#I may be lukewarm on organized religion at best; but historical accuracy is rather important to me

[crusaderiguess]

I would kinda disagree with some of the Christianity bit. Sure, Nazis didn't say no to Christian supporters, but they had a lot of quarrels with various churches, be they Protestant or Catholic.

There were various conflicts within the protestant churches, going so far as lesser splits between the 'Bekennende Kirche'1 and the 'Deutsche Christen'2. The Bekennende Kirche were rather outspoken, or as outspoken as you can get, about the standardization and increased nationalism the Nazis were pushing onto them (see Gleichschaltung), while the Deutsche Christen were fully on board.

The Catholic Church is a bit harder to pin down and varied from country to country. The Pope himself laundered money for the Nazis through the Vatican national bank while Polish Catholics were being persecuted, with various members of their clergy ending up in the camps (Look up the Pfarrerblock if you're interested).

Just to reiterate, the Nazis were lukewarm about Christianity at best, going so far as to promote the use of 'Gottgläubig'3 instead of your denomination on your government papers, but that doesn't mean they didn't cooperate.

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.