Hitler’s Religious Beliefs: An Analysis
[Originally sent as a message to the YouTuber Aron Ra and later edited for clarification and format]
Aron,
Four months ago, you did a show on The Line with Forrest where you talked to a caller named Kieth who told a ridiculous story about a Nazi that turned to Jesus and became a "good person" due to faith. Both you and Forrest made some excellent points. But both of you (as so many atheist advocates do) have been inaccurately representing Hitler and the Nazi Party for years, and frankly, I just can't take it anymore.
I am not a credentialed historian, nor do I have any professional academic expertise in World War II or the ideology of the Nazi Regime. That being said, I am a second-generation German American whose grandfather was drafted and fought under Hitler's army and whose paternal grandparents both accepted and embraced Nazism until the day they died—even after moving to the United States and living out the American Dream for themselves and their children.
They remained isolated within a close-knit German community where their views were not fringe. My grandfather was the Bier Chairman for the German American Festival in Toledo, Ohio, spoke very little English, and was a hateful, regimented, and emotionally distant man who I found infinitely fascinating. He died when I was very young, and I never got the chance to discuss anything meaningful with him as an adult when I would have been capable of understanding the nuances of his past.
My grandmother and I had a catastrophic falling out in my early teens due to her bigotry, so I only got to hear the highly sugarcoated, rosy-tinted, and propaganda-smothered details of her life without the ability to critically question her assertions before she died of stomach cancer. This ignorance of their history turned into a lifelong obsession about World War II and Nazi beliefs to where I consider myself a [very] amateur historian on the subject. It is with this knowledge that I write to you now.
The true beliefs of Adolf Hitler
have been long debated in social media comment sections by atheists and theists. I have heard many atheists claim that Hitler was a Christian and devout Catholic, citing his numerous public speeches claiming his adherence to the Church and god himself. Theists counter the atheists by claiming Hitler was an atheist, as evidenced by different public speeches and personal writings in order to prove the evil consequences of atheism and support the theists' moral superiority.
Armed with similar evidence, the two sides invariably end up screaming about the idiotic views of the other until one ragequits and abandons the debate in a huff. I've never seen a clear winner in such skirmishes, and my increasing frustration caused me to evaluate the evidence for myself.
So what did I find?
Was Hitler an atheist or a Christian?
Answer: he was neither.
Hitler was born to a devout practicing Catholic mother and was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church in Austria. His father, a thrice-married adulterer, alcoholic, violent, and non-religious man, was quite distrustful of the Catholic Church. Schoolmates of Hitler report that after leaving home at the age of 18, he never again attended mass or received the sacraments in the Catholic Church.
Hitler's views on religion conflicted and varied widely over the course of his rule. In the early days of his rise to power, in public, he claimed to be a Catholic and frequently appealed to god and both Protestant and Catholic Churches as being essential to the moral foundations of the German people:
"For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will." Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, 1925
In a speech delivered at Koblenz in 1934, Hitler said:
"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian; these are Christian principles."
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life." My New Order, Adolf Hitler, 1941
In private, however, Hitler hated organized religion, including Christianity, and believed the State should be revered instead of the Church. Hitler stated:
"We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany." A History of National Socialism, Konrad Heiden, 1935
He worked hard to dismantle the Church, but did so covertly and pragmatically so as not to anger the populace. Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945, wrote on April 29th, 1941, in his diary that although Hitler was "a fierce opponent" of the Vatican and Christianity, "he forbids me to leave the church. For 'tactical reasons.'"
In his memoir titled Inside the Third Reich, Hitler's confidant and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer wrote:
"Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church," yet "he conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him."
And continuing from Speer's memoir:
"Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS, vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He, too, would remain a member of the Catholic Church, he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact, he remained in the church until his suicide."
He made false promises of protection to various church leaders to secure their votes on the Enabling Act of 1933, granting Hitler dictatorial powers, which he subsequently used to eliminate all competing political parties and religious organizations that did not wholly endorse Nazism. He frequently sent priests who stood in his way to be murdered in concentration camps (OSS; The Nazi Master Plan; Annex 4: The Persecution of the Christian Churches, July 1945) and eliminated the teaching of Christianity to the Hitler Youth, removing all clergy from German schools by 1939.
He believed in a bastardized version of evolution (similar in name only) known as "social Darwinism," which parrotted "survival of the fittest" as its most prominent ideal while ignoring the method of natural selection, substituting eugenics in its place. Hitler never referenced Darwin or Darwinism in any of his writings, public or private speeches, and Darwin's books were notably absent from his expansive library.
He did cite Arthur de Gobineau as a prominent source to support his bigoted ideology. Quoted from Gobineau's Inequality of Human Races, published in French in 1853 and translated into German in 1897:
“It is said that Genesis does not admit of a multiple origin for our species... we must, of course, acknowledge that Adam is the ancestor of the white race. The scriptures are evidently meant to be so understood, for the generations deriving from him are certainly white... there is nothing to show that, in the view of the first compilers of the Adamite genealogies, those outside the white race were counted as part of the species at all."
“I conclude... that the permanence of racial types is beyond dispute; it is so strong and indestructible that the most complete change of environment has no power to overthrow it.”
Hitler also used American anti-miscegenation laws, which used biblical—not scientific—evidence to substantiate its claims. In June 1934, Nazi lawyers met with U.S. Justice Department officials to study the legislation in detail, which was then co-opted into later German anti-miscegenation laws, a crucial component of the Nuremberg Laws.
It cannot be said that Hitler was an "evolutionist" or a "Darwinist," as his ideology was mainly based on scriptural and theistic interpretations. Yet, confusingly, he believed that science would eventually eliminate the people's need for Christianity.
Quoted from Hitler's Table Talk:
"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure... it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually, the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature, there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic."
However, Hitler's acceptance of "evolution" was so far removed from Darwin's actual theory and thoughts on the legitimacy of the concept of race that it can only be concluded that Hitler never read Darwin's books and neither accepted nor invoked his theory to support Nazism. The phrase "survival of the fittest" was severely misinterpreted and twisted in order to justify his murderous agenda of those he considered genetically "subhuman," and of the Jews who he saw as racially inferior, not theologically so.
Theists often conflate atheism with Darwinism, regardless of the fact that Darwin considered himself to be a theist when he wrote On the Origin of Species and only considered himself to be agnostic at the time of his death. Whether Hitler believed in evolution does not negate the truth of evolutionary theory as reported by Darwin, despite theists' continued demonization of the theory as illegitimate and evil because they believe Hitler to be an ardent supporter.
That being said, Hitler was absolutely not an atheist, and Nazism was not an atheist movement.
In a 1928 speech, he said:
"We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact, our movement is Christian."
In a 1933 speech delivered in Berlin, Hitler stated about atheism:
"We were convinced that the people need and require this [Christian] faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
In a speech delivered in Stuttgart in February of 1933, Hitler stated:
"In the first place, it is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany. I do not merely talk of Christianity; no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties that destroy Christianity. If many wish today to take threatened Christianity under their protection, where, I would ask, was Christianity for them in these fourteen years when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government."
He believed in god but did not accept Jesus because Jesus was Jewish (or he denied he was Jewish, choosing to believe he was an Aryan—this stance would vacillate over time).
He even tried to create his own version of religion, called "German Christianity" or "nondenominational positive Christianity," uniting the 28 Protestant sects under the "Reich Church." This centered around his "superior race" ideology and rejected the divinity of Jesus as well as much of the Old Testament. Hitler intended for the Reich Church to be the established State Church in a manipulative ploy to control the minds of German citizens, but it did not catch on and was eventually abandoned.
Quoted from Hitler's Mein Kampf:
"The two Christian denominations look on with indifference at the profanation and destruction of a noble and unique creature who was given to the world as a gift of God's grace. For the future of the world, however, it does not matter which of the two triumphs over the other, the Catholic or the Protestant. But it does matter whether Aryan humanity survives or perishes."
Hitler was a massive fan of the theologian Martin Luther, using his seminal anti-Semitic treatise, On The Jews And Their Lies, as a blueprint for the Nazi Regime's eventual imprisonment and murder of the Jews. Luther recommended seven remedial actions to be taken against the Jewish people.
In summary, the treatise commands for Jewish synagogues, schools, and homes to be burned to the ground; for any gold and silver owned by Jews to be confiscated; for their religious writings to be seized and burned; for Jewish preaching to be made illegal punishable by death; for Jews to be given no legal right of safe passage; for no mercy or kindness be given to Jews; and for Jews to be forced to work as slave labor. In 1938, the Nazi government periodical, The Information Digest, published all seven of Luther's recommendations.
It should also be noted that Kristallnacht, the night the Nazis arrested 30,000 Jews and destroyed hundreds of Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues on November 10th, 1938, was Martin Luther's birthday.
In a proclamation, Hitler stated in 1933 that "Christianity [was] the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life." He frequently appealed to a "creator of the universe" and "eternal Providence" in his writings and speeches.
Quoting from Mein Kampf:
"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."
Essentially, Hitler was a DEIST—NOT an atheist, NOR a Christian. But even that is an overly simplistic conclusion, as no answer is 100% correct.
Every time I hear this crap from Christians and atheists, it makes my ass twitch. Christians claim he was an atheist; atheists claim he was a Catholic. Well, they're both wrong. I wish people would look it up before spreading misinformation while attacking the other side with a dishonest and factually incorrect "gotcha."
So please, respectfully, stop saying that Hitler was a Catholic because he was only one on paper to better manipulate German citizens who were overwhelmingly Protestant and Catholic. He hated Christianity, he hated Catholicism, he hated atheists, and he murdered anyone who didn't buy into his seriously convoluted religious ideas.
To Hitler, the German State was to be worshiped above all things; "blood and soil" were the alters on which he knelt. Neither theists nor atheists have to claim him. We can toss him out like the garbage human he was, and both sides can quit bickering about it.
Thank you for your time. If you'd like to discuss it further, I'd be happy to discuss it via email or on your channel. I think it's vital in our ongoing battle with theists to be honest and dismantle misinformation, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes us.
I hope you and the wifey, danger noodles, and puppers are doing well.
Sincerely,
