Thereligious beliefs ofAdolf Hitler, the dictator ofNazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate.

His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political career, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towardstraditionalChristian ideals, but later deviated from them.^[1][2] Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial toorganized Christianity and establishedChristian denominations.^[3][4] He also staunchlycriticized atheism.^[5]

Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother,Klara Hitler, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; his father,Alois Hitler, was afree-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church.^[6][7] In 1904, he wasconfirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral inLinz,Austria, where the family lived.^[8] According toJohn Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler's confirmation sponsor had to "drag the words out of him ... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him".^[9] Toland offers the opinion that Hitler "carried within him its teaching thatthe 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 ..." Michael Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, he never again attendedMass or received thesacraments after leaving home at 18 years old.^[10]

In a speech in 1932, Hitler declared himself "not a Catholic and not a Protestant, but aGerman Christian".^[11] The German Christians were aProtestant group that supportedNazi ideology.^[12] Both Hitler and the Nazi Party promoted "nondenominational"positive Christianity,^[13][14] a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as thedivinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as theOld Testament.^[15][16] In one widely quoted remark, Hitler described Jesus as an "Aryan fighter" who struggled against "the power and pretensions of the corruptPharisees"^[17] and Jewish materialism.^[18] Hitler spoke often of Protestantism^[19] andLutheranism,^[20] stating, "Through me the Evangelical Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England"^[21] and that the "great reformer"Martin Luther^[22] "has the merit of rising against the Pope and the Catholic Church".^[23]

Hitler's regime launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants into a jointProtestant Reich Church, and moved early to eliminatepolitical Catholicism.^[24] Even though Nazi leadership wasexcommunicated from the Catholic Church,^[25] Hitler agreed to theReich concordat with the Vatican, but then routinely ignored it, and permittedpersecutions of the Catholic Church.^[26] Several historians have insisted that Hitler and his inner circle were influenced by other religions. In a eulogy for a friend, Hitler called on him to enterValhalla^[27] but he later stated that it would be foolish tore-establish the worship ofOdin (or Wotan) withinGermanic paganism.^[28] Most historians argue he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons and that his intentions were to eventually eliminateChristianity in Germany, or at least reform it to suit a Nazi outlook.^[29]

Alan Bullock wrote that Hitler had been raised Catholic, but, though impressed by its organizational powers, repudiated Christianity on what he considered to be rational and moral grounds.^[30] Bullock wrote that Hitler believed neither in "God nor conscience", but found both "justification and absolution" in a view of himself echoingHegel's view that heroes were above conventional morality, and that the role of "world-historical individuals" as the agents by which the "Will of the World Spirit", the plan of Providence is carried out. Following his early military successes, Hitler "abandoned himself entirely tomegalomania" and the "sin ofhubris", an exaggerated self-pride, believing himself to be more than a man.^[31] Once the war was over, wrote Bullock, Hitler wanted to root out and destroy the influence of the churches, though until then he would be circumspect for political reasons:^[30]

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.

At the turn of the century, leading Hitler expert^[32]Ian Kershaw wrote an influential biography of Hitler which used new sources to expound on Hitler's religious views. He concluded that Hitler was spiritual, but nevertheless critical of the churches:

...making the German Army "into the first army in the world, in training, in the raising of units, in armaments, and, above all, in spiritual education (in der geistigen Erziehung)" was vital. If this did not happen, then "Germany will be lost," [Hitler] declared.^[33]

...

However much Hitler on some occasions claimed to want a respite in the conflict [with the churches], his own inflammatory comments gave his underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat on the "Church Struggle", confident that they were working towards the Fuhrer...Hitler's impatience with the churches prompted frequent outbursts of hostility. In early 1937, he was declaring that "Christianity was ripe for destruction" (Untergang), and that the churches must therefore yield to the "primacy of the state", railing against "the most horrible institution imaginable"^[34]

British historianRichard J. Evans, who writes primarily on Nazi Germany and World War II, noted Hitler claiming that Nazism is founded on science: "Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition' Germany could not tolerate the intervention of foreign influences such as the Pope and 'Priests', he said, were 'black bugs', 'abortions in black cassocks'."^[35]

British historianRichard Overy, biographer of Hitler, sees Hitler as having been a skeptic of religion: "Both Stalin and Hitler wanted a neutered religion, subservient to the state, while the slow programme of scientific revelation destroyed the foundation of religious myth."^[36] Overy writes of Hitler as skeptical of all religious belief, but politically prudent enough not to "trumpet his scientific views publicly", partly in order to maintain the distinction between his own movement and the godlessness ofSoviet Communism.^[37] In 2004, he wrote:^[38]

He was not a practising Christian but had somehow succeeded in masking his own religious skepticism from millions of German voters. Though Hitler has often been portrayed as aneo-pagan, or the centrepiece of a political religion in which he played the Godhead, his views had much more in common with the revolutionary iconoclasm of the Bolshevik enemy. His few private remarks on Christianity betray a profound contempt and indifference ... Hitler believed that all religions were now "decadent"; in Europe it was the "collapse of Christianity that we are now experiencing". The reason for the crisis was science. Hitler, like Stalin, took a very modern view of the incompatibility of religious and scientific explanation.

HistorianPercy Ernst Schramm describes Hitler's personal religious creed, after his rejection of the Christian beliefs of his youth, as "a variant of themonism so common before the First World War".^[39] According to Schramm, these views were indirectly influenced by the work ofErnst Haeckel and his disciple, Wilhelm Bölsche.^[17] Schramm quotes Dr. Hanskarl von Hasselbach, one of Hitler's personal physicians, as saying that Hitler was a "religious person, or at least one who was struggling with religious clarity". According to von Hasselbach, Hitler did not shareMartin Bormann's conception that Nazi ceremonies could become a substitute for church ceremonies, and was aware of the religious needs of the masses. "He went on for hours discussing the possibility of bridging the confessional division of the German people and helping them find a religion appropriate to their character and modern man's understanding of the world."^[17]

Hitler's personal conception of God was as "Providence". For instance, when he survived the assassination attempt ofJuly 20, 1944, he ascribed it to Providence saving him to pursue his tasks. In fact, as time went on, Hitler's conception of Providence became more and more intertwined with his belief in his own inability to make an error of judgment.Alfred Jodl stated at Nuremberg that Hitler had "an almostmystical conviction of his infallibility as leader of the nation and of the war". Another of his physicians, Dr. Karl Brandt, said that Hitler saw himself as a "tool of Providence. He was ... consumed by the desire to give the German people everything and to help them out of their distress. He was possessed by the thought that this was his task and that only he could fulfill it."^[17]

BBC historianLaurence Rees characterises Hitler's relationship to religion as one of opportunism and pragmatism: "his relationship in public to Christianity – indeed his relationship to religion in general – was opportunistic. There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church".^[40] Considering the religious allusions found inMein Kampf, Rees writes that "the most coherent reading" of the book is that Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, but did "not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual 'soul'."^[41]

Max Domarus has written that Hitler replaced belief in theAbrahamic God with belief in a peculiarly German "god".^[42] He promoted the idea of this god as the creator of Germany, but Hitler "was not a Christian in any accepted meaning of that word."^[43] Domarus writes that Hitler neither believed in organized religion nor saw himself as a religious reformer.^[43] Hitler had fully discarded belief in the Judeo-Christian conception of God by 1937, writes Domarus, but continued to use the word "God" in speeches – but 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."^[42] Although Hitler did not "abide by its commandments", Domarus believed that 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'".^[42]

AuthorKonrad 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."^[44] Derek Hastings 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".^[45]

The biographerJohn Toland, recounts that in the aftermath of an attempted assassination in 1939, Hitler told dinner guests thatPope Pius XII would rather have seen the "plot succeed" and "was no friend of mine", but also writes that in 1941 Hitler was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite his detestation of its hierarchy"^[46] According toGuenter Lewy, Hitler was notexcommunicated from the Catholic Church prior tohis death.^[47] Although he had received the Catholic sacraments of Baptism as an infant, and Confirmation later in his youth, there is little evidence he considered himself subject to the teaching of the Church from adolescence onward, whatever cultural affiliation he claimed.

Samuel Koehne ofDeakin University wrote in 2012: "Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not. But it remains very difficult to ascertain his personal religious beliefs, and the debate rages on." While Hitler was emphatically not "Christian" by the traditional or orthodox notion of the term, he did speak of a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, "conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing" and that "For this reason, some recent works have argued Hitler was aDeist".^[48] 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".^[49]

Richard Steigmann-Gall finds Hitler a Christian. He wrote in 2003 that even after Hitler's rupture with institutional Christianity (which he dated to around 1937), he sees evidence that he continued to hold Jesus in high esteem,^[50] and never directed his attacks on Jesus himself.^[51] Use of the term "positive Christianity" in theNazi Party Program of the 1920s is commonly regarded as a tactical measure, but Steigmann-Gall believes it may have had an "inner logic" and been "more than a political ploy".^[18] He considers that Hitler was Christian at least until the early 1930s, and that he saw Jesus as anAryan opponent of the Jews.^[52]

In his memoirs, Hitler's confidant, personal architect, and Minister of ArmamentsAlbert Speer, wrote: "Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church", yet "conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him":^[53]

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.

TheGoebbels Diaries also remark on this policy. Goebbels wrote on 29 April 1941 that though Hitler was "a fierce opponent" of the Vatican and Christianity, "he forbids me to leave the church. For tactical reasons."^[54]

According to Speer, Hitler's private secretary,Martin Bormann, relished recording any harsh pronouncements by Hitler against the church.^[55] Speer considered Bormann to be the driving force behind the regime's campaign against the churches. Speer thought that Hitler approved of Bormann's aims, but was more pragmatic and wanted to "postpone this problem to a more favourable time":^[56]

"Once I have settled my other problem," [Hitler] occasionally declared, "I'll have my reckoning with the church. I'll have it reeling on the ropes." But Bormann did not want this reckoning postponed ... he would take out a document from his pocket and begin reading passages from a defiant sermon or pastoral letter. Frequently Hitler would become so worked up ... and vowed to punish the offending clergyman eventually ... That he could not immediately retaliate raised him to a white heat ...

Hitler, wrote Speer, viewed Christianity as the wrong religion for the "Germanic temperament":^[53] Speer wrote that Hitler would say: "You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we havethe religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the fatherland as the highest good? TheMohameddan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"^[57] Speer also wrote of observing in Hitler "quite a few examples", and that he held a negative view toward Himmler and Rosenberg'smystical notions.^[58][59]

Martin Bormann, who was serving as Hitler's private secretary, persuaded Hitler to allow a team of specially picked officers to record inshorthand his private conversations for posterity.^[60] Between 1941 and 1944, Hitler's words were recorded in transcripts now known asHitler's Table Talk.^[61] 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.^[62] Speer noted in his memoirs that Bormann relished recording any harsh pronouncements made by Hitler against the church: "there was hardly anything he wrote down more eagerly than deprecating comments on the church".^[55] Within the transcripts, Hitler speaks of Christianity as "absurdity" and "humbug" founded on "lies" with which he could "never come personally to terms."^[63]

The widespread consensus among historians is that the views expressed inHugh Trevor-Roper's translation ofTable Talk, are credible and reliable, although as with all historical sources, a high level of critical awareness about its origins and purpose are advisable.^[64] The remarks fromTable Talk accepted as genuine include such quotes as "Christianity is the prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society."^[65] Alan Bullock's seminal biographyHitler: 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 inTable Talk,^[66] and repeats other views appearing inTable Talk such as: the teachings of Christianity are a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle andsurvival of the fittest.^[67]

Michael Burleigh contrasted Hitler's public pronouncements on Christianity with those inTable 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 visceralanti-clericalism."^[68] 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: "Hitler's hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war". Hitler'sTable Talk has the dictator often voicing stridently negative views of Christianity, such as: "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity."^[69]

Transcripts inTable Talk have Hitler favoring science over Christianity. On 14 October 1941, in an entry concerning the fate of Christianity, Hitler says: "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."^[70] Religion will crumble before scientific advances, says Hitler: "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."^[71]

Hitler feared the collapse of the pact with churches would lead to "the state of the animal" — atheism. "I'm convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse. An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science. That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious questions."^[72]

According toTable Talk, Hitler believed that Jesus' true Christian teachings had been corrupted by theapostleSt Paul, who had transformed them into a kind ofJewish Bolshevism, which Hitler believed preached "the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedienceto an only god. This iswhat caused the death of the Roman Empire."^[73][74]

InTable Talk, Hitler praisedJulian the Apostate'sAgainst the Galileans, an anti-Christian tract fromAD 362, in the entry dated 21 October 1941, stating: "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. ... Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, theGalilean, 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 thatJesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way,regarded Him asthe son of a whore—of a whore anda Roman soldier. Thedecisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean's object was to liberatehis country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's whythe Jews liquidated Him. Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before theRoad to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely."^[73]

Richard Carrier made some isolated comparisons of passages from the German, French and English editions of Table Talk, and found in each case that the English edition by Trevor-Roper was a translation of the French edition byFrancois Genoud, rather than from the German editions; and also that the French translation contained significant distortions, which generally heightened the impression of Hitler's hatred for Christianity. Carrier concluded that "the Trevor-Roper edition is to be discarded as worthless." However, Carrier found that three German versions "have a common ancestor, which must be the actual bunker notes themselves", and recommended that scholars needed to work directly with the German editions.^[75] In his introduction to a 2013 edition of Trevor-Roper'sTable Talk, Gerhard Reinberg agreed that the Trevor-Roper edition "derives from Genoud's French edition and not from either of the German texts."^[76] After examining Trevor-Roper's personal correspondence and papers, Mikael Nilsson concluded that Trevor-Roper was fully aware of the fact that his edition was based on the French text, but failed to reveal the problems in public.^[77]

TheGoebbels Diaries, written by Hitler's Propaganda MinisterJoseph Goebbels, provide important insights into Hitler's thinking and actions.^[78] In a diary entry of 28 December 1939, Goebbels wrote that "the Fuhrer passionately rejects any thought of founding a religion. He has no intention of becoming a priest. His sole exclusive role is that of a politician."^[79] In an 8 April 1941 entry, Goebbels wrote "He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity."^[80]

In 1937, Goebbels noted that Hitler's impatience with the churches "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".^[81] In his entry for 29 April 1941, Goebbels noted long discussions about the Vatican and Christianity, and wrote: "The Fuhrer is a fierce opponent of all that humbug".^[54]

In 1939, Goebbels wrote that theFührer knew that he would "have to get around to a conflict between church and state" but that in the meantime "The best way to deal with the churches is to claim to be a 'positive Christian'."^[79]

In another entry, Goebbels wrote that Hitler was "deeply religious but entirely anti-Christian".^[82][83] Goebbels wrote on 29 December 1939:^[84]

The Führer is deeply religious, though completely anti-Christian. He views Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of their religious rites. Both (Judaism and Christianity) have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end they will be destroyed.

Goebbels notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had "expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity."^[85] Hitler, wrote Goebbels, saw the pre-ChristianAugustan Age as the high point of history, and could not relate to the Gothic mind nor to "brooding mysticism".^[80]

The diaries also report that Hitler believed Jesus "also wanted to act against the Jewish world domination. Jewry had him crucified. ButPaul falsified his doctrine and undermined ancient Rome."^[86]

Otto Strasser was a German politician and an early member of the Nazi Party, he together with his brotherGregor Strasser, was a leading member of the party's left-wing faction. "Despite the fact that Hitler never renounced his membership in the Catholic Church, before he seized power in 1933 and for about two months thereafter", wrote Weikart, during the conversation with his brother in 1920, Strasser stated that he was disappointed with Hitler because:^[87]

We are Christians; without Christianity Europe is lost. Hitler is an atheist.

Ernst Hanfstaengl was a German-American businessman and intimate friend of Hitler. He eventually fell out of favour with Hitler, however, and defected fromNazi Germany to the United States. He later described Hitler to be an atheist to all intents and purposes by the time I got to know him:^[88]

He was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time.

TheAnschluss saw the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in early 1938. The Austrian chancellor,Kurt Schuschnigg, had traveled to Germany to meet Hitler, who, according to Schuschnigg's later testimony, went into a threatening rage against the role of Austria in German history, saying, "Every national idea was sabotaged by Austria throughout history; and indeed all this sabotage was the chief activity of theHabsburgs and the Catholic Church." This ended in Hitler's ultimatum to end Austrian independence and hand the nation to the Nazis.^[89]

Following the 1944 assassination attempt in the "20 July plot", Hitler credited his survival to fate in a radio broadcast the following day. German deputy press chiefHelmut Suendermann declared, "The German people must consider the failure of the attempt on Hitler's life as a sign that Hitler will complete his tasks under the protection of a divine power".^[90]

Following a meeting with Hitler, CardinalMichael von Faulhaber, a man who had "courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church—went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious", noted Kershaw.^[91] In November 1936 the Roman Catholic prelate met Hitler atBerghof for a three-hour meeting. He left the meeting and wrote "The Reich Chancellor undoubtedly lives in belief in God. He recognises Christianity as the builder of Western culture".^[92]Kershaw cites Faulhaber's case as an example of Hitler's ability to "pull the wool over the eyes of even hardened critics", demonstrating Hitler's "evident ability to simulate, even to potentially critical church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity".^[93]

Krieger claims that Hitler had abandoned the Catholic Church^[94] while Hitler's last secretary asserted that he was not a member of any church.^[95]Otto Strasser stated critically of the dictator, "Hitler is an atheist" for his unsettling sympathy to "Rosenberg'spaganism."^[96]

In his post-war memoirs, under the entry for August 6, 1938, titled 'Church (Question) – Mu(nich)',Gerhard Engel wrote: “He[Hitler] said he was still a member of the Catholic Church and would remain so.”^[97] Engel later noted the following under the entry for January 20, 1940, titled 'Relationship to the Church': “‘F. spoke at length again about religious belief and his attitude to the churches. Undoubtedly under sniper fire fromB(ormann) andH(immler) a less conciliatory attitude is developing. Whereas in the past he wanted to live and let live, he is now determined to fight the churches.F. literally: ‘The war, here as in many other areas, presents a favourable opportunity to dispose of it (the church question) root and branch.’”^[98]

Adolf Hitler was raised in aRoman Catholic family in theAustrian monarchy (Roman Catholics were the dominant religious group there). However, reliable historical details on his childhood are scarce. According to Hitler historianIan Kershaw, the reflections Hitler provided on his own life inMein Kampf are "inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation", while information that was given during the Nazi period is "dubious", as can be the postwar recollections of family and acquaintances.^[99]

Hitler was baptised as aCatholic in the same year he was born, 1889.^[100] Hitler's fatherAlois, though nominally a Catholic, was somewhatreligiously skeptical and anticlerical,^[101] while his motherKlara was a devout practising Catholic.^[102]A. N. Wilson wrote: "Much is sometimes made of the Catholic upbringing of Hitler ... it was something to which Hitler himself often made allusion, and he was nearly always violently hostile. 'The biretta! The mere sight of these abortions in cassocks makes me wild!'"^[103] Hitler boasted of expressing skepticism to clergyman-teachers when taught religious instruction in school.^[104][105] He attended several primary schools. For six months, the family lived opposite a Benedictine Monastery at Lambach, and on some afternoons, Hitler attended the choir school there.^[106] Hitler later wrote inMein Kampf that at this time he dreamed of one day takingholy orders.^{[107][108][109]}

Hitler wasconfirmed on 22 May 1904. According to Rissmann, as a youth Hitler was influenced byPan-Germanism and began to reject theCatholic Church, receiving confirmation only unwillingly.^[10] BiographerJohn 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".^[9] Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, Hitler never again attendedMass or received thesacraments after leaving home.^[10]

In 1909, Hitler moved to Vienna and according toAlan Bullock his intellectual interests there vacillated and his reading included "Ancient Rome,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, theSocial Democrats, the Habsburgs – without restraint".^[111]

InPercy Ernst Schramm's "The Anatomy of a Dictator", which was based on an analysis of the transcripts of the "Table Talk" recordings, Hitler is quoted as saying that "after a hard inner struggle" he had freed himself from the religious beliefs of his youth, so that he felt "as fresh as a foal in the pasture".^[39]

Although personally skeptical, Hitler's public relationship to religion was one of opportunistic pragmatism.^[40] In religious affairs, he readily adopted a strategy "that suited his immediate political purposes."^[112] He typically tailored his message to his audience's perceived sensibilities^[113] and Kershaw considers that few people could really claim to "know" Hitler, who was "a very private, even secretive individual", able to deceive "even hardened critics" as to his true beliefs.^[91][114] In private, he scorned Christianity, but when out campaigning for power in Germany, he made statements in favour of the religion.^[115]

Hitler's public utterances were peppered with references to "God" and "Spirit".^[116][117] InHitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Bullock wrote that Hitler, likeNapoleon before him, frequently employed the language of "divine providence" in defence of his own personal myth, but ultimately shared with the Soviet dictatorJoseph Stalin "the same materialist outlook, based on the nineteenth-century rationalists' certainty that the progress of science would destroy all myths and had already proved Christian doctrine to be an absurdity":^[118]

Hitler's own myth had to be protected, and this led him, like Napoleon, to speak frequently of Providence, as a necessary if unconscious projection of his sense of destiny which provided him with both justification and absolution. 'The Russians', he remarked on one occasion 'were entitled to attack their priests, but they had no right to assail the idea of a supreme force. It's a fact that we're feeble creatures and that acreative force exists'".

Hitler had an "ability to simulate, even to potentially critical Church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity [from Bolshevism]" wrote Kershaw, which served to deflect direct criticism of him from Church leaders, who instead focused their condemnations on the known "anti-Christian party radicals".^[119]

Mein Kampf (1924–25), written while Hitler was in prison afterhis failed 1923 putsch, contains numerous references to "God", "the Creator", "Providence" and "the Lord".^{[122][123][124][125]}

Laurence Rees described the thrust of the work as "bleaknihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy: "What's missing fromMein Kampf", wrote Rees – "and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should – is any emphasis on Christianity" – though Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, concluded Rees, "the most coherent reading ofMein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul" ... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed."^[41]

Paul Berben wrote that insofar as the Christian denominations were concerned, Hitler declared himself to be neutral inMein Kampf – but argued for clearseparation of church and state, and for the church not to concern itself with the earthly life of the people, which must be the domain of the state.^[115] According toWilliam Shirer, Hitler "inveighed against political Catholicism inMein Kampf and attacked the two main Christian churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem", while also warning that no political party could succeed in "producing a religious reformation".^[15]

InMein Kampf Hitler wrote 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."^[122]

Hitler wrote of the importance of a definite and uniformly acceptedWeltanschauung (world view), 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 religious belief". The various substitutes hitherto offered could not "usefully replace the existing denominations".^[121]

Examining how to establish a new order, Hitler argued that the greatness of powerful organizations was reliant on intolerance of all others, so that the greatness of Christianity arose from the "unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defence of its own teaching". Hitler rejected a view that Christianity 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 overeuthanasia in Nazi Germany, Hitler wrote that the churches should give up missionary work in Africa, and concentrate on convincing Europeans that it 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".^[121] The churches should forget about their own differences and focus on the issue of "racial contamination", he declared.^[121]

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.

When he arrived inVienna as a young man, Hitler claimed, he was not yet anti-Semitic: "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."^[126] Hitler was a strong supporter of Austrian politicianGeorge Schonerer's pan-Germanic movement which advocated anti-Catholic ideas. Acclaiming Schonerer's anti-Catholic campaign, Hitler wrote:

The root of the whole evil lay, particularly in Schonerer’s opinion, in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany; and that for this very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality. ... The attitude of thePan-German movement toward the Catholic Church was determined far less by its position onscience, etc., than by its inadequacy in the championing of German rights and, conversely, its continued aid and comfort toSlavic arrogance and greed.Georg Schonerer was not the man to do things by halves. He took up the struggle toward the Church in the conviction that by it alone he could save theGerman people.^[127]

Hitler thought that anti-Semitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: "The anti-Semitism of theChristian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles." Instead, Hitler argued that Jews should be deplored on the basis of their "race".^[128] Outlining a parallel betweenmilitantism and Christianity's rise to power as theRoman Empire's officialstate religion, Hitler wrote:

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.^[129]

Elsewhere inMein Kampf, Hitler speaks of the "creator of the universe" and "eternal Providence".^[125][130] He also states that the Aryan race was created by God, and that it would be a sin to dilute it through racial intermixing:

Thevölkisch-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 fulfillGod'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.^[124]

In Mein Kampf, Hitler saw Jesus as against the Jews rather than one 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."^[131]

Derek Hastings writes that, according to Hitler's personal photographerHeinrich Hoffmann, the strongly anti-SemiticHieronymite^[132] Catholic priestBernhard Stempfle was a member of Hitler's inner circle in the early 1920s and frequently advised him on religious issues.^[133] He helped Hitler in the writing ofMein Kampf.^[134] He was killed by the SS inthe 1934 purge.^[135]

Article 24 of Hitler'sNational Socialist Programme of 1920 had endorsed what it termed "positive Christianity", but placed religion below party ideology by adding the caveat that it must not offend "the moral sense of the German race".^[136]Nondenominational, the term^{[clarification needed]} could be variously interpreted, but allayed fears among Germany's Christian majority as to the oft-expressed anti-Christian convictions of large sections of the Nazi movement.^[40] It further proposed a definition of a "positive Christianity" which could combat the "Jewish-materialistic spirit".^[137]

In 1922, a decade before Hitler took power, former prime minister ofBavaria Countvon Lerchenfeld-Köfering stated in a speech before theLandtag 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 turned Lerchenfeld's perspective of Jesus on its head, telling a crowd in Munich:

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 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.^[138]

In a 1928 speech, he said: "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian."^[139]

In light of later developments, Rees notes, "The most persuasive explanation of [Hitler's] statements is that Hitler, as a politician, simply recognised the practical reality of the world he inhabited ... Had Hitler distanced himself or his movement too much from Christianity it is all but impossible to see how he could ever have been successful in a free election. Thus his relationship in public to Christianity – indeed his relationship to religion in general – was opportunistic. There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church".^[40] Richard Evans considers 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.^[140]

In 1932, Hitler came up with the nameGerman Christians (Deutsche Christen) for a pro-Nazi group within Protestantism. "Hitler saw the relationship in political terms. He was not a practicing Christian, but had somehow succeeded in masking his own religious skepticism from millions of German voters", wroteOvery, who considered that Hitler found the arrangement useful for a time, but ultimately expected Christianity to wilt and die before "the advances of science".^[141] In this early period, the "German Christian" movement sought to make the Protestant churches in Germany an instrument of Nazi policy.^[16][142] Adherents promoted notions of racial superiority and race destiny.^[143] Hitler backed the formal establishment of the "German Christians" in 1932.^[144] It was nationalistic and anti-Semitic and some of its radicals called for repudiation of the Old Testament (theHebrew Scriptures) and thePauline epistles of the New Testament – because of their Jewish authorship.^[145]

Hitler's movement was not united on questions of religion. The consensus among historians is that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it.^[146] Use of the term "positive Christianity" in the Nazi Party Program of the 1920s is generally regarded as a tactical measure, rooted in politics rather than religious conviction. Author Steigmann-Gall has put forward a minority interpretation, that positive Christianity had an "inner logic" and been "more than a political ploy".^[18] He believes Hitlersaw Jesus as an Aryan opponent of the Jews.^[147][52] Though anti-Christians later fought to "expunge Christian influence from Nazism" and the movement became "increasingly hostile to the churches", Steigmann-Gall wrote that even in the end, it was not "uniformly anti-Christian".^[18][148]

Samuel Koehne, a Research Fellow at theAlfred Deakin Research Institute, working on the official Nazi views on religion, answers the questionWas Hitler a Christian? thus: "Emphatically not, if we consider Christianity in its traditional ororthodox form: Jesus as theson of God, dying for the redemption of the sins of all humankind. It is nonsense to state that Hitler (or any of the Nazis) adhered to Christianity of this form. ... However, it is equally true that there were leading Nazis who adhered to a form of Christianity that had been 'aryanised.'" and "Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not."^[149]

Prior to the Reichstag vote for theEnabling Act of 1933, under which Hitler gained the "temporary" dictatorial powers with which he went on to permanently dismantle theWeimar Republic, Hitler promised the German Parliament that he would not interfere with the rights of the churches. However, with power secured in Germany, Hitler quickly broke this promise.^[151][152]

Through 1933 and into 1934, the Nazi leader required a level of support from groups like the German conservatives and theCatholic Centre Party in the Reichstag, and of the conservativePresident von Hindenburg, in order to achieve his takeover of power with the "appearance of legality".^{[153][page needed]} In a proclamation on 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."^[154]

On 21 March 1933, the Reichstag assembled in thePotsdam Garrison Church, to show the "unity" of Nazism 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.^[100]

Hitler sought to gain the votes of the Catholic Centre Party and German conservatives for the Enabling Act with a mix of intimidation, negotiation and conciliation.^[155] On 23 March 1933, just prior to the vote for the Enabling Act, he described the Christian faiths as "essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German people"^[15] and "We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of most of the German people."^[156] "With an eye to the votes of the Catholic Centre Party", wrote Shirer, he added that he "hoped to improve relations with the Holy See".^[15]

The Centre Party asked for guarantees of the rights of the churches. Hitler promised that the institutions of the Weimar Republic and churches would be protected, and said his government saw the churches as "the most important factors for upholding our nationhood". Amid threats and talk of civil war, the Centre Party voted for the Act.^[157][158] Hitler's false promises of protection for the churches and institutions of the republic were never kept.^[157][158]

In January 1934, Hitler angered the churches by appointing theneo-paganAlfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist. The Fuhrer launched an effort towardcoordination ofGerman Protestants under a unifiedProtestant Reich Church under theDeutsche Christen Movement, but the attempt failed – resisted by theConfessing Church. InThe Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany,Susannah Heschel noted that theDeutsche Christen differed from traditional Christians by rejecting the Hebrew origins of Christianity. In public statements made during his rule, Hitler continued to speak positively about a Nazi vision of Christian German culture,^[159] and his belief in an Aryan Christ. Hitler added thatSaint Paul, as a Jew, had falsified Jesus' message – a theme Hitler repeated in private conversations, including, in October 1941, when he made the decision to murder the Jews.^[160]

Ian Kershaw said that Hitler had lost interest in supporting theDeutsche Christen from around 1934.^[81] However, 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.^[161]

In 1937,Hanns Kerrl, Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, explained "positive Christianity" as not "dependent upon theApostles' Creed", nor in "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, but rather, as being represented by theNazi Party: "The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation", he said.^[162]

During negotiations leading to theReichskonkordat with the Vatican, Hitler said, "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."^[163] However, as Hitler consolidated his power, schools became a major battleground in the Nazicampaign against the churches. In 1937, the Nazis banned any member of theHitler Youth from simultaneously belonging to a religious youth movement. Religious education was not permitted in the Hitler Youth and by 1939, clergymen teachers had been removed from virtually all state schools.^[164] Hitler 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 withTeutonic rituals andsun-worship.^[165] By 1939 all Catholic denominational schools had been disbanded or converted to public facilities.^[166]

Thepropaganda of the Nazi party actively promoted Hitler as a saviour of Christianity^[167] and Nazi propaganda supported theGerman Christians in their formation of a single national church that could be controlled and manipulated.^[168]

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

According to Bullock, as an adolescent in Vienna, Hitler read widely, including books onoccultism,hypnotism, andastrology. However, his interest in these subjects was fleeting, and there is no evidence that he ever subscribed to any of these schools of thought.^[111] Bullock found "no evidence to support the once popular belief that Hitler resorted to astrology" and wrote that Hitler ridiculed those in his own party like Himmler (who wanted to re-establish pagan mythology) and Hess (who believed in astrology).^[169][30] Albert Speer wrote that Hitler had a negative view toward Himmler and Rosenberg'smystical notions. Speer quotes Hitler as having said of Himmler's attempt to mythologize the SS:^[58]

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 ...

In a speech he made in Nuremberg on September 6, 1938, Hitler said thatChristian mysticism creates dark forces, that there are noplaces of worship - but places of national anthem - that there are no cult places, there are national places, besides, he rejected mysticism and occultism:

I want to differentiate here between theVolk, i.e. the healthy, full-blooded mass of Germany loyal to the Volk, and a decadent, so-called high society, unreliable because only conditionally linked by blood. It is sometimes casually referred to as the 'upper class,' being, however, in reality no more than the scum produced by a societal mutation gone haywire from having had its blood and thinking infected by cosmopolitism. In this period of the most inward orientation, Christian mysticism demanded an approach to the solution of structural problems and hence to an architecture whose design not only ran contrary to the spirit, of the time, but which also helped produce these mysterious dark forces which made the people increasingly willing to submit themselves to cosmopolitism ... This philosophy does not advocate mystic cults, but rather aims to cultivate and lead a Volk determined by its blood. [–] Therefore we do not have halls for cults, but halls for the Volk. Nor do we have places for worship, but places for assembly and squares for marches. We do not have cult sites, but sports arenas and play areas. And it is because of this that our assembly halls are not bathed in the mystical twilight of cult sites but rather are places of brightness and light of a beautiful and practical nature. In these halls, no cult rituals take place, they are exclusively the site of Volk rallies of the type which we conducted in the years of our struggle, which we have become accustomed to, and which we shall preserve in this manner. 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. At the head of our program there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill adivine will – not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.^[170]

Corroborating the Nuremberg speech of September 6, 1938, about Hitler's view on Church's architecture (which according to Hitler was inspired from Christian mysticism, which produced "dark forces") we find a similar thought which Hitler expressed toGoebbels about the "gloomy Cathedral", where he prefers theancient Greek andRoman temples which according to Hiler were "light, airy" in contrast to the "gloomy"Gothic Cathedrals. It is also important to note that Hitler forbade bombing Athens when theWehrmachtinvaded Greece in 1941, due to his love for the ancient Greek temples/architecture, while theLuftwaffe specifically targetedCoventry Cathedral during theCoventry Blitz:

[The Führer] hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity. According toSchopenhauer, Christianity andsyphilis have made humanity unhappy and unfree. What a difference between the benevolent, smilingZeus and the pain-wracked, crucified Christ. ... What a difference between a gloomy cathedral and a light, airy ancient temple. ... The Führer cannot relate to the Gothic mind. He hates gloom and brooding mysticism. He wants clarity, light, beauty. And these are the ideals of life in our time.^[171]

According toRon Rosenbaum, some 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 magazineOstara, and give credence to the claim of its publisherJörg Lanz von Liebenfels that Hitler visited him in 1909 and praised his work.^[172] John Toland wrote that evidence indicates Hitler was a regular reader ofOstara.^[173] Toland also included a poem that Hitler allegedly wrote while serving in the German Army on theWestern Front in 1915.^[174]

The seminal work onAriosophy,The Occult Roots of Nazism byNicholas Goodrick-Clarke, devotes its last chapter the topic ofAriosophy 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 ofThe Occult Roots of Nazism byRohan Butler, Goodrick-Clarke is more cautious in assessing the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels on Hitler thanJoachim Fest in his biography of Hitler.^[175]

Comparing Hitler toErich Ludendorff, Fest writes: "Hitler had detached himself from such affections, in which he encountered the obscurantism of his early years, Lanz v. Liebenfels and theThule Society, again, long ago and had, inMein Kampf, formulated his scathing contempt for thatvölkischromanticism, which however his own cosmos of imagination preserved rudimentarily."^[176]Fest refers to the following passage fromMein 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 everyCommunist blackjack.^[177]

In a speech aboutPaul von Hindenburg on 7 August 1934 (five days after Hindenburg's death), Hitler said that a martyred commander would go toValhalla:

Nearly twenty years ago today, the bells sounded here and echoed throughout Germany for the first time in honor of the name of the Field Marshal. Today, to the peal of these same bells, the nation has accompanied its venerable departed hero back to the great battlefield of his unequaled victory. It is here, in the midst of the slumbering grenadiers of his victorious regiments, that the tired commander shall find his peace. The towers of the castle shall be defiant guards of this, his last great headquarters in the East. Standards and flags shall salute him. And the German Volk will come to its dead hero to gather new strength for life in times of need, for even when the last trace of this body shall have been obliterated, his name will ever more be immortal. Dead Commander, enter into Valhalla now!^[178]

It is not clear if this statement is an attack at anyone specific. It could have been aimed atKarl Harrer or at theStrasser 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."^[179] Hitler also said something similar in public speeches.^[180]

Older literature states that Hitler had no intention of instituting worship of theancient Germanic gods in contrast to the beliefs of some other Nazi officials.^[181] InHitler's Table Talk one can find this quote:

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

In an article published by theSimon Wiesenthal Center,Jackson J. Spielvogel and David Redles assert that alleged influences of various portions of the teachings ofH. P. Blavatsky (the founder of theTheosophical Society with doctrines as expounded by her 1888 bookThe Secret Doctrine) and the adaptations of her ideas by her followers, throughAriosophy, theGermanenorden and theThule Society, constituted a popularly unacknowledged but decisive influence over the developing mind of Hitler.^[182] The scholars state that Hitler himself may be responsible for turning historians from investigating his occult influences.^[182] 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 ofreincarnation,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.^[182]

In his childhood, Hitler had admired the pomp of Catholic ritual and the hierarchical organization of the clergy. Later he drew on these elements, organizing his party along hierarchical lines and includingliturgical forms into events or using phraseology taken from hymns.^[183] Because of these liturgical elements, Daim's claim of Hitler'smessiah-like status and the ideology'stotalitarian nature, the Nazi movement, like otherfascist movements andcommunism, is sometimes termed a "political religion" that is anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious.^[184][185]

Although Hitler expressed negative views towards the mystical notions of some of his senior Nazi underlings in private,^[186]he nevertheless appointedHeinrich Himmler andAlfred Rosenberg to senior positions in the Nazi movement.^[58][59]William L. Shirer wrote that, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler – backed by Hitler – the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute theold paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods with thenew paganism of the Nazi extremists".^[187] The régime launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants under a unifiedProtestant Reich Church (but this was resisted by theConfessing Church), and moved early to eliminatepolitical Catholicism.^[24] Blainey wrote: "Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was itshigh priest ... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions".^[188]

In 1924, during his imprisonment, Hitler had chosen Alfred Rosenberg to lead the Nazi movement in his absence.^[189] In his seminal 1930 workThe Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg wrote: "We now realize that the central supreme values of the Roman and the Protestant Churches ... hinder the organic powers of the peoples determined by their Nordic race, ... they will have to be remodeled". Hitler called Rosenberg's book "derivative, pastiche, illogical rubbish!"^[190] But in January 1934, Hitler appointed Rosenberg as the cultural and educational leader of the Reich – the official Nazi philosopher and ideologist. Rosenberg was notoriously anti-Christian.^[191] Church officials were perturbed by Hitler's appointment of Rosenberg as Nazi philosopher as it apparently endorsed Rosenberg's anti-church and neo-pagan philosophy. The Vatican bannedThe Myth of the Twentieth Century in February 1934.^[192] During the war, Rosenberg outlined the future he envisioned for religion in Germany. Among its articles: the National Reich Church of Germany was to claim exclusive control over all churches; publication of the Bible was to cease; crucifixes, Bibles and saints were to be removed from altars; andMein Kampf was to be placed on altars as "to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book"; and the Christian Cross was to be removed from all churches and replaced with the swastika. But Rosenberg was, in the end, a marginalised figure in the Hitler regime.^[193]

In 1929, Hitler selected Heinrich Himmler to head the NaziSchutzstaffel (SS) security forces. Himmler saw the main task of the SS as "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a 'Germanic' way of living" in order to prepare for the coming conflict between "humans andsubhumans":^[194] He set about making his SS the focus of a "cult of theTeutons".^[195] In 1937 Himmler wrote that it was "the mission of the SS to give the German people in the next half century the non-Christian ideological foundations on which to lead and shape their lives. This task does not consist solely in overcoming an ideological opponent but must be accompanied at every step by a positive impetus: in this case that means the reconstruction of the German heritage in the widest and most comprehensive sense."^[196]

Hitler viewed atheists as uneducated, and atheism as the state of the animals.^[72] He associated atheism withBolshevism, communism, and "Jewish materialism".^[197] Richard Overy cited Hitler's belief in racial biology as evidence of scientific views and atheism, but stated that Hitler was not a thorough atheist in that sense because of his theistic and spiritual ideologies:^[198]

Truth lay in natural science, and for Hitler that meant the truths of racial biology – natural selection, racial struggle, "identity of kind". Hitler was politically prudent enough not to trumpet his scientific views publicly, not least because he wanted to maintain the distinction between his own movement and the godlessness ofSoviet Communism. Nor was he a thorough atheist. His public utterances are peppered with references to "God" and "Spirit". For Hitler theeschatological truths that he found in his perception of the race represented the real "eternal will that rules the universe"; in the infinite value of the race and the struggle to sustain it men find what they might call God, an inner sense of the unity and purposiveness of nature and history ...Such views could be detected in the development of critical theology in Germany before the First World War, which suggested that God should be experienced as inner feeling rather than as external morality... What Hitler could not accept was that Christianity could offer anything other than false "ideas" to sustain its claim to moral certitude.

The historianGeoffrey Blainey wrote that Hitler courted and benefited from fear among German Christians of militant Communist atheism.^[188] "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."^[188] In early 1933, Hitler publicly defended National Socialism against charges that it was anti-Christian. Responding to accusations byEugen Bolz, the Catholic Centre PartyStaatspräsident ofWürttemberg, 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 aparty, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government.

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."^[201]

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 theatheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."^[202] In a speech delivered atKoblenz, August 26, 1934 Hitler said: "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, whileMarxism 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."^[203]

Hitler's choice of theswastika 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 to be the prototypical white invaders and the sign of the swastika to be a symbol of the Aryanmaster race.^[204] The theory was inspired by the German archaeologistGustaf Kossinna,^[205] who argued that the ancient Aryans were a superiorNordic race from northern Germany who expanded into the steppes of Eurasia, and from there into India, where they established theVedic religion.^[205]

Hitler's views on Islam are also a matter of controversy. On the one hand, Hitler privately demeaned ethnic groups he associated with Islam, notably Arabs, as racially inferior. On the other hand, he was also purported to make private and public statements expressing admiration for what was perceived to be the militaristic nature of Islam.^[206]

AmongEastern religions, Hitler described religious leaders such as "Confucius,Buddha, and Muhammad" as providers of "spiritual sustenance".^[207] In this context, Hitler's connection toAmin al-Husseini, who served as theGrand Mufti of Jerusalem until 1937– which included his asylum in 1941 – has been interpreted by some as a sign of respect, while others characterize it as a relationship born out of political expediency.^[208] Starting in 1933, al-Husseini, who had launched a campaign to both expel the British from the Middle East and Jews from both Egypt and Palestine, became impressed by theJewish boycott policies which the Nazis were enforcing in Germany, and hoped that he could use the anti-semitic views which many in the Arab region shared with Hitler's regime in order to forge a strategic military alliance that would help him eliminate the Jews from Palestine.^[209] Despite al-Husseini's attempts to reach out to Germany, Hitler refused to form such an alliance with al-Husseini, fearing that it would weaken relations with Britain.^[210][209] During the1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, Husseini strengthened ties with Germany, fostering the spread of Nazi customs in Palestinian strongholds.^[211] The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt followed suit. Hitler's influence grew in the region, with the Germany government approving financial and military support for Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood in 1937.^[212][209] At times, Hitler blamed Christianity for the emergence of Islam.^[213][214]

During a meeting with a delegation of distinguished Arab figures, Hitler learned of how Islam motivated theUmayyad Caliphate during theinvasion of Gaul. According to Albert Speer, referencingHitler's Table Talk, Hitler wished that the Caliphate had won theBattle of Tours against theFranks in 732: "TheMohammedan religion would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"^[215] "HadCharles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers – already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity! – then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so."^[216] According to Speer, Hitler believed that if Islam had taken root in central Europe, the Germanic people would have become the "heirs of that religion" and would have "stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire" as Islam, according to him suited the Germanic temperament.^[215] The remarks are problematic as they originate with Hitler's Table Talk. Historian Mikael Nilsson has noted that the Table Talks where Hitler’s comment came from were heavily distorted and revised, especially byFrancois Genoud, who also forgedThe Testament of Adolf Hitler and likely inserted pro-Arab phrases to reconcile his own support for ArabNationalism andTerrorism.^[217] It contrasts sharply with other comments he has known to have made referencing Islam. Many of which was kept by the stenographers of the German Foreign Ministry. In March 1944 Hitler stated that Germany was defending Europe as it had done in the past when it “broke the Arab wave at Poitiers”, and prevented south-eastern Europe from being “lost forever” in theGreat Turkish War.^[218] Hitler compared Islam toCommunism — and Christian Europe’s wars against Islamic empires to his war against theSoviet Union — on numerous occasions, such as in December 1942 (where he contrasted the "inner process" of Germany'sProtestant Reformation with the foreign world view and foreign races that the Islamic world and Soviet Union represented),^[219] January 1943,^[220] February 1943 (in a letter toBenito Mussolini),^[221] and a second time during March 1944, where he compared the alliance between the Soviet Union and theUnited Kingdom with theFranco-Ottoman Alliance against theHoly Roman Empire of the German Nation — saying that likeFrance the British were allying themselves with an “anti-European power”, and he referred to Islam as the empowering ideology of the anti-European world similar to Communism in his own day, and like Islam (that he said was built around a “Muslim race”), he claimed Communism flew under a second banner of “Pan-Slavism”.^[222] In the table talks themselves he gives approval to historical Christian powers fighting against Islamic empires at times, such as theHoly Roman Empire's conflict with theOttoman Empire in the Great Turkish War, which he referred to as the "glorious days ofPrince Eugene".^[223]

Hitler also referred to Germany’s Invasion of the Soviet Union as a "Crusade" ("Kreuzzug”,^[224] literally translated as “Cross-struggle”) naming it “Operation Barbarossa” after the crusading Holy Roman EmperorFrederick Barbarossa who set out on a campaign against the Muslim SultanSaladin.^[225] At a Nuremberg rally on September 14, 1936 he also mocked that a British journalist ignoring the threat of the Soviet Union to Europe was no different than a 15th-century “Humanist” in Vienna denying the threat of Islam to Europe during the Ottoman Empire’s expansion because “it divided the world into east and west”.^[226]

Despite Hitler's seeming admiration for Islam at times,^[227] and his willingness to work with some exiled Arab political leaders, he viewed Arab people as racial and social inferiors. Speer acknowledged that in private, Hitler regarded Arabs as an inferior race^[215] and that the relationship he had with various Muslim figures was more political than personal.^[215] Hitler was also quoted in the early war years stating, "We shall continue to make disturbances in the Far East and inArabia. Let us think as men and let us see in these peoples at best lacquered half-apes who are anxious to experience the lash."^[228][229] However, he is alleged to have also acknowledged positive aspects of Muslim culture, stating that the peoples of Islam would be closer to Germany than, for instance, France.^[230] This however comes from a Francois Genoud forgery.^[231]

Despite being a minority in Europe, Arabs faced Nazi persecution with racist incidents againstEgyptians in the 1930s.^{[232][233][234]} The Nazis targeted individuals of mixed Arab/North African heritage,sterilizing hundreds and imprisoning 450 Arab inmates inconcentration camps, including Auschwitz, where they were subjected to forced labor, particularlyAlgerians residing in France.^[235][236]

In spite of Hitler's conflicting opinions on Islam and Arabs, in a letter toPresident Roosevelt during the war,Winston Churchill pointed out that Muslim soldiers were providing "the main army elements on which we [the British] must rely for the immediate fighting."^[237] Many Muslims have sacrificed themselves to save Jews and fight the Nazis the like ofNoor Inayat Khan,Abdol-Hossein Sardari, andSi Kaddour Benghabrit the founder of theGreat Mosque of Paris.^[238]

National Socialist ideology developed a racial hierarchy which placed minority groups – most especially the Jews – assubhuman. The categorization was based on the Nazi conception of race, and not on religion, thus Slavs and Poles (who were overwhelmingly Christian) were also grouped as inferior to the so-called "Aryan" peoples. Hitler espoused a ruthless policy of "negativeeugenic selection", believing that world history consisted of a struggle for survival between races, in which the Jews plotted to undermine the Germans, and inferior groups like Slavs and defective individuals in the German gene pool, threatened the Aryan "master race".^[239] However, Hitler also had ideological objections to Judaism as a faith, and some of Hitler's antipathy towardsPauline Christianity (as opposed to his "Nordic Jesusism") flowed from its Jewish origins, as he saw (Pauline) Christianity as "indelibly Jewish in origin and character" and a "prototype of Bolshevism", which "violated the law ofnatural selection".^[240]

Writing for the public inMein Kampf, Hitler described the Jews as enemies of all civilization and as materialistic, unspiritual beings: "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."^[241] In the work, he also described a 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."^[241]

During negotiations for theConcordat between the Catholic Church and Germany in 1933, Hitler said to Bishop ofOsnabrückWilhelm 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 inghettos, 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".^[242]

Scholarly interest continues on the extent to which inherited, long-standing, cultural-religious notions ofanti-Judaism in Christian Europe contributed to Hitler's personal racial anti-Semitism, and what influence apseudo-scientific "primitive version ofsocial-Darwinism", mixed with 19th centuryimperialist notions, brought to bear on his psychology. While Hitler's views on these subjects have often been called "social Darwinist", Hitler's grasp of the subject has been argued to have been incomplete,^{[243][244][245][246]} there is little agreement among historians as to what the term may mean, or how it transformed from its 19th-century scientific origins, to become a central component of a genocidal political ideology in the 20th century.^[239]

According to historianLucy Dawidowicz, anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity, and the line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther to Hitler is "easy to draw". In herThe 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-Semitic writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history ofJudenhass which can be traced toHaman's advice toAhasuerus, although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in Germannationalism.^[247] Writers includingSusannah Heschel andJohn Toland, have drawn links between Hitler's Catholic background and his anti-Semitism.^[248] Catholic historianJosé M. Sánchez argues that the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust was explicitly rooted in Christianity:^[249]

There is, of course, a long tradition of anti-Semitism in all of the Christian churches. ... There is little question that the Holocaust had its origin in the centuries-long hostility felt by Christians against Jews. There werepogroms in the Middle Ages. Jews faced legal and religious restrictions right up to the twentieth century in many countries. The popes, when they were monarchs of the Papal States, established ghettoes^[249]

Laurence Rees in contrast, notes that there is little emphasis on Christianity inMein Kampf, which presents a view of the universe conspicuously at odds with traditional Christian notions long established in Germany. Hitler's vision is ordered instead around principles of struggle between weak and strong.^[41] Rees argues that Hitler's "bleak and violent vision" and visceral hatred of the Jews had been influenced by sources outside the Christian tradition. The notion of life as struggle Hitler drew from social Darwinism, the notion of the superiority of the "Aryan race" he drew fromArthur de Gobineau'sThe Inequality of the Human Races; from events following Russia's surrender in World War One when Germany seized agricultural lands in the East he formed the idea of colonising the Soviet Union; and fromAlfred Rosenberg he took the idea of a link between Judaism and Bolshevism, writes Rees.^[250]

Richard J. Evans notes that Hitler "used his own version of the language of social Darwinism as a central element in the discursive practice of extermination...", and the language of Social Darwinism, in its Nazi variant, helped to remove all restraint from the directors of the "terroristic and exterminatory" policies of the regime, by "persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science and nature".^[251] Fest considers that Hitler simplified de Gobineau's elaborate ideas ofstruggle for survival among the different races, from which the Aryan race, guided by providence, was supposed to be the torchbearers of civilization.^[252]

In his rhetoric^[when?] Hitler fed on the old accusation ofJewish deicide. It has been speculated that Christian anti-Judaism influenced Hitler's ideas, especially such works asMartin Luther's essayOn the Jews and Their Lies^[253] and the writings ofPaul de Lagarde.^{[citation needed]} Others disagree with this view. Shirer argues that Luther's essay was influential.^[253] This view was expounded byLucy Dawidowicz. (Dawidowicz 1986, p. 23) Uwe Siemon-Netto disputes this conclusion (Siemon-Netto 1995, pp. 17–20). Hitler biographer Toland writes that in 1941 Hitler was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite his detestation of its hierarchy" and adhered to "its teaching that theJew 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."^[248]

In the aftermath of World War II, a Soviet major whoasserted Hitler's survival speculated that "It is possible that the man wishes to surround himself with the legend of Jesus Christ," implying that the escaped dictator would ape a main tenet of Christianity, theresurrection of Jesus.^[254]

Smaller religious minorities faced harsher repression, with theGerman Jews expelled for extermination on the grounds ofNazi racial theories.Jehovah's Witnesses wereruthlessly persecuted for refusing bothmilitary service and allegiance to Hitler's movement.

Nazi ideology could not accept an autonomous establishment whose legitimacy did not spring from the government. It desired the subordination of church to state.^[255] Nevertheless, Nazi Germany was not formally atheist, and other than for Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses, religious observance was permitted.^[256]Julian Baggini wrote that Hitler's Germany was not a "straightforwardly atheist state", but one which "sacralized" notions of blood and nation.^[257]

Hitler feared the results of overt attacks on the deep-rooted German churches, as around two thirds of Germans were Protestant and most of the rest were Roman Catholic.^[258] German conservative elements, such as the officer corps of the army, opposed Nazi efforts against the churches, and Hitler needed to show caution.^{[259][260][261][188]} The Hitler regime responded to the ideological challenge of Christian morality using political repression and persecution and by challenging Christian teachings through education and propaganda.^[136] Some scholars, such asRichard Steigmann-Gall, argue that while there were anti-Christian Nazis, they did not represent the movement's position.^[262]

Hitler possessed radical instincts in relation to the Nazi conflict with the Churches, and though he occasionally spoke of wanting to delay a struggle and was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism out of political considerations, Kershaw considers that his "own inflammatory comments gave his immediate underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat in the 'Church Struggle'".^[263]

According to Overy, Hitler "wanted to neutralise any political threat from organised religion ... The first step was to reach agreement with the Roman Catholic Church, whose theology was not susceptible to the new nationalist trends". Hitler dispatched the Catholic conservativeFranz von Papen to negotiate aConcordat with the Vatican. He obtained an agreement that clergy would refrain from politics, in return for guarantees of Church rights.^[264][24] Hitler was delighted, and received the congratulations of German Catholic leaders.^[265] However, violations of the treaty began almost as soon as it was signed.^[266][267] Hitler promulgated thesterilization 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".^[268] Catholic publications were shut down. TheGestapo began to violate the sanctity of theconfessional.^[269][263]

As Hitler's genocidal plans began to manifest, Catholic priests and bishops held no public protests. Instead, they prayed in support of Germany's cause, seeking to show that their support for Hitler was undiminished.^[270]

By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with Hitler, had become highly disillusioned andPope Pius XI issued theMit brennender Sorge encyclical – accusing Germany of violations of the Concordat and of sowing the tares of "open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church", and denounced the pagan myth of "blood and soil".^[269] Hitler's invasion of the predominantly Catholic Poland in 1939 ignited theSecond World War. Kershaw 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".^[26]

On Protestantism, Hitler proposed to unite Germany's 28 Protestant churches into oneReich Church, which was the German Evangelical Church. Hitler stated to Albert Speer, "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as inEngland."^[271] Steigmann-Gall wrote that Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism, as Protestantism was more liable to reinterpretation and non-traditional readings, more receptive to "positive Christianity", and because some of its liberal branches had held similar views.^[272][273] Hitler's interest was opportunistic: "From Hitler's point of view, a national church was of interest purely from a point of view of control and manipulation", wrote Kershaw.^[274] He installed his friendLudwig Müller as leader of the movement and sought to establish a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic unified Reich Church.^[275] Resistance quickly arose in the form of thePastors' Emergency League, led byMartin Niemöller, which had 40% of clergy by 1934 and founded theConfessing Church, from which some clergymen opposed the Nazi regime.^[276]

WhenGerman Christians called for rejection of the Bible as "Jewish superstition" and of the Christian calling to "love thy neighbour", the movement lost still further support. Hitler's move to have Müller elected Bishop failed – despite intimidation. He then abandoned his efforts to unite the Protestant churches, appointedHanns Kerrl as Minister for Church Affairs in December 1934, and distanced himself permanently from the so-called "German Christians".^[264][277] According to Steigmann-Gall, he regretted that "the churches had failed to back him and his movement as he had hoped".^[278] A relative moderate, Kerrl initially had some success 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". Kerrl said Nazi positive Christianity rejected theApostles' Creed and Divinity of Christ as the basis of Christianity, and called Hitler the herald of a new revelation.^[162] Hitler had Niemöller sent to the concentration camps in 1938, where he remained until war's end.^[279] Hitler largely ignored Kerrl, who died in office in 1941 and was not replaced.

From the mid 1930s, the Nazi movement came increasingly to be led by vehement anti-Christians, whom Hitler appointed to key positions.^{[18][148][280]} As with the "Jewish question", the radicals pushed the Church struggle forward, especially in Catholic areas, so that by the winter of 1935–1936 there was growing dissatisfaction with the Nazis in those areas.^[281] Kershaw wrote that in early 1937, Hitler again told his inner circle that though he "did not want a 'Church struggle' at this juncture", he expected "the great world struggle in a few years' time". Nevertheless, wrote Kershaw, Hitler's impatience with the churches "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". Priests were frequently denounced, arrested and sent to concentration camps.^[282] AtDachau, the regime established a dedicatedClergy Barracks for church dissidents.^[283][284] The Confessing Church seminary was banned. Its leaders, likeDietrich Bonhoeffer, were arrested. Implicated in the1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he was later executed.^[285]

Overy wrote that Christianity was ultimately as incompatible with Nazism as it was with Soviet Communism and that "Hitler expected the end of the disease of Christianity to come about by itself once the falsehoods were self-evident. During the war he reflected that in the long run 'National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together'."^[279] Other historians have written of a more active intent on the part of Hitler and the Nazi leadership.^[29] Kershaw noted that Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of Eastern Europe saw no place for Christian churches and that Goebbels wrote from conversations with Hitler that there was an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view which would need settling after the war.^[286] Speer noted in his memoir that churches were not to receive building sites inHitler's new Berlin.^[287] Bullock wrote "once the war was over, Hitler promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches".^[30] The Nazi plan was to "de-Christianise Germany after thefinal victory", writes historian of German ResistanceAnton Gill.^[288] "By the latter part of the decade of the thirties church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion. Since the overwhelming majority of Germans were either Catholic or Protestant this goal had to be a long-term rather than a short-term Nazi objective", wroteMichael Phayer.^[289]

In its brief of evidence for theNuremberg trials concerning the Nazi persecution of the churches, the AmericanOffice of Strategic Services (a forerunner to the CIA) compiled a report entitled "The Nazi Master Plan" which examined the Nazi persecution of the churches and found that the Hitler regime had a plan to subvert and destroy German Christianity.^{[290][291][292]} The investigator wrote:

"National Socialism was by its very nature hostile to Christianity and the Christian churches ... Conflict was inevitable ... Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation by a complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion tailored to fit the needs of National Socialist policy. This radically anti-Christian position is most significantly presented in Alfred Rosenberg'sMyth of the Twentieth Century...generally regarded afterMein Kampf as the most authoritative statement of National Socialist ideology. ... Thus in a declaration of 5 November 1934,Baldur von Schirach, theGerman youth leader declared... 'the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognised as a purpose of the National Socialist movement'. Considerations of expediency made it impossible, however to adopt this radical anti-Christian policy officially. Thus the policy actually adopted was to reduce the influence of the Christian churches as far as possible through use of every available means, without provoking the difficulties of an open war of extermination."

According to Kershaw, in 1937 Goebbels noted Hitler was becoming more radical on the 'Church Question', and indicated that, though current political circumstances required waiting, his long-term plan was to eventually dissolve the Reich concordat with Rome, detach the church entirely from the state and turn the entire force of the party to 'the destruction of the clerics', and end thePeace of Westphalia in a 'great world showdown'.^[293] In 1941, when BishopClemens August Graf von Galen protested against Nazi Euthanasia and seizures of church properties, although Hitler's sympathies lay with the radicals who wanted von Galen dead and church properties seized, he calculated that this would turn Catholic areas still further against the regime. "Only the need for peace in relation with the churches to avoid deteriorating morale on the home front determined his stance", wrote Kershaw, "Events in theWarthegau (where by 1941 94% of churches and chapels in the Posen-Gnesen diocese were closed, 11% of the clergy were murdered, and most of the remainder thrust into prisons and concentration camps) showed the face of the future."^[294]

Explaining his stance towards future of Christianity and other religions under Nazi rule in a series of private conversations in 1941, Hitler states:

Christianity is a rebellion againstnatural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure... it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with theChurches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. 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."

The National Socialist movement was not formally atheist, and generally allowed religious observance.^[256]Julian Baggini wrote that Hitler's Germany was not a "straightforwardly atheist state", but one which "sacrilized" notions of blood and nation.^[257] On October 13, 1933, Deputy FührerRudolf Hess issued a decree stating: "No National Socialist may suffer any detriment on the ground that he does not profess any particular faith or confession or on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all."^[296] However, "The aggressive spread of atheism in the Soviet Union alarmed many German Christians", wroteGeoffrey Blainey, and Hitler saw Christianity as a "temporary ally" against Bolshevism, and courted and benefited from fear among German Christians of militant Communist atheism.^[188] In that same year the regime banned most atheistic andfreethinking groups in Germany – other than those that supported the Nazis.^[297][298]

When criticised for anti-Christian sentiments in February 1933, Hitler claimed that it was the Nazis not the Catholic Centre Party that had taken on atheist politics.^[200] When negotiating the concordat with the Catholic Church, Hitler said he supported religious education in schools.^[163] Once in office however, Hitler then pursued a policy of suppression of denominational schools and church youth organizations.^[299] Clergymen teachers were removed from virtually all state schools.^[164] By 1939 all denominational schools had been disbanded or converted to public facilities.^[166] In that year, Evans notes, some 95% of Germans still called themselves Protestant or Catholic, while only 3.5% "Deist" (gottgläubig) and 1.5% atheist. Most in these latter categories were "convinced Nazis who had left their Church at the behest of the Party, which had been trying since the mid 1930s to reduce the influence of Christianity in society".^[300]

John Conway notes that the majority of the three million Nazi Party members continued to pay their church taxes and register as either Roman Catholic orProtestant Christians, "despite all Rosenberg's efforts."^[301] Aggressive anti-Church radicals like Joseph Goebbels andMartin Bormann saw thekirchenkampf campaign against the Churches as a priority concern, and anti-church andanticlerical sentiments were strong among grassroots party activists.^[302] From 1938, writes Overy, "Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery and a prominent party atheist, took a leading role in trying to sever all state financial support for the churches, and to limit their legal status and activities, but the need to mobilise church support for the war effort from September 1939 led, as it did in the Soviet Union after 1941, to a limited political truce between church and state."^[279] Speer considered Bormann to be the driving force behind the regime's campaign against the churches and thought that Hitler approved of his aims, but wanted to "postpone this problem to a more favourable time":^[56]

George Mosse wrote of Bormann's beliefs:^[303]

[He believed that] God is present, but as a world-force which presides over the laws of life which the Nazis alone have understood. This non-Christian theism, tied to Nordic blood, was current in Germany long before Bormann wrote down his own thoughts on the matter. It must now be restored, and the catastrophic mistakes of the past centuries, which had put the power of the state into the hands of the Church, must be avoided. The Gauleiters are advised to conquer the influence of the Christian Churches by keeping them divided, encouraging particularism among them...

Jehovah's Witnesses numbered 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 andpersecuted. About 6,000 were sent to the concentration camps.^[304]

Anti-Judaism as well as racial anti-Semitism were central parts of Hitler's philosophy. His regime perpetrated theFinal Solution, an effort to exterminate the Jews, which resulted in a genocide estimated by historians to have killed between 4,204,000 and 7,000,000 Jews.^[305] Hitler's ideology presented the Jews as a biological challenge to the "purity" of German blood.

Through Minister of Ecclesiastical AffairsHanns Kerrl (d. 1941), the Nazi Party endorsed Hitler as effectively replacing Jesus in its effort to elevate state over church.[306]^[307] Kerrl stated before some church leaders in 1937 that "Positive Christianityis National Socialism ... True Christianity is represented by the party ... the Führer is the herald of a new revelation."^[162]

• Arab and Muslim rescue efforts during the Holocaust
• Rescue of Jews by Catholics during the Holocaust
• Catholic resistance to Nazi Germany
• Gottgläubig
• Nazi occultism
• Odinism
• Religious affiliations of chancellors of Germany

Notes

Bibliography

Wikiquote has quotations related toReligious views of Adolf Hitler.

• Mein Kampf; by Adolf Hitler
• Mein Kampf; by Adolf Hitler (James Vincent Murphy's translation, published by Hurst and Blackett in 1939)
• Dunning, Brian (11 January 2022)."Skeptoid #814: Nazis and the Occult".Skeptoid. Retrieved14 May 2022.

• Adolf Hitler
• Anti-Catholicism in Germany
• Anti-Christian sentiment in Germany
• Anti-Judaism
• Occultism in Nazism
• Religion in Nazi Germany
• Religious views by individual

• Pages with missing ISBNs
• Webarchive template wayback links
• CS1 maint: location
• CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown
• CS1 maint: location missing publisher
• All articles with dead external links
• Articles with dead external links from August 2023
• Articles with permanently dead external links
• CS1: long volume value
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Wikipedia articles needing clarification from October 2024
• Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from October 2024
• Articles containing German-language text
• All articles with vague or ambiguous time
• Vague or ambiguous time from April 2017
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from April 2017