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Views during childhood and youth

Adolf Hitler was brought up in his family's religion by his Roman Catholic parents. According to historian Bradley F. Smith, Hitler's father, though nominally a Catholic, was a freethinker, while his mother was a practising Catholic. According to historian Michael Rissmann young Adolf was influenced in school by Pan-Germanism and darwinism and began to reject the Church and Catholicism, protesting against being confirmed by the bishop. A boyhood friend reports that after Hitler had left home, he never attended Mass or received the Sacraments.

Views as an adult

Hitler's religious beliefs can be gathered from his public and private statements; they present a discrepant picture and some attributed private statements remain disputed.

Public statements

In public statements, Hitler frequently spoke positively about the Christian heritage of German culture and his belief in Christ, possibly to appeal to the popular religious sentiment. For example, on March 23, 1933, he addressed the Reichstag: "The National Government regards the two Christian confessions (i.e. Catholicism and Protestantism) as factors essential to the soul of the German people. ... We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of the German people." At one point he described his religious status: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." Hitler never ended his church membership, but according to Albert Speer, "he had no real attachment to it."

Private statements

Hitler’s private statements are more mixed. There are negative statements about Christianity reported by Hitler’s intimates, Goebbels, Speer, and Bormann. Joseph Goebbels, for example, notes in a diary entry in 1939: "The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay." Albert Speer reports a similar statement: “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"

Positive Christianity

In contrast to other Nazi leaders, Hitler did not adhere to esoteric ideas, occultism, or neo-paganism, and even ridiculed such beliefs in private. Drawing on Higher Criticism and some branches of theologically liberal Protestantism, Hitler advocated what he termed Positive Christianity, purged of everything that he found objectionable. Hitler never directed his attacks on Jesus himself, but viewed traditional Christianity as a corruption of the original ideas of Jesus, whom Hitler regarded as an Aryan opponent of the Jews. In Mein Kampf he 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." Hitler rejected the idea of Jesus' redemptive suffering, stating in 1927: "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 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."

Hitler's god and racism

Hitler did not believe in a "remote, rationalist divinity" but in an "active deity," which he frequently referred to as "Creator" or "Providence". In Hitler's belief God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival along social darwinist lines. The "Aryan race", supposedly the bearer of civilisation, is allocated a special place:

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

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

Hitler and Protestantism

As Protestantism was more open to such reinterpretations and some branches had similar views, Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism. His views were supported by the German Christians movement, but rejected by the Confessing Church. According to Steigmann-Gall, Hitler regretted that "the churches had failed to back him and his movement as he had hoped;" and he stated according to Albert Speer: "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England."

Hitler and Catholic ritual

In his childhood, Hitler admired the pomp of Catholic ritual and the hierarchical organisation of the clergy. Later, he drew on these elements, organizing his party along hierarchical lines and including liturgical forms into events or using phraseology taken from hymns. Because of these liturgical elements, Hitler's Messiah-like status and the ideology's all-encompassing nature, the Nazi movement is sometimes termed a "political religion". Hitler himself, however, strongly rejected the idea that Nazism was in any way a religion.

The argument that Christianity in some way directly inclined Hitler to anti-Semitic notions can be challenged via reference to his Mein Kampf in which Hitler literally writes of an upbringing in which no particluar anti-Semitic prejudice prevailed - in Linz Hitler wrote of no apparent anti-Semitism either in his family unit nor being expressed by the traditional Church of his childhood. It has been commented on by D. Cameron Watt in his preface to the Ralph Mannheim translation of the book that Hitler's views as intricately detailed in Mein Kampf changed very little from its writing through to the period of his defeat in 1945, some 20 years later.

Hitler writes,

"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 by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created."

(Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim translation, p.413). The significance of this passage is powerful indeed - a declaration that the eventual destruction of traditional Christianity was to be a further goal of Hitler's ideology.

Hitler already had plans made ready in which a detailed systematical approach towards the Roman Catholic Church was laid out. The Roman Catholic Church was supposed to "eat from the hands of the government." As a first step Hitler wanted to force the German Catholics to abolish priestly celibacy and make them accept a nationalisation of all church property, as had happened in France in 1905. Then, after the "Final Victory" of National Socialism, Hitler wanted to dissolve all monastic orders, religious congregations and wanted to forbid even the smallest influence of the Catholic Church upon the education of children and adults. He wanted to reduce vocations to the priesthood by forbidding seminaries to receive applicants before their 25th birthdays, hoping that these men would marry beforehand, during the time (18 - 25 years) in which they were obliged to work in military or labour service. Along with this process, the Church's sacraments would have to be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life. Hitler wanted to slowly dismantle the institutions of the Catholic Church and fit the Church itself into a new National Socialist German state religion, because Hitler still firmly believed, that religion and believe in God was something "the simple people need." But because the "laws of evolution" - upon which a new religion would have to be founded - were not yet precisely researched, according to Hitler, he rejected to decree religious changes and laws in a hurry, preferring instead to wait after the final victory. As Hitler and Goebbels did not want to create a third front of Catholics against their regime in Germany itself, they refrained from bringing into practice their radical plans against the Catholic Church. Nevertheless in his diary Goebbels openly wrote about the "traitors of the Black International who again stabbed our glorious government in the back by their criticism", by which he meant the relucant or actively resisting Catholic clergymen who wore black cassocks.

References

1. "Closely related to his support of education was his tolerant skepticism concerning religion. He looked upon religion as a series of conventions and as a crutch for human weakness, but, like most of his neighbors, he insisted that the women of his household fulfill all religious obligations. He restricted his own participation to donning his uniform to take his proper place in festivals and processions. As he grew older Alois shifted from relative passivity in his attitude toward the power and influence of the institutional Church to a firm opposition to "clericalism," especially when the position of the Church came into conflict with his views on education." - Bradley F. Smith: Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood and Youth Stanford/California, 1967 p.27
2. Historian Bradley F. Smith: "Alois insisted she attend regularly as an expression of his belief that the woman's place was in the kitchen and in church....Happily, Klara really enjoyed attending services and was completely devoted to the faith and teachings of Catholicism, so her husband's requirements worked to her advantage. "Bradley F. Smith: Adolf Hitler: His Family, Childhood and Youth Stanford/California, 1967 p.42
3. Michael Rissmann, Hitlers Gott. Vorsehungsglaube und Sendungsbewußtsein des deutschen Diktators, Zürich München: Pendo, 2001, pp. 94-96 ISBN 3858424218. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (sections 2041–2043) defines Mass attendance on Sundays and Holy Days as the "First Precept of the Church", an absolute minimum requirement.
4. quoted by Dennis Barton..
5. cited by John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, New York: Anchor Publishing, 1992, p. 507 ISBN 0385420536.
6. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 96
7. The collection called Table Talk is questioned by some; while most historians consider it a useful source, they do not regard it as wholly reliable. Ian Kershaw makes clear the questionable nature of Table Talk as a historically valid source; see his Hitler 1889-1936 Hubris London, 1998, xiv. Richard Carrier goes further contending that certain portions of Table Talk, especially those regarding Hitler's alleged hatred of Christianity, are outright inventions: see his "Hitler's Table Talk, Troubling Finds" German Studies Review26:3 (forthcoming 2003). However, although Kershaw recommends treating the work with caution, he does not suggest dispensing with it altogether. (The Holy Reich, p. 253)
8. Steigmann-Gall, pp. 252-253; Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Orion Pub., 1997 ISBN 1857992180, p. 96.
9. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich p.255
10. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 257, 260
11. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich p. 260
12. Cited in Norman H. Baynes, The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1, New York: Oxford University Press, 1942, pp. 19-20 ISBN 0598758933. In a speech delivered on 12 April 1922, Munich
13. Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 26
14. Cite error: The named reference Gall was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
15. Steigmann-Gall, p.84
16. Steigmann-Gall, p.260
17. Michael Rissmann, p. 96.
18. Especially Eric Voegelin: in Political Religions, (Edward Mellen Press, 1986) ISBN 0889467676, advocated such a classification. Discussion at Rissmann, p. 191-197.
19. All the quotes of this alinea were taken from two historical works: HÜRTEN, H. `Endlösung` für den Katholizismus? Das nationalsozialistische Regime und seine Zukunftspläne gegenüber der Kirche, in: Stimmen der Zeit, 203 (1985) 534-546. NATTER, B. Hitlers Tafelgesprekken 1941-1944, Antwerpen and Amsterdam, 2005.

External links

• A review of Richard Steigmann-Gall's book on Nazism, Hitler, and Christianity.

• Adolf Hitler