Damned STUPID Priest yesterday . . .

[Belacqua]

The openly christian Nazi Germany killed at least 6,000,000 on religious grounds.

You're really stretching it to say that the murders were done on religious grounds. 

In the early days of WWI as the German army proceeded through Belgium, it was considered good strategy to kill all the priests they could find. They calculated that priests could have authority in organizing local resistance. The motivation was power and land, which easily overrode religious comradeship.

Nazism was rooted in ethnic theories. These theories derived from the Enlightenment project to explain national and regional differences through materialist explanations. (That is, not the blessings and promises of God, but "scientific" things like blood and inheritance.) Montesquieu, for example, said that national character was determined by climate (with the French climate being the best, of course). For a long time there were influential theories going around that ethnic differences, differences of blood, scientific differences, determined which "race" was superior. It is horrifying to read the opinions of influential Enlightenment philosophers on the scientific (they thought) facts concerning blacks, Asians, and "Semitic" peoples. 

Nazis adopted a ridiculously simple ethnic view in which Aryans were superior, as demonstrated by the empirical facts of history. Semites, they argued, were demonstrably inferior. The fact that Semites were allowed to have influential positions in German culture, or even to mingle their blood with purer races, was to them horrifying. 

This had nothing to do with religion in the sense of belief, theology, etc. It had nothing to do with the soteriological views of the Semites. It was blood. And the Nazis fought for "blood and soil." 

They were perfectly happy to murder Christian gays, Christian handicapped people, etc. If it were a religious question, of belief, Jews could have saved themselves by converting. But that wasn't what the Nazis measured to determine who lived and who died. They measured ethnic percentages. 

Yes, it said "God with us" on their uniforms. Dimwits are comforted by the idea that cannon fodder goes to heaven. But Wall Street traders also deal in currency that says "In God we trust" on it, and it's not God's trust that they're working for.