This is why much of the supposed “evidence” of church support for the Nazis is patent misrepresentation. For example, German soldiers did indeed have the motto “
Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) on their belt buckles.
But they had carried this motto for about 60 years before the Nazis ever existed. It had been a heraldic motto in Prussia for centuries and so became the motto of the unified Germany’s Imperial standard in 1871 and had been inscribed on German helmets in the First World War.
Nazi belt buckles, on the other hand, had no religious slogans. Those of the Waffen SS carried their motto “
Meine Ehre heißt Treue” (My Honour is Loyalty) while those of the Hitler Youth read “
Blut und Ehre” (Blood and Honour). And the photo of Pius XII supposedly being honoured by Nazi guards, which was used on the covers of most editions of Cornwell’s
Hitler’s Pope, was actually taken in 1927 when the then Papal Nuncio Pacelli was visiting President von Hindenburg. The “Nazi guards” are actually soldiers of the democratic Weimar Republic, though the covers of Cornwell’s book
artfully retouch the photo to highlight Pacelli and blur the soldiers to make it easier to mistake them for SS guards. The distortion here is quite literal.