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Religious views of Adolf Hitler

See also: Religion in Nazi Germany and Religious aspects of Nazism
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The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi 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 towards traditional Christian ideals, but later abandoned them.[1][2] Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations.[3][4] He also criticized 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 a free-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church.[6][7] In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived.[8] According to John 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 that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God ..." Michael Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, he never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home at 18 years old.[10]

In a speech in 1932, Hitler declared himself "not a Catholic and not a Protestant, but a German Christian".[11] The German Christians were a Protestant group that supported Nazi ideology.[12] Both Hitler and the Nazi Party promoted "nondenominational" positive Christianity,[13][14] a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament.[15][16] In one widely quoted remark, Hitler described Jesus as an "Aryan fighter" who struggled against "the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees"[17] and Jewish materialism.[18] Hitler spoke often of Protestantism[19] and Lutheranism,[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 joint Protestant Reich Church (but this was resisted by the Confessing Church), and moved early to eliminate political Catholicism.[24] Even though Nazi leadership was excommunicated from the Catholic Church,[25] Hitler agreed to the Reich concordat with the Vatican, but then routinely ignored it, and permitted persecutions 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 enter Valhalla[27] but he later stated that it would be foolish to re-establish the worship of Odin (or Wotan) within Germanic paganism.[28] Most historians argue he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons and that his intentions were to eventually eliminate Christianity in Germany, or at least reform it to suit a Nazi outlook.[29]

  1. ^ Steigmann-Gall 2003, p. 265: "During the Kampfzeit and into the first years of the Third Reich, he maintained – both publicly and privately – that the movement bore some fundamental relationship to Christianity, as witnessed by his repeated intonations of positive Christianity and his repeated reference to the relevance, even priority, of Christian social ideas to his own movement. Then we see an apparent total rejection of those same ideas near the end."
  2. ^ Hastings, Derek (2011). Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199843459. While there is little doubt that Hitler was a staunch opponent of Christianity throughout the duration of the Third Reich, I would caution against viewing Hitler's religious identity in static terms. Rather, it seems to me that Hitler's religious stance underwent a significant evolution over time, particularly in an external-historical sense but quite possibly internally as well. Before the Beerhall Putsch, Hitler made public statements of devotion to his "Lord and Savior" that would never have been made – either publicly or privately – at a later date. […] At the same time, a shift is already visible in the pages of Mein Kampf away from energetic and open advocacy to a much more subdued tolerance of Christianity, a respect for the institutional strength of the Catholic Church, and a practical desire to avoid interconfessional squabbles within the movement.
  3. ^ *Bullock 1991, p. 219: "Hitler had been brought up a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church... [but] to its teachings he showed only the sharpest hostility... he detested [Christianity]'s ethics in particular"
    • Ian Kershaw; Hitler: A Biography; Norton; 2008 ed; pp. 295–297: "In early 1937 [Hitler] 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'"
    • Richard J. Evans; The Third Reich at War; Penguin Press; New York 2009, p. 547: Evans wrote that Hitler believed Germany could not tolerate the intervention of foreign influences such as the Pope and "Priests, he said, were 'black bugs', 'abortions in black cassocks'". Evans noted that Hitler saw Christianity as "indelibly Jewish in origin and character" and a "prototype of Bolshevism", which "violated the law of natural selection".
    • Richard Overy: The Dictators Hitler's Germany Stalin's Russia; Allen Lane/Penguin; 2004. p. 281: "[Hitler's] few private remarks on Christianity betray a profound contempt and indifference".
    • A. N. Wilson; Hitler a Short Biography; Harper Press; 2012, p. 71.: "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!'"
    • Laurence Rees; The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler; Ebury Press; 2012; p. 135.; "There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church"
    • Derek Hastings (2010). Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 181 : Hastings considers it plausible that Hitler was a 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."
    • Joseph Goebbels (Fred Taylor Translation); The Goebbels Diaries 1939–41; Hamish Hamilton Ltd; London; 1982; ISBN 0241108934 : 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".
    • Albert Speer; Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs; Translation by Richard and Clara Winston; Macmillan; New York; 1970; p. 123: "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's Table Talk: "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."
  4. ^ "Was Hitler religious? The Nazi leader hated Christianity as well as Judaism". The Washington Post. 2019-04-20. Retrieved 2022-06-11.
  5. ^ Weikart, Richard (2016). Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. unpaginated. ISBN 978-1621575511. It's true that Hitler's public statements opposing atheism should not be given too much weight, since they obviously served Hitler's political purposes to tar political opponents. However, in his private monologues, he likewise rejected atheism, providing further evidence that this was indeed his personal conviction. In July 1941, he told his colleagues that humans do not really know where the laws of nature come from. He continued, "Thus people discovered the wonderful concept of the Almighty, whose rule they venerate. We do not want to train people in atheism." He then maintained that every person has a consciousness of what we call God. This God was apparently not the Christian God preached in the churches, however, since Hitler continued, "In the long run National Socialism and the church cannot continue to exist together." The monologue confirms that Hitler rejected atheism, but it also underscores the vagueness of his conception of God. [...] While confessing faith in an omnipotent being of some sort, however, Hitler denied we could know anything about it. [...] Despite his suggestion that God is inscrutable and unfathomable, Hitler did sometimes claim to know something about the workings of Providence. [...] Perhaps even more significantly, he had complete faith that Providence had chosen him to lead the German people to greatness.
  6. ^ Brendan Simms (2019). Hitler: A Global Biography. Basic Books. pp. 21–. ISBN 978-1541618206.
  7. ^ "Taufregister 03 – 103/03; Braunau am Inn; Oberösterreich: Rk. Diözese Linz; Österreich; Matricula Online". Matricula Online. 1889-04-22. Retrieved 2021-10-07.
  8. ^ Bullock (1991), p.26
  9. ^ John Toland; Hitler; Wordsworth Editions; 1997 Edn; p. 18
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference Michael Rissmann 2001, pp. 94–96 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Rossol, Nadine; Ziemann, Benjamin (6 January 2022). The Oxford Handbook of the Weimar Republic. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0198845775.
  12. ^ Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Univ of North Carolina Press. 9 November 2000. ISBN 978-0807860342.
  13. ^ Hitler's Priests: Catholic Clergy and National Socialism. Cornell University Press. 14 April 2008. ISBN 978-1501757150.
  14. ^ from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1969). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922 – August 1939. 1. New York: Howard Fertig. p. 402.
  15. ^ William L. Shirer; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; Secker & Warburg; London; 1990, p. 234.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference Christian Church 1960 pp. 235 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Schramm, Percy Ernst (1978) "The Anatomy of a Dictator" in Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader. Detwiler, Donald S., ed. Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Kreiger Publishing Company. pp. 88–91. ISBN 089874962X; originally published as the introduction to Picker, Henry (1963) Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquarter ("Hitler's Table Talk")
  18. ^ Steigmann-Gall 2003, pp. 13–50, 252.
  19. ^ Steigmann-Gall 2003, p. 347.
  20. ^ Adolf Hitler; His Family, Childhood, and Youth. Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace. 1967. ISBN 978-0817916220.
  21. ^ Speer, Albert (1997). Inside the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster. p. 95. ISBN 978-0684829494.
  22. ^ Wood, Barry (2020). Invented History, Fabricated Power: The Narrative Shaping of Civilization and Culture. London: Anthem Press. p. 342. ISBN 978-1785274763.
  23. ^ Steigmann-Gall 2003, p. 256.
  24. ^ Ian Kershaw; Hitler a Biography; 2008 Edn; W. W. Norton & Company; London; p. 290.
  25. ^ Lindsay, Deborah G. (2020). Behind Barbed Wire: A History of Concentration Camps from the Reconcentrados to the Nazi System 1896–1945. Universal-Publishers. p. 234. ISBN 978-1627342988.
  26. ^ Ian Kershaw. Hitler a Biography; 2008 Edition; W.W. Norton & Company; London p. 661. [ISBN missing]
  27. ^ Clifford, Alexander (December 16, 2021). Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Hitler: Germany's Generals and the Rise of the Nazis. Pen and Sword Military. ISBN 9781526783349 – via Google Books.
  28. ^ Hitler, Adolf (October 18, 2013). Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944: Secret Conversations. Enigma Books. ISBN 9781929631667 – via Google Books.
  29. ^ Cite error: The named reference BundleEradicate was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

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