Ask an ordinary American Boomer to name the embodiment of evil and he's unlikely to say Satan. He'll more likely say Adolf Hitler. Every movie, every school unit and every cable panel has taught them that. Fascism is the devil, the Nazis are the demons, and the worst thing you can call a man is the name of a dictator who murdered millions and died in a bunker in 1945.
To start with the obvious, Hitler and the Nazis did some things that were gravely evil, and the Church said as much while it was happening. In 1937 Pope Pius XI sent "Mit brennender Sorge" into Germany and had it read from the pulpits on Palm Sunday:
"Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds."
That judgment stands, sure. The question here however, is where a Christian's hatred of evil acts ought to go. In the postwar consensus, shaped by groups like the ADL and AJC, it lands on the sinner, that being the ideology of fascism and it's boogeyman caricature of the Nazis and Hitler. But are we blaming the correct thing? Society today projects fascism onto any advocacy of state-level authority, making anything less than full license evil. And, of course, if you speak authoritarian views that could benefit your community you become Uncle A. reincarnated.
You see this whenever one comments Catholicly on immigration/race, feminist, and Jewry afflictions ravaging young Christian White men and Western civilization. A White person preserving his heritage and protecting his nation from being overrun by third-world migrant hordes is a fascist. A husband's divine authority over his wife is labeled a dictatorship. A Christian criticizing Jewry and/or Zionism is labeled a Nazi.
The post-war view of evil couldn't be further from the truth. What does Scripture tell us? "We are not contending against flesh and blood," St. Paul writes, "but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." The enemy Paul names is not a party nor ideology, a regime nor a dictator. It's the host of fallen spirits that drives them.
The secular world has no place for these very real spirits because it stupidly questions their existence entirely. Yet, ironically, still has to put somebody in the empty chair they created. The dominion of evil is reduced only to a political and historical scope, something now filed under the chaos of the mid 20th-century. Ironically, that new arrangement suits the devil fine. A man who thinks evil began and ended with Hitler has no reason to fear the thing whispering sweet nothings to him tonight. It makes him idolatrize the status quo following the end of World War II.
Pope Paul VI saw this coming. In his general audience of Nov. 15, 1972, he said, "one of the Church's greatest needs is to be defended against the evil we call the Devil." He warned against those who "explain the Devil as a pseudo-reality, a conceptual, fanciful personification of the unknown causes of our misfortunes." That is exactly what the culture has done, only in reverse. It took a one-sided view of human crimes and made a charismatic man the personification of evil, and it made the actual Evil One into a corky cartoonish character and/or a sexy Halloween costume.
The Catechism doesn't allow this. It explains what the last line of the Our Father means, "evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God." There is one Evil One. He is not Hitler, Stalin or anyone else demonized in a history book. He is a fallen angel who "radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign," and of whom the Church teaches, "There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death."
That's where all of a Christian's hatred belongs. St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the Psalms' "perfect hatred," wrote that "hatred of a person's evil is equivalent to love of his good. Hence also this perfect hatred belongs to charity." With the demons there is no good left to will for them. "We cannot have the friendship of charity towards the demons," Thomas says.
A man is different, even a really bad one. Thomas says love is due to our neighbor "in respect of what he holds from God, i.e. in respect of nature and grace, but not in respect of what he has of himself and from the devil, i.e. in respect of sin and lack of justice." Then he says it plainly: "the hatred of one's brother, if we consider it simply, is always sinful." Hate the sin, hate the lie of the ideology and hate the demon who sold it. Hating the man himself puts you in the wrong.
The Church has also never declared any named person damned, and a Catholic doesn't get to do it on his own authority either. The Catechism teaches that "although we can judge that an act is in itself a grave offense, we must entrust judgment of persons to the justice and mercy of God." It teaches that God "predestines no one to go to hell" and that "The Church prays that no one should be lost." Hell is real and people go there. Who is there is God's business.
So here's what the devil gets when Hitler stands in for Satan. He gets a generation that pours its moral passion into hating Hitler while living comfortably with divorce, contraception, porn, abortion and his other "Greatest Hits" listed above. He gets people who think evil is something other men do in uniform. And he gets Christians who have forgotten that they're supposed to pray for sinners, the worst ones included, because Christ died for them.
Father Chad Ripperger, an exorcist and Thomist, describes what the demons have left after their fall: "They still have their knowledge, but they got stripped of their state of grace." He said the only thing left to them is power, and that "they hate Christ and they hate God ultimately." That's the hatred driving the whole war, and it's the thing worth hating back.
Don't fall for the dissimulations of the post-war era, and never make your hatred of man or political ideology. Instead, turn your hatred on the one who deserves all of it, and pray for every man in that history, because you may need someone to pray for you one day.
Especially Hitler.
