. It remained surprisingly popular in some families into the 1950s and is still occasionally performed, often by people unaware of its origins.

Storm troopers sang carols alongside Nazi marching songs at public events, and Hitler Youth groups held torch-lit solstice rallies modelled on imagined pagan rites.

Swastikas on the tree, soldiers in the stocking

Decorations changed as well. The press began calling the Christmas tree a "light tree" or "Jul tree". The star on top, which could suggest the Star of Bethlehem, was sometimes replaced by a swastika, a sun wheel or a sig rune, and some tree lights were made in swastika shapes. In 1934, "people's Christmas trees" hung with swastikas stood in city squares.

Families were encouraged to make ornaments in the shape of "Odin's sun wheel" and to bake biscuits shaped like birds, wheels, runes and swastikas. Toy catalogues sold tanks, planes, machine guns and chocolate SS soldiers. Heinrich Himmler gave SS members ornate Yule lanterns called Julleuchter, some of which were produced at the Dachau concentration camp, a grim detail that shows how closely the festive and the criminal were bound together.

Wartime ornaments shaped like military symbols reportedly survive in collections, though the exact range is hard to document. What is clear is that the regime wanted children to associate Christmas with the army and the party.

The 1941 Christmas party photographs

Some of the best-known images of a Nazi Christmas come from a party for senior figures held in December 1941, the month Germany's advance on Moscow stalled and Hitler declared war on the United States. The photographs, which show Hitler among officials and uniformed guests under a large decorated tree, are credited to Hugo Jaeger, one of his personal photographers.

Jaeger's pictures have a remarkable history. As the war ended he hid them in a suitcase and then buried them in glass jars outside Munich, checking on them over the years. In 1955 he moved them to a bank vault, and in 1965 he sold them to LIFE magazine, which published many of them online in 2009.

Viewers often remark on how solemn Hitler looks at what should be a festive event. It is tempting to read meaning into that, but a single expression in a staged photograph tells us little. What the images do show is how the regime used the trappings of Christmas to display power and loyalty at the very moment its war of annihilation was expanding.

How ordinary Germans responded

For all the effort, Nazi Christmas remained largely a public performance. Churches objected to removing Christ from the festival, and most families kept their nativity scenes, hymns and church services. Reports from the National Socialist Women's League, the body tasked with bringing the new rituals into homes, noted "much doubt and discontent" when officials pushed too hard.

Clergy also pushed back. In Düsseldorf, churches promoted their own women's groups as an alternative, and Catholic priests warned women that joining the party's league could lead to excommunication. Some women stayed away from its Christmas events altogether. Even well into the war, Gestapo reports noted that grumbling about official policy tended to melt into a general "Christmas mood".

War Christmas and the end of the experiment

As the war turned against Germany, the campaign against Christian elements lost priority. The regime increasingly used Christmas to bind families at home to soldiers at the front, through radio broadcasts and parcels. By 1944, with Allied armies advancing from east and west, public celebrations were presented as a day of remembrance for the war dead.

That was the last Christmas of the Third Reich. Four months later, at the end of April 1945, Hitler was dead and the regime collapsed. Most of its invented customs vanished with it, though a few songs and symbols lingered quietly in family traditions.

Common myths about Nazi Christmas

"The Nazis renamed Christmas Rauhnacht, or Wild Night." The Rauhnächte are an old folk name for the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany, linked with winter spirits and customs. There is no good evidence that the regime officially replaced "Weihnachten" with that term; the name it promoted was Julfest.

"Santa was banned." The Weihnachtsmann was reinterpreted as a figure of Wotan rather than abolished. Saint Nicholas, the historical model for Santa, was a fourth-century Greek bishop of Myra in Asia Minor, and that Christian, non-Germanic origin is exactly what Nazi writers tried to obscure.

"The plan worked." It did not. The regime controlled public squares, radio and party events, but private Christmas remained largely Christian. The episode is a reminder that propaganda can occupy a festival without capturing what people actually believe.

Sources: Wikipedia: Christmas in Nazi Germany; Joe Perry, The Conversation: How the Nazis co-opted Christmas; JSTOR Daily: What Christmas meant to the Nazis; Wikipedia: Hugo Jaeger. Topic first covered in Greek by Mixani tou Xronou.

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