By MICHAEL SANDULA

Contributing Reporter

Derek Hastings, an Oakland University history professor, said the Nazis’ ability to appeal to people’s desire to belong to something bigger them themselves gave them their destructive power.

The Oakland Center’s Oakland Room was filled last Wednesday with people who came to hear Hastings’ hour-long lecture on Nazism as a political religion. It was the first installment of this year’s “History Comes Alive” lecture series hosted by OU’s department of history. 

Hastings said the Nazis employed religious symbolism and the image of Adolf Hitler as a messianic figure to create a “measure of transcendence.”

For example, 16 Nazis killed in a shootout became martyrs for the Nazi party, hailed as “secular saints.”

Hastings showed images of Hitler with doves and crosses above his head that were used as propaganda and said that such symbolism was combined with fervent preaching of German pride. Hastings said Hitler gave radio addresses on “family values” and “racially pure children [being] the key” to Germany’s future, and that these attitudes culminated in the Holocaust.

“Inclusion requires exclusion,” Hastings said.

He said that nothing since has come close to the extremity of Nazism, but still cautioned people to be wary of politicians who aren’t honest or objective.

“Beware when the goal of a politician isn’t trying to engage your brain, but is trying to sweep you up in a tide of emotion,” Hastings said.

Elizabeth Kondrat, a history major, said the lecture gave her a “new way of looking at the Nazi regime.”

Hastings’ book, “Rethinking the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and the Birth of the Nazi Movement,” will be published this fall.

The “History Comes Alive” series has two more to come this semester. The next installment takes place Feb. 18, when Professor Don Matthews will discuss President John F. Kennedy, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and the challenge of Arab neutralism.