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Category: Hitler’s Religion (book)

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Albert Speer Catholic Church Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 3

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

In many of his private conversations and monologues, as well as in some of his public speeches, Hitler sounded like a rationalist, using science to undermine religion. Also, he denied a personal afterlife…

Hitler’s freethinking bent seems to go back to his youth and may have come from his father, who was also disgruntled with the church. When reflecting back on his childhood religion classes in a January 1942 monologue, Hitler claimed that he “was the eternal questioner.” He read a lot of freethinking literature, and he challenged his religion teacher with his findings, allegedly driving his teacher to despair. He would continually ask his teacher about doubtful themes in the Bible, but the teacher’s answers were always evasive. One day Hitler’s teacher asked him if he prayed, and he responded, “No, Sir, I do not pray; I do not believe that the dear God has an interest if a pupil prays!” Hitler also reported that he hated the mendacity of his religion instructor, who once told Hitler’s mother in front of him that Hitler’s soul was lost. Hitler responded by telling his teacher that some scholars doubt there is an afterlife. In February 1942, Hitler confessed that he had not believed in Christianity since he was about thirteen to fifteen years old. According to Hitler, “None of my [school] comrades believed in the so-called communion any longer.” Hitler regaled his secretaries with accounts of his youthful exploits, including stories about embarrassing his religion teacher, whom he considered unkempt and filthy. He told his secretaries that he developed an aversion to clergymen from his earliest youth…

This was not the only time Hitler praised Enlightenment philosophers. During a monologue in October 1941, he lamented that current discussions about religion were in a miserable state compared to the writings of the French Enlightenment or to Frederick the Great’s discussions with Voltaire. Nine months later, he told Bormann that of the books that Bormann had given him to look at, he was especially interested in Frederick the Great’s books, Briefe über die Religion (Letters on Religion) and Theologische Streitschriften (Theological Polemics). Hitler commented that it would be valuable if all Germans, especially leaders and military officers, could read these works by Frederick, because then they would see that Hitler was not alone in his “heretical thoughts.” Hitler obviously thought highly of Frederick, not only for his military exploits and tenacity but also for his Enlightened religious views. Hans Frank noticed this tendency, too, testifying that Hitler increasingly identified with Frederick the Great’s Enlightened rationalism, which completely suppressed his childhood faith. The theologian Paul Hinlicky claims that Hitler’s conception of God was shaped by Enlightenment thought, asserting, “Hitler embraced the rationalist, watch-maker God typical of deistic (not ‘theistic’) thought whose stern and ruthless law he discovered anew in Darwinian natural selection. In this way, Hitler renounced the God identified by biblical narrative”…

In 1927, Hitler corresponded with a Catholic priest who had previously supported Nazism but by this time had some misgivings. Hitler contradicted the priest’s claim that Christianity had brought an end to Roman barbarism. Instead, Hitler insisted that Christianity was even more barbaric than the Romans had been, killing hundreds of thousands for their heretical beliefs…

Hitler attacked those in the churches who opposed his regime, indignantly claiming that their resistance was “nothing more than the continuation of the crime of the Inquisition and the burning of witches, by which the Jewish-Roman world exterminated whatever offered resistance to that shameful parasitism.” In a February 1942 monologue, Hitler mocked the Christian story of God sending His Son to die for humanity. Then, after Christianity became established, Hitler complained, Christians used violence to force everyone to believe…

Another way that Hitler paralleled Enlightenment rationalism was by stressing the variety of religions in the world. Hitler saw the presence of numerous religions in the world as a major hurdle to believing in any particular one. The basic idea was that since there were so many different religions, each claiming to be the sole and exclusive truth, most religions were necessarily wrong. Why, then, believe in one particular religion, just because by accident you happened to be raised in the society that embraced it? In a monologue in October 1941, Hitler expressed this point clearly. Where he got his statistics from is uncertain, but he claimed that there were 170 large religions in the world, so at least 169 must be wrong. The implication, however, was that all 170 were probably wrong. Then he claimed that no religion still being practiced was older than 2,500 years, while humans have existed for at least 300,000 years (having evolved from primates). This implied that religions were temporary phenomena of questionable validity. A few months later, he made similar remarks, claiming that human conceptions of Providence are constantly shifting. Only about 10 percent of people in the world believed in Catholicism, he claimed, and the rest of humanity had many different beliefs. This time, he gave the figure of 500,000 years for the existence of the human species, noting that Christianity only existed during an “extremely short epoch of humanity.”

In his 1935 speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally, he argued that religious ideas and institutions are inseparably linked to the continued existence of its practitioners and thus are not eternal truths. Religions, according to Hitler, are only valid to the extent that they contribute to the survival of the people (Volk) practicing them…

Five years earlier, he had given his first Nuremberg Party Rally speech after taking power and at the time presented his racial ideology as scientific. “In nature,” he explained, “there are no inexplicable accidents…. Every development proceeds according to cause and effect.” Therefore, in order to triumph as a Volk, Germans needed to discover the “eternal laws of life” and conform to them. Some of the most important laws of nature, Hitler explained, are that races are unequal and culture depends on the biological quality of the people, not on their environment. These two ideas—racial inequality and biological determinism—were prominent among German biologists and anthropologists, so in this case Hitler’s views were consistent with the science of his day…

After coming to power, Hitler continued to prioritize science over religion. When meeting with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Hitler reminded him that the world was changing, and he thought the Catholic Church should change with it. He reminded the cardinal of the Church’s past conflicts with science over its belief in a six-day creation and the geocentric theory of the solar system. Then he told Faulhaber that the Church must abandon its opposition to Nazi racial and eugenics legislation, because such policies “rest on absolute scientific research”…

When he was a boy, his religion teachers would teach the creation story from the Bible, while his science teachers would teach the theory of evolution. As a pupil, he recognized that these teachings were completely contradictory. He admitted that the churches in recent times had saved face somewhat by retreating to the position that biblical stories could be interpreted symbolically. However, he took the side of science and evolutionary theory against religion and the churches’ doctrines.

Another reason that some people might mistake Hitler for an atheist was his aforementioned rejection of a personal afterlife. Based on his interaction with Hitler, Walter Schellenberg, one of the most influential SS officers during World War II, testified the following:

Hitler did not believe in a personal god. He believed only in the bond of blood between succeeding generations and in a vague conception of fate or providence. Nor did he believe in a life after death. In this connection he often quoted a sentence from the Edda, that remarkable collection of ancient Icelandic literature, which to him represented the profoundest Nordic wisdom: “All things will pass away, nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds.”

In his New Year’s Proclamation in 1943, Hitler publicly insinuated that he did not believe in an individual afterlife, telling his fellow Germans, “The individual must and will pass away, as in all times, but the Volk must live on.” According to Albert Speer, one of Hitler’s closest friends who met with him not long before he committed suicide, Hitler faced his own death without any hope of an afterlife. Hitler told him, “Believe me, Speer, it is easy for me to end my life. A brief moment and I’m free of everything, liberated from this painful existence.” Hitler clearly did not think there was any kind of personal afterlife and certainly had no inkling of any divine judgment after death…

In February 1942, in the midst of a screed accusing Christianity of destroying the noble, ancient world, Hitler blamed the Jews for introducing the “beastly idea” that one’s life continues in a future world. The Jews used this promise of life after death as an excuse, according to Hitler, to exterminate life in the present world. Hitler contradicted this allegedly Jewish view, asserting that persons cease to exist at death…

In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that true Aryan religion must uphold “the conviction of survival after death in some form.” This, however, still underscores the fuzziness of his conception of the afterlife, since “in some form” is rather vague and openended. It could mean a personal afterlife, but it could also simply mean continuing to exist in one’s descendants or in matter rearranged. The latter seems closer to the position Hitler stated elsewhere…

He reiterated this point in a January 1928 speech, where he posed the question crucial to all religions, “Why is the individual in the world at all?” He answered that we do not know why we are living, but we do know that we have an instinct not only to live, but also to continue our existence in to the future. This is “the yearning to immortalize oneself in the body of a child.” The highest humans—and Hitler clearly thought the Aryans were the highest—extend this desire to preserving the entire species, not just one’s own children.

The view that Hitler saw the afterlife as an impersonal return to nature or the Volk is reinforced by an entry in Goebbels’ diary during December 1941. The entry is especially intriguing because it was one of the only times that Goebbels noted a point of disagreement between Hitler and himself about religion. Goebbels claimed that in his view—but not in Hitler’s—the average German needs to regard the afterlife as a continuation of the individual. “One cannot make do by saying, he goes again into his Volk (people) or into his native soil (Mutterboden).” In this discussion, Goebbels states that Hitler did not believe in an individual afterlife, and he implies that Hitler took the position that afterlife simply means returning to the blood and soil from which one came.

The view that the afterlife is simply a continuation of life in future generations was reflected in an SS pamphlet on funerals. It quoted Himmler, who stated that death held no terror, because it found meaning in the continuation of life. He explained, “The individual dies, but in his children his people (Volk) grow beyond him even during his life. Because we love the future of the life of our people (Volk) more than ourselves, we freely and bravely consent to go to the death, wherever it must be.” This notion of an impersonal afterlife was not uncommon in Nazi circles. It was so widespread that Pope Pius XI criticized the Nazi view of the afterlife in his 1937 encyclical. Pius complained, “Immortality in a Christian sense means the survival of man after his terrestrial death, for the purpose of eternal reward or punishment. Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order”…

Hitler’s vague notion of God inspired him because he considered God the creator and sustainer of the German Volk. When Hitler used the term Volk, he was referring to the Germanic people as a racial entity, so Volk was synonymous with the Aryan or Nordic race (terms also used interchangeably). But it was also conveniently ambiguous, making it a great propaganda tool appealing to Germans who might differ in their interpretations of it. It could mean all the German people belonging to the unified German nation, or it could mean all those who were ethnically German, or it could even mean all those having Nordic racial characteristics, even if they were ethnically Danish or Dutch or Norwegian or Polish. Hitler preferred this last definition and tried during World War II to construct a Greater Germanic Reich that incorporated all those identified as members of the Nordic race, no matter their nationality. However, most Germans opted for one of the first two definitions…

Hitler made the connection between God and the German Volk so often that Max Domarus, who edited a massive four-volume collection of Hitler’s speeches, claimed Hitler’s God was a “peculiarly German God,” not the God worshipped by most other people throughout the ages…

Domarus added this insightful footnote to the passage: “In this context as well it is evident that Hitler understood the term ‘Almighty’ to refer to a god that existed exclusively for the German people.” Of course, Hitler believed that God existed everywhere, but he also believed the Volk was God’s special people with a special mission, and he tried to instill this faith in his fellow Germans. Rather frequently Hitler encouraged his fellow Germans to believe that their work and struggle on behalf of their people was assured of success, because God was with them. In June 1937, while boasting of his achievements and preparing for future conquest, Hitler exhorted his compatriots to expect that God would bless them if they tenaciously worked for Germany…

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Note of the Editor:

Here is, with the honourable exception of GLR, the astronomical failure of American racialism. Only if they worked to restore Germany’s honour—the exact reverse of the anti-Nazi West of our day—could God help them.

Let us remember the words of Michael O’Meara: ‘The greatest of the “conservative” thinkers, Joseph de Maistre, pointed out long ago that the French Revolution led the revolutionaries rather than was led by them. For he believed that certain Providential forces rule our lives. These forces he saw in Christian terms, but others, like Heidegger, for instance, saw them in terms of Being, over which humans have no control. In either case, the force of Providence or Being or Destiny has a power that has often made itself felt in our history. For this reason, I have little doubt that Europeans will eventually throw off the Judeo-liberal system programming their destruction. I’m less confident about we Americans, given the greater weakness of our collective identity and destiny. But nevertheless even we might be saved from ourselves by this force—as long as we do what is still in our power to do’.

But O’Meara failed in one of his articles to honour the German Chancellor and his Reich because of, I suspect, the Catholicism of his Irish parents. Like many other Americans, he clung somehow to the Semitic god of the Christians.

The salvation of the Aryan consists in honouring Hitler and no longer Jesus. Then, and only then, the true God will help them.

Nicht in kalten Marmorsteinen,
Nicht in Tempeln, dumpf und tot:
In den frischen Eichenhainen
Webt und rauscht der deutsche Gott.

 
 
 
 
 

Not in cold marble stones,
Not in temples dull and dead:
In the fresh oak groves
Weaves and rustles the German god.

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Arthur de Gobineau Arthur Schopenhauer Friedrich Nietzsche Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Wagner Richard Weikart St Paul

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 2

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

Who influenced Hitler’s religion? Even as allied bombers reduced German cities to rubble in 1944, Hitler fantasized about his post-war architectural exploits. One of his most grandiose schemes was to transform his hometown of Linz, Austria, into the cultural capital of the Third Reich. A secretary of his remembered this as one of Hitler’s favorite topics of conversation. On May 19, 1944, Hitler regaled his entourage with his plans for Linz, which included a huge library. Inside a large hall of the library, he planned to display the busts of “our greatest thinkers,” whom he considered vastly superior to any English, French, or Americans intellectuals…

Hitler enthused about Nietzsche, however, asserting: “Nietzsche is the more realistic and more consistent one. He certainly sees the grief of the world and the human race, but he deduces from it the demand of the Superman (Übermensch), the demand for an elevated and intensified life. Thus Nietzsche is naturally much closer to our viewpoint than Schopenhauer, even though we may appreciate Schopenhauer in some matters”…

In this chapter, I highlight several of the most important thinkers who impacted his perspective: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Julius Friedrich Lehmann… He [Hitler] advised that all German young people should read the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer…

Rosenberg jotted down in his diary that Hitler once cited Schopenhauer as the source of the saying that “antiquity did not know two evils: Christianity and syphilis.” (Rosenberg, a Schopenhauer adept, apparently was not sure if this was really a Schopenhauer quote, for he placed a question mark by it.) Goebbels recorded the same conversation in his diary, but he remembered Hitler saying, “According to Schopenhauer, Christianity and syphilis made humanity unhappy and unfree.” Either way, Hitler saw Schopenhauer as an opponent of Christianity and was agreeing with his anti-Christian outlook.

Then there was Nietzsche…

According to Max Whyte, “For many intellectuals in the Third Reich, Nietzsche provided not merely the decorative furnishing of National Socialism, but its core ideology.” The official Nazi newspaper published articles honoring Nietzsche, and they “applauded Nietzsche’s ‘battle against Christianity.’” In his 1936 speech to the Nazi Party Congress, the party ideologist, Rosenberg, identified Nietzsche as one of three major forerunners of Nazism. The following year, Heinrich Härtle published Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus (Nietzsche and National Socialism) with the official Nazi publishing house. He admitted that some of Nietzsche’s political perspectives were problematic from a Nazi standpoint, but his final verdict was that Nietzsche was an important forerunner of Nazism…

On his visit to the Nietzsche Archive in October 1934, he brought along his architect friend, Albert Speer, and commissioned the building of a memorial hall, where conferences and workshops could be held to promote Nietzschean philosophy. The project cost Hitler 50,000 marks from his private funds and was almost completed by the end of World War II. During that same visit, Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a photo that circulated widely of Hitler gazing on the bust of Nietzsche.

On Mussolini’s sixtieth birthday in 1943, Hitler presented him a special edition of Nietzsche’s works… Hitler’s friend, Ernst Hanfstaengl, claimed that when he heard Hitler give his March 21, 1933, speech in Potsdam, he detected a shift in Hitler’s thought. Hanfstaengl wrote,

I pulled myself together with a start. What was this? Where had I read that before? This was not Schopenhauer, who had been Hitler’s philosophical god in the old Dietrich Eckart days. No, this was new. It was Nietzsche… From that day at Potsdam the Nietzschean catch-phrases began to appear more frequently—the will to power of the Herrenvolk [master people], slave morality, the fight for the heroic life, against reactionary education, Christian philosophy and ethics based on compassion.

At the 1933 Nuremberg Party Congress, Hitler endorsed the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, i.e., Nietzsche’s rejection and inversion of traditional Judeo-Christian morality…

While never endorsing the “death of God,” Hitler expressed agreement with Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity. In January 1941, Goebbels recorded in his diary that Hitler was riled up against scholars, including philosophers, but he made an exception for Nietzsche, who, he asserted, “proved in detail the absurdity of Christianity. In two hundred years it [i.e., Christianity] will only remain a grotesque memory.” Thus, Hitler approved of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian stance and predicted the ultimate demise of Christianity.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were also potent influences on Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer. In fact, Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner was well known. The Führer regularly attended the Bayreuth Festival and forged personal connections with the Wagner family and the Bayreuth Circle, who were powerful influences on the racist and anti-Semitic scene in early twentieth-century Germany…

Wagner did not believe that Jesus rose from the dead… In 1881 he read Gobineau and adopted his racist theory at once, calling him “one of the cleverest men of our day.” He embraced Gobineau’s view that race was the guiding factor behind historical development. Further, the key problem with humanity—the primary sin—was that the white race, the Aryans, had mixed with other races, contaminating their blood. Gobineau’s theory would have a powerful impact on German racial thought by the early twentieth century and would help shape Hitler’s worldview, possibly through Wagner or the Bayreuth Circle, but likely also through other racist writers.

Another Schopenhauer devotee and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was an important precursor of Nazi racial ideology. When Hitler was in Bayreuth for a speaking engagement, he requested an appointment with Chamberlain, so they met for the first time on September 30 and October 1, 1923. A few days after that first meeting, Chamberlain wrote excitedly to his new acquaintance, expressing his great admiration for Hitler. Until his death in January 1927, Chamberlain remained his devoted supporter. A few days after attending Chamberlain’s funeral, Hitler told a Nazi Party assembly that Chamberlain was a “great thinker.” Many Nazi speakers and publications, including the Völkischer Beobachter, feted Chamberlain as the preeminent racial thinker…

The parallels between some of Chamberlain’s and Hitler’s ideas are patently obvious, such as Germanic racial supremacy, anti-Semitism, and the constant struggle between races. Both men believed that Indo-Germanic people were the sole creators of higher culture. However, these ideas were circulating widely in Germany independently of Chamberlain…

According to Rosenberg’s diary entry, Hitler agreed with Rosenberg that Chamberlain was mistaken to defend Paul’s teachings. To be sure, Chamberlain thought Paul’s writings were riddled with contradictions, and he spurned Paul’s Epistle to the Romans because he viewed it as a continuation of the Jewish conception of a God who “creates, commands, forbids, becomes angry, punishes, and rewards.” Nonetheless, Chamberlain insisted that many passages in Paul evince a more refreshing, mystical approach to God. Hitler, on the other hand, rejected Paul altogether, as the account of the same conversation recorded in Hitler’s monologues made clear.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s comment:

At the 1933 Nuremberg Party Congress, Hitler endorsed the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, i.e., Nietzsche’s rejection and inversion of traditional Judeo-Christian morality…

Since the author of this book is a Christian, his prose doesn’t reveal the truth.

It was Christianity, a Semitic ideology, that inverted Greco-Roman values. Nietzsche and Hitler’s NS only wanted European values to return to their Aryan roots.

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Catholic Church Child abuse Hitler's Religion (book) Joseph Goebbels Judeo-reductionism Mein Kampf (book) Racial right Richard Weikart Rudolf Hess

Hitler’s Religion: Chapter 1

Goebbels’ Diaries

Joseph Goebbels, based on his frequent and extensive conversations with Hitler, recorded numerous times in his diary that Hitler was anti-Christian and wanted to destroy the churches. A few days after Christmas in 1939, he conversed with Hitler and reported, “The Führer is deeply religious, but entirely anti-Christian. He sees in Christianity a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a strata deposited by the Jewish race.”

The first chapter of Richard Weikart’s book is entitled ‘Was Hitler a Religious Hypocrite?’ In the white advocates’ internet movement, Carolyn Yeager has been the most faithful in holding in high esteem the memory of Hitler and his Reich. But like many Christian white nationalists, she has failed to notice the hypocrisy of the Führer’s public pronouncements when compared to his private pronouncements. I recommend Weikart’s book to those racialist Christians who are stuck with Hitler’s public image.

Who was the historical Hitler? Since, in many respects, Hitler is the antithesis of the archetypal Jesus, we can recall a verse from Mark’s gospel that portrays him: ‘He spoke to them only in parables, but to his disciples privately he explained everything’.

Plenty of evidence suggests Hitler was concerned lest he offend the religious sensibilities of the German public. In a lengthy passage in Mein Kampf, he warned against repeating the disastrous course that caused Georg von Schönerer’s Pan-German Party to nose dive. Schönerer was an Austrian politician in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who wanted to unite all Germans in a common empire. His fervent German nationalism brought him into conflict with the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, which would dissolve if Schönerer had his way. He also promoted a biological form of anti-Semitism, wanting to purify the German people by getting rid of this allegedly foreign race. In 1941, Hitler told his colleagues that when he arrived in Vienna in 1907, he was already a follower of Schönerer. By the time he wrote Mein Kampf, he agreed fully with Schönerer’s Pan-German ideals, affirming, “Theoretically speaking, all the Pan-German’s [Schönerer’s] thoughts were correct.” However, he blamed Schönerer for not recognizing the importance of winning the masses over to Pan-Germanism and harshly criticized him for launching the Los-von-Rom (Away-from-Rome) Movement, which called on Austrians to abandon the Roman Catholic Church. Schönerer opposed Catholicism because he considered it an internationalist organization that undermined nationalism.

This reminds me of what Henry VIII did in separating the Church of England from papal authority.

He believed it posed a danger to the German people since it included many different nationalities, including his enemies: the Slavic groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Schönerer himself personally left the Catholic Church in January 1900 and joined the Lutheran denomination. Though he occasionally lauded Luther and Protestantism, his concern was purely political. According to Andrew G. Whiteside, a leading expert on Schönerer, he remained a pagan at heart and was indifferent to Christianity; though sometimes he claimed to be a Christian, at other times he admitted, “I am and remain a pagan.” Another time, he stated, “Where Germandom and Christendom are in conflict, we are Germans first… If it is un-Christian to prefer the scent of flowers in God’s own free nature to the smoke of incense… then I am not a Christian.” According to Whiteside, “none of the Pan-German leaders was in the least religious.”

Hitler viewed the Los-von-Rom Movement as an unmitigated disaster because it unnecessarily alienated the masses from the Pan-German Party, precipitating its decline. Hitler suggested the proper political course would be to imbue ethnically German Catholics (and Protestants) with nationalist sentiments so they would support a “single holy German nation,” just as they had done during World War I. Hitler also rejected Schönerer’s anti-Catholic crusade because he insisted that a successful political movement must concentrate all its fury on a single enemy. A struggle against Catholicism would dissipate the Nazi movement’s power and sense of conviction it needed to carry on its fight against the Jews.

Wow, this puts me closer to Schönerer than to Hitler, even though, privately, Hitler believed the same as Schönerer did about the religion of our parents.

But we must try to understand Hitler. In the case of Henry VIII, the winds of the zeitgeist on the British Isle were in his favour. The Austrians and Catholic Germans weren’t prepared for such a step, and in any case, German Lutheranism was as harmful to the Aryan cause as Roman Catholicism. If someone wants, like Hitler, to do politics, he has to compromise.

While Hitler faulted Schönerer for alienating the masses through his anti-Catholic campaign, he was not thereby endorsing Catholicism. Overall, he supported Schönerer’s ideological goals and only objected to his inopportune tactics: “[The Pan-German movement’s] goal had been correct, its will pure, but the road it chose was wrong.” What Hitler learned from Schönerer’s tactical mistake was that political parties should steer clear of interfering with people’s religious beliefs or attacking religious organizations: “For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else he has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes! Especially in Germany any other attitude would lead to a catastrophe.” Hitler thus warned any anticlerical members of his party to keep their antireligious inclinations private, lest they alienate the masses.

Hitler’s compromise took a toll that is noticeable even in American white nationalism: what I have been calling monocausalism on this site.

By focusing, at least in the Reich’s public pronouncements, solely on Jews as the Enemy #1 of the Aryan, the public NS ideology exonerated Christians. I won’t reprove what Hitler did, because rather than being a religious reformer he chose to be a politician; and every politician has to compromise. But this tactic left a gap in racial ideology that to this day hasn’t been filled. (Since American white nationalists aren’t politicians but internet commentators, unlike the NS of the previous century they could break down the barrier between private and public, and start saying what Hitler said privately about Christianity, which they don’t.)

In 1924, when Hitler was interned in Landsberg Prison after his failed Beer Hall Putsch, his fellow prisoner and confidante Rudolf Hess talked with other Nazis about religion. Hitler did not join the conversation; afterward, he told Hess that he dared not divulge his true feelings about religion publicly. Hitler confessed that, even though he found it distasteful, “for reasons of political expediency he had to play the hypocrite toward his church.” From the early days of his political activity, Hitler recognized that being a religious hypocrite had its political advantages.

In his diaries, Goebbels confirmed that Hitler camouflaged his religious position to placate the masses. Based on his conversations with Hitler more than a year before the Nazis came to power, Goebbels wrote that Hitler not only wanted to withdraw officially from the Catholic Church but even wanted to “wage war against it” later. However, Hitler knew withdrawing from Catholicism at that moment would be scandalous and undermine his chances of gaining power. Rather than commit political suicide, he would bide his time, waiting for a more opportune moment to strike against the churches. Goebbels, meanwhile, was convinced the day of reckoning would eventually come when he, Hitler, and other Nazi leaders would all leave the Church together. If Hitler was being frank with Goebbels, then his public religious image was indeed a façade to avoid offending his supporters.

It couldn’t be clearer.

In a diary entry from June 1934, Rosenberg also explained how Hitler masked his true religious feelings for political purposes… According to Rosenberg, Hitler divulged his anti-Christian stance and “more than once emphasized, laughing, that he had been a heathen from time immemorial,” and that “the Christian poison” was approaching its demise. Rosenberg explained, however, that Hitler kept these views top secret.

Multiple sources, not only his monologues that we have begun to translate, portray what Hitler said to his ‘apostles’ in private in contrast to his ‘parables’ to the people.

In a major speech on the sixth anniversary of the Nazi regime (the same speech where he threatened to destroy the Jews if a world war broke out), Hitler remonstrated against the “so-called democracies” for accusing his government of being antireligious. He reminded them that the German government continued to support the churches financially through taxes and pointed out that thousands of church leaders were exercising their offices unrestrained. But what about the hundreds of pastors and priests who had been arrested and thrown into prison or concentration camps?

A fair question.

The only religious leaders persecuted by his regime, he smugly said, were those who criticized the government or committed egregious moral transgressions, such as sexually abusing children.

It is a myth that American Boston journalists were the first in the West, at the beginning of this century, to expose the Can of Worms that is the Catholic Church: it was the Germans. We can imagine how many Catholic children would have been spared if Hitler had won the war…

“Nor is it acceptable,” Hitler told the churches, “to criticize the morality of a state,” when they should be policing their own morals (the Nazi regime was at this time conducting trials of Catholic clergy for sexual abuse). He continued, “The German leadership of state will take care of the morality of the German state and Volk.” In Hitler’s view, morality was the purview of the state and its political leaders, not religious institutions and religious leaders. Any pastor or priest teaching his congregation morality contrary to Nazi policy or ideology could be labeled a political oppositionist, even if he was simply teaching moral precepts that Christians had been teaching for centuries.

Highly commendable, but because he lost the war we never settled accounts with Christianity: something Hitler planned to do after the war.

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Henry Picker Hitler's Religion (book) Monologe im Führerhauptquartier Richard Carrier Richard Weikart

A note on sources

(excerpts)

by Richard Weikart

The authenticity of most of Hitler’s speeches and writings are uncontroversial, and I use them liberally. However, some have questioned Hitler’s Table Talks as a reliable source for discovering Hitler’s views on religion. In an interesting piece of detective work, Richard Carrier demonstrates convincingly that the English version of Hitler’s Table Talk is based on the translation of a problematic and possibly inauthentic text.[1] Thus, I do not use nor cite the English translation of Hitler’s Table Talk. However, even Carrier admits that the two German editions edited by Henry Picker and Werner Jochmann are generally reliable. Carrier was hoping that debunking Hitler’s Table Talk would demolish the image of Hitler as an anti-Christian that many scholars have built on this flawed document. Unfortunately for Carrier, Hitler is every bit as anti-Christian in the Jochmann and Picker editions.

The Picker and Jochmann editions of Hitler’s Table Talk monologues are very similar—indeed verbatim—in many passages. Each contains some passages not found in the other one. However, when comparing the many passages they share in common, most of them are identical, though occasionally there are very minor differences. Oddly, Carrier maintains that Picker is probably more reliable than Jochmann, but this is not the opinion of most scholars. I have read both editions and will rely mostly on Jochmann, though many of the passages I quote are in both editions. I will only use Picker sparingly and to confirm points Hitler made elsewhere, not to try to establish some unique point. We also need to remember that these monologues are not transcriptions of Hitler’s talks, but are reconstructions based on notes taken during the monologues. Based on some testimony of those present at these monologues, the renditions we have are generally accurate, since they were written immediately afterwards.

The only book Hitler published during his lifetime, Mein Kampf, poses a different kind of problem. It is notoriously unreliable as a memoir, and many scholars—myself included—consider some of the vignettes about his earlier life completely fictitious. It does, however, accurately convey Hitler’s ideology, as does Hitler’s Second Book, which was only discovered after World War II.

Two other contemporary sources—Joseph Goebbels’ diaries and the recently recovered Alfred Rosenberg diaries—confirm the general account of Hitler’s monologues. My book is one of the first to use Rosenberg’s diaries, which do not divulge anything that overturns our previous knowledge about Hitler, but rather corroborate other sources and provide some interesting details…

Where I use English language sources, in most cases I have read the original German to verify the accuracy of the translation.

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[1] Richard C. Carrier, ‘Hitler’s Table Talk: Troubling Findings’, German Studies Review, 26 (2003): 561-76.

Categories
Charles Darwin Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart Theology

Hitler’s religion: Introduction

I woke up thinking that I was going to post another entry on Deschner’s history of Christianity today, but this comment from Mauricio, and my response changed my mind:

What strikes me about the matter is that, in recent times, American white nationalism has had only a couple of notable individuals who openly identify with NS memory: Carolyn Yeager and Hadding Scott.

By rejecting the final solution or the Master Plan East as Allied propaganda, they both hold to Christian ethics, and in Yeager’s case, she believes in Hitler’s public pronouncements on Christianity which, according to the Weikart book that just reached me, were PR pronouncements compared to Hitler’s harsh judgments in private (recorded even outside his table talks).

The revisionist historian Mark Weber also, a few years ago, looked solely and exclusively at Hitler’s public pronouncements. Simply put, there is no one of note in today’s white nationalist world who dares to look the ghost of Hitler in the eye.

______ 卐 ______

 

Hitler’s Religion by Richard Weikart offers a detailed analysis of a subject I am passionate about. Already in the dustcover we learn that with this book Weikart is ‘delving more deeply into the question of Hitler’s religious faith than any researcher to date’, and that ‘like the racist forms of Darwinism prevalent at the time, Hitler’s… religion was a direct attack on the Judeo-Christian ethics on which Western civilization is built’.

Herein lies the fundamental flaw of the book. Weikart doesn’t seem to realise that European civilisation is not to be confused with Western Christian Civilisation (see Daybreak, pages 25-44). Charles Bellinger, author of The Genealogy of Violence and The Trinitarian Self, wrote about Weikart’s book:

Hitler… sought to avoid alienating his support base in Germany, which was to a great extent churchgoing. But in private Hitler led his top aids in developing a subtle strategy to gradually destroy any traces of religious faith that would dissent from his [Bellinger’s pejorative adjective] plans to redraw the map of Europe, eliminate all Jews, and extirpate from human consciousness the idea that all human beings have an equal dignity and value before God, and a call from God to love all people as neighbors, with particular care for the weak.

Like Bellinger, Weikart is a Christian. He insulted National Socialism even in the subtitle of his book: ‘The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich’, and on pages x and xii of his Introduction he says: ‘Evil often appears in the guise of piety’ and ‘Hitler’s evil was so intense and inexplicable that…’

This reminds me of some words from a book by Ron Rosenbaum about Hitler that I read when I was still a normie. Rosenbaum is a Jewish author, but Weikart is something worse: a traitor to his ethnic group. Because he reasons as Christians reason, he fails to realise that the evil was not in Hitler, but in himself and the other Christians who obey the Jew (i.e., who subscribe to the ethical value system bequeathed to us by Judeo-Christianity). That said, Weikart’s book is a real gold mine for those of us who know that racial preservation cannot be mixed with the cult of a Semitic god, as we see in this paragraph:

Otto Strasser, a leader in the early Nazi movement who broke away from Hitler in 1930, told his brother in the late 1920s why he was increasingly dissatisfied with Hitler: ‘We are Christians; without Christianity Europe is lost. Hitler is an atheist’. Despite the fact that Hitler never renounced his membership in the Catholic Church, before he seized power in 1933 and for about two months thereafter, the Catholic hierarchy forbade Catholics from joining the Nazi Party because they viewed Hitler’s movement as fundamentally hostile to their faith. In 1937, Pope Pius XI condemned the Nazi regime, not only for persecuting the Catholic Church and harassing its clergy, but also for teaching ideology that conflicted with Catholic doctrines.

Will those American white advocates sympathetic to NS be honest enough to recognise this?

Whatever conformed to the laws of nature was morally good, and whatever contravened nature and its ways was evil. When Hitler explained how he hoped to harmonize human society with the scientific laws of nature, he emphasized principles derived from Darwinian theory, especially the racist forms of Darwinism prominent among Darwin’s German disciples. These laws included human biological inequality (especially racial inequality), the human struggle for existence, and natural selection. In the Darwinian struggle for existence, multitudes perish, and only a few of the fittest individuals survive and reproduce. If this is nature’s way, Hitler thought, then he should emulate nature by destroying those destined for death.

Weikart omits—as neochristian atheists also don’t want to see—that Darwin himself harboured exterminationist ideas about blacks (see pages 37-39 of Daybreak). For those who believe that Hitler was a Christian, this passage should alert them:

Indeed, the Nuremberg Party Rally continued through the weekend, and when it came time for the normal Sunday morning worship services for the Christian God, Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy conspicuously participated in Nazi Party festivities instead of going to church…

George Lincoln Rockwell was right that Hitler tried to form a new religion:

During the Second German Empire (1871–1918), a common nationalist slogan had been ‘One Volk, one Empire, one God’. Just about every German would have recognized this saying, since it was emblazoned on many postcards and even on a German postage stamp during the Second Empire.

The book then reproduces the image of a NS

poster proclaiming the new Nazi saying, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (‘One Volk, one Empire, one Führer’). In this new slogan, which was widely disseminated in the Third Reich on posters and a postage stamp, the Führer had replaced God… By 1938, the confession of faith did not even mention God and seemed to imply that Hitler was now filling His shoes.

Perhaps what most enraptured me about the religion that I now call the religion of sacred words,[1] Hitlerism, is the following passage (I’ve highlighted some words in red):

The messianic thrust of the Hitler cult manifested itself frequently, as in this Hitler Youth song at the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally:

We are the joyful Hitler Youth
We need no Christian virtue
For our Führer Adolf Hitler
Is ever our Mediator.

 

 
 
 
 

No pastor, no evil one, can hinder
Us from feeling as Hitler’s children.
We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and holy water.

The church can be taken away from me,
The swastika is redemption on the earth,
Its will I follow everywhere,
Baldur von Schirach[2] take me along!

Of course, not all Germans thought that way:

Some leading Nazis considered themselves Christians, while others were staunchly and forthrightly anti-Christian. Some Nazis embraced occultism, while others scoffed at it. Some promoted neo-paganism, while others considered pagan rites and ceremonies absurd. Hitler really did not care what they believed about the spiritual realm as long as it did not conflict with Nazi political and racial ideology…

[H]e clearly enunciated the central tenet of his worldview: the primacy of race. This racial worldview attempted to explain the essence of human existence and the meaning of history, while also providing moral guidance. Though this does not make Hitler’s ideology a religion per se, his comprehensive philosophy of life inevitably came into conflict with many religions, because most religions also claim to provide answers to these fundamental questions. Hitler recognized this problem, maintaining in Mein Kampf that a worldview such as his own must be intolerant toward any other worldview that conflicts with it—and here he specifically mentioned Christianity as a rival.

American white nationalism comes to mind. However, while it is true that Hitler had no choice but to become a public hypocrite because he was a public figure (in private he behaved like the real Hitler), white nationalists, who aren’t public figures because they have almost zero power in today’s West, are like Boromir.

Three years later, in his cultural speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally, he told the party faithful, ‘A Christian era can only possess a Christian art, a National Socialist era only a National Socialist art’. Hitler believed that the triumph of his worldview would transform the entire culture of Germany, whereupon it would no longer reflect previous religious concerns.

This reminds me of what a friend who speaks fluent German, and has helped me with the German section of this site, said about Bach’s music. But publicly Hitler could pretend to be someone else, so Weikart tells us: ‘As long as the churches or other religious organizations allowed him to rule this world, they could say whatever they wanted about the spiritual realm’.

This is especially true if we consider the moral philosophy of Nazism, which centered on promoting the biological welfare and advancement of the Nordic race and often conflicted with Christian ethics. Hitler’s Darwinian-inspired moral code called for the eradication of the weak, sick, and those deemed inferior, rather than universal love.

Deemed? Weikart seems to ignore what Jared Taylor has been calling race realism for decades. Universal love? I call that deranged altruism, which didn’t exist among whites before Christianity. Nevertheless, Weikart has a very clear mind, a thousand times better than Wikipedia’s definition of panentheism. I rarely speak of God but I have used this word on this site to explain my theological views. Weikart says:

In addition to pantheism, a position known as panentheism also emerged during the Romantic era. Panentheism is close to pantheism, but not quite the same, since it teaches that nature is a part of God, but God also transcends nature to some extent. In this view, nature is divine, but it is not all of God. In pantheism, God and nature are completely identical… During the Nazi period, the philosopher Kurt Hildebrandt argued that the pantheism or panentheism of German idealist philosophy—which he espoused—was the basis for any valid theory of biological evolution. He thus argued that pantheism and panentheism were the proper foundation for Nazi racial ideology.

Very true, and that’s why we have been saying that atheists are not true apostates but that, axiologically, they remain Christians. But some NS Germans had yet to mature:

Another problem creating confusion about Hitler’s religion is that some people (though usually not historians, who know better) think the Nazis had a coherent religious position. Some wrongly assume that because Rosenberg or Himmler embraced neo-paganism, this must have been the official Nazi position. However, there was no official Nazi position on religion, except perhaps for the rather vague and minimalist position that some kind of God existed.

Hitler’s blunder was to go on a rampage against the Soviet Union (almost a whole continent). Instead, his immature countrymen should have practised an internal jihad as a prelude to the external jihad of the new faith that was to conquer the world. We can already imagine the influence that a National Socialist state that didn’t invade the SU (unless it developed atomic bombs before them) would have exerted in the West if it had dedicated itself to propagating this new faith with the full power of the State…

____________

[1] I refer to the 14 words. But Hitler equally agreed with what now I call ‘the 4 words’.

[2] The leader of the Hitler Youth.

Categories
Hitler's Religion (book) Richard Weikart

Weikart’s book

Last year a commenter called to my attention a passage from Hitler’s Religion by Richard Weikart:

Worse yet, he [Hitler] 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. (Mein Kampf, Chapter V)

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. He was usually more circumspect, refraining from open criticism of Christianity. However, many of his colleagues testified that Hitler’s personal opinion about Christianity did not match his hypocritical public stance; Hitler, for his part, thought religion itself was hypocritical.

Gilad Atzmon, a Jew whose relatively recent books have been reviewed by the racial right, said that the intolerant fanatics win.

He is right: and that was why Julian the Apostate failed: he was a very tolerant emperor towards Christians, Jews and pagans. The priest of the 14 words, on the other hand, is as intolerant as the Christians who destroyed the classical world.

As I said last year to the commenter who quoted the passage above, ‘Although Richard Weikart is ideologically an enemy, he is infinitely more honest about Hitler’s anti-Christianity than Richard Carrier. I guess I’ll have to get a copy of Weikart’s book…’

I just ordered it from Amazon.