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Hitler in 1933

Contradictory accounts exist about Adolf Hitler's religious views, including his ties to Christianity and the Catholic church. According to Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church to his political associates, but remained a formal member of the Catholic church until his death, and even ordered his chief associates to remain members; while having "no real attachment to it." Biographer John Toland, while noting that Hitler believed Pope Pius XII was "no friend", wrote also that he was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite his detestation of its hierarchy" and drew links between Hitler's Catholic background and his antisemitism. Conversely, historian Robert Soucy states Hitler believed Christian and Nazi beliefs were incompatible and intended to replace Christianity with a "racist form of warrior paganism". Additionally, biographer Alan Bullock wrote that, though raised Catholic, Hitler was a rationalist and materialist, who saw Christianity as a religion "fit for slaves", and against the natural law of selection and survival of the fittest. Though Hitler had respect for the 'great position' of the Catholic church, Bullock wrote he became hostile to its teachings.

Adolf Hitler was raised by a sceptic father and a devout Catholic mother; he ceased to participate in the sacraments after childhood. In office, Hitler agreed a Concordat with the Catholic Church, and briefly sought to unify Germany's Protestant churches under the Nazi aligned Deutsche Christen Movement, which rejected the Hebrew origins of the Gospel. Hitler routinely violated his treaty with the Vatican and failed in his effort to Nazisfy German Protestantism.

In his book Mein Kampf and in public speeches he often made statements that affirmed a belief in Christianity. Prior to World War II Hitler had promoted "positive Christianity", a movement which purged Christianity of its Jewish elements and instilled it with Nazi philosophy. According to the controversial collection of transcripts edited by Martin Bormann, titled Hitler's Table Talk, as well as the testimony of some intimates, Hitler had privately negative views of Christianity. Others reported he was a committed believer. Many historians say that Hitler had a general covert plan, which some say existed even before the Nazis' rise to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich, which was to be accomplished through control and subversion of the churches and to be completed after the war.

The young Adolf Hitler

Reliable historical details on the childhood of Adolf Hitler are scarce. According to the biographer Ian Kershaw, the reflections Hitler himself provided in Mein Kampf are "inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation", information that was given during the Nazi period is "dubious", as can be the post-war recollections of family and acquaintances.

Hitler was born in 1889, in Braunau, Austria. Hitler's father Alois, though nominally a Catholic, was somewhat religiously skeptical and anticlerical, while his mother Klara was a practicing Catholic. As a child, Hitler was baptised a Catholic. His father was an authoritarian presence in the home and died in 1903. His mother, a gentler influence, died in 1907.

The Hitler family moved home several times in Adolf's young days and he attended several primary schools. According to Toland, after selling their farm, the Hitler family lived for six months opposite an imposing Benedictine Monastery at Lambach, and on some afternoons, Hitler attended the choir school at the monastery. Around this time, Hitler is said to have dreamed of taking holy orders.

After completing his Volksschule (primary) schooling, Adolf's father overruled his son's preference for enrollment at a classically focused Gymnasium school and sent him to a more scientific and technically focused Realschule in Linz in 1900. Hitler developed a fascination with German mythology and the Teutons. According to historian Michael Rissmann, young Hitler was influenced in school by Pan-Germanism, and began to reject the Catholic Church, receiving confirmation only unwillingly. He was confirmed on 22 May 1904. Toland wrote of the 1904 ceremony at Linz Cathedral, that Hitler's confirmation sponsor said he nearly had to "drag the words out of him... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him".

Rissmann relates a story where a boyhood friend claimed that after Hitler had left home, he never again attended Mass or received the sacraments.

According to an interview with a British correspondent years after the First World War, Hitler claimed a mysterious voice told him to leave a section of a crowded trench during a minor barrage. Moments after he left the trench, a shell fell on that particular spot. Hitler saw this experience as a message that he was a uniquely illuminated individual who had a special task to fulfill. This story did not, however, appear in Mein Kampf.

After completing his schooling at 16, Hitler sought a career as an artist. In 1909 he moved to Vienna. There his intellectual interests vacillated - according to Alan Bullock, in the public library his reading was indiscriminate and unsystematic, but included: "Ancient Rome, the Eastern religions, Yoga, Occultism, Hypnotism, Astrology, Protestantism, each in turn excited his interest for a moment... He struck people as unbalanced. He gave rein to his hatreds - against the Jews, the priests, the Social Democrats, the Hapsburgs - without restraint".

Views as an adult

Hitler's public and private statements on religion were often in conflict. The biographer Kershaw wrote that few people could really claim to "know" Hitler - "he was by temperament a very private, even secretive individual", unwilling to confide in others.

Many private statements attributed to him remain disputed. In public, as in private, he was unequivocal in his disdain for Judaism.

Scholarly opinion

In The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, it is noted that Hitler supported the Deutsche Christen church which rejected the Hebrew origins of the Gospel and stated first that Jesus was an Aryan and also that Paul as a Jew had falsified Jesus's message, a theme Hitler repeatedly mentioned in private conversations. In October of 1941, when Hitler made the decision to murder the Jews, he repeated that very proclomation.

In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny Alan Bullock, wrote that Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist with no feeling for the spiritual or emotional side of human existence: a "man who believed neither in God nor in conscience ('a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcision')". Bullock wrote: "From political considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the dangers of strengthening the Church by persecution. Once the war was over he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches". According to Bullock, Hitler had some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, but utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". German conservative elements, such as the officer corps opposed Nazi efforts against the churches and, in office, Hitler restrained his anticlerical instincts out of political considerations. Bullock wrote that, in the long run, Hitler intended to destroy the influence of the Christian churches:

Hitler had been brought up a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church. For Protestant clergy he felt only contempt: 'They are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs...[-] They have neither a religion you can take seriously nor a great position to defend like Rome'. It was the 'great position' of the Church that he respected; towards its teaching he showed only the sharpest hostility. In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.

The biographer Ian Kershaw wrote that in 1937, Hitler told his inner circle that he "did not want a 'Church struggle" at this juncture", he expected "the great world struggle in a few years' time". Nevertheless, wrote Kershaw, inflammatory remarks by Hitler gave his underlings license to intensify their church struggle - and Goebells's noted his approval of anti-Christian propaganda and the show trials of clergy. Hitler's impatience with the churches, wrote Kershaw, "prompted frequent outbursts of hostility. In early 1937 he was declaring that 'Christianity was ripe for destruction', and that the Churches must yield to the "primacy of the state", railing against any compromise with "the most horrible institution imaginable".

According to Max Domarus, although Hitler did not "abide by its commandments", he retained elements of the Catholic thinking of his upbringing even into the initial years of his rule:

As late as 1933, he still described himself publicly as a Catholic. Only the spreading poison of his lust for power and self idolatry finally crowded out the memories of childhood beliefs and in 1937 he jettisoned the last of his personal religious convictions, declaring to comrades, 'Now I feel as fresh as a colt in the pasture'".

— Max Domarus, from The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary

Ultimately, Domarus wrote, Hitler replaced belief in the Judeo-Christian God with belief in a peculiarly German "god". He promoted the idea of God as the creator of Germany, but Hitler "was not a Christian in any accepted meaning of that word." Domarus also points out that Hitler did not believe in organized religion and did not see himself as a religious reformer. According to historian Laurence Rees, "Hitler did not believe in the afterlife, but he did believe he would have a life after death because of what he had achieved." Historian Richard Overy maintains that Hitler was not a "practising Christian," nor was he a "thorough atheist." According to Robert S. Wistrich Hitler thought Christianity was finished but he did not want any direct confrontation for strategic reasons. Samuel Koehne, a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, working on the official Nazi views on religion, answers the question Was Hitler a Christian? thus: "Emphatically not, if we consider Christianity in its traditional or orthodox form: Jesus as the son of God, dying for the redemption of the sins of all humankind. It is a nonsense to state that Hitler (or any of the Nazis) adhered to Christianity of this form." Koehne says Hitler was probably not an atheist and refers to the fact that recent works have asserted that he was a deist. Richard Evans concluded his statements on Hitler's religious views by suggesting that the gap between Hitler's public and private pronouncements was due to a desire not to cause a quarrel with the churches that might undermine national unity.

Richard Steigmann-Gall argues that even after a rupture with institutional Christianity (which Steigmann-Gall dated to around 1937) Hitler continued to hold Jesus in high esteem, considering him to have been an Aryan fighter who struggled against Jewry. In Hitler's view, Jesus' true Christian teachings had been corrupted by the Apostle Paul, who had transformed them into a kind of Jewish Bolshevism, which Hitler believed preached "the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the death of the Roman Empire." Steigmann-Gall concluded Hitler was religious at least in the 1920s and early 1930s, citing him expressing a belief in God, divine providence, and Jesus as an Aryan opponent of the Jews. However, he admits that by holding this position he "argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it."

The biographer John Toland, noted that, in the aftermath of a 1939 attempted assassination, Hitler told dinner guests that Pope Pius XII would rather have seen the "plot succeed" and "was no friend of mine". Later in his biography, Toland wrote that, in 1941, Hitler was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite his detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within himself its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God — so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty." (for the official Catholic position against Nazi racism in the 1930s see Mit brennender Sorge). Derek Hastings sees Hitler's commitment to Christianity as more tenuous. He considers it "eminently plausible" that Hitler was a believing Catholic as late as his trial in 1924, but writes that "there is little doubt that Hitler was a staunch opponent of Christianity throughout the duration of the Third Reich."

In his writings on Hitler's recurrent religious images and symbols, Kenneth Burke concluded that "Hitler's modes of thought are nothing more than perverted or caricatured forms of religious thought"

Public statements

Mein Kampf & early career

Hitler combined elements of autobiography with an exposition of his racist political ideology in Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), published between 1925 and 1927. The book contains various religious pronouncements. According to William Shirer, Hitler "inveighed against political Catholicism in Mein Kampf and attacked both of the Christian Churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem...", while also warning that no political party could succeed in "producing a religious reformation".

Hitler spoke of the importance of a definite and uniformly accepted Weltanschauung (outlook on the world), and noted that the diminished position of religion in Europe had led to a decline in necessary certainties - "yet this human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief". The various substitutes hitherto offered, he said could not "usefully replace the existing denominations". Therefore he said:

The political leader should not estimate the worth of a religion by taking some of its shortcomings into account, but he should ask himself whether there be any practical substitute in a view which is demonstrably better. Until such a substitute be available only fools and criminals would think of abolishing the existing religion.

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf]

Examining how to establish a new order, Hitler argued that the greatness of powerful organisations was reliant on an intolerance of all others, thus he said the greatness of Christianity arose from the "unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defence of its own teaching". Hitler rejected a view that Chritianity brought civilization to the Germanic peoples however, "It is therefore outrageously unjust to speak of the pre-Christian Germans as barbarians who had no civilization. They never have been such." Foreshadowing his conflict with the Catholic Church over euthanasia in Nazi Germany, Hitler said that the churches should give up missionary work in Africa, and concentrate on convincing Europeans that is more pleasing to God if they adopt orphans rather than "give life to a sickly child that will be a cause of suffering and unhappiness to all". The Christian churches should forget about their own differences and focus on the issue of "racial contamination", Hitler said:

The two Christian denominations look on with indifference at the profanation and destruction of a noble and unique creature who was given to the world as a gift of God's grace. For the future of the world, however, it does not matter which of the two triumphs over the other, the Catholic or the Protestant. But it does matter whether Aryan humanity survives or perishes.

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

When he arrived in Vienna as a young man, Hitler indicated that the later fervency of his antisemitism had not fully formed: "In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith." Hitler decided that antisemitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: "The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles. The reason for this mistake gave rise to the second error also... this shilly-shally way of dealing with the problem the anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists turned out to be quite ineffective.

In Mein Kampf, Richard Steigmann-Gall saw "no indication of [Hitler] being an atheist or agnostic or of believing in only a remote, rationalist divinity. Indeed, he referred continually to a providential, active deity."

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

"His [the Jewish person's] life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In retum, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties — and this against their own nation."

In an attempt to justify Nazi aggression, Hitler drew a parallel between militantism and Christianity's rise to power as the Roman Empire's official state religion:

"The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created. Political parties are inclined to compromises; philosophies never. Political parties even reckon with opponents; philosophies proclaim their infallibility."

Elsewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler speaks of the "creator of the universe" and "eternal Providence." He also states his belief that the Aryan race was created by God, and that it would be a sin to dilute it through racial intermixing:

"The völkisch-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will."

In Mein Kampf, Hitler saw Jesus as against the Jews, rather than of them: "And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God."

In 1922, a decade before his ascension to power, Hitler stated before a crowd in Munich: "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."

Rise to power

In the early 1930s, Hitler's public comments on Christianity were moderate. Key voting blocks which Hitler needed to persuade to drop their opposition to a Nazi Government were the Catholic Centre Party and German conservatives. He pursued their votes with a mix of intimidation, negotiation and conciliation. In a proclamation to the German Nation February 1, 1933, Hitler stated, "The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life."

On 23 March 1933, just prior to the crucial Reichstag vote for the Enabling Act which effectively dissolved Parliamentary government in Germany, Hitler described the Christian faiths as "essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German people" and "We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of most of the German people." "With an eye to to the votes of the Catholic Centre Party", wrote Shirer, he added that he hoped to improve relations with the Holy See. He promised that the passing of the Enabling Act would not threaten the Reichstag, the President, the States or the Churches. Hitler secured passage of the Act, but did not honour these promises.

Third Reich

If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work. -Speech to the Old Guard at Munich 24 February 1939

According to Max Domarus, Hitler had fully discarded belief in the Judeo-Christian conception of God by 1937, but continued to use the word "God" in speeches. According to Domarus, it was not the God "who has been worshiped for millennia", but a new and peculiarly German "god" who "let iron grow". Thus Hitler told the British journalist Ward Price in 1937: "I believe in God, and I am convinced that He will not desert 67 million Germans who have worked so hard to regain their rightful position in the world."

In public statements, especially at the beginning of his rule, Hitler frequently spoke positively about a Nazi vision of "Christian" German culture, and his belief in an Aryan Christ.

Historian Joachim Fest wrote, "Hitler knew, through the constant invocation of the God the Lord (German: Herrgott) or of providence (German: Vorsehung), to make the impression of a godly way of thought." He used his "ability to simulate, even to potentially critical Church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity," according to biographer Ian Kershaw. Kershaw adds that Hitler's ability also succeeded in appeasing possible Church resistance to anti-Christian Nazi Party radicals.

According to Steigmann-Gall, Hitler's references to Jesus, God as the "Lord of Creation" and the necessity of obeying "His will" reveals that Christianity was fused into his thinking. "What Christianity achieves is not dogma, it does not seek the outward ecclesiastical form, but rather ethical principles.... There is no religion and no philosophy that equals it in its moral content; no philosophical ethics is better able to diffuse the tension between this life and the hereafter, from which Christianity and its ethic were born," Hitler stated.

The propaganda machinery of the Nazi party actively promoted Hitler as a savior of Christianity, and Nazi propaganda supported the German Christians in their formation of a single national church that could be controlled and manipulated.

Private statements

"We are the first to exhume these teachings! Through us alone, and not until now, do these teachings celebrate their resurrection! Mary and Magdelene stood at the empty tomb. For they were seeking the dead man! But we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ!"

Major General Otto Wagener's 1946 memoirs; Turner, Henry Ashby, ed. (1985). Memoirs of a Confidant. Yale University Press, pp. 139-140.

"The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie." Letter to the Nazi Party, 22 July 1933; John Cornwell (2008). Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. New York: Penguin, p. 118.

In his memoirs, Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, wrote "Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church...", yet "he conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him":

Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He too would remain a member of the Catholic Church he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact he remained in the church until his suicide.

— Extract from Inside the Third Reich, the memoir of Albert Speer

Hitler, wrote Speer, viewed Christianity as the wrong religion for the "Germanic temperament": Speer wrote that Hitler would say: "You see it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"

It was Goebbels' opinion that Hitler was "deeply religious but entirely anti-Christian." In his diary Goebbels reported that Hitler believed Jesus "also wanted to act against the Jewish world domination. Jewry had him crucified. But Paul falsified his doctrine and undermined ancient Rome."

Hitler typically tailored his message to his audience's perceived sensibilities. As in other matters, his private statements on religion were often conflicting. Hitler's intimates, such as Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann suggest that Hitler had negative opinions of Christianity, while Nazi General Gerhard Engel was convinced that he was a believer,

having written in his diary that in 1941 Hitler stated,

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."

According to Kershaw, Hitler could "pull the wool over the eyes of even hardened critics", thus, following a meeting in 1936, Cardinal Faulhaber, a man who had "courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church - went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious". Faulhaber wrote in a confidential report that Hitler "undoubtedly lives in belief in God" and that he "recognizes Christianity as the builder of western culture." Kershaw believes that Hitler had deceived Faulhaber, noting his "evident ability to simulate, even to potentially critical church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity".

Author Konrad Heiden has quoted Hitler as stating, "We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany."

Hitler's Table Talk

Extensive transcripts on Hitler's thoughts on religion are contained within Hitler's Table Talk. Between 1941 and 1944, Hitler's words were recorded in transcripts subsequently published as Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (1953) which was reissued as Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 in 1976 and also published as Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–44: His Private Conversations, 2nd ed. in 1973. The transcripts concern not only Hitler's views on war and foreign affairs, but also his characteristic attitudes on religion, culture, philosophy, personal aspirations, and his feelings towards his enemies and friends. Within the transcripts of Table Talk, Hitler speaks of Christianity as "absurdity" and "humbug" founded on "lies" with which he could "never come personally to terms."

According to Speer, Hitler made "harsh pronouncements against the church" amongst his political associates, and his private secretary, Martin Bormann, relished recording any such remarks: "there was hardly anything he wrote down more eagerly than deprecating comments on the church".

The widespread consensus among historians is that the views expressed in Trevor-Roper's translation of Table Talk, are credible and reliable, although as with all historical sources, a high level of critical awareness about its origins and purpose are advisable in using it. The remarks from Table Talk accepted as genuine include such quotes as 'Christianity is the prototype of Bolshevism: the mobillization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.' Alan Bullock's seminal biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny quotes Hitler as saying "Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure", found also in Table Talk, and repeats other views appearing in Table Talk such as: the teachings of Christianity are a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and survival of the fittest.

Michael Burleigh contrasted Hitler's public pronouncements on Christianity with those in Table Talk, suggesting that Hitler's real religious views were 'a mixture of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzschean contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral anti-clericalism.' Richard Evans also reiterated the view that Nazism was secular, scientific and anti-religious in outlook in the last volume of his trilogy on Nazi Germany, writing, 'Hitler's hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war;' his source for this was the 1953 English translation of Table Talk.

In the transcripts, Hitler spoke of the myths of religion crumbling before scientific advances:

The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.

— Adolf Hitler, from Hitler's Table Talk (1941-1944)

In Table Talk, Hitler praised Julian the Apostate's Three Books Against the Galilaeans, an anti-Christian tract from AD 362. In the entry dated 21 October 1941 Hitler stated:

When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn't know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians.... the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry... and it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore—of a whore and a Roman soldier. The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul.... Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely.

— Adolf Hitler, per transcript appearing in Hitler's Table Talk

The historical validity of remarks in the translations of Hitler's Table Talk, the source of many of the statements Hitler made about Christianity, has been challenged by historian and atheist advocate Richard Carrier, who went so far as to call it 'entirely untrustworthy'.

Christianity and "Positive Christianity"

Positive Christianity

Article 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party platform promised to combat the "Jewish-materialistic spirit" but offered a qualified statement of support for freedom for religious confessions "in so far as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race". It expounded the notion of a non-demoninational "Positive Christianity" which the party would uphold. Positive Christianity was a militant, non-denominational Nazified version of Christianity which emphasized Jesus as an active preacher, organizer, and fighter who opposed the institutionalized Judaism of his day. It purged or deemphasized the Jewish aspects of Christianity and was infused with aspects of nationalism and racial antisemitism. In 1937, Hitler's friend and Minister for Religious Affairs, Hans Kerrl said that Positive Christianity was not dependent on the Apostle's Creed or faith in Christ as the son of God, but rather on the Party: "The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation".

Hitler chose Ludwig Muller (pictured) to be Reich Bishop of the German Evangelical Church, which sought to subordinate German Protestantism to the Nazi Government.

Hitler appointed Hanns Kerrl as Minister for Church Affairs in 1935. Kerrl called Hitler the "herald of a new revelation" and said that the Nazi conception of "Positive Christianity" did not depend on the Apostle's Creed or on belief in "Christ as the son of God".

Consensus among historians who treat the matter of Christianity in prewar Nazi Germany is that the Nazi-backed "positivist" or "German Christian" church was endeavoring to make the evangelical churches of Germany an instrument of Nazi policy. Nazi ideology conflicted with traditional Christianity in various respects. Nazis criticized Christian ideals of "meekness and guilt" on the basis that they "repressed the violent instincts necessary to prevent inferior races from dominating Aryans". Although ideas about racial superiority and the destiny of their race which animated the German Christian movement had been present in German religious circles as early as 1930, the movement was not formally established until 1932 when it officially became known as the "German Christians" with backing from Hitler himself. It was nationalistic and anti-Semitic and some of its radicals called for repudiation of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) and the Pauline epistles of the New Testament - because of their Jewish authorship.

The pretension of the Hitler regime that all Protestant churches in Germany should be subsumed under the leadership of the German Christians served as an impulse to action for other Christian leaders who saw the racist, ultra-nationalistic, and totalitarian emphases of the German Christian church as incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When those not in agreement organized their opposition and, calling themselves the Confessing Church, publicly proclaimed articles of faith that denied the position of the German Christians, they eventually came under severe persecution by the State. About the end of March 1935 six hundred of the principal leaders of the Confessing Church were arrested and many others received visits from the Gestapo to emphasize the government's point of view concerning these matters. Later, there were new arrests, and it began to be known that those who had been taken away were ending up in concentration camps. Given the totalitarian atmosphere of Nazi Germany at that time, it would be ingenuous to believe that these measures against the Confessing Church and in support of the policies of the German Christians might have been taken without Adolph Hitler's consent. Hitler made it clear that there would be no place for the Christian churches in his vision of the future for the east.

According to Steigmann-Gall, Hitler never directed his attacks on Jesus himself, whom Hitler regarded as an Aryan opponent of the Jews. Hitler viewed traditional Christianity as a corruption of the original ideas of Jesus by the Apostle Paul. In Mein Kampf Hitler had written that Jesus "made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross." In a speech 26 June 1934, Hitler stated:

The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavour to protect both the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from interference with their doctrines (Lehren), and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of today.

Former Prime Minister of Bavaria, Count von Lerchenfeld-Köfering stated in a speech before the Landtag of Bavaria, that his beliefs "as a man and a Christian" prevented him from being an anti-Semite or from pursuing anti-Semitic public policies. Hitler while speaking the Bürgerbräukeller turned Lerchenfeld's perspective of Jesus on its head:

I would like here to appeal to a greater than I, Count Lerchenfeld. He said in the last session of the Landtag that his feeling 'as a man and a Christian' prevented him from being an anti-Semite. I say: My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. .. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.

Persecution of Christian Churches by Hitler regime

See also: Catholic Church and Nazi Germany and Confessing Church

Prior to the vote for the Enabling Act, Hitler promised the Reichstag on 23 March 1933, that he would not interfere with the rights of the churches. With power secured in Germany, Hitler quickly broke these promises He dishonoured a concordat signed with the Vatican and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany. He divided the Lutheran Church (Germany's main Protestant denomination) and instigated a brutal persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses. Many historians say that Hitler had a general covert plan to destroy Christianity within the Reich, which was to be accomplished through control and subversion of the churches and to be completed after the war. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Hitler intended to replace Christianity with a "racist form of warrior paganism". William Shirer wrote, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.

Polish prisoners in Dachau toast their liberation from the camp. Dachau had its own Priests' barracks for clerical enemies of the Hitler regime.

Catholicism

Hitler moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism in Germany. Amid widescale intimidation, the Bavarian People's Party and Catholic Centre Party had ceased to exist by early July. Vice Chancellor Papen meanwhile negotiated a Reich Concordat with the Vatican, which prohibited clergy from participating in politics. "The agreement", wrote Shirer, "was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi Government". Almost immediately Hitler promulgated the sterilization law, and began work to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. Clergy, nuns and lay leaders began to be targeted, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or "immorality". In Hitler's bloody night of the long knives purge of 1934, Erich Klausener, the head of Catholic Action, was assassinated by the Gestapo. Catholic publications were shut down. The Gestapo began to violate the sanctity of the confessional. By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with Hitler, had become highly disillusioned and Pope Pius XI issued the Mit brennender Sorge encyclical - accusing the Hitler regime of violations of the Concordat and of sowing the tares of "open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church". Goebbels noted heightened verbal attacks on the clergy from Hitler in his diary and wrote that Hitler had approved the start of trumped up "immorality trials" against clergy and anti-Church propaganda campaign. Goebbels' orchestrated attack included a staged "morality trial" of 37 Franciscans.

Hitler's invasion of predominantly Catholic Poland in 1939 ignited the Second World War. Kerhsaw wrote that, in Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of the East, "There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches". Hitler instigated a policy of murdering or suppressing the ethnic Polish elites: including religious leaders. He proclaimed: "Poles may have only one master – a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed." Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps.

Protestantism

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Martin Niemoller, "Hitler's Personal Prisoner", was a leading Protestant voice against Nazism. He was incarcerated at Dachau from 1941 until liberation in 1945.

According to Bullock, Hitler considered the Protestant clergy to be "insignificant" and "submissive" and lacking in a religion to be taken seriously. The Church Federation proposed the well qualified Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh to be the new Reich Bishop, but Hitler endorsed his friend Ludwig Muller and the Nazis terrorized supporters of Bodelschwingh. Kershaw wrote that the subjugation of the Protestant churches proved more difficult than Hitler had envisaged however. With 28 separate regional churches, his bid to create a unified Reich Church through Gleichschaltung ultimately failed, and Hitler became disinterested in seeking supporting the so-called "German Christians" Nazi aligned movement. Muller's heretical views against St Paul and the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible quickly alienated sections of the Protestant church. Not all the Protestant churches submitted to the state, which Hitler said in Mein Kampf was important in forming a political movement. Pastor Martin Niemöller responded with the Pastors' Emergency League, which resisted Muller's efforts in making the Protestant churches an instrument of Nazi policy. The movement grew into the Confessing Church, from which some clergymen opposed the Nazi regime. By 1940 it was public knowledge that Hitler had abandoned advocating for Germans even the syncretist idea of a positive Christianity.

By 1934, the Confessional Church had declared itself the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany, but Muller had failed to form a united Protestant movement behind the National Socialist Party. To instigate a new effort at coordinating the Protestant churches, Hitler appointed another friend, Hans Kerrl to the position of Minister for Church Affairs. A relative moderate, Kerrl initially had some success in this regard, but amid continuing protests by the Confessing Church against Nazi policies, he accused dissident churchmen of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of "Race, blood and soil". He rejected the Apostle's Creed and called Hitler the herald of a new revelation. The Confessing Church seminary was banned. Its leaders, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer were arrested. Implicated in the 1944 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, he was later executed.

Memorial to the Jehovah's Witnesses of Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Jehovah's Witnesses were a small Christian minority, numbering around 30,000 at the start of Hitler's rule in Germany. For refusing to declare loyalty to the Reich, and refusing conscription into the army, they were declared to be enemies of Germany and persecuted. About 6000 were sent to the concentration camps.

Steigmann-Gall argues that Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism, as Protestantism was more liable to reinterpretation and a non-traditional readings, more receptive to positive Christianity, and because some of its liberal branches had held similar views. According to Steigmann-Gall, Hitler regretted that "the churches had failed to back him and his movement as he had hoped." Hitler stated to Albert Speer, "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England."

Long term plans

In 1999 Julie Seltzer Mandel, while researching documents for the "Nuremberg Project", discovered 150 bound volumes collected by Gen. William Donovan as part of his work on documenting Nazi war crimes. Donovan was a senior member of the U.S. prosecution team and had compiled large amounts of evidence that Nazis persecuted Christian Churches. In a 108-page outline titled "The Nazi Master Plan" Office of Strategic Services investigators argued that the Nazi regime had a plan to reduce the influence of Christian churches through a campaign of systematic persecutions. "Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [of church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said the report. The most persuasive evidence came from "the systematic nature of the persecution itself."

In Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of Eastern Europe, there was to be no place for Christian Churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progress on the 'Church Question'. 'But is clear', noted Goebells, himself among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, 'that after the war it has to be solved... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view". Bullock wrote that "once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian churches, but until then he would be circumspect": Writing for Yad Vashem, the historian Michael Phayer wrote that by the latter 1930s, church officials knew that the long term aim of Hitler was the "total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion".

In his memoirs, Hitler's chief architect Albert Speer recalled that when drafting his plans for Hitler's "new Berlin", when he told Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann that he had consulted with Protestant and Catholic authorities over the locations for churches: "Bormann curtly informed me that churches were not to receive building sites.

Hitler and atheism

Various scholars consider Hitler's final religious position to be one of deism. Some have used the terminology that he did not "believe in God", others that he was "atheist". The question is debated. During his career, and for a variety of reasons, he made various comments against atheistic movements.

Through 1933 and into 1934, Hitler required a level of support from groups like the German conservatives and the Catholic Centre Party in the Reichstag, and of the conservative President von Hindenberg, in order to achieve his takeover of power with the "appearance of legality". During this period, he gave a number of undertakings not to threaten the German churches. On 21 March 1933, the Reichstag assembled in the Potsdam Garrison Church, to show the "unity" of National Socialism with the old conservative Germany of President von Hindenburg. Two days later, the Nazis secured passage of the Enabling Act, granting Hitler dictatorial powers. Less than three months later all non-Nazi parties and organizations, including the Catholic Centre Party had ceased to exist.

In A Short History of Christianity, the historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that Hitler and his Fascist ally Mussolini were atheists, but that Hitler courted and benefited from fear among German Christians of militant Communist atheism. "The aggressive spread of atheism in the Soviet Union alarmed many German Christians", wrote Blainey, and with the National Socialists becoming the main opponent of Communism in Germany: "[Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible. Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions".

Hitler often associated atheism with Bolshevism, Communism, and Jewish materialism. In early 1933, Hitler publicly defended National Socialism against charges that it was anti-Christian. He stated in a speech to the people of Stuttgart on February 15, 1933: "Today they say that Christianity is in danger, that the Catholic faith is threatened. My reply to them is: for the time being, Christians and not international atheists are now standing at Germany’s fore. I am not merely talking about Christianity; I confess that I will never ally myself with the parties which aim to destroy Christianity. Fourteen years they have gone arm in arm with atheism. At no time was greater damage ever done to Christianity than in those years when the Christian parties ruled side by side with those who denied the very existence of God. Germany's entire cultural life was shattered and contaminated in this period. It shall be our task to burn out these manifestations of degeneracy in literature, theater, schools, and the press—that is, in our entire culture—and to eliminate the poison which has been permeating every facet of our lives for these past fourteen years." Responding to accusations by Eugen Bolz, the Catholic Centre Party Staatspräsident of Württemberg, that the National Socialist movement threatened the Christian faith, he said:

And now Staatspräsident Bolz says that Christianity and the Catholic faith are threatened by us. And to that charge I can answer: In the first place it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany. I do not merely talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity. If many wish today to take threatened Christianity under their protection, where, I would ask, was Christianity for them in these fourteen years when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government.

— Adolf Hitler,Speech delivered at Stuttgart 15 February 1933"

Eugen Bolz was forced from office soon after the Nazis took power, and imprisoned for a time. Later he was executed by the Nazi regime.

During negotiations leading to the Reichskonkordat with the Vatican of July 20, 1933, and ratified on September 10 of the same year; Hitler said that "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith." However, once Hitler had obtained full power, he sometimes allowed pressure to be placed on German parents to remove children from religious classes to be given ideological instruction in its place, while in elite Nazi schools, Christian prayers were replaced with Teutonic rituals and sun-worship.

In a radio address October 14, 1933 Hitler stated, "For eight months we have been waging a heroic battle against the Communist threat to our Volk, the decomposition of our culture, the subversion of our art, and the poisoning of our public morality. We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion. We owe Providence humble gratitude for not allowing us to lose our battle against the misery of unemployment and for the salvation of the German peasant." Once Hitler had obtained full power, particularly following the death of President von Hindenberg in 1934, he routinely dishonoured the concordat. In 1933, the Hitler regime banned most atheistic and freethinking groups in Germany - other than those that supported the Nazis.

In a speech delivered in Berlin, October 24, 1933, Hitler stated: "We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

In a speech delivered at Koblenz, August 26, 1934 Hitler states: "There may have been a time when even parties founded on the ecclesiastical basis were a necessity. At that time Liberalism was opposed to the Church, while Marxism was anti-religious. But that time is past. National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles."

In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Bullock wrote that Hitler's belief in himself had an echo of Hegel's thoughts on heroes standing above conventional morality and the role of "world-historical individuals" as the agents by which the "Will of the World Spirit", the plan of Providence is carried out. Hitler, wrote Bullock, came to see himself as "a man with a mission, marked out by Providence, and therefore exempt from the ordinary canons of human conduct". Bullock concluded: "It is in this sense of mission that Hitler, a man who believed neither in God nor in conscience ('a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcission') found both justification and absolution". Following his early military successes, Hitler "abandoned himself entirely to meglomania" and the "sin of hybris", an exageratted self-pride, beleiving himself to be more than a man.

Transcripts contained in Hitler's Table Talk have Hitler expressing faith that science would wear away religion. On 14 October 1941, in an entry concerning the fate of Christianity, Hitler is reported to have said: "Science cannot lie, for it's always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It's Christianity that's the liar. It's in perpetual conflict with itself." The transcript continues: "The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death... The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble."

Islam and eastern religions

Among eastern religions, Hitler described religious leaders such as "Confucius, Buddha, and Mohammed" as providers of "spiritual sustenance". In this context, Hitler's connection to Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem — which included asylum in 1941, the honorary rank of an SS Major-General, and a "respected racial genealogy" — has been interpreted more as a sign of respect than political expedience. Hitler expressed admiration for the Muslim military tradition and directed Himmler to initiate Muslim SS Divisions as a matter of policy. However, Nazi-era Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer acknowledged that Hitler was only cooperating with Muslim figures, such as al-Husseini, because he felt the antisemitic views they shared would eventually help him win power and influence over the Middle East in the long run. According to Speer, Hitler stated in private, "The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" Speer also stated that when he was discussing with Hitler events which might have occurred had Islam absorbed Europe:

"Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire."

Hitler's choice of the Swastika as the Nazis' main and official symbol was linked to the belief in the Aryan cultural descent of the German people. They considered the early Aryans of India to be the prototypical white invaders and the sign as a symbol of the Aryan master race. The theory was inspired by the German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who argued that the ancient Aryans were a superior Nordic race from northern Germany who expanded into the steppes of Eurasia, and from there into India, where they established the Vedic religion.

Mysticism and occultism

See also: Nazism and occultism

Some scholars maintain that, in contrast to a few other Nazi leaders, Hitler did not adhere to esoteric ideas, occultism, or mysticism (see also Nazism and occultism) and even ridiculed such beliefs in private and possibly in public. Hitler stated: "We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us." Bullock found "no evidence to support the once popular belief that Hitler resorted to astrology." Albert Speer wrote that Hitler had a negative view toward Himmler and Rosenberg's mystical notions. Speer quotes Hitler as having said of Himmler's attempt to mythologize the SS:

What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now [Himmler] wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave...

— Adolf Hitler quoted in Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich

Other scholars believe the young Hitler was strongly influenced, particularly in his racial views, by an abundance of occult works on the mystical superiority of the Germans, like the occult and anti-Semitic magazine Ostara, and give credence to the claim of its publisher Lanz von Liebenfels that Hitler visited him in 1909 and praised his work. Indeed, evidence indicates Hitler was a regular reader of Ostara.

Hitler's contact to Lanz von Liebenfels makes it necessary to examine how far his religious views were influenced by Ariosophy, an esoteric movement in Germany and Austria that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. (Whether Ariosophy is to be classified as Germanic paganism or Occultism is a different question.) The seminal work on Ariosophy, The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, devotes its last chapter the topic of Ariosophy and Adolf Hitler. Not at least due to the difficulty of sources, historians disagree about the importance of Ariosophy for Hitler's religious views. As noted in the foreword of The Occult Roots of Nazism by Rohan Butler, Goodrick-Clarke is more cautious in assessing the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels on Hitler than Joachim Fest in his biography of Hitler. A Hitler biography by John Toland that appeared in 1992 reprints a poem that Hitler allegedly wrote while serving in the German Army on the Western Front in 1915. This poem includes references to magical runes and the pre-Christian Germanic deity Wotan (Odin), but it is mentioned neither by Goodrick-Clarke nor by Fest.

While he was in power, Hitler was definitely less interested in the occult or the esoteric than other Nazi leaders. Unlike Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess, for example, Hitler had no interest in astrology. Nevertheless, Hitler is the most important figure in the Modern Mythology of Nazi occultism. There are teledocumentaries about this topic, with the titles Hitler and the Occult and Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail. In fact, the latter is all about Himmler's search for the Grail, and probably only had "Hitler" in the title because he's the more well-known Nazi.

Comparing him to Erich von Ludendorff, Fest writes: "Hitler had detached himself from such affections, in which he encountered the obscurantism of his early years, Lanz v. Liebenfels and the Thule Society, again, long ago and had, in Mein Kampf, formulated his scathing contempt for that völkish romanticism, which however his own cosmos of imagination preserved rudimentarily." Fest refers to the following passage from Mein Kampf:

"The characteristic thing about these people [modern-day followers of the early Germanic religion] is that they rave about the old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull's horns over their heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack.

It is not clear if this statement is an attack at anyone specific. It could have been aimed at Karl Harrer or at the Strasser group. According to Goodrick-Clarke, "In any case, the outburst clearly implies Hitler's contempt for conspiratorial circles and occult-racist studies and his preference for direct activism." Hitler also said something similar in public speeches. Although, the quote is really just criticizing German romanticists for lack of action, not necessarily their spiritual or cultural beliefs. Hitler, himself, was very much into the culture he refers to here, especially in the case of Wagner operas.

Older literature states that Hitler had no intention of instituting worship of the ancient Germanic gods in contrast to the beliefs of some other Nazi officials. In Hitler's Table Talk one can find this quote:

"It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund.

Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles in an article published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center assert that the influence of the anti-Judaic, Gnostic and root race teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, the founder of The Theosophical Society with doctrines as expounded by her book "The Secret Doctrine", and the adaptations of her ideas by her followers, through Ariosophy, the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, constituted a popularly unacknowledged but decisive influence over the developing mind of Hitler. The scholars state that Hitler himself may be responsible for turning historians from investigating his occult influences. While he publicly condemned and even persecuted occultists, Freemasons, and astrologers, his nightly private talks disclosed his belief in the ideas of these competing occult groups - demonstrated by his discussion of reincarnation, Atlantis, world ice theory, and his belief that esoteric myths and legends of cataclysm and battles between gods and titans were a vague collective memory of monumental early events.

Role of religion in the Nazi state

Main article: Religion in Nazi Germany

In Hitler's political relations dealing with religion he readily adopted a strategy "that suited his immediate political purposes." According to Marshall Dill, one of the greatest challenges the Nazi state faced in its effort to "eradicate Christianity in Germany or at least subjugate it to their general world outlook" was that the Nazis could not justifiably connect German faith communities to the corruption of the old regime, Weimar having no close connection to the churches. Because of the long history of Christianity in Germany, Hitler could not attack Christianity as openly as he did Judaism, Communism or other political opponents. The list of Nazi affronts to and attacks on the Catholic Church is long. The attacks tended not to be overt, but were still dangerous; believers were made to feel that they were not good Germans and their leaders were painted as treasonous and contemptible. The state removed crucifixes from the walls of Catholic classrooms and replaced it with a photo of the Führer.

Hitler issued a statement saying that he wished to avoid factional disputes in Germany's churches. He feared the political power that the churches had, and did not want to openly antagonize that political base until he had securely gained control of the country. Once in power Hitler showed his contempt for non-Aryan religion and sought to eliminate it from areas under his rule. Within Hitler's Nazi Party some atheists were quite vocal, especially Martin Bormann. During negotiations relating to the Concordat with the Catholic Church and the Nazis state in 1933, Hitler expressed his view on the relationship between race and religion to Bishop Wilhelm Berning:

I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognised the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognised. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognise the representatives of this race as pestilant for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions

Hitler often used religious speech and symbolism to promote Nazism to those that he feared would be disposed to act against him. He also called upon religion as a pretext in diplomacies. The Soviet Union feared that if they commenced a programme of persecution against religion in the western regions, Hitler would use that as a pretext for war.

In 1985 the Austrian author Wilfried Daim published a photograph of an alleged document signed by Hitler in 1943, which proposed the:

"Immediate and unconditional abolition of all religions after the final victory ('Endsieg') not only for the territory of Greater Germany but also for all released, occupied and annexed countries ..., proclaiming at the same time Hitler as the new messiah. Out of political considerations the Muslim, Buddhist and Shintoist religion will be spared for the present. The 'Führer' has to be presented as an intermediate between a redeemer and a liberator, yet surely as one sent by God, who has to get godly honour. The existing churches, chapels, temples and cult places of the different religions have to be changed into 'Adolf-Hitler-consecration places'. The theological faculties of the universities have to be transformed into the new faith. Special emphasis has to be laid on the education of missionaries and wandering preachers, who have to proclaim the teaching in Greater Germany and in the rest of the world and have to form religious bodies, which can be used as centres for further extension. (With this the problems with the abolition of monogamy will disappear, because polygamy can be included into the new teaching as one of the statements of faith.)"

In his childhood, Hitler had admired the pomp of Catholic ritual and the hierarchical organisation of the clergy. Later he drew on these elements, organizing his party along hierarchical lines and including liturgical forms into events or using phraseology taken from hymns. Because of these liturgical elements, Daim's claim of Hitler's Messiah-like status and the ideology's totalitarian nature, the Nazi movement, like other fascist movements and Communism, is sometimes termed a "political religion", even though these "political religions" were anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious.

God, racism and anti-Semitism

According to Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, the strongly anti-Semitic Catholic priest Bernhard Stempfle was a member of Hitler's inner circle in the early 1920s and frequently advised him on religious issues. He was killed by the SS in the 1934 purge.

To the extent he believed in a divinity, Hitler did not believe in a "remote, rationalist divinity" but in an "active deity," which he frequently referred to as "Creator" or "Providence". In Hitler's belief God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival as depicted by Arthur de Gobineau. The "Aryan race," supposedly the bearer of civilization, is allocated a special place:

"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and the reproduction of our race ... so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. ... Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence."

In November 1936 the Roman Catholic prelate Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber met Hitler at Berghof for a three hour meeting. He left the meeting convinced that "Hitler was deeply religious" and that "The Reich Chancellor undoubtedly lives in belief in God. He recognises Christianity as the builder of Western culture".

Hitler viewed the Jews as enemies of all civilization and as materialistic, unspiritual beings, writing in Mein Kampf: "His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine." Hitler described his supposedly divine mandate for his anti-Semitism: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

In his rhetoric Hitler also fed on the old accusation of Jewish Deicide. Because of this it has been speculated that Christian anti-Semitism influenced Hitler's ideas, especially such works as Martin Luther's essay On the Jews and Their Lies and the writings of Paul de Lagarde. Others disagree with this view. In support of this view, Hitler biographer John Toland opines that Hitler "carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God..." Nevertheless, in Mein Kampf Hitler writes of an upbringing in which no particular anti-Semitic prejudice prevailed.

According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz, anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity, and that the line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther to Hitler is "easy to draw." In her The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, she writes that Luther and Hitler were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews. Dawidowicz states that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass, which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus, although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism. Catholic historian José Sánchez argues that Hitler's anti-Semitism was explicitly rooted in Christianity.

Hitler simplified Arthur de Gobineau's elaborate ideas of struggle for survival among the different races, from which the Aryan race, guided by providence, was supposed to be the torchbearers of civilization. In Hitler's conception, Jews were enemies of all civilization, especially the Volk. Although Hitler has been called a "Social Darwinist, he was not such in the usual sense of the word. Whereas Social Darwinism stressed struggle, change, the survival of the strongest, and a ceaseless battle of competition, Hitler, through the use of modern industrial technology and impersonal bureaucratic methods ended all competition by the ruthless suppression of all opponents." His understanding of Darwinism was incomplete and based loosely on the theory of "survival of the fittest" in a social context, as popularly misunderstood at the time.

See also

• Benito Mussolini's religious beliefs
• German Christians Movement
• Guilt by association
• Kirchenkampf
• Nazi occultism
• Race of Jesus
• Religion in Nazi Germany
• Religious aspects of Nazism
• The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

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External links

• Mein Kampf - by Adolf Hitler
• Mein Kampf - by Adolf Hitler (published by Hurst and Blackett, 1939)
• Introduction to The Holy Reich - by Richard Steigmann-Gall
• Review of Richard Steigmann-Gall's Holy Reich - by John S. Conway

Religious beliefs Hitler, Adolf