Hitler Tried to 'Nazi-ize' Christmas

Research for a new exhibition has found that Nazi Germany tried to remove Christ from Christmas using swastika tree ornaments, "Germanic" cookies and putting a Nazi spin on holiday traditions ( see pictures ).

The Telegraph reports that the atheist Nazis tried to turn Christmas into a pagan winter solstice celebration, and many of the changes made by the Nazis are still in use in Germany today.

"Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis -- after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child," Judith Breuer, who helped her mother Rita create the exhibition, told the German newspaper Spiegel . "The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian."

Traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favorite carols.

"I always thought that 'Unto Us a Time Has Come' was a song about wandering through winter snow," said Heidi Bertelson, a lawyer who visited the exhibit. "I didn't realize that Christ had been excised."

The Nazi version of the song, and other carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke Baby Jesus, removed the religious references and replaced them with images of snowy fields.

During the war years, the Nazis produced a book of material each Christmas that had stories, letters, songs and illustrations. There is no mention of the Christian nature of the holiday as the Nazis used the German word for Christmas -- Weihnacht -- throughout the books.