Thursday, June 07, 2007

Hitler's religion


I wrote this some years ago. The topic has been thoroughly covered many times elsewhere but many Christians are still in denial so it needs to be said again.

It is quite common to hear Christians claim that Hitler and his followers were Atheists or that the Third Reich was anti religious. This is far from true.

Hitler was raised as a catholic in a culture seething with the influences of Christianity. Any visitor to Germany will see that every small settlement has at least one church, some villages have several and most towns can still boast magnificent church buildings. I have visited a few myself.

In 1933 the German Freethinkers League, a following mainly of intelectual atheists with about half a million members, was disbanded by the Nazis.

There can be no doubt that Hitler believed in a Christian god and regarded himself as a Christian.

The following quotes are translations from Hitler's speeches - I make no apologies for pilfering them from the following excellent source: http://www.atheism.about.com/religion/atheism/library/quotes/bl_q_AHitler.htm where you will find 60 quotes.

"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so"
[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]

"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work".
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]

"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." [Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 46]

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people."
[Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]

"Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time."
[Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter."
[Adolf Hitler, speech on April 12, 1922, published in My New Order, quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]

"What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator."
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 125]

"This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief."
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.152]

"And the founder of Christianity. made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God."
[Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp.174]


"I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal."
[Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 1]

"Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise."
[Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1]

"Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country]... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity. .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past ... (few) years."
[The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872]

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people. [Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]

I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it. [Adolf Hitler, from Rauschning, _The Voice of Destruction_, pp. 239-40]


My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. [Adolf Hitler, speech on April 12, 1922, published in My New Order, quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]

The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]

Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on His ungrateful children. [Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 7, reflecting on World War I]

11 comments:

  1. I hear that Hitler was an atheist, too. And its annoying and wrong. He was a Jesus freak and believed he was doing god's work.

    Thanks for the post!

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  2. Hitler did indeed believe he was a Christian doing God's will. But just because someone sounds like a Christian doesn't mean they really are. Hitler simply was not. Christians are known by their fruits. If someone lives the way Christ told us to in the name of Christ then there is very little doubt that they are not a Christian. But if someone says all the right things (like Hitler did) and yet does terrible things that contradict everything that Jesus Christ said (like kill His chosen people) it is usually safe to assume that they are a Christian in name only and don't really represent Jesus Christ/God.

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  3. Many of those quotes have never been proven to be of Hitler, but these all have. They seem to show the exact opposite of what you claim and back up what most secular historians think about Hitler. He was no a Christian but appeared to have a paganistic or panthiestic beleif.

    "So 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,"
    Adolf Hitler, 14 October 1941.

    When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours. In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together. … No, it does not mean a war. The ideal solution would be to leave the religions to devour themselves, without persecutions. But in that case we must not replace the Church with something equivalent…The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. [Hitler's Table Talk, p. 6-7]

    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. [p. 51]

    [Regarding a concordat with the Churches] Firstly, in this way the authority of the State would be vitiated by the fact of the intervention of a third power concerning which it is impossible to say how long it would remain reliable. In the case of the Anglican Church, this objection does not arise, for England knows she can depend on her Church. But what about the Catholic Church? Wouldn't we be running the risk of her one day going into reverse after having put herself at the service of the State solely in order to safeguard her power? If one day the State's policy ceased to suit Rome or the clergy, the priests would turn against the State, as they are doing now. History provides examples that should make us careful.
    Secondly, there is also a question of principle. Trying to take a long view of things, it is conceivable that one could found anything durable on falsehood? When I think of our people's future, I must look further than immediate advantages, even if these advantages were to last three hundred, five hundred years or more. I'm convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse.
    An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as her perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science.
    That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious questions. I've thus prevented my Catholic and Protestant supporters from forming groups against one another, and inadvertently knocking each other out with the Bible and the sprinkler. So we never became involved with these Churches' forms of worship. And if that has momentarily made my task a little more difficult, at least I've never run the risk of carrying grist to my opponent's mill. The help we would have provisionally obtained from a concordat would have quickly become a burden on us. In any case, the main thing is to be clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided.
    Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid of things that can't, or can't yet, be explained--that is to say, of the unknown. If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can't satisfy them with the Party's programme. Time will go by until the moment when science can answer all the questions.
    So 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. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.
    Originally, religion was merely a prop for human communities. It was a means, not an end in itself. It's only gradually that it became transformed in this direction, with the object of maintaining the rule of the priests, who can love only to the detriment of society collectively....
    Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.
    [Hitler's Table Talk, pp 58-62]

    The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. [Table Talk, p. 75]...The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world—in order to ruin it—re-opened the same breach in modern times, taking as his pretext the social question. Just as Saul became St. Paul, Mardochai has become Karl Marx. [p. 314]

    The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St Paul....For the Galilean's object was to liberate His country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's why the Jews liquidated Him....The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore and a Roman soldier. [Table Talk, p. 76] ... Christ was an Aryan and St Paul used his doctrine to mobilize the criminal underworld and this organize a proto-Bolshevism.... Christianity is an invention of sick brains....The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem. [p. 142-4]

    If it's possible to buy the high dignitaries of the Church with money, let's do it. And if one of them wanted to enjoy his life, and for this purpose put his hand into the till, for the love of Heaven let him be left in peace. The ones we have to fear are the ascetics, with rings under their eyes, and the fanatics.[Table Talk, p. 411]... I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would never have believed possible. For the moment I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews. The fate of a few filthy lousy Jews and epileptics is not worth bothering about. [p. 625].

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  4. Most of the above Hitler quotes in the main entry are political piffle talk, designed to assuage fears of a religious public whose initial votes or later personal support he needed, or whose doubts he needed to calm. The man clearly believed in nationalism and race and perhaps a God who validated that. His declarations of religion were clearly for public or persuasive consumption.


    Religion and Christianity may be all myth, but so is Hitler's alleged Christian religiosity, hardly proved by the clearly politically opportune statements of a known manipulative liar. (Hitler closed religious schools down and ripped out their crucifixes as fast as he could get away with it, and yet quotes by him on religious schools, clearly a sop to get a signature on a treaty, are treated as his true feelings. Might as well quote him publicly pledging Czechoslovakia's security and saying he was really a fan of Czech freedom.

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  5. Religion has been used as a motivational tool by lots of fascists. Stalin was an atheist. But, he re-opened the churchs at the outset of WWII. Beware of wolves hiding in sheeps'clothing. Hitlers and Stalins live today. They wrap themselves in the cloak of religion or patriotism. But, don't let it tarnish the image of religion or honest love of country. Just be smart enough to recognize them and brave enough call them out for their dishonesty.

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  6. OK, so you seem to be suggesting that religious people you like are genuine but those you do not like are actually atheists pretending to be religious. Perhaps it is the other way around.

    My father in law was a guard in the interment camps housing German officers as the allies advanced through Europe. He told me the German Officers held christian ceremonies and prayed often. Cunning, these atheist Germans, even in the face of defeat.

    Or could it be that many modern Christians are in denial and prefer to believe the propaganda issued by the churches on the winning side.

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  8. Goebbels notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had "expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity." Albert Speer reports in his memoirs of a similar statement made by Hitler: "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?"

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  9. Perhaps Hitler was, at times, frustrated with the christian churches. However the mountains of evidence attesting to his loyalty to the Catholic church in particular and his activities against freethinkers demonstrates that he was pro religion. The quote above still does not have the Nazi leader or his followers as atheists - he is suggesting that the regime might embrace another form of theism. It is clear that Hitler believed in God and organised religion in some form. It is also undeniable that the German people were overwhelmingly Lutherian or Catholic. In short - the Nazis regime was not Atheist.

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  10. OK Anonymous, shall we ignore all the material evidence for now and be "wised up". We need to ask why Hitler would pretend to be an atheist. Who did he need to convince - of course, it was the German people who you believe were also atheists. That is why they wore crosses, carried bibles, prayed and built churches for themselves. In fact they all said they believed in god because they were all atheists.

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  11. Communism with the Mask Off by Joseph Goebbels

    "Bolshevism denies religion as a principle, fundamentally and entirely. It recognises religion only as an “opium for the people.” For the help and support of religious belief, however, National Socialism absolutely places in the foreground of its programme a belief in God and that transcendental idealism which has been destined by Nature to bring to expression the racial soul of a nation".

    "What does Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel."

    Joseph Goebbels, diary entry for October 16, 1928.

    National Socialism was a pantheistic and deist religion. For further proof I suggest you read my thread.

    http://vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=1719452&postcount=44

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