InNazi Germany,gottgläubig (lit. 'believing in God')[1][2] was aNazi religious term for a form ofnon-denominationalism anddeism practised by those German citizens who hadofficially left Christian churches but professed faith in somehigher power ordivine creator.[1] Such people were calledGottgläubige ("believers in God"), and the term for the overall movement wasGottgläubigkeit ("belief in God"); the term denotes someone who still believes in a God, although without having anyinstitutional religious affiliation.[1] TheseNazis were not favourable towards religious institutions of their time, nor did they tolerateatheism of any type within their ranks.[2][3] The 1943Philosophical Dictionary definedgottgläubig as: "official designation for those who profess a kind of piety and morality appropriate to the [German[4]] species, without being bound to a church denomination, whilst however also rejectingirreligion andgodlessness."[5] TheGottgläubigkeit was a form of deism, and was "predominantly based on creationist and deistic views".[6] In the 1939 census, 3.5% of the German population identified asgottgläubig.[2]
In the 1920programme of theNazi Party (NSDAP),Adolf Hitler first mentioned the phrase "Positive Christianity". The Nazi Party did not wish to tie itself to a particularChristian denomination but with Christianity in general,[7][8] and soughtfreedom of religion for all denominations "so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of theGermanic race." (point 24).
When Hitler and the NSDAP got into power in 1933, they sought to assert state control over the churches, on the one hand through theReichskonkordat with theRoman Catholic Church, and the forced merger of theGerman Evangelical Church Confederation into theProtestant Reich Church on the other. This policy seems to have gone relatively well until late 1936, when a "gradual worsening of relations" between the Nazi Party and the churches saw the rise ofKirchenaustritt ("leaving the Church").[1] Although there was no top-down official directive to revoke church membership, some Nazi Party members started doing so voluntarily and put other members under pressure to follow their example.[1] Those who left the churches were designated asGottgläubige ("believers in God"), a term officially recognised by the Interior MinisterWilhelm Frick on 26 November 1936. He stressed that the term signified political disassociation from the churches, not an act ofreligious apostasy.[1] The term "dissident", which some church leavers had used up until then, was associated with being "without belief" (glaubenslos), whilst most of them emphasized that they still believed in a God, and thus required a different word.[1]
The Nazi Party ideologueAlfred Rosenberg was the first to leave his church[9] on 15 November 1933.[1] In early 1936,SS leadersHeinrich Himmler andReinhard Heydrich terminated their membership of the Roman Catholic Church, followed by a number ofGauleiter includingMartin Mutschmann (Saxony),Carl Röver (Weser-Ems), andRobert Heinrich Wagner (Baden).[1] In late 1936, Roman Catholic party members especially left the church, followed in 1937 by a flood of primarily Protestant party members.[1] Thereligious status of Adolf Hitler is a matter of debate among historians; Joel Krieger claims that Hitlerhad abandoned the Catholic Church,[10] and Hitler's private secretaryTraudl Junge reported that Hitler was not a member of any church;[11] this was also confirmed by another of Hitler's secretaries,Christa Schroeder.[12] According to some historians such asMichael Phayer and Klaus Scholder, Hitler was excommunicated from the church.[13][14] However, the shifting actualreligious views of Adolf Hitler remain unclear due to conflicting accounts from Hitler's associates such asOtto Strasser,Martin Bormann,Joseph Goebbels, and others.[15]
After coming to power in 1933, the upper cadres of the Nazi Party concluded that their worldview was incompatible with Christianity, even if it was considered too risky to state this publicly; because of this, the party was still committed toPositive Christianity on paper. During the 1934 party congress, Hitler declared: "Religions, too, only make sense if they serve to preserve the living substance of humanity." Hitler clarified that by humanity he meant the allegedly 'superior' part of humanity - the Aryan race. Positive Christianity proved unsuccessful, and as the Nazi hypothesis that Jesus Christ was an 'Aryan' rather than Jewish became untenable, further discussions were suppressed on this topic. Instead, it was decided that the party should pursue a policy of separating the Nazi state from Christianity completely.[16]
To achieve this, the Interior MinisterWilhelm Frick proposed a policy of "de-confessionalisation", which assumed cautiously removing religious communities from German culture and identity without altering the legal relationship between the state and the churches. Rudolf Hess expanded upon this concept and coined his own term - "denominationalisation". Hess embarked on this policy by purging religious influence from the Nazi party; in November 1935, he ordered that all major figures of the party were to "refrain from any interference in church or religious matters", including individual actions. Bormann also contributed to this policy by implementing an espionage program on German clergymen under the slogan of ensuring religious neutrality. Subsequently, Hess started implementing policies that affected all members of the NSDAP. In May 1936, he banned party members from belonging to Christian student and academic associations, and in June 1936 party members were not allowed to participate in any religious events while wearing party badges or uniforms.[17]
In 1937, this policy was escalated further by a decree from November 1937, in which Bormann banned all party members from attending "denominational events inside and outside the church and meetings of other ideological communities", with religious communities such as the "German Faith Movement" (German:Deutsche Glaubensbewegung) and "German Knowledge of God (House of Ludendorff)" (German:Deutsche Gotterkenntnis (Haus Ludendorff)) being explicitly mentioned as ideological communities; the only exception to this rule was granted in case of funerals. Here the policy also started directly targeting churches, explaining the new laws as a way to ensure the 'neutrality' of both the churches and the state. Catholic press was severely limited and effectively banned, with German historianFriedrich Zipfel remarking: "The possibilities for publication were so severely restricted that ultimately it was no longer possible to think of really informing the people of the church." Church authorities that continued to publish church newspapers or communicate with other congregations were threatened with confiscations, arrests and legal proceedings, and were suppressed by SS or police crackdowns.[18]
In accordance to this policy, the nondenominational "Gottgläubigkeit" that the Nazi state promoted was "not only alien to Christianity, but opposed to it". Following a moral code based on the "sense of morality and ethics of the Germanic race", NaziGottgläubigkeit no longer tried to dispute the Jewish origins of Christianity as the early concepts of Positive Christianity did, but rather embraced the fact and used it to rally against the "Jewish spirit" that was present in Christianity. The Bible was denounced as a product of "Jewish fabulism", and the dogmas of Christian churches, with the Catholic Church in particular, were mocked. Commenting on the dogmatism of Catholicism, Hitler remarked: "I don't care about dogmas." Describing the undogmatic character of theGottgläubigkeit, Hitler described it as "worship in solemn form without theological party bickering, with a fraternal tone of genuine love without humble theatre and empty formulaic chatter, without those disgusting frocks and women's skirts... You can serve God in heroic garb alone." This gave the Nazi-promoted nondenominationalism a very vague character.[19]
Ultimately, the policy was considered unsuccessful and had no considerable effect. Even in the SS, the champion of anti-Christian sentiment, the majority of members still belonged to a Christian church. By the end of 1938, 25% of all SS members becameGottgläubig, overtaking Catholicism which was already severely underrepresented and relatively rare amongst SS troops. However, almost 50% of the SS remained members of Protestant churches. Amongst the general population, the Catholic Church, which was the primary target of the Nazi anti-religious policy, suffered almost no defections and an overwhelming majority of theGottgläubiger came from Protestant churches where "German-Christian" orreichskirchliche influences grew in strength. In Berlin, whereGottgläubigkeit proved most successful, 77% of the city's population was Protestant prior to the introduction of Nazi policy, with Catholics making up 10% of the population and 13% belonging to other religions (including the Jews, which made up 4% of the Berlin population). By 1939, 10% of the city becamegottgläubig, whereas Protestantism declined to 70% and non-Christian religions to 8%. Meanwhile, Berlin Catholicism was not only unaffected byGottgläubigkeit, but slightly grew to 11% of the population.[20]
The gottgläubig population was almost exclusively present in large cities.Berlin had an exceptionally high percentage of theGottgläubiger, which made up 10% of the city's population. This was followed byHamburg (7.2%),Vienna (6.2%) andThuringia (5.79%). It was observed thatGottgläubigkeit proved most successful in anti-clerical areas, which made large cities susceptible to the Nazi anti-religious policy.[21] The anti-Christian character ofGottgläubigkeit was affirmed by Nazi leadership, with Bormann writing in 1941:
National Socialist and Christian conceptions are incompatible. The Christian churches build on peoples' uncertainty and attempt to maintain this fear in the widest possible section of the population, since only in this way can the Christian churches keep their power. By contrast National Socialism rests upon scientific foundations. Christianity has inalterable foundations, which were established almost 2000 years ago and which have stiffened into dogmas alien to reality. On the other hand, National Socialism, if its task is to be fulfilled, must always be geared towards the newest findings of scientific research. ... It follows from the incompatibility of National Socialist and Christian concepts that we are to reject a strengthening of existing Christian confessions.
— Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (2003), p. 245
People who identified asGottgläubig could hold a wide range of religious beliefs, including non-clerical Christianity,[1]Germanic Neopaganism,[1] a generic non-Christiantheism,[23]deism,[2] andpantheism.[2] However, theGottgläubigkeit was itself considered a form of deism, and was "predominantly based on creationist and deistic views".[6] Strictly speaking,Gottgläubigen were not even required to terminate their church membership, but strongly encouraged to.[1] TheGottgläubigen also included atheists who chose this identification as to either express their support for the NSDAP, or to avoid the negatively-associated label with atheism, as it was associated with "atheistic Bolshevism".[24]
By the decree of theReich Ministry of the Interior of 26 November 1936, this religious descriptor was officially recognised on government records.[25] The census of 17 May 1939 was the first time that German citizens were able to officially register asGottgläubig.[25] Out of 79.4 million Germans, 2.7 million people (3.5%) claimed to beGottgläubig, compared to 42.8 millionProtestants (54%), 32.3 millionCatholics (40.5%),[22] 314,000Jews (0.4%), 86,000 adherents of other religions (0.1%, includingGermanic Neopagans,Buddhists,Hindus,Muslims, and other religious sects and movements), and 1.2 million (1.5%) who hadno faith (glaubenslos).[2][25] Paradoxically, Germans living in urban areas, where support for the Nazi Party was the lowest, were the most likely to identify asGottgläubig, the five highest rates being found inBerlin (10.2%),Hamburg (7.5%),Vienna (6.4%),Düsseldorf (6.0%), andEssen (5.3%).[1]
Majority of theGottgläubigen came from anti-clericals and Protestants, with an SS report from 1939 writing that "one can be certain that the Protestant portion of the population displays greater appreciation for the struggle and the task of the SS, and hence is more readily recruited [to Gottgläubigkeit] than the Catholic [portion]." Before launching the anti-confessional campaign, the Nazi party promoted Protestantism, with Himmler going as far as stating that "to be Protestant is to be Germanic, but also that to be Germanic is to be Protestant." Nazi propaganda depicted Luther as a rebel against the "Jewish" Catholic Church and the "Jew-popes", portraying the Protestant Reformations as a struggle that "has always been a hallmark of Germanic blood or German blood"; conversely, party members promoted Luther's "On the Jews and Their Lies" and used passages from it as a justification of Nazi antisemitism.[26]
According toRichard Steigmann-Gall, in Austria "Protestants had stood in the forefront of support for Nazism and Austria's reintegration into Germany." After 1933, Austria and Sudetenland experienced a large increase of converts from Catholicism to Protestantism, with this trend including leader of the Sudeten SdPKonrad Henlein, who converted for "conviction and love for his Volk". In 1941 Bormann observed that those who converted to Protestantism after 1933 consequently left the church to becomegottgläubig instead, showing that the conversions to Protestantism and thenGottgläubigkeit were manifestations of support for the Nazi party.[27]
The termGottgläubig still appeared sporadically a few yearsafter the end of the Second World War, and was recognised in the 1946 census inside theFrench Occupation Zone, before it faded from official documents.[28]
Reichsführer-SSHeinrich Himmler, himself a former Roman Catholic, was one of the main promoters of theGottgläubig faith.[2] He was particularlyhostile towards Christianity, its values, the churches, and their clergy.[2] Himmler viewed all of Christianity and the priesthood as nothing but an indecent union, with the majority of its priesthood constituting "an erotic homosexual league of men" whose only purpose was to create and maintain a "twenty-thousand-year-old Bolshevism."[2] To theReichsführer-SS Christianity was the greatest plague delivered by history, and he demanded that it be dealt with accordingly.[2] A perennial favorite song of the storm troopers had this refrain: "Storm Trooper Comrades, hang the Jews and put the priests against the wall."[2]
He insisted on the existence of acreator God, who favoured and guided theThird Reich and theGerman nation, as he announced to theSS: "We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the Earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer. Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS."[2] He did not allow atheists into the SS, arguing that their "refusal to acknowledge higher powers" would be a "potential source of indiscipline".[3]
Himmler was not particularly concerned by the question how to label thishigher power; God Almighty, the Ancient One, Destiny, "Waralda", Nature, etc. were all acceptable, as long as they referred to some "higher power that had created this world and endowed it with the laws of struggle and selection that guaranteed the continued existence of nature and the natural order of things."[2] According to Himmler, "Only he who opposes belief in a higher power is considered godless"; everyone else wasGottgläubig, but should be thus outside of the church. SS members were put under pressure to identify asGottgläubig and revoke their church membership, if necessary under the threat of expulsion.[2]
The SS personnel records show that most of its members who left the churches of their upbringing, did so just before or shortly after joining the SS.[2] TheSicherheitsdienst (SD) members were the most willing corps within the SS to withdraw from their Christian denominations and change their religious affiliation to theGottgläubig faith at 90%. Of the SS officers, 74% of those who joined the SS before 1933 did so, while 68% who joined the SS after 1933 would eventually declare themselvesGottgläubige. Of the general SS membership, 16% had left their respective churches by the end of 1937.[29]