One day away from Advent, our look at Christmas in wartime takes us to Nazi Germany. If Hitler’s National Socialists (and especially the SS) had had their way Christmas would have been replaced by a pagan Julfest with festivities on the winter solstice instead of December 25. However, Christmas was too firmly rooted in German culture to be attacked so directly. Instead the Nazi state tried a campaign of bait and switch, offering material and ceremonies that looked like Christmas but which were really subversive of its Christian essence.
This is mostly clearly in evidence in an Advent calendar sent out to German families to use in the run-up to Christmas Day. There were no stories of the baby Jesus; rather, a forest-born Golden Child was featured. No angels on the tree but swastika-shaped ornaments; St Nicholas was replaced by Knecht Ruprecht who was linked in the text to Nordic mythology.
Note the whirling sun which evokes the solstice and the swastika.
The caption says “Soon Ruprecht will enter the house and empty his sack for me. I gave his white horse hay which he likes.”
The 1943 edition of the Advent calendar shows German soldiers mourning at the grave of a fallen comrade surrounding by vignettes of Nazi conquests: burning villages in Russia, sinking merchantmen in the Atlantic, grapes from France, etc. The next year, the last Christmas of the war, this advent calendar kept the image of the soldiers but removed the wreath of victories celebrating territories the Germans had been driven out of.