Category: Hitler’s Religion (book)

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American racial right Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

A brief reflection on Weikart’s book

It doesn’t matter that Richard Weikart is a Christian. I find his scholarship impeccable. He did us a great service even if that was never his intention because he forces those white nationalist sympathisers of National Socialism to take sides.

A considerable percentage of these sympathisers in America are Christians. The facts about Hitler’s biography that Weikart unearthed will put them at a crossroads: either they reject Judeo-Christianity, which Hitler called ‘pestilence’, or they repudiate the Führer.

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Hitler's Religion (book) Nature Religion Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Conclusion

In mid-January of 1940, Hitler was discussing with his colleagues a rather frequent topic of his conversations and monologues: the church. After he sarcastically imitated Niemöller, the Confessing Church leader who was incarcerated in a concentration camp, someone in his entourage indicated to him that posterity might not be able to figure out what Hitler’s own religious views were, because he never openly stated his beliefs. The person who brought this to Hitler’s attention had clearly noticed the discrepancy between his private expressions of intense antipathy to Christianity and his public religious image. Since many in Hitler’s entourage were also intensely anti-Christian, perhaps they were trying to provoke him to state his personal religious views publicly. In any case, this observation about the inscrutability of Hitler’s religious views still has merit today—even though we have far more information about Hitler available to us than most of his contemporaries had.

That, of course, does not mean everyone draws the same conclusion. As we have seen, some people today interpret Hitler as an atheist, while others insist he was a Christian…

Interestingly, when Hitler was confronted in January 1940 with the observation that people might not know where he stood religiously, he suggested that, on the contrary, it should not be difficult for people to figure it out. After all, he asserted, he had never allowed any clergy to participate in his party meetings or even in funerals for party comrades. He continued, “The Christian-Jewish pestilence is surely approaching its end now…”

Hitler clearly thought that anyone should be able to figure out that he was not a Christian. Nonetheless, Rosenberg reported in his diary later that year that Hitler had determined that he should divulge his negative views about Christianity in his last testament “so that no doubt about his position can surface. As head of state he naturally held back—but nevertheless after the war clear consequences will follow.” Many times, Hitler told his colleagues that he would reckon with Christianity after the successful conclusion of the war…

So, what did Hitler not believe? He continually rejected Christianity, calling it a Jewish plot to undermine the heroic ideals of the (Aryan-dominated) Roman Empire. He did not accept the deity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, or indeed any of the miracles of Jesus. There is no evidence that he believed in a triune God. Though he esteemed Jesus as an Aryan fighter against Jewish materialism who was martyred for his anti-Jewish stance, he did not ascribe to Jesus’s death any significance in human salvation. Indeed, he did not believe in salvation at all in the Christian sense of the term, because he denied a personal afterlife. Despite his public invocations to God, Hitler also did not believe in the efficacy of prayer. His God responded to people and judged them according to their works, not their words. Although he spurned Christianity, this did not lead him to disbelieve in every form of deity, however. He overtly rejected atheism, associating it with “Jewish-Bolshevism.” Further, he explicitly condemned mysticism, occultism, and neo-paganism. Thus, it is evident Hitler was neither a Christian, atheist, occultist, nor neo-paganist.

While this narrows the range of religious options slightly, it still leaves us with agnosticism, pantheism, panentheism, deism, and non-Christian theism. A reasonable case could be made for more than one of these options. In order solve this puzzle, however, one must not only examine the full panoply of Hitler’s religious statements but also decipher how to weigh those statements. Are his private statements more revealing of his true convictions than his public speeches? Probably, but even his private statements must be used cautiously. Are his books a better indication of his personal beliefs than his speeches? This is likely, because he seemed to be more systematic in explaining his worldview in Mein Kampf and in his Second Book. However, they also served propaganda purposes and must be used carefully as well…

One problem is that Hitler often portrayed God as an impersonal force, yet sometimes he implied God did take a personal interest in humanity, or at least in the German people’s destiny. Though he usually insisted that God does not intervene in the natural cause-and-effect relationships in the universe, at times he seemed to ascribe a role to Providence in history…

One of the reasons that I do not think Hitler was a theist is because he did not seem to think God could contravene the laws of nature. Hitler often called the laws of nature eternal and inviolable, thus embracing determinism. He interpreted history as a course of events determined by the racial composition of people, not by their religion or other cultural factors. The way to understand humanity and history, according to Hitler, was to study the laws of nature. He considered science, not religious revelation, the most reliable path to knowledge. What Hitler thought science revealed was that races are unequal and locked in an ineluctable struggle for existence, which would determine the future destiny of humanity…

Evil or sin, in Hitler’s opinion, was anything that produced biological degeneration. Thus, Hitler thought he was operating in complete harmony with God’s will by sterilizing people with disabilities and forbidding the intermarriage of Germans and Jews. Killing the weak to make way for the strong was part of the divine plan revealed in nature, in Hitler’s view. Thus, even murdering disabled Germans, launching expansionist wars to wrest territory from allegedly inferior races, and murdering millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, Slavs, and others defined as subhumans, was not only morally permissible but also obedience to the voice of God. After all, that was how nature operated, producing superabundantly and then destroying most of the progeny in the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler often reminded his fellow Germans that even if this seemed ruthless, it was actually wise. In any case, he warned that they could not moralize about it, because humans were completely subject to the laws of nature.

In the end, while recognizing that Hitler’s position was somewhat muddled, it seems evident his religion was closest to pantheism. He often deified nature, calling it eternal and all-powerful at various times throughout his career. He frequently used the word “nature” interchangeably with God, Providence, or the Almighty. While on some occasions he claimed God had created people or organisms, at other times (or sometimes in the same breath) he claimed nature had created them. Further, he wanted to cultivate a certain veneration of nature through a reinvented Christmas festival that turned the focus away from Christianity. He also hoped to build an observatory-planetarium complex in Linz that would serve as a religious pilgrimage site to dazzle Germans with the wonders of the cosmos. Overall, it appears a pantheist worldview was where Hitler felt closest to home…

[H]opefully this study of Hitler’s religion sheds light on a number of important issues. First, his anti-Christianity obviously shaped the persecution of the Christian churches during the Third Reich. Second, his religious hypocrisy helped explain his ability to appeal to a broad constituency…

Finally, and most importantly, his religion did not provide him any transcendent morality. Whatever Hitler’s stance on other religious issues, his morality was entirely of this world, derived from his understanding of the workings of nature. In my view, this was the most pernicious element of his religion. Hitler followed what he considered the dictates of nature by stealing, killing, and destroying. Ultimately, however, he perished, because his God could not give him life.

 

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Editor’s note:

I included this final paragraph from Richard Weikart’s book only to show that the Christian author of Hitler’s Religion saw Hitler in photographic negative: white he saw black, black white; dark grey light grey, and light grey dark grey.

Once one transvalues values, it becomes clear that ‘the Jewish-Christian pestilence’, to use Uncle Adolf’s words, is what is driving the Aryan on the path to extinction.

What Weikart and the rest of the Christians and secular neochristians ignore is that one can only gain power by obeying the laws of Nature, not by violating them as they do (here Hitler hit the nail on the head). In fact, violating Nature’s laws will lead to a catastrophe greater than what happened after World War II.

Hitler did love Mother Nature. Above, Alpine view of the Berghof chalet, 1936 (Heinrich Hoffmann Collection, Bavarian State Library).

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American racial right Axiology Ethnic cleansing Eugenics God Hitler's Religion (book) Miscegenation Nature Richard Weikart Transvaluation of all values

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 10

On April 10, 1923, Hitler fulminated, “The liberation [of Germany] requires more than diligence; to become free requires pride, will, spite, hate, hate, and once again, hate.” A year earlier, he told a Munich crowd, “Christianity prescribes to us faith, hope and love. Love and hope cannot help us; only faith can, because it begets the will.” Hitler preached hate, spurned Christian love, and later ordered the murder of millions of innocent [sic] people, including Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and people with disabilities.

 

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Note of the Editor: This is where we see the gulf between me and not only the author of Hitler’s Religion, but with white nationalists who don’t know how to hate to the point of becoming exterminationists.

 

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The notion that Hitler was a Nietzschean promoting an aristocratic morality and spurning the so-called slave morality of Christianity was a position already popularized in the 1930s and 1940s by Hermann Rauschning, a Nazi leader who jumped ship well before Hitler launched his war of aggression and genocide. Rauschning became a vociferous critic of Hitler from exile. On the basis of his personal contacts with Hitler, he claimed Hitler was an “Antichrist” waging a “deliberately planned battle against the dignified, immortal foundation of human society; the message from Mount Sinai.” Rauschning called this “Hitler’s Battle Against the Ten Commandments.” According to Rauschning, Hitler said he was fighting against “the curse of so-called morals, idolized to protect the weak from the strong in the face of the immortal law of battle, the great law of divine nature. Against the so-called ten commandments [sic], against them we are fighting.” Rauschning’s work is controversial and must be used cautiously, because he is not always accurate in his description of Hitler’s religious and philosophical stance. Nonetheless, it is interesting he intimated that Hitler’s religious position was either pantheistic or at least close to pantheism, since he put the words “divine nature” in Hitler’s mouth. He also testified that Hitler stated, “For our Volk it is decisive, whether they uphold the Jewish Christian faith with its morality of sympathy, or a strong heroic faith in God in nature, in God in one’s own Volk, in God in one’s own destiny, in one’s own blood.”

More recently, the German philosopher Gunnar Heinsohn has taken Rauschning’s position even further, arguing that the reason Hitler wanted to annihilate the Jews was to extinguish their moral teaching promoting the sanctity of life. No doubt Heinsohn is correct when he explains that Hitler embraced a social Darwinist position that was the polar opposite of Judaism’s ethics, which forbade murder and enjoined loving one’s neighbor. However, the problems with Heinsohn’s position are legion. First, most Christians believe in the Ten Commandments, too, and the prohibition against murder is just as pronounced in the Christian tradition as in Judaism, so why didn’t Hitler kill all Christians in his zeal to eliminate this ethical code?
 

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Note of the Editor: As Savitri Devi said, Hitler was one thing, Kalki will be another…

 

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When Hitler pursued policies that most of us consider evil, he was not, in his mind, abandoning moral considerations. On the contrary, he was convinced that what he was doing was not only morally justified, but morally praise-worthy.

I argued this point extensively in my previous book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, where I identify Hitler’s ethical position as a racist form of evolutionary ethics. Hitler believed that whatever promoted evolutionary progress was morally good, and anything that hindered progress or led to biological degeneration was reprehensible. In his view, any moral system, code, or commandments must be judged according to how it contributes to the biological advancement (or regression) of humanity. His belief that the Aryan or Nordic race was superior to all other races led him to this corollary: Whatever benefits the Nordic race is moral. Wolfgang Bialas’s recent analysis of Nazi ethics agrees largely with this interpretation of Hitler’s thought. Bialas states, “The Nazi worldview clearly had an ethical dimension, rooted in notions of an evolutionary ethic that legitimized the struggle for existence.” Indeed, so many historians have argued that social Darwinism was a central tenet of Nazi ideology that this idea is considered commonplace.

Since Hitler based his ethical views on natural laws, especially evolutionary laws, this means that Christian ethics were not sacrosanct. Some elements of Christian morality might, in Hitler’s view, comport with the laws of nature and thus be valid. Other Christian commandments, however, needed to be discarded as relics of the benighted, prescientific past. Indeed, many historians have noted the fundamentally anti-Christian thrust of Hitler’s ethics. Alan Bullock, an early biographer of Hitler, explains, “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.” Another biographer, Joachim Fest, notes that Hitler wanted to replace Judeo-Christian morality with the “indubitable will of Nature.” Claudia Koonz, in her insightful study titled The Nazi Conscience, argues that Nazism preached and practiced a coherent moral ideology that was an “absolutist secular faith” contrary to Christianity. The Holocaust historian Robert Wistrich also stresses the anti-Christian character of the Nazi moral vision, stating, “For at the heart of Nazism, despite its cunning pretense of ‘positive Christianity,’ there was a deep-seated rejection of the entire civilization that had been built on Judeo-Christian ethics.” Ulf Schmidt, who specializes in the history of medicine and medical ethics under Nazism, likewise interprets Nazi ideology as a departure from Christian moral teaching. He asserts, “Nazism reveals a fundamental break with Judeo-Christian ethics, an attack against a traditional belief system based on altruism and compassion”…

By the time he made this statement in October 1941, German physicians following his orders had murdered over 70,000 Germans with disabilities, and German killing squads operating in Soviet territories had massacred multitudes of Jews and communist officials…

Another way that Hitler’s morality diverged from Christian norms was that he ignored or reinterpreted what Jesus called the most important commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Hitler did love nature, so perhaps in some sense he did love his pantheistic God. However, Jesus was quoting from the Old Testament, where the Lord specified was Yahweh. Hitler certainly did not love that God, whom he identified as the God of the Jews.

Further, Hitler continually insisted that God was inscrutable and unknowable, unlike in Christianity, where one could cultivate a personal, loving relationship with Him. One cannot communicate with the impersonal kind of God that Hitler believed in. (I do not give much weight to Hitler’s public invocations to God in his speeches, since they seem to have been intended for his audience, not as a sincere effort to communicate with God.) In any case, Hitler never encouraged people to love God and cultivate a relationship with Him, so whatever positions he took on other questions of ethics, he missed the central tenet of Christian morality…

What Hitler thought he discovered through reason was that nature was ruled by the struggle for existence, and humans could not escape this natural law. He believed that the struggle for existence had produced everything, including humanity, and would continue to lead to biological progress. Gilmer Blackburn expresses a view widely shared by historians when he explains the primacy of struggle in Hitler’s worldview: “If the Nazi dictator entertained convictions that could be termed ‘religious,’ his creed began and ended with the struggle for existence.” In Hitler’s view, then, morality consisted of submitting to the universal law of the struggle for existence by fighting one’s enemies and triumphing—or else perishing —in the contest. Only through this struggle could humanity thrive and progress. Trying to evade the struggle would only lead to decline and biological degeneration.
 

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Note of the Editor: What to make of the pacifism of Greg Johnson and other white nationalist pundits, for whom the concept of Holy Racial Wars is anathema?

 

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He then scoffed at those who thought they could contravene the laws of nature and extinguish the instinct for preservation: “For only then [if the self-preservation instinct could be eliminated] could one try to implement the statutes of a League of Nations or the Geneva Convention, in the place of the law of the all-powerful nature (Allgewalt Natur) that has been valid since the beginning of all life on this earth.” He then asserted that the “unbreakable laws of nature” will continue to hold sway over the struggle for existence between humans in the future. Hitler’s use of the term “all-powerful nature” (Allgewalt Natur) implies pantheism, since it ascribes to nature a characteristic—omnipotence— exclusive to deity. Further, he clearly invoked natural laws, especially the struggle for existence, as the arbiter of morality…“Whether man agrees to or rejects this harsh law makes absolutely no difference,” he said. “Man cannot change it; whoever tries to withdraw from this struggle for life does not erase the law but only the basis of his own existence”…

Hitler deduced two key principles from the need to wage the struggle for existence: the right to destroy those who are weaker and the right to take living space, i.e., land, from them. These themes reverberate through many of Hitler’s speeches and writings, and found their ultimate fulfillment in his genocidal policies during World War II…

In another passage in Mein Kampf which addresses the need to promote population expansion, he articulated the social Darwinist perspective that this process would result in the weak perishing in the competition for limited resources… He then spelled out the consequences of his pro-natalist policy more clearly: “A stronger race will drive out the weak, for the vital urge in its ultimate form will, time and again, burst all the absurd fetters of the so-called humanity of individuals, in order to replace it by the humanity of Nature which destroys the weak to give his place to the strong”…

In the struggle for existence in nature, many organisms are exterminated, so, Hitler queried, why should we suppose that this would be different for human races, some of which are not far separated from apes? Hitler warned against moralizing about this struggle or the destruction of the inferior creatures of the earth (such as other human races), stating, “On this earth the right of the stronger holds sway, the right of struggle and the right of victory; if you think that rights prevail, then you are deceiving yourself.” The struggle is good in itself, Hitler claimed, because it prevents degeneration, which would otherwise occur…

During World War II, Hitler continually justified his genocidal policies by appealing to the laws of nature, especially in “secret speeches” given to military cadets and officers. (Some of these “secret speeches” had thousands in attendance; in this respect, they were hardly secret. However, they are called “secret speeches” because they were not open to the general public and not published at the time, as many of Hitler’s speeches were.) In May 1944, Hitler lectured his military leadership about the reasons they needed to be relentlessly harsh in the war. Hitler insisted that nature knows nothing of tolerance, but rather eliminates the weak:

“There is no tolerance in nature. Nature is, if I take ‘tolerant’ as a human concept, the most intolerant thing that has ever existed. It destroys everything that is not capable of living, that will not or cannot defend itself; it eliminates them…”

Later in this speech, Hitler broached the topic of his harsh anti-Jewish policies, and though he did not specifically mention the mass extermination of the Jews, he certainly implied it. He insisted that his policy of “driving out” the Jews was “just as nature does it, not brutal, but rational, in order to preserve the better ones [i.e., the Germans].” He then answered those who might wonder if this could have been accomplished in a less cruel fashion: “We stand in a struggle for life and death.” Anything that helped the Aryans preserve their race in this struggle was morally right, Hitler informed them. Thus, cruelty, oppression, murder, and even genocide were morally justified, in his view, if they advanced the cause of the German people.

During his Nuremberg Party Congress address in 1929, Hitler indicated one of the corollaries to his view that the strong should prevail over the weak: infanticide for those deemed inferior. He hoped to take the “natural process of selection” into his own hands if he came to power by “acting deliberately according to racial laws.” He then praised Sparta for having practiced infanticide, and he criticized modern European societies for setting up institutions to care for the weak and sickly…

By killing approximately 200,000 disabled Germans during World War II, Hitler thought he was pleasing God.

When Hitler spoke about the triumph of the stronger in the struggle for existence, he was of course rooting for the home team: the German people, whom he believed to be racially superior, because they had substantial portions of so-called Aryan or Nordic racial elements in their blood. Though at times Hitler called the German Volk a creation of God and indeed “the highest image of the Lord,” on many other occasions he actually deified the German Volk. In his May Day speech in 1923, he told his audience that National Socialists needed to learn to love their Fatherland and Volk with a fanatical love that “allows no other idols beside it.” Seeing divinity in the German Volk is consistent with a pantheistic view, where God pervades everything.

Hitler’s devotion to the German Volk was in some ways even more pronounced than his devotion to the inscrutable God, because the German Volk was closer at hand. Hitler never quite figured out how to worship his unknowable Providence, but he did find ways to serve the German people (or, at least, he thought he was serving them). He often claimed that the German Volk was supreme on this earth and the object of his complete faith and commitment. In October 1935, he denied that he was subject to anyone except his own conscience. Then he continued, “And this conscience has but one single commander (Befehlsgeber): our Volk!” Two days earlier, he made a similar statement: “The Volk alone is our Lord (Herr), and we serve this Volk according to our best knowledge and conscience.” Both these statements would be blasphemous for anyone believing in a monotheistic god that transcends the German Volk. If Hitler had been a monotheist, he should have confessed God as the commander of his conscience, not the Volk. If he were a Christian, he should have confessed Jesus as his Lord.

 

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Note of the Editor: If white nationalists had their race as their God and not Jesus, they would celebrate Uncle Adolf’s birthday every April 20, not Jesus’ putative birthday. Think of Parrish’s Daybreak painting on this site to see what we mean by God: not just any kind of life but the most sublime, including majestic Nature.

 

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Just a few days after he came to power in February 1933, he preached to his fellow Germans that the Volk was the highest value they could pursue. They were engaged in a struggle in which the goal was “the preservation of this Volk and this soil, the preservation of this Volk for the future, in the realization that this alone can constitute our reason for being”…

Hitler served a God and cultivated a conscience that did not care if some people were exterminated in the global struggle for existence. His God only cared about the strongest, the ablest, and the most intelligent—and Hitler was convinced that the German people embodied these traits better than any other race.

 

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Editor’s note: If the Western traitors had not thrown so much manure on Hitler’s memory, his words and not those of David Lane would be our sacred words, as Adolf’s precede Dave’s.
 

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How did Hitler’s vision of the supremacy of the German Volk and his utter disregard for other peoples fit into the Christian command to love your neighbor as yourself, which Jesus called the second most important commandment?… Hitler’s insistence that Germans should hate or harm their racial enemies, rather than love them, demonstrates once again his opposition to Christian morality…

When Hans Frank asked Hitler what he read at the Western Front during World War I, Hitler replied that at first he read the Gospels. Later, he gladly set them aside, he said, in part because “the story about turning the other cheek, when one receives a blow, is not a good prescription for the Front.” In December 1941, Goebbels recorded in his diary that Hitler rejected Christianity because of its Sermon on the Mount morality.

Christianity, Hitler claimed, “is Jewish in its entire essence. A religion that proceeds from the principle that one should love his enemies, may not kill, and must offer the left cheek when struck on the right one, is not suitable for a manly doctrine of defending one’s Fatherland. Christianity is in fact a doctrine of decay. For a modern person it deserves only intellectual disdain.”

Hitler’s contempt for Christian morality, including some of the Ten Commandments (such as the prohibition on killing), was palpable. Certainly many versions of Christianity had interpreted loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek in such a way that did not apply to many areas of life, such as warfare. However, no one committed to Christian morality would directly criticize a commandment of Jesus—or one of the Ten Commandments—as Hitler did.

Not only did Hitler not consider other races part of the same moral community with the German Volk, but he also construed them as competitors in the racial struggle for existence. Thus he held that destroying people of other races is not only morally permissible, but morally good and right…

In 1933, Hitler could not publicly spell out what suppressing other races meant, because he was still trying hard to deceive the world into thinking he was a man of peace so he could remilitarize without outside interference. However, after the genocidal war on the Eastern Front was in full swing, Hitler divulged his racial philosophy in all its brutality to his entourage. In a monologue in October 1941, Hitler expounded his philosophy of conquest and racial annihilation. He planned to sift through the people in the conquered territories of the East to find racially desirable elements that could be preserved. However, Russians living in the cities “must completely die off. We need not have any pangs of conscience about this,” because “we do not have any responsibility toward these people.” The Germans’ task, Hitler asserted, was to settle these territories with Germans and treat the natives as American Indians had been treated.

Hitler denied, however, that he had any hatred for these people. Rather, he was acting with cool deliberation. He remarked, “I am approaching this matter ice-cold. I feel that I am only the executor of a historical will [i.e., a will guiding historical development]”… Hitler asserted: “Heaven only recognizes power.” He then sarcastically dismissed the “principle that all humans should love one another”…

Hitler considered expansionist warfare a part of the God-ordained racial struggle. This was a constant theme in Mein Kampf and in many of his speeches, especially during World War II. It was also the primary message of his Second Book, where he claimed that the earth is not given once and for all to anyone, but rather is on loan from Providence to those courageous enough to take possession of it and strong enough to hold onto it. Once again, Hitler thought the stronger race had God on its side, even as it crushed the weaker. “Therefore,” he asserted, “every healthy native people sees nothing sinful in the acquisition of land, but rather something natural.” The “modern pacifist,” he continued, “who repudiates this most holy right” lives off past injustices.
 

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Editor’s note: Once more: Johnson et al…

 

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In a December 1940 speech, Hitler enunciated similar social Darwinist themes that virtually quoted from his Second Book and reiterated major points he made in Mein Kampf. People ignore these wise but harsh laws at their peril, according to Hitler, because those not strong enough to prevail in the struggle have forfeited their right to exist.

In a monologue in October 1941, Hitler contrasted his philosophy of expansionist warfare with Christianity. He presented war as essentially a struggle over land and resources, and, as he did so often in other venues, justified killing in warfare by appealing to the pitiless struggle in nature. War, he stated, “corresponds to the principle in nature, ever to bring about selection through struggle: The law of existence demands uninterrupted killing, so that the better will live. Christianity is rebellion against this fundamental principle, a protest against the creation; followed consistently, it would lead to the breeding of the inferior”…

Hitler’s belief that nature imposed a moral imperative to expand the population had profound implications for his views on sexual morality. His pro-natalist sexual morality had some points of contact with traditional Christian views, since the Catholic Church opposed contraception, abortion, prostitution, and homosexuality. However, Hitler’s opposition was based on entirely different premises. Hitler only opposed them to the extent that they interfered with increasing the number of healthy Nordic babies, which was the ultimate goal of his sexual morality. In the case of contraception and abortion, Hitler favored contraception and abortion for those deemed biologically inferior. In July 1933, Hitler passed a decree that resulted in the compulsory sterilization of about 350–400,000 Germans with disabilities. While prohibiting abortion for healthy Germans, abortions for Germans with disabilities were required, and Jews and other racial “undesirables” were allowed to practice abortion.

One of the most important commandments in Hitler’s sexual morality was thou shalt not mix your blood with other races. While the Catholic Church forbade intermarriage between Catholics and non-Catholics, Hitler forbade intermarriage and sexual relations between Germans and Jews, regardless of their religious convictions.
 

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Note of the Editor: As my ancestors were Spanish, I am fascinated by the origins of the tragedy of ancient Hispania. When the values were standing, the Visigoths burned at the stake those who interbred with the Iberian mudbloods. That all changed with what the Visigothic king Recceswinth did, who, being duped by the Christians, transvalued the most vital value: from trying to keep the bloodline pure to what would become in Spain the burning at the stake of heretics. The astronomic blunder of Recceswinth dates back to the 7th century. Weikart, as a good Christian, lives under the sky of the inverted values bequeathed to us by Christianity; so in this passage, and his book in general, he sees everything in a photographic negative (as does every Christian and neochristian in the West who condemns Hitlers’ eugenics).

 

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For Hitler, it was a sin— punishable by law after the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated in 1935— for a Catholic of Aryan descent to marry a Catholic with Jewish grandparents. Hitler also forbade intermarriage of Germans with Slavs but encouraged German intermarriage with the Norwegians or Dutch, because they were deemed fellow Nordic peoples…

Goebbels noted that Hitler was not prudish but viewed sexual morality from an entirely different perspective than Christians did. Hitler thought, “We must also view this question [sexual morality] from the standpoint of its utility for the Volk. That is our morality.” The main point, according to Hitler, was to get as many children as possible for the Volk.

Because he favored marriage and procreation, Hitler was incensed that the Catholic Church taught celibacy for priests and nuns. In his view, this robbed the German people of its potential and weakened it in its struggle with other races. In October 1941, Hitler lamented that Catholicism encouraged some women to forgo marriage. However, even more important than marriage, Hitler intoned, was that women bear children: “Nature doesn’t care at all, whether before-hand a declaration is made in the presence of witnesses! Nature wants the woman to have a child.” This demonstrates once again that, for Hitler, nature dictated morality. In this case, the morality it dictated was that extramarital sexual relations were perfectly fine, as long as they resulted in more healthy German babies.

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Adolf Hitler Charles Darwin Extermination of the Neanderthals Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 9

One of the most serious objections lodged against the interpretation of Hitler as a pantheist is his use of the term “Creator” in his writings and speeches. Hitler occasionally referred to an Almighty Creator or Eternal Creator, and he sometimes asserted humans were made in the image of God. If Hitler believed in a God who created nature as a distinct entity, separate from himself as deity—as monotheistic religions have traditionally taught—then he would not be a pantheist. He would most likely be a deist, since he generally spurned the idea that God intervened miraculously in history.

In his speech to the 1935 Nuremberg Party Congress, Hitler called God “the Creator” of the German Volk. However, he also implied that God would not intervene miraculously on behalf of his chosen people. They would have to work and fight to gain the Almighty’s favor and blessing. Hitler stated, “In the long run God’s favor will be given only to him who deserves it. He who speaks and acts in the name of a people created by the Almighty continues to act under this commission so long as he does not sin against the substance and the future of the work of the Creator that has been placed in his hand. Therefore it is good that the conquest of power is always bound up with hard fighting.” Hitler’s God was not one who intervened super-naturally in historical developments. Rather, he rewarded people according to the way they worked and fought. God did not break into the cause and effect relationship governed by natural law.

In January 1943, Hitler again called God “Creator” yet implied this version was not a miracle-working deity; rather, he expected humans to make their own way in the world… “In this mightiest struggle of all time, we cannot expect that Providence give us victory as a present. Each and every people will be weighed, and what is judged too light will fall.”
 

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Editor’s note: If this is true, and I believe it is, American white nationalism will fall: it is too timid an intellectual movement.

 

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God’s judgment is thus not a decision of a personal deity but the result of natural causation: those who work hard and fight bravely win. It is also interesting to note that, according to this speech, one of the things Hitler’s God established was the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence…

Hitler explicitly rejected the creation stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Finally, Hitler embraced an evolutionary account of the origins of humanity.

Let’s explore these last two points in greater depth. Never did Hitler express belief in the biblical creation story—which, after all, derived from the Jewish scriptures. (We have already seen that Hitler’s anti-Semitism led him to spurn the Old Testament as a Jewish document.) He obviously did not embrace young-earth creationism (which is what most Americans mean today when they use the term creationism), since on quite a few occasions he mentioned the earth existing for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years. For example, in Mein Kampf, he warned pacifists that their naiveté would have disastrous consequences, because “this planet once moved through the ether for millions of years without human beings and it can do so again some day if men forget that they owe their higher existence, not to the ideas of a few crazy ideologists, but to the knowledge and ruthless application of Nature’s stern and rigid laws”…

In general, Hitler regarded the Old Testament creation stories as delusional inventions of the Jewish mind. On October 24, 1941, Hitler spoke at great length to his entourage about the controversy between science and religion, and specifically between evolution and Christianity. Hitler opened this lengthy monologue on evolution by claiming that the church’s teachings are contrary to modern research. In fact, as Hitler expounded on this science-religion controversy, he clearly came down on the side of science and bashed the church, asserting, “The definition of the church is a misuse of the creation for earthly purposes.” He also divulged his pantheistic tendencies: “Whoever sees God only in an oak or in a tabernacle and not in the Whole, cannot be pious deep inside; he remains stuck in the outward.” In addition, Hitler praised the French Enlightenment thinkers’ anticlericalism and the progress of science. After expostulating on the glories of science and the ignorance of the church, Hitler pronounced his belief in the evolution of humans. He stated, “There have been humans at the rank at least of a baboon in any case for 300,000 years at least. The ape is distinguished from the lowest human less than such a human is from a thinker like, for example, Schopenhauer”…
 

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Editor’s note: Just what I meant in my previous post, ‘On the hermit’s cave’.

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[Hitler’s secretary Christa] Schroeder confirmed in considerable detail that Hitler believed in human evolution through the process of struggle and selection. Two other associates of Hitler testify that belief in Darwinian evolution was integral to his ideology. Wagener remembered a conversation in the summer of 1931 when Hitler professed, “Everywhere in life only a process of selection can prevail. Among the animals, among plants, wherever observations have been made, basically the stronger, the better survives”.

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Editor’s note: And the Jews are proving to be stronger than the Aryans because of the Christian malware in the latter’s head, the parasite that weakened them (compare today’s Aryans with what Flavian dynasty member Titus did in Jerusalem).
 

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This not only demonstrates Hitler believed in Darwinian natural selection, but it also suggests he saw the process as nonteleological, i.e., not directed by some deity. Wagener claimed that Hitler based his support for killing the weak and the sick on this vision of natural selection. Otto Dietrich generally concurred, stating that Hitler’s “evolutionary views on natural selection and survival of the fittest coincided with the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel.” Hitler was not an atheist, according to Dietrich, but believed in a Supreme Being who “had created laws for the preservation and evolution of the human race. He believed that the highest aim of mankind was to survive for the achievement of progress and perfection.” Thus, evolutionary thought was central to Hitler’s goals and policies.

In his two books, Hitler discussed evolutionary theory as vital to his theory of racial struggle and eugenics. Several times throughout Mein Kampf, he specifically employs the term “struggle for existence” (“Kampf um das Dasein”); in fact, the phrase or its plural appears three times in a passage several pages long where Hitler described why the Germans should be both pro-natalist and expansionist. Historian Robert Richards, however, inexplicably claims that Hitler’s views in this passage are un-Darwinian, because—according to Richards—a Darwinian should supposedly want population expansion only within restricted borders, which would allow the fit to triumph over the unfit. Richards argues expanding into new territory would lessen the struggle, allowing the fit and less fit “to have fairly equal chances.”

Richards, however, miscalculates here because he leaves out one of the most important factors in Hitler’s reasoning: the living space (Lebensraum) is to be taken from allegedly inferior races. Thus, expanding is part of the Darwinian racial struggle that allows the allegedly fitter Nordic race to outcompete allegedly inferior races. Contra Richards, Hitler’s discussion makes perfect sense in a Darwinian world if unequal races are waging a struggle for existence. In fact, the whole idea of Lebensraum was first formulated by Friedrich Ratzel, a Darwinian biologist who later became a geographer. In addition, many pro-natalist eugenicists with impeccable Darwinian credentials, such as Alfred Ploetz or Max von Gruber, agreed with Hitler’s position on expansionism (indeed, they may have influenced Hitler in this matter).
 

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Editor’s note: On the following pages (231-236) of Hitler’s Religion, pages containing a very important quotation from Hitler’s second book, we see that Hitler understood Darwinism perfectly.

The point is that this Darwinism will lead us to our exterminationist philosophy (remember what Darwin himself believed would be the fate of coloured people). Weikart continues:

 

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In June 1944, Hitler explained his views on war to an audience of army officers in a remarkably candid speech. He opened it by basing his philosophy of war on natural law:

“Among the processes that are essentially immutable, that remain the same throughout all time, and that only change in the form of the means applied, is war. Nature teaches us with every gaze into its workings, into its events, that the principle of selection dominates it, that the stronger remains victor and the weaker succumbs. It teaches us that what often appears to someone as cruelty, because he himself is affected or because through his education he has turned away from the laws of nature, is in reality necessary, in order to bring about a higher evolution of living organisms”.

Hitler then insisted that humans must follow the ways of nature, not the allegedly misguided path of humanitarians. If they pursue humanitarianism, Hitler warned, they will be supplanted by other organisms that take the struggle seriously.
 

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Editor’s note: Instead of ‘humanitarians’ or ‘humanitarianism’, the Christian author of this book didn’t dare to write simply ‘Christians’ or ‘Christianity’. If the ancient Romans would have had weapons of mass destruction and survived the next centuries instead of succumbing to Christianity, we can already imagine the fate of the Huns, the nascent Muslims or the Mongol invaders.
 

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As I have demonstrated above, Hitler did indeed believe in human evolution. It was not a peripheral element of his worldview, either. It helped shape his understanding of the human struggle for existence, natural selection among humans and human races, eugenics, pronatalism, killing the disabled, and expansionism. Of course, Hitler’s evolutionary views were synthesized with many other influences, such as anti-Semitism and nationalism; it was by no means the sole influence on his ideology or policies.

But in addition to all the times Hitler explicitly broached the topic of human evolution, he even more frequently discussed the racial struggle for existence, the struggle for existence within the Nordic race, natural selection, and many other Darwinian themes. He often abbreviated these terms as “racial struggle,” “struggle,” and “selection,” just as many of his contemporaries, including biologists and eugenicists, did, but key issue here is the concept, not the exact terminology. When Hitler spoke about the “selection” of the strongest organisms and the elimination of the weakest, it did not matter whether he used the exact term “natural selection” (though he did at times). He was obviously describing it, and that is the crucial issue…

“The ape is distinguished from the lowest human less than such a human is from a thinker like, for example, Schopenhauer.” In a 1933 speech at the Nuremberg Party Rally, he stated, “The gulf between the lowest creature which can still be styled man and our highest races is greater than that between the lowest type of man and the highest ape.” These last two comments paraphrase statements Haeckel made in many of his works; two examples are “the difference between the lowest primitive humans and the highest evolved cultured humans is in this respect greater than that between the former and the apes” and “the differences between the highest and the lowest humans is greater than that between the lowest human and the highest animal.”

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Editor’s note: Emphasis in the original. I hope that by now you understand my iterated statement on this site about “the extermination of the Neanderthals”: something I have been telling myself for decades in the cave but only in recent years dared to divulge.

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Hitler asserts, “Nature knows no political boundaries. First, she puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry.” In other words, nature is the source of living organisms—not some Creator God—and lets these organisms fight it out among themselves. Nature is not actively intervening or doing miracles but rather allowing its laws to prevail.

Categories
God Hans F. K. Günther Hitler's Religion (book) Martin Bormann Nature Nordicism Religion Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 8

Editor’s Note: We will now read excerpts from ‘Who was Hitler’s Lord?’, the eighth chapter of Hitler’s Religion by Richard Weikart:
 

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One of the most famous quotations from Hitler’s Mein Kampf is, “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.” Some construe this to mean Hitler believed in the Christian God and saw his war fighting against Jews as part of a religious battle that had been waged for centuries. Even though Hitler did not overtly appeal to Christianity in this statement, his use of the terms “Almighty Creator” and “Lord” would have been understood by many of his contemporaries (and those who currently ignore Hitler’s many anti-Christian utterances) as the Christian God. Anti-Semites in the Catholic or Protestant churches would have applauded him for doing “the work of the Lord.”

Nonetheless, there are major problems with suggesting that this statement indicates Hitler’s Lord was the Christian God. The aim of Hitler’s anti-Semitism—the “Lord’s work” he thought he was doing—was radically different from the goal of traditional Christian anti-Semitism (as mentioned in chapter six). The context itself suggests Hitler had some other kind of God in mind. Hitler was fulminating against the “Jewish doctrine of Marxism,” which he thought “rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature.” In the sentence immediately preceding his famous quotation about doing the work of the Lord, Hitler stated, “Eternal Nature inexorably avenges the infringement of her commands.” Four important points emerge from this. First, Hitler personified nature in this passage, ascribing to it characteristics that would normally be associated with God. Second, Hitler called nature eternal. If he thought nature existed forever, as this statement indicated, then the God he believed in could not have created nature sometime in the past. Thus Hitler’s God was not even a deistic, much less a theistic, God. The “Almighty Creator” he mentioned in the following sentence could not have created nature, making it highly probable that Hitler’s “Creator” was nature. Third, Hitler believed that nature’s commands defined morality, since he claimed nature issues commands…

Thus, the “Lord” on whose behalf Hitler was fighting the Jews was none other than nature deified. Samuel Koehne seems to agree with this interpretation, stating in a recent article, “At times he [Hitler] conflated this ‘divine will’ and ‘Nature,’ or the ‘commands’ of ‘Eternal Nature’ and the ‘will of the Almighty Creator.’” When Hitler called nature eternal in Mein Kampf, this was not just a slip of the pen (or typewriter). He referred to nature as eternal on several occasions throughout his career…

I am not, of course, the first person to conclude Hitler was a pantheist. In 1935, a religious commentator George Shuster placed the dominant German religious beliefs in the 1930s into five categories: Catholicism, Lutheranism, Judaism, neo-pantheism, and negativity toward religion. Though Hitler was influenced by the first two, his deepest cravings evinced pantheism, according to Shuster. Pius XI did not specifically mention Hitler in his encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, but he did combat therein the “pantheistic confusion” he saw in Nazi ideology. Shortly after World War II, the German theologian Walter Künneth interpreted Hitler’s religion as a form of apostasy from Christianity. He argued that when Hitler used terms like God, Almighty, and Creator, as he was wont to do, he redefined these terms in a pantheistic direction. Künneth stated, “In proper translation Hitler meant by ‘Creator’ the ‘eternal nature,’ by ‘Almighty’ and ‘Providence’ he meant the lawfulness of life, and by the ‘will of the Lord’ he meant the duty of people to submit themselves to the demands of the race.”

Robert Pois argues not only that Nazism advocated a religion of nature, but that it was central to the Nazi project. Their “religion was one which could and did serve to rationalize mass-murder,” he asserts. He only spends a few pages discussing Hitler’s own religious views, but he does portray Hitler as a pantheist who exalted “pitiless natural laws” above humanity. “What Hitler had done,” according to Pois, “was to wed a putatively scientific view of the universe to a form of pantheistic mysticism presumably congruent with adherence to ‘natural laws.’” In Pois’s view, Hitler’s pantheistic perspective was part of the Nazi revolt against the Christian faith and its values. Hitler “had virtually deified nature and he most assuredly identified God (or Providence) with it.” Pois might overstate the role played by the “religion of nature” in the Nazi Party, but he does demonstrate that it was not uncommon. André Mineau argues that the SS was inclined toward pantheism, stating, “The SS view of religion was a form of naturalistic pantheism that had integrated the biological paradigm.”

A number of other scholars who have analyzed Hitler’s religion concur it was pantheistic… Thomas Schirrmacher, in the most extensive and thorough analysis of Hitler’s religion to date, emphasizes the anti-Christian character of Hitler’s theology. However, Schirrmacher interprets Hitler as a non-Christian monotheist, specifically rejecting the idea that Hitler was a pantheist or deist. Oddly, however, Schirrmacher admits Hitler used the terms God, Almighty, and Creator synonymously with the rule of nature and the laws of nature.

Before I explain Hitler’s pantheistic religion in greater depth, it is important to understand that pantheism was an influential religious perspective in German-speaking lands (and elsewhere in Europe) before and during Hitler’s time. By the early twentieth century, two forms of pantheism had emerged, which I will call mystical pantheism and scientific pantheism. Mystical pantheists believed that the cosmos had a mind or will that was supreme, while scientific pantheists stressed determinism, i.e., the strict rule of natural laws. According to scientific pantheism, the laws of nature are an expression of the will of God and thus inescapable and ironclad. Mystical pantheism disagreed with this view, denying that science could fathom the mind of the universe. Mystical pantheism sometimes had affinities or even overlapped with animism, polytheistic nature-gods, or occultism. Scientific pantheism, on the other hand, shared similarities with atheism…
 

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Editor’s note

This is central to understanding what I call the religion of holy words, and only those philosophers who have speculated in astrophysical mysteries, as Roger Penrose has done, would understand anything. I mean how the beauty of the alphabet with which God created the universe (mathematics), to quote Galileo, is related to the beauty of Nature and the Aryan race in particular.

To defend Aryan beauty is to defend the emerging God that is being born with the pure, unpolluted Aryans, as can also be seen in this new series of images on European beauty that I have started in the new incarnation of this site. He who doesn’t feel beauty to the extent of wanting to preserve it, has not been initiated into the mysteries of our religion.

Weikart continues:

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Some forms of anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century favored pantheism as an antidote to the supposedly Jewish features of monotheism. For instance, Eduard von Hartmann, who is sometimes regarded as a forerunner of Freud because of his philosophizing about the unconscious, promoted pantheism as a replacement for Christianity in 1874. He believed Christianity was in its death throes. Hartmann was a popularizer of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, though he blended it with Schelling’s pantheism. Hartmann praised pantheism as the original religion of the Aryans, while denigrating monotheism as an inferior Semitic religion…

(The NS regime honored the German Darwinian biologist and pantheist Ernst Haeckel by including his portrait in the 1936 “Exhibition of Great Germans” in Berlin.)

Another early twentieth-century figure who shared many affinities with Hitler’s religious views was Hans F. K. Günther, whom Hitler admired for his writings on Nordic racism. Hitler was so enthusiastic about Günther’s work that he pressed Wilhelm Frick to appoint him to a professorship in social anthropology at the University of Jena in 1930, and Hitler attended his inaugural lecture. When Hitler instituted a Nazi Party Prize for Art and Science at the 1935 Nuremberg Party Rally, he bestowed the first prize for science on Günther. In 1934, Günther discussed Nordic religion in his book Piety of a Nordic Kind. (The copy of this book that I examined was owned by the Adolf Hitler School, an elite Nazi educational institution, so, clearly the Nazis approved of this work.) In this book, Günther examined the religiosity of the Indo-Germanic people, not the specific content of their religions, yet he admitted that pantheism or some kind of mysticism is more compatible with Nordic religious inclinations than theism is. Like Hitler, he believed that the world is eternal, and he dismissed as an “Eastern” invention the idea that God created the world (“Eastern” likely meant Jewish in this context—it clearly was not referring to South or East Asian religions.) He also denied body-soul dualism, the need for redemption, and the existence of an afterlife, claiming instead that true religion should focus on this world…

Martin Bormann’s outspoken pantheistic views also seem similar to Hitler’s religion, and though he probably did not influence Hitler, he was able to disseminate his views to other Nazi Party leaders. In June 1941, Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party apparatus and one of the most powerful figures in the final four years of the Third Reich, issued a statement on the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity to all the Gauleiter. He told them that Nazis do not understand God as a human-like being sitting somewhere in the cosmos, but rather as the vastness of the universe itself. He continued,

“The force which moves all these bodies in the universe, in accordance with natural law, is what we call the Almighty or God. The assertion that this world-force can worry about the fate of every individual, every bacillus on earth, and that it can be influenced by so-called prayer or other astonishing things, is based either on a suitable dose of naiveté or on outright commercial effrontery.”

Bormann then equated morality with the laws of nature, which are the will of God. Though Rosenberg was critical of Bormann’s style, even he noted the content of Bormann’s missive was similar to Hitler’s ruminations during his Table Talks.

Bormann also equated God with nature in his private correspondence. In February 1940, he wrote to Rosenberg and encouraged him to help develop a handbook of moral instruction for the youth, so they could replace religion classes with moral education. One of the moral laws that Bormann wanted included was “love for the all-ensouled nature, in which God manifests himself even in animals and plants”…

When we examine Hitler’s religious statements in depth, we find that he often expressed views of nature and God that seem closer to pantheism than to any other religious position. Also, his friends and associates noticed that he had an extremely intense love of nature. His boyhood friend August Kubizek noted that Hitler loved nature “in a very personal way. He viewed nature as a whole. He called it the ‘Outside.’ This word from his mouth sounded so familiar, as though he had called it ‘Home’”…

Wagener also recalled Hitler discussing the celebration of Christmas. After noting that Christmas had originated as a pagan ceremony at the time of the winter solstice, Hitler indicated his approval for celebrating Christmas, but not in honor of Jesus’s birth. He asked, “Now, why shouldn’t our young people be led back to nature?” He hoped that Christmas festivities could lead children away from the church and “into the great outdoors, to show them the powerful workings of divine creation and make vivid to them the eternal rotation of the earth and the world and life.” He desired the Hitler Youth to introduce Christmas traditions in which “the young people should be led back to nature, they should recognize nature as the giver of life and energy. It is only in the freedom of nature that a human being can also open himself to a higher morality and a higher ethic.” Thus, Christmas Hitler-style would draw young people away from the church while fostering veneration for nature as the highest entity…

In a monologue in February 1942, Hitler discussed his plans for the observatory and planetarium he wanted to erect near his former hometown of Linz, Austria, which he intended to turn into a cultural capital of his Third Reich. Perched on a hill above Linz, the planetarium would replace the Catholic baroque pilgrimage church currently located there.

The church —this “temple of idols,” Hitler called it—would be torn down to make way for the observatory, which would become a Nazi pilgrimage site. The slogan on the observatory would read, “The heavens proclaim the glory of the Eternal One.” Hitler dreamed of tens of thousands of visitors flowing through this planetarium every Sunday, so they could comprehend the immense vastness of the universe. Thus Sunday would be a time to venerate nature, not the Christian God. Hitler hoped this contemplation of nature would instill in Germans a kind of religiosity that would replace the “superstition” of the churches.

He wanted people to be religious, but in an anticlerical (pfaffenfeindlichen) fashion. “We can do nothing better,” he said, “than to direct ever more people to these wonders of nature.” At the observatory, Hitler thought, people could learn, “A person can comprehend this and that, but he cannot dominate nature; he must know that he is a being dependent on the creation.” Hitler envisioned this observatory and planetarium as the new temples for the worship of nature. He was so serious about building the observatory that he had one of his favorite architects, Professor Gieseler, begin drawing up plans for it in 1942.

Another way that Hitler endowed nature with the attributes usually associated with God was by portraying it as the source of morality. In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued humans can never master nature but have to submit to its laws. An individual

“… must understand the fundamental necessity of Nature’s rule, and realize how much his existence is subjected to these laws of eternal fight and upward struggle. Then he will feel that in a universe where planets revolve around suns, and moons turn about planets, where force alone forever masters weakness, compelling it to be an obedient slave or else crushing it, there can be no special laws for man. For him, too, the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom hold sway. He can try to comprehend them; but escape them, never.”

Nature dictates moral and social laws to humans, just as it controls the physical laws of the universe. Hitler reiterated this theme of nature being the source of morality several times in Mein Kampf, including passages discussed earlier in this chapter…

According to Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder, Hitler often discussed religion and the churches with the secretaries. She testified, “He had no kind of tie to the church. He considered the Christian religion an outdated, hypocritical and human-ensnaring institution. His religion was the laws of nature.” Schroeder confirmed what seems obvious from reading through Hitler’s monologues: he rejected Christianity and worshipped nature…

Hitler had little or no reason to pose as a pantheist, because this would not have appealed to a very large constituency. However, he had very strong political reasons to pose as a believer in a more traditional kind of God. Savvy politician that he was, he wanted to appeal to Germans of all religious persuasions, so he used more traditional God-language to win popular support. This is consistent with his own statements about the relationship between religion and propaganda, and it squares with what we know about his hypocritical use of Christian themes.

Another strong possibility is that Hitler’s view of God was not pantheistic, but panentheistic. Friedrich Tomberg argues this, claiming that Hitler embraced a panentheism that believed “everything is in nature, but nature is in God.” This would allow Hitler to equate nature with God, because panentheists see nature as divine. However, they also see God as having an existence beyond nature, too. A panentheist could construe God as intervening in history in some ways, though usually not in miraculous events. This could correspond roughly with the way Hitler described God blessing or favoring the German Volk.

Categories
Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Constantine Genuine spirituality Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart Sexual degeneracy

Some reflections

I would like to say something about the seventh chapter of Hitler’s Religion; not just what I quoted here, but the entire chapter. My reading of this book continues to confirm my premise: The most influential NS men, and those who inspired them, were just one step away from reaching the other side of the psychological Rubicon, but didn’t reach solid ground. (N.b.: I cannot link to the article ‘My stepping stones’ on the psychological Rubicon for the moment, as a technician is just about to see if it is possible to upload the WordPress-censored entries here. If this new incarnation of WDH doesn’t appear for a few moments, don’t be alarmed: we’re reconfiguring it.)

From this follows the need to create a new religious movement to take this last step, a movement I call the priesthood of the sacred words. And in doing so I must confess that I find myself somewhat closer to Himmler than to Hitler on this point.

On pages 189-90 of Hitler’s Religion Weikart informs us that, although Hitler criticised Gothic cathedrals and medieval mysticism for their somberness, he didn’t believe that NS was a religious cult for holding mystical ceremonies. In fact, his 1938 Nuremberg Rally speech was an open rebuke to Himmler, Rosenberg and other neo-pagans in the movement. Rosenberg himself in his major work recalled that Hitler had disapproved of Himmler’s plans to reintroduce the cult of Wotan and Thor. Hitler was even suspicious of Rosenberg’s studies of Germanic prehistory because he preferred the cultures of Greece and Rome.

Recall from The Fair Race that the original cultures of Greece and Rome were founded by Norsemen, and that only in their more decadent stages did they undergo interbreeding. I can well understand Hitler on this point and what he said about Wotan in one of his after-dinner talks. But Himmler’s idea was the right one: for a movement to be successful, it is necessary for believers to feel the mysterium tremendum, what Jung and others call the numinous.

And that can only be inspired by a semi-religious movement. I understand Hitler because there were occult and parapsychological aspects in some high-ranking National Socialists that had to be rejected. But an ideal compromise would have been, as Manu Rodríguez rightly said in one of our books, to use the rebuilt Greco-Roman temples (starting e.g., by destroying the Vatican and putting in its place a huge temple to Zeus) to teach languages, history and literature of the peoples with Nordic blood (peoples that obviously include Greece and Rome in their origins).

The other reflection I wanted to communicate this day is due to the recent article ‘What is a Woman?’ by Spencer Quinn, who tells us: ‘It began in the 1960s, when we pretended that blacks were the intellectual equals of whites’.

That is not true. While Quinn is correct in saying that Matt Walsh (pic above), who produced the amazing documentary What is a Woman?, didn’t dare to name the influential Jews in gender ideology, the ideology of equality began in the writings of a much older Jew, St Paul. Constantine brought to Constantinople the inversion of Greco-Roman values we read in that famous verse in the Epistle to the Galatians, inducing, with all the power of the Roman Empire, a melting pot of races in the so-called second Rome. There began the Aryan decline big time. While the ancient Greeks and Romans with Nordic blood were racists, Christianity broke down the barriers—not something as recent as the 1960s.

Once I finish reviewing Weikart’s book on Hitler’s religion, we will continue translating Karlheinz Deschner’s history of Christianity.

Categories
Arthur de Gobineau Bible Deranged altruism Eugenics Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Mein Kampf (book) Miscegenation Racial studies Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 7

Editor’s note: Here are some excerpts from the seventh chapter of Richard Weikart’s book.
 

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Under the leadership of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy had tried to blend a mystical racism with a scientific view of an evolutionary hierarchy of races. Despite professing the brotherhood of all humanity, theosophy taught racial inequality, and Blavatsky even endorsed the extermination of inferior races. Lanz also drew inspiration from non-mystical, non-occult sources, such as the physician and racial theorist Ludwig Woltmann. Before founding his own journal, Lanz wrote an extended review of Woltmann’s book, Die politische Anthropologie, for a freethinking journal and waxed enthusiastic about Woltmann’s racist doctrine of Nordic superiority. Woltmann’s book had been written for a prize competition for the best work on the political and social implications of Darwinian theory. He synthesized Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Arthur Gobineau’s theory of the racial superiority of the Nordic race.

[Left, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882), a French aristocrat.] Woltmann was a biological and racial determinist, believing that not only physical characteristics, but also mental and moral traits, are hereditary. Thus, one’s destiny is predetermined in one’s biological makeup. Race, according to Woltmann, is the key to historical development, because some races—the fair-skinned Nordic one especially—were superior. The Nordic race, he stated, is “the highest product of organic evolution,” and they were the founders of civilization. Further, he believed that races arose through an ongoing racial struggle for existence, and, like Gobineau, he thought that racial mixing was deleterious, leading to racial decline.

Though Lanz used the term Aryan rather than Nordic, many of his ideas about race were similar to those of Woltmann and other Nordic racists. Lanz believed that “race is the driving force behind all deeds,” determining the destiny of all peoples, or Völker. Racial wisdom was thus the paramount value, motivating him to establish a religion of race. Lanz warned that the Aryan race was threatened with decline, and his religion aimed at rescuing and preserving this endangered, but valuable, race. The key peril confronting Aryans was racial mixture. One of the more bizarre claims that Lanz made—based on his mystical interpretation of the Bible—was that the Fall happened when Eve copulated with an animal, producing progeny who were half-ape and half-human. These “ape-people” that Eve bore were the ancestors of the inferior races around the globe, such as black Africans, and their animal blood tainted all inferior races. This Fall involved racial mixture with a vengeance, and it dehumanized all non-Aryans, who supposedly had admixtures of animal blood coursing through their veins.

Unlike Hitler, who despised the Hebrew Bible as the effluvium of the Jewish mind, Lanz claimed that Moses was a Darwinist who—if interpreted in the proper mystical sense—taught Aryans how to triumph in the racial struggle through conscious racial selection. Lanz maintained that the Jews had succeeded historically despite their inferiority because they had appropriated the biblical wisdom that was really intended for Aryans. Aryans should embrace the Bible, including the Old Testament, “as the hard, racially proud and racially conscious book, which proclaims death and extermination to the inferior and world domination to the superior (Hochwertigen).” Unfortunately, Lanz continued, a false kind of love had been incorporated into the Bible by some misguided souls.

Elsewhere, Lanz elaborated that the kind of neighborly love and compassion that most people equated with Christianity, and which appeared in the Bible, was based on a misinterpretation hypocritically taught by the inferior races, the so-called “ape-people.” The word “neighbor” in the Old Testament really meant, he assured his fellow Aryan racists, one’s racial comrade. Thus the command to love our neighbor really “means that we only have to love our racial comrades, thus those who stand closest to our kind and our race.” In a 1907 issue of Ostara, he warned his fellow Aryans that they were committing race suicide by extending generosity to those of inferior races. Rather, they should always discriminate racially in their charitable giving. (Apparently, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan meant nothing to Lanz—or to Hitler.) Ominously, Lanz compared racially inferior people to weeds needing to be pulled. A major theme in this pamphlet and many others was the need to introduce eugenics measures to improve the race.

Many of Lanz’s doctrines became core tenets of Hitler’s worldview: the primacy of race in determining historical developments, Aryan superiority (with the Aryans being the sole creators of culture), the Darwinian racial struggle, the need for eugenics policies, and the evils of racial mixing. Hitler also shared Lanz’s view that Aryans had developed an ancient civilization in the mythical Atlantis. In a passage of Mein Kampf that decries racial mixing in a manner reminiscent of Lanz’s writings, Hitler admonished the state to elevate the status of marriage, which under the present system was supposedly contributing to biological decline. By hindering the marriages of those he dubbed inferior, he hoped marriages could “produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.” By claiming that racial mixture could result in human-ape hybrids, Hitler was pulling a page out of Lanz’s repertoire. No wonder [Wilfried] Daim was struck by the similarities between Lanz and Hitler and supposed that Hitler’s ideology hailed largely from Lanz’s writings. Given all these parallels, most historians acknowledge the likelihood that Lanz’s Ariosophy influenced Hitler’s ideology, either directly or indirectly.

But another like-minded Ariosophist in Vienna, Guido von List, was probably even more influential among early twentieth-century Pan-German nationalists than his colleague Lanz. He introduced the swastika symbol into Aryan racist circles before Lanz, and his ideas were widely discussed in the Pan-German press in Vienna. List and Lanz propagated similar occult racial ideologies, and they belonged to each other’s organizations. Before becoming entranced with occult thinking, List wrote for Pan-German publications. He carried this intense nationalist and racist heritage with him into his occult Aryan religion.

Like Lanz, he claimed he was recovering ancient Germanic wisdom that had been lost, and he wanted to replace Catholicism with his mystical faith. He preached Aryan supremacy, the need to engage in the struggle for existence against other races, and eugenics measures to improve the vitality of the Aryan race. In 1908, he explained the core of his message: “The high meaning of this custom [of ancient Aryans] lay in the intention of a planned, widespread breeding of a noble race, which through strict sexual laws would also remain racially pure.” List wanted to reconstitute an ancient Germanic priesthood with esoteric knowledge that could elevate the racially purified and ennobled Aryans to dominate the globe.

We do not know if Hitler had any direct contact with List or the List Society when he lived in Vienna. Brigitte Hamann, however, believes that Hitler’s racial ideology had more in common with List than with Lanz. List, for example, taught that the Aryans evolved into a superior race during the Ice Age. They were steeled in body and mind by the harsh conditions, and they had to wage a bitter battle against the elements. Natural selection eliminated the weak, sickly, and less cooperative, leaving the robust, healthy, and more moral members to propagate their superior biological traits. Hitler narrated a similar tale of Aryan origins in his 1920 speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” List also viewed nature as the source of divine power, and according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, he reduced all morality to just one ethical precept: “Live in accordance with Nature.” Hitler’s ethical views also stressed conformity to nature and its laws…

In August 1918, shortly before the end of the war, he [Rudolf von Sebottendorff] founded the Thule Society in Munich as an organization to foster German nationalism and Aryan racism. The Thule Society adopted the swastika as its symbol and “Heil” as its greeting, thus contributing to later Nazi practices.

In June 1918, Sebottendorff acquired the Münchner Beobachter as the mouthpiece for the Thule Society. In order to attract young Germans to his movement, he featured sports articles in this newspaper. However, its real purpose was to advance his racist and ultranationalist views, so he also published articles on these themes. One early article he wrote was “Keep Your Blood Pure,” which sounds remarkably similar to Hitler’s racial philosophy in Mein Kampf. In this essay, Sebottendorff asserted that race is the key to understanding history. He was incensed that Christianity had led some Germans to embrace racial equality. He wrote,

Encouraged by Christianity they propagated the doctrine of the equality of humans. Gypsies, Hottentots, Brazilian natives, and Germans are supposedly completely equal in value. Too bad the great teacher, nature, teaches otherwise. It teaches: This equality is nonsense. It is the greatest lie that humanity has ever been talked into. To the destruction of us Germans. There are higher and lower races! If one values the racial mish-mash, the “Tschandalen” [this was Lanz’s term for inferior human races that had resulted from a human-ape hybrid] the same as the Aryans—the noble humans—then one commits a crime against humanity… Wherever one looks in the past, the bearers of Germanic blood have always been the bearers and creators of culture.

The affinities with Hitler’s worldview are obvious: racial inequality, the role of nature in confirming racial inequality, and the Aryans as the sole creators of culture. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Sebottendorff boasted that he had laid the intellectual foundation for Nazism.

Sebottendorff’s view of Christianity was similar to Hitler’s, too. He criticized many of its features, especially its tendency to promote human equality. While appreciating Luther’s anti-Semitism, he noted that it was nonetheless deficient, because it was based on religious, not racial, considerations. He also dismissed the notion that people should turn the other cheek. Rather, he proclaimed, they should strike back until their opponent remained on the ground. Strangely, Sebottendorff thought Jesus approved of this pugnacity, for he continued, “That was also the opinion of our Savior: He came to bring the sword”…

A different movement, neo-paganism, also held sway over some leading Nazis, especially Himmler and Rosenberg. Neo-paganism, the attempt to resurrect the old Germanic gods and goddesses, sometimes overlapped with occultism, though some neo-paganists were staunch opponents of it. Both schools of thought were anti-Christian in their orientation. The occultist Sebottendorff, for example, tried to resurrect the worship of Wotan and other ancient Germanic gods. Himmler and Rosenberg saw neo-paganism as a way to bring Germans back to their original pre-Christian religion. Neo-paganism countered the universalizing tendencies of Christianity and emphasized the distinctiveness of the Aryan race, even in their religion.

Despite all these historical connections between Hitler and occultists, the popular idea that Hitler was an occultist—or at least powerfully influenced by occultism—faces serious objections…

Categories
Abraham Lincoln American civil war Hitler's Religion (book) Jewish question (JQ) Mein Kampf (book) National Socialism Richard Weikart Robert Morgan / Jack Frost

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 6

Editor’s note: This is the first regular article after the June 8th accident: some excerpts from Richard Weikart’s chapter ‘Did Hitler derive his anti- Semitism from Christianity?’
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Hitler blamed the Jews for just about everything that he opposed: communism, capitalism, internationalism, liberalism, materialism, egalitarianism, pacifism, and, of course, Christianity. That sneaky rabbi Paul had formulated his version of Christianity, Hitler believed, on the “Jewish-Bolshevik” principles of human equality. When Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, he complained that the Christian churches were not sufficiently anti-Semitic. He asked, “In the Jewish question, for example, do not both denominations [Catholic and Protestant] today take a standpoint which corresponds neither to the requirements of the nation nor to the real needs of religion?” A few paragraphs later, he remarked that Protestantism was better than Catholicism in defending the national interests of Germany, but it was still deficient, because it “combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.” For Hitler, Christianity was essentially Jewish and thus weakened the German effort to combat the Jewish threat. He certainly did not see his anti-Semitism as congruent with the teachings and policies of the Christian churches…

Anti-Jewish animus was sometimes tempered by the Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbor and even one’s enemies. Also, Christians often opposed the biological racism that flourished in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth century. Historian Leon Poliakov remarks, “Judeo-Christian tradition was both anti-racist and anti-nationalist.” If one reads the biological racist literature of early twentieth-century Germany, one frequently finds that racist ideologues criticized the Christian churches for their racial egalitarianism.

Christian anti-Semites differed from racial anti-Semites because Christians usually did not object to the Jews as a biological entity; rather, they opposed their religion. If Jews would give up their Jewish religion and be baptized into the Christian faith, they would be accepted as full-fledged members of German society, as they often were. But the secular, racial form of anti-Semitism that flowered around 1900—and which Hitler embraced— regarded conversion and assimilation as the absolute worst things that could happen, because then Jews would intermarry with Germans. Hitler believed this would pollute the German bloodline with inferior hereditary traits. Thus, the key difference between Christian anti-Semitism and racial anti- Semitism was that the former wanted to assimilate the Jews into German society while the latter believed it was necessary to eliminate them physically from Germany. Racial anti-Semites usually did not see the churches as allies in their campaign against the Jews.

NS propaganda: “Baptism did not make him a
non-Jew” from Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz (1938).

One of the leading figures in developing the racist anti-Semitism that became prominent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was Wilhelm Marr, who coined the term anti-Semitism. Marr warned in a popular book in 1879 that the Jews were conquering the Germans in a racial war. This battle of the Germans against the Jews “was from the beginning no religious [war], it was a struggle for existence, that was waged against the foreign domination of Jewry.” Marr, a harsh critic of Christianity, depicted his theory about the racial struggle against Jews as a secular, scientific standpoint. Because he believed the Jews were a race, not a religion, he advocated segregation and discrimination, not assimilation, as the cure for the “Jewish question”… Marr’s antireligious, racist version of anti-Semitism gained many adherents at the end of the nineteenth century, especially as biological racism exploded in popularity among secular-minded intellectuals…

In the period 1919 to 1923, one of the main topics in Hitler’s speeches was the Jewish threat. In August 1920, Hitler delivered a programmatic speech in Munich on “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” Hitler depicted the Aryans or Nordic people as a race that developed in the northern parts of Europe. Because of the harsh climate, the Aryan race developed a diligent character, viewing labor as a duty to the community. Also, the tough conditions of life weeded out the weak and sickly among them, giving them greater physical stamina and contributing to the development of an inner life. The Jews, on the other hand, never developed an appreciation for labor.

In sum, Hitler said, “We see that here two great differences lie in the race: Aryanness means a moral conception of labor and through it what we hear so often today: socialism, sense of community, common welfare before self-interest—Jewry means an egoistic conception of labor and thereby mammonism and materialism, the exact opposite of socialism!”

Hitler emphasized these moral and immoral traits of Aryans and Jews were biological and hereditary. In answering the question, “Why Are We Anti- Semites?,” Hitler made clear that he opposed the Jews’ supposedly hereditary immoral qualities, especially their laziness and greed. His anti- Semitism was not based on religious considerations. To be sure, he did mention a couple of passages from the Hebrew Bible, but these were used to illustrate Jewish greed and immorality, not because he opposed their religious beliefs or practices. Not only do we find zero Christian anti- Semitic themes in this speech, but Hitler specifically distanced himself from Christianity by accusing the Jews of spreading Christianity, a theme he would take up often later, but usually in private, not in public forums…

The secularized version of anti-Christian anti-Semitism that became prominent in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany was grafted onto the earlier Christian version of anti-Semitism. Centuries-old caricatures of the Jews were reinterpreted as Jewish biological traits. Further, the Christian churches in Germany and Austria continued to peddle a good deal of anti-Jewish animosity in the early twentieth century, thus giving succor to the Nazi anti-Semitic juggernaut. Both Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Christian anti-Semitism—thus, both religion and secularization—were necessary conditions for the advent of the Nazi Holocaust. The anti-Semitic message that Hitler preached, however, was far more anti-Christian than Christian.

 

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Editor’s note: In this chapter I begin to glimpse the tragedy of the leading NS ideologues and their compromise with the Christian masses of Germans.

The fact is that, publicly, they could not speak out. And they themselves believed in an Aryan and fictitious Jesus because there was no research like Richard Carrier’s (see the video linked in the sticky post).

That’s why they focused so much on the JQ—the CQ was taboo in Nazi Germany, as it still is now in American white nationalism.

For example, it is common on the racial right to distort the driving force that moved the Yankees to war with southern racists, something that Robert Morgan has taken issue with a galaxy of conservative commenters on The Unz Review for some time now.

The following is his last exchange this month but, as I don’t yet know how to modify the theme code of this new incarnation of WDH (the software automatically italicises all indented quotes and turn the indented quotes brown), I won’t indent Morgan’s next quotes or those he argues with:
 

Robert Morgan: Jared Taylor is such a brazen liar I decided to make an annotated version of his remarks about Lincoln.

“Lincoln didn’t like slavery, but he didn’t like blacks, either.”

Yet Lincoln was more responsible than any other man for freeing them and turning them loose on white people. I ask you, is this the action of a man who hated blacks?

“Once they were free, he wanted them gone.”

Correction: he once or twice said he wanted them gone, but his actions prove he didn’t.

“In 1862, when you’d think he was busy fighting a war, he was worrying about how to get rid of black people.”

But not worrying very much, apparently. In his last public address before being assassinated, he called for them to be made citizens and given the vote. It should be easy to see from this facile turnabout that at heart, Lincoln was no racist, but a dyed-in-the-wool racial egalitarian.

“He appointed James Mitchell as United States Commissioner of Emigration [of negroes] to find a place, far away, where all blacks would go. Mitchell invited a delegation of blacks to the White House so Lincoln could ask them to clear out.”

And here we come to the nub of the matter. Any “plan” that relied on all the negroes volunteering to leave was not a plan at all, only a pipe dream.

“This was the first time blacks had set foot in the White House on official business and not as servants, slaves, or workmen.”

In other words, on terms of equality with whites. Another first from Jared Taylor’s hero, “Honest” Abe. I suppose it’s fitting, in a way, that a liar such as Taylor should admire Lincoln, one of the greatest and most successful liars to ever hold the American presidency. And that’s saying something!

“He told the blacks that it was only because their people were in this country that Yankees and Confederates were slaughtering each other.”

Let’s note that this is the exact opposite of what Taylor and other Civil War revisionists argue. They are quite fond of making the astonishingly stupid claim that the Civil War had NOTHING at all to do with slavery. Why, it was only an attempt to save the Union, doncha know! LOL.

“He told them he had picked out a nice place for them in Central America, and asked them to convince all other blacks to pack up and go there.”

Asked them! To convince all the other blacks to pack up and go there! LOL. Yes, very realistic! If Lincoln actually believed that had a snowball’s chance in hell of happening then he must have been even stupider than the average “white nationalist” who buys into the lie that Lincoln didn’t like negroes.

“But, somehow, it’s today’s Democrats—not Lincoln in 1862—who are ‘the real racists’.”

Jared Taylor’s comical attempt to portray the Great Emancipator as “the real racist” is an epic fail.

Sollipsist: “No matter how big you make the word NOTHING, it still fails to accurately represent the factual and historical arguments that correctly identify slavery as a catalyst rather than a first cause.”

Robert Morgan: Lincoln says it’s the ONLY cause. Again, as Taylor puts it: “He told the blacks that it was only because their people were in this country that Yankees and Confederates were slaughtering each other. ”

How’s that for “factual and historical”? So who’s lying here? JT? Lincoln? Both?

Sollipsist: “It would be progress just to get most people to the point at which they’d realize (or maybe even grudgingly admit) that economics, manufacturing concerns, and centralized political control had ANYTHING to do with sending 600,000+ people to their death.”

Robert Morgan: In The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the Union soldiers sang the line Let us die to make men free! N.b., they didn’t claim to be willing to die for manufacturing concerns, for economics, for tariffs, for centralized political control, or even to save the Union. Their cause was freeing the slaves. Without this moral cause, it’s hard to see how they would have justified the war, either to themselves or anyone else.

Categories
Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 5

Update 12 June. This was the last post I published on the old incarnation of The West’s Darkest Hour, on the same day they axed that site. As I said at midnight, fortunately I had a Word backup, so I can reproduce it again here. I consider the issue of the anti-Christianity of the NS Germans of the last century to be of the utmost importance for the reasons given by Coel Hen in his letter to me yesterday. Behold the last entry on my old site:

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 5

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Munich town hall
(a painting by Adolf Hitler)

 
Did Hitler want to destroy the churches?

According to Ernst von Weizsäcker, whom Hitler appointed
ambassador to the Vatican, Heinrich Himmler once told Weizsäcker’s wife, “We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.” The Security Service of Himmler’s SS kept church leaders and organizations under surveillance and continually proposed policies to limit and hinder their activities. The Gestapo arrested hundreds of priests and pastors, some for violating Nazi restrictions or encroachments on the churches, and others on trumped-up charges. Other leading Nazi officials were equally hostile toward the Christian churches. In June 1941, Bormann, who had recently stepped into Hess’s vacated position as leader of the Nazi Party Chancellery and had thus become one of the most powerful officials under Hitler, sent a circular letter to all Nazi Gauleiter about the relationship between National Socialism and Christianity. Therein he asserted, “National Socialist and Christian views are irreconcilable. The Christian churches are based on people’s ignorance… on the other hand, National Socialism builds on a scientific foundation.” Goebbels and Rosenberg wholeheartedly agreed with Bormann and Himmler and hoped to hasten the demise of the Christian churches. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials stressed the intense antagonism of the Nazi regime toward the churches, which was a common perception in the Anglo-American world at the time. And many historians, such as John Conway in The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45, provide abundant evidence of the Nazi regime’s anti-Christian character…

The question then emerges whether Hitler wanted to destroy the churches, hoped the churches would continue to exist after accepting Nazi dominion and ideology, or was he indifferent about their continued existence?…

When he reflected back on his religious upbringing, he claimed that he hated Christianity from his youth. Once he became a politician, however, his desire to see the end of Christianity was tempered by a realistic acknowledgement that the religion was too deeply rooted in the German people’s psyche and emotions simply to abolish it immediately. Even when Hitler privately uttered his most vicious threats against the churches during World War II, he often indicated that the destruction of the churches would not be a quick and easy project.

In sum, Hitler did want to destroy the churches, but for him, it was a long-term goal that required time and patience. He hoped to accomplish it by gradually increasing restrictions on the churches and, more importantly, wresting the education and training of the youth away from them. Undermining the churches was also subsidiary to many of Hitler’s more important goals, such as eliminating the Jews, crushing communism, building German unity, and expanding Germany’s borders.

Some of Hitler’s close colleagues understood his ambivalent position. His press chief, Otto Dietrich, explained that Hitler’s restraint toward religious groups was a political move. In order not to alienate supporters, he sometimes endured attacks from church circles, although he often privately threatened future vengeance against them. Further, Dietrich noted that Hitler’s private invective against the churches encouraged Himmler, Bormann, and other anticlericals in his party to attack the churches. Weizsäcker took a similar view of Hitler’s position toward the churches. While the official Nazi platform supported “positive Christianity,” Weizsäcker explained,

In practice, things were very different. Hitler himself took care not to attack the Churches openly. But he had from his youth been an enemy of the Church; and without his tacit agreement the rigorous measures that were taken would hardly have been possible. An acquaintance of mine heard him say that in one or two generations the Christian churches would die out of their own accord.

For Hitler, the church question was not a peripheral subject; it was a major topic of conversation. The theme came up repeatedly in his private conversations with Goebbels, Rosenberg, and other officials; in private speeches to party officials; in talks with his secretaries; and in his monologues. In July 1941, he told his entourage, “In the long run National Socialism and the churches cannot exist side by side.” When one of his secretaries asked if that meant he was going to launch a new war against the churches, Hitler responded, “No, that does not mean a war; the ideal solution is to do away with the churches by allowing them to shrivel away by themselves gradually and without violence.” Indeed, Hitler’s desire to destroy the churches through a gradual, nonconfrontational approach often brought him into conflict with more zealous anticlerical Nazi officials, who favored more drastic measures against the churches. Because of this, Hitler sometimes served as a moderating influence on anti-church policies. Nonetheless, his ultimate goal was the eradication of the churches, even if he was more patient than some of his comrades.

Before coming to power in 1933, Hitler recognized that an anti- Christian platform would be political suicide, so he consistently portrayed himself in public as supportive of Christianity and the churches. Even so, he was unable to cover up completely the animus toward Christianity that percolated through his party…

Many of Hitler’s most vociferous professions of support for Christianity occurred in speeches where he was overtly countering charges that he was anti-Christian… Still, Hitler had difficulty playing his juggling act between the churches and the anticlerical forces in his party, because anticlerical Nazis such as Rosenberg—who edited the official Nazi newspaper—often alienated Christians…

By early 1937, the Vatican had sent seventy diplomatic protests to the Nazi regime concerning violations to the Concordat. Pope Pius XI was fed up with the constant infractions and finally decided to publicly rebuke the Nazi regime for its continuous transgressions of the Concordat…

Less than two months after Pius issued his encyclical, Hitler held a long discussion about the church question with his Nazi colleagues. He told his comrades, “We must humble the church and make it our servant.” He then suggested several means to accomplish this: (1) ban celibacy, (2) confiscate church property, (3) forbid the study of theology before age twenty-four, (4) dissolve monastic orders, and (5) remove the right to educate from the churches. Once these were implemented, Hitler continued, the churches would decline within a few decades to the point that they “will eat out of our hands.” Soon thereafter, according to Goebbels, Hitler was seriously contemplating the separation of church and state, which he had threatened earlier and which would have been a major financial blow to the churches.

Though Hitler did not take these drastic measures, he did ramp up his persecution of the Catholic clergy and considered ending the Concordat…

While Hitler told his fellow Nazis that he did not want to take strong actions against the church during the war, his secretary testified to a friend—and Goebbels’ diaries made clear—that Hitler always reminded the Nazis this was merely a temporary expedient. After the war, he promised, he would reckon with the churches…

From 1940 to 1942, about three hundred monasteries and church institutions were closed, and the German army took over many church hospitals…

Many other clergy were harassed or imprisoned by Nazi authorities. One example was a Catholic priest in Berlin, Bernhard Lichtenberg, arrested on October 23, 1941, for praying for Jews and for those in concentration camps. Under interrogation, Lichtenberg boldly outlined multiple complaints against the Nazi government, including their elimination of religious instruction from schools, the attempt to remove the crucifix from schools, the killing of disabled people, and the persecution of Jews. He stated, “National Socialist ideology is incompatible with the teaching and commands of the Catholic Church.” After serving his two-year sentence, he was rearrested (just as Niemöller had been earlier) and died in November 1943 while awaiting transfer to Dachau.

However, while allowing and even encouraging the imprisonment of many clergy, Hitler was more cautious in dealing with bishops. Hitler was furious when Catholic Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen spoke out boldly in public sermons in July and August 1941 against the Nazi confiscations of monasteries and against the Nazi program of killing disabled people. Though some Nazi officials wanted Galen executed, Hitler demurred, arguing that arresting Galen would damage the war effort. He advised delay…

In September 1941, he had joked that he would cure the bishops’ “headaches” by taking their heads off…

Another indication of his hostility toward the churches was his treatment of newly annexed and occupied territories from 1938 to the end of the war. When Hitler annexed Austria… the Nazi regime began shutting down Catholic organizations, schools, monasteries, and in 1939 even abolished the church tax. As Hitler expanded into Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1938-39, he likewise refused to apply the Concordat, even to the territories directly annexed to the German Reich. Hitler also denied the Vatican any authority over the Catholic Church in annexed or occupied territories…

In occupied territories with non-German populations, however, Hitler did not care if the people continued practicing their religion, as long as it did not foment any anti-German sentiments. However, he did want to eliminate any Polish leaders who might oppose Nazi rule, and this included the Catholic clergy. Before opening the Polish campaign on September 1, 1939, Heydrich organized SS commando squads who swept into Poland behind the regular army and murdered Polish intellectuals and leaders. They carried a list with 61,000 names, and by December 1939, they had killed about 50,000 men, including Jews, political figures, and intellectuals, but also many Catholic priests. Quite a few Polish priests were sent to Dachau during the war, too.

To Hitler, it was no issue if the allegedly inferior Poles kept their Catholic faith, as long as they served faithfully as slaves to the “master race.” In a meeting with Bormann, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, and Hans Frank, governor of the rump state of Poland known as the General Government, Hitler explained he favored allowing them to continue practicing Catholicism. He continued, “Polish priests will be fed by us, and in turn they will direct their herd in the direction we desire. The priests will be paid by us, and in turn they will preach what we desire. If a priest goes against the grain, then he will be dealt with mercilessly. The priests are to keep the Poles mute and stupid.”

On another occasion, Hitler implied that allowing other countries and peoples to keep their religion was useful, because the churches sapped their strength, which was to Germany’s advantage. In December 1941, he stated, “In any case, we would not desire that the Italians or Spaniards lose their Christianity: whoever has it, has bacilli constantly present.” In that same monologue, Hitler also boasted that he would “march into the Vatican,” expel the Catholic prelates, and then say, “Excuse me, I made a mistake. But then they are gone!” His fait accompli would strike at the very head of the Catholic Church, stripping the German Catholic Church of its international connections.

How serious was Hitler about attacking the Vatican and removing the pope?… What was Hitler planning to do to the churches after the war was over?… The ultimate goal of these policies was the complete elimination of the churches, even if it would take a few years or a few decades. Thus, Hitler was working toward the abolition of the churches with an incremental, not cataclysmic, approach…

A few months later, he derided Christianity as a poison bacillus akin to Bolshevism and suggested, “The struggle with the churches will perhaps last several years or under the circumstances maybe a decade, but it will certainly lead to a radical solution.” One of Hitler’s secretaries thought that if Hitler had won the war, he intended to initiate a vigorous campaign against the churches immediately by withdrawing from the Catholic Church…

“When we are free from Christianity,” he said, “the other peoples [i.e., non-Germans] can keep Christianity.”

We gain another glimpse of Hitler’s prospects for the churches after the war by examining his plans for rebuilding the bombed-out cities of Germany. Actually, Hitler’s scheme to rebuild the cities of Germany began even before the war. In 1938, the Nazi regime demolished St. Matthew’s Church in Munich and replaced it with a parking lot. When the Nazi regime was formulating plans to build several new urban developments, Bormann issued a directive from Hitler in July 1939 that no churches should be built in them, nor should places be reserved for their later construction. They had no place in the new order Hitler was creating.

Categories
Albert Speer Alfred Rosenberg Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Catholic Church Constantine Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian Heinrich Himmler Hitler's Religion (book) Jesus Joseph Goebbels Michelangelo Old Testament Protestantism Richard Weikart Schutzstaffel (SS) St Paul

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 4

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Many Christian leaders in the 1930s and 1940s, both within and outside Germany, recognized Hitler was no friend to their religion. In 1936, Karl Spiecker, a German Catholic living in exile in France, detailed the Nazi fight against Christianity in his book Hitler gegen Christus (Hitler against Christ). The Swedish Lutheran bishop Nathan Soderblom, a leading figure in the early twentieth-century ecumenical movement, was not so ecumenical that he included Hitler in the ranks of Christianity. After meeting with Hitler sometime in the mid-1930s, he stated, “As far as Christianity is concerned, this man is chemically pure from it.”

Many Germans, however, had quite a different image of their Führer. Aside from those who saw him as a Messiah worthy of veneration and maybe even worship, many regarded him as a faithful Christian. Rumors circulated widely in Nazi Germany that Hitler carried a New Testament in his vest pocket, or that he read daily a Protestant devotional booklet. Though these rumors were false, at the time many Germans believed them…

Most historians today agree that Hitler was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Neil Gregor, for instance, warns that Hitler’s “superficial deployment of elements of Christian discourse” should not mislead people to think that Hitler shared the views of “established religion.” Michael Burleigh argues that Nazism was anticlerical and despised Christianity. He recognizes that Hitler was not an atheist, but “Hitler’s God was not the Christian God, as conventionally understood.” In his withering but sober analysis of the complicity of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany, Robert Ericksen depicts Hitler as duplicitous when he presented himself publicly as a Christian…

However, when we turn to Hitler’s view of Jesus, we find a remarkable consistency from his earliest speeches to his latest Table Talks. He expressed admiration for Jesus publicly and privately, without once directly criticizing Him. But his vision of Jesus was radically different from the teachings of the Catholic Church he grew up in. For him, Jesus was not a Jew, but a fellow Aryan. He only rarely stated this explicitly, though he frequently implied it by portraying Jesus as an anti-Semite. However, in April 1921, he told a crowd in Rosenheim that he could not imagine Christ as anything other than blond-haired and blue-eyed, making clear that he considered Jesus an Aryan. In an interview with a journalist in November 1922, he actually claimed Jesus was Germanic…

While Hitler appreciated Jesus because he considered him a valiant anti-materialistic anti-Semite, I have never found any evidence that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Richard Steigmann-Gall bases his mistaken claim that Hitler believed in Jesus as God on a mistranslation of Hitler’s April 22, 1922 speech (some of which we discussed earlier in this chapter). According to the Norman Baynes’ edition of The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, during that speech Hitler stated about Jesus, “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 the fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter.” The term that is translated “God’s truth!” is wahrhaftiger Gott, a common German interjection that is rendered in some German-English dictionaries as “good God!” or “good heavens!” In the original German edition, wahrhaftiger Gott is set off in commas, indicating that it is indeed an interjection… Steigmann-Gall uses this mistranslation to argue that Hitler believed in the deity of Jesus. Apparently, he did not understand the colloquial expression used…

While Hitler’s positive attitude toward Jesus—at least the Jesus of his imagination—did not seem to change over his career, his position vis-a-vis Christianity is much more complex. Many scholars doubt that as an adult he was ever personally committed to any form of Christianity. They interpret his pro-Christian utterances as nothing more than the cynical ploy of a crafty politician. Almost all historians, including Steigmann-Gall, admit that Hitler was anti-Christian in the last several years of his life…

Even when he publicly announced his Christian faith in 1922 or at other times, Hitler never professed commitment to Catholicism. Further, despite his public stance upholding Christianity before 1924, he provided a clue in one of his earliest speeches that he was already antagonistic toward Christianity. In August 1920, Hitler viciously attacked the Jews in his speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” One accusation he leveled was that the Jews had used Christianity to destroy the Roman Empire. He then claimed Christianity was spread primarily by Jews. Since Hitler was a radical anti-Semite, his characterization of Christianity as a Jewish plot was about as harsh an indictment as he could bring against Christianity. Hitler was also a great admirer of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom he considered fellow Aryans. Blaming Christianity for ruining the Roman Empire thus expressed considerable anti-Christian animus. Hitler often discussed both themes—Christianity as Jewish, and Christianity as the cause of Rome’s downfall—later in life.

Hitler’s anti-Christian outlook remained largely submerged before 1924, because—as Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf—he did not want to offend possible supporters…

But by the time Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1924-25, he was walking a tightrope. His political ally, General Ludendorff, was increasingly hostile to the Catholic Church, as were many on the radical Right in Weimar Germany. Hitler did not want to follow them into political oblivion—and indeed Ludendorff did end up politically isolated, perhaps in part because of his antireligious crusade. But Hitler was also sensitive to the anticlerical thrust within and outside his party. Thus, after warning his followers in the first volume of Mein Kampf against offending people’s religious tastes, he threw caution to the wind in the second volume by sharply criticizing Christianity. In one passage, he complained that both Christian churches in Germany were contributing to the decline of the German people, because they supported a system that allowed those with hereditary diseases to procreate. The problem, he thought, was that the churches focused on the spirit and neglected the physical basis of a healthy life. Hitler immediately followed up this critique by blasting the churches for carrying out mission work among black Africans, who are “healthy, though primitive and inferior, human beings,” whom the missionaries turn into “a rotten brood of bastards.” In this passage, Hitler harshly castigated Christianity for not supporting his eugenics and racial ideology.

Worse yet, he actually threatened to obliterate Christianity later in the second volume. After calling Christianity fanatically intolerant for destroying other religions, Hitler explained that Nazism would have to be just as intolerant to supplant Christianity:

A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance will only be broken by a new idea, driven forward by the same spirit, championed by the same mighty will, and at the same time pure and absolutely genuine in itself. The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered in to 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.

Hitler’s anti-Christian sentiment shines through clearly here, as he called Christianity a “spiritual terror” that has “afflicted” the world. Earlier in the passage, he also argued Christian intolerance was a manifestation of a Jewish mentality, once again connecting Christianity with the people he most hated. Even more ominously, he called his fellow Nazis to embrace an intolerant worldview so they could throw off the shackles of Christianity. He literally promised to visit terror on Christianity. Even though several times later in life, especially before 1934, Hitler would try to portray himself as a pious Christian, he had already blown his cover.

Hitler’s tirade against Christianity in Mein Kampf, including the threat to demolish it, diverged remarkably from his normal public persona… In January 1937, Goebbels was with Hitler during an internecine debate on religion and reported, “The Führer thinks Christianity is ripe for destruction. That may still take a long time, but it is coming.”

In reading through Goebbels’ Diaries, Hitler’s monologues, and Rosenberg’s Diaries, it is rather amazing how often Hitler discussed religion with his entourage, especially during World War II. He was clearly obsessed with the topic. On December 13, 1941, for example, just two days after declaring war on the United States, he told his Gauleiter (district leaders) that he was going to annihilate the Jews, but he was postponing his campaign against the church until after the war, when he would deal with them. According to Rosenberg, both on that day and the following, Hitler’s monologues were primarily about the “problem of Christianity.” In a letter to a friend in July 1941, Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder claimed that in Hitler’s evening discussions at the headquarters, “the church plays a large role.” She added that she found Hitler’s religious comments very illuminating, as he exposed the deception and hypocrisy of Christianity. Hitler’s own monologues confirm Schroeder’s impression…

When Hitler told his Gauleiter in December 1941 that the regime would wait until after the war to solve the church problem, he was probably trying to restrain some of the hotheads in his party. But he also promised the day of reckoning would eventually come. He told them, “There is an insoluble contradiction between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic worldview. However, this contradiction cannot be resolved during the war, but after the war we must step up to solve this contradiction. I see a possible solution only in the further consolidation of the National Socialist worldview”…

At a cabinet meeting in 1937, Hitler commented, “I know that my un-Christian Germanic SS units with their general non-denominational belief in God can grasp their duty for their people (Volk) more clearly than those other soldiers who have been made stupid through the catechism.” Hitler’s contempt for Christianity could hardly have been more palpable.

Hitler’s press chief, Otto Dietrich, confirmed Frank’s impression. In private, according to Dietrich, Hitler was uniformly antagonistic to Christianity. Dietrich wrote in his memoirs:

…Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the “first Jewish-Communistic cell”…

Dietrich stated, “Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.” This confirms the point Goebbels made in his diary—that Hitler hoped ultimately to replace Christianity with a Germanic worldview through indoctrination of children…

[Albert] Speer recalled a conversation in which Hitler was told that if Muslims had won the Battle of Tours, Germans would be Muslim. Hitler responded by lamenting Germany’s fate to have become Christian: “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?” As this conversation reveals, Hitler saw religion not as an expression of truth, but rather as a means or tool to achieve other ends—namely, the preservation and advancement of the German people or Nordic race. In April 1942, Hitler again compared Christianity unfavorably with Islam and Japanese religion. In the case of Japan, their religion had protected them from the “poison of Christianity,” he opined…

In fact, Hitler contemptuously called Christianity a poison and a bacillus and openly mocked its teachings… After scoffing at doctrines such as the Fall, the Virgin Birth, and redemption through the death of Jesus, Hitler stated, “Christianity is the most insane thing that a human brain in its delusion has ever brought forth, a mockery of everything divine.” He followed this up with a hard right jab to any believing Catholic, claiming that a “Negro with his fetish” is far superior to someone who believes in transubstantiation. Hitler… believed black Africans were subhumans intellectually closer to apes than to Europeans, so to him, this was a spectacular insult to Catholics… Then, according to Hitler, when others did not accept these strange teachings, the church tortured them into submission…

Another theme that surfaced frequently in Hitler’s monologues of 1941-42 was that the sneaky first-century rabbi Paul was responsible for repackaging the Jewish worldview in the guise of Christianity, thereby causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. In December 1941, Hitler stated that although Christ was an Aryan, “Paul used his teachings to mobilize the underworld and organize a proto-Bolshevism. With its emergence the beautiful clarity of the ancient world was lost.” In fact, since Christianity was tainted from the very start, Hitler sometimes referred to it as “Jew-Christianity”… He denigrated the “Jew-Christians” of the fourth century for destroying Roman temples and even called the destruction of the Alexandrian library a “Jewish-Christian deed.” Hitler thus construed the contest between Christianity and the ancient pagan world as part of the racial struggle between Jews and Aryans.

In November 1944, Hitler described in greater detail how Paul had corrupted the teachings of Jesus…

Hitler’s preference for the allegedly Aryan Greco-Roman world over the Christian epoch shines through clearly in Goebbels’s diary entry for April 8, 1941… “The Führer is a person entirely oriented toward antiquity. He hates Christianity, because it has deformed all noble humanity.” Goebbels even noted that Hitler preferred the “wise smiling Zeus to a pain-contorted crucified Christ,” and believed “the ancient people’s view of God is more noble and humane than the Christian view.” Rosenberg recorded the same conversation, adding that Hitler considered classical antiquity more free and cheerful than Christianity with its Inquisition and burning of witches and heretics. He loved the monumental architecture of the Romans, but hated Gothic architecture. The Age of Augustus was, for Hitler, “the highpoint of history.”

From Hitler’s perspective, Christianity had ruined a good thing. In July 1941 he stated, “The greatest blow to strike humanity is Christianity,” which is “a monstrosity of the Jews. Through Christianity the conscious lie has come into the world in questions of religion.” Six months later, he blamed Christianity for bringing about the collapse of Rome. He then contrasted two fourth-century Roman emperors: Constantine, also known as Constantine the Great, and Julian, nicknamed Julian the Apostate by subsequent Christian writers because he fought against Christianity and tried to return Rome to its pre-Christian pagan worship. Hitler thought the monikers should be reversed, since in his view Constantine was a traitor and Julian’s writings were “pure wisdom.” Hitler also expressed his appreciation for Julian the Apostate in October 1941 after reading Der Scheiterhaufen: Worte grosser Ketzer (Burned at the Stake: Words of Great Heretics) by SS officer Kurt Egger. This book contained anti-Christian sayings by prominent anticlerical writers, including Julian, Frederick the Great, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Lagarde, and others. It was a shame, Hitler said, that after so many clear-sighted “heretics,” Germany was not further along in its religious development… A few days later, Hitler recommended that Eggers’s book should be distributed to millions because it showed the good judgment that the ancient world (meaning Julian) and the eighteenth century (i.e., Enlightenment thinkers) had about the church.

This notion that Christianity was a Jewish plot to destroy the Roman world was a theme Hitler touched on throughout his career, from his 1920 speech “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” to the end of his life. It made a brief appearance in his major speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally in 1929, and reappeared in a February 1933 speech to military leaders. In a small private meeting with his highest military leaders and his Foreign Minister in November 1937, Hitler told them that Rome fell because of “the disintegrating effect of Christianity.” From the way that Hitler bashed a generic “Christianity” as a Jewish-Bolshevik scheme, it seems clear that he was targeting all existing forms of Christianity…

During a monologue on December 14, 1941, Hitler divulged a decisive distaste for Protestantism. That day, Hitler learned Hanns Kerrl, a Protestant who was his minister for church affairs, had passed away. Hitler remarked, “With the best intentions Minister Kerrl wanted to produce a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity. I do not believe that is possible.” Hitler explained that the form of Christianity with which he most sympathized was that which prevailed during the times of papal decay. Regardless of whether the pope was a criminal, if he produced beauty, he is “more sympathetic to me than a Protestant pastor, who returns to the primitive condition of Christianity,” Hitler declared. “Pure Christianity, the so-called primitive Christianity… leads to the destruction of humanity; it is unadulterated Bolshevism in a metaphysical framework.” In other words, Hitler preferred Leo X, the great Renaissance patron of the arts who excommunicated Luther, to the Wittenberg monk who called the church back to primitive, Pauline Christianity. According to Rosenberg’s account of this same conversation, Hitler specifically mentioned the corrupt Renaissance Pope Julius II, Leo X’s predecessor, as being “less dangerous than primitive Christianity”…


(Note of the Editor: Left, The monument of Julius II, with Michelangelo’s statues of Moses, with Rachel and Leah). Many anti-Semites in early twentieth-century Germany despised the Old Testament as the product of the Jewish spirit, and Hitler was no exception. He saw the Old Testament as the antithesis of everything he stood for. In his view, it taught materialism, greed, and deception. Further, it promoted racial purity for the Jews, since it taught them to avoid mingling with other races…

Moreover, Hitler lamented that the Bible had been translated into German, because this made Jewish doctrines readily available to the German people. It would have been better, he stated, if the Bible had remained only in Latin, rather than causing mental disorders and delusions…

Many SS members followed Himmler’s example and encouragement to withdraw from the churches, and Hitler lauded them for their anti-church attitude. Hitler once advised Mussolini to try to wean the Italian people away from the Catholic Church, lest he encounter problems in the future. When Mussolini asked how to do this, Hitler turned to his military adjutant and asked him how many men in Hitler’s entourage attended church. The adjutant replied, “None”…

In the end… he [Hitler] had utter contempt for the Jesus who told His followers to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. He also did not believe that Jesus’s death had any significance other than showing the perfidy of the Jews, nor did he believe in Jesus’s resurrection.