Adolf Hitler was raised as a Roman Catholic by his parents, as was customary where he grew up. According to historian Bradley F. Smith, Hitler's father, though nominally a Catholic, was a freethinker,[6] while his mother was a devoted Catholic.[7]According to historian Michael Rissmann young Adolf was influenced in school by Pan-Germanism and darwinism and began to reject the Church and Catholicism as an adolescent. After he had left home, he ceased to practise the Catholic religion altogether, neither attending mass nor receiving other sacraments. [8]
According to the church historian Owen Chadwick, Hitler found in Houston Stewart Chamberlain ideas which well expressed a justification for the nationalist and antisemitic doctrines about which he was already fanatical. These ideas were that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan, and the churches had corrupted his influence and Judaized his message. Chadwick claims that from his late teens Hitler hated Roman Catholic priests and despised Protestant pastors.[9]
Hitler's religious beliefs have to be gathered from his public and private statements and present a discrepant picture and are disputed. In public statements, Hitler frequently spoke positively about the Christian heritage of German culture and his belief in Christ. For example, on March 23, 1933, he addressed the Reichstag: "The National Government regards the two Christian confessions (i.e. Catholicism and Protestantism) as factors essential to the soul of the German people. ... We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of the German people."[10] At one point he described his religious status:"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."[11] Hitler never ended his church membership, but according to Albert Speer, "he had no real attachment to it."[12]
Hitler’s private statements were more mixed. There are negative statements about Christianity reported by Hitler’s intimates, Goebbels, Speer, and Bormann.[13]. Joseph Goebbels, for example, notes in a diary entry in 1939: “The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay.” Albert Speer reports a similar statement: “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?[14]
In contrast to other Nazi leaders, Hitler did not adhere to esoteric ideas, occultism or neo-paganism and even ridiculed such beliefs in private. Drawing on Higher Criticism and some branches of theologically liberal Protestantism, Hitler advocated what he termed Positive Christianity, purged of everything that he found objectionable. Hitler never directed his attacks on Jesus himself,[15] but viewed traditional Christianity as a corruption of the original ideas of Jesus,[16] whom Hitler regarded as an Aryan opponent of the Jews.[17]In Mein Kampf he wrote that Jesus "made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross". Hitler rejected the idea of Jesus' redemptive suffering, stating in 1927: "My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter."[18]
Hitler did not believe in a "remote, rationalist divinity" but in an "active, deity,"[19], to which he frequently referred to as "Creator" or "Providence". In Hitler's belief God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival along social darwinist lines. The "Aryan race", supposedly the bearer of civilisation, is allocated a special place:
"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and the reproduction of our race...so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission alloted it by the creator of the universe...Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence."[20]
The Jews he viewed as enemies of all civilisation and as materialistic, unspiritual beings, writing in Mein Kampf: "His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. He also fed on the old accusation of deicide and desribed his supposedly divine mandate for his anti-semitism: "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.
As Protestantism was more open to such reinterpretations and some branches had similar views, Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism.[21] His views were supported by the German Christians movement, but rejected by the Confessing Church. According to Steigmann-Gall, Hitler regretted that "the churches had failed to back him and his movement as he had hoped;"[22] and he stated according to Albert Speer: "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England”.
From childhood, Hitler admired the pomp of Catholic ritual and the hierarchical organisation of the clergy. Later, he drew on these elements, organizing his party along hierarchical lines and including liturgical forms into events or using phraseology taken from hymns.[23] Because of these liturgical elements, Hitler's Messiah-like status and the ideology's all-encompassing nature, the Nazi movement is sometimes termed a "political religion".[24] Hitler himself, however, deplored the idea that Nazism was in any way a religion.
According to historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, much is known about Hitler's views on religion through Hitler's book, Mein Kampf.[20]
He also states his belief that the Aryan race was created by God, and that it would be a sin to dilute it through racial intermixing. Hitler writes:
"The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. 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."
Refering to God as the "Lord of Creation" and the necessity of obeying "His" will, show Hitler's Christian thinking, according to Steigmann-Gall. Elsewhere in Mein Kampf, he says, Hitler makes references to Jesus. Other sources also show Hitler's Christian thinking, according to Steigmann-Gall. He notes an unpublished manuscript where Hitler sketched out his world-view, and he gives as an example a speech on April 1922 where Hitler said that Jesus was "the true God". Finally, Steigmann-Gall gives another example where in a private Nazi meeting Hitler again stated the centrality of Jesus' teachings to the Nazi movement.
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