Adolf Hitler was brought up as a Roman Catholic by his Roman Catholic parents. According to historian Bradley F. Smith, Hitler's father, though nominally a Catholic, was a freethinker, while his mother was a devoted Catholic.[6] Michael Rissmann states that young Hitler began to object to the Church and Catholicism as an adolescent, protesting against being confirmed. A boyhood friend reports that after Hitler had left home, he never saw him attending mass or receiving the sacraments.[7]
According to the eminient 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.[8]
Hitler's religious beliefs changed over the years, and as they are gathered from his public and private statements, 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."[9]
About his own religious stance, he said:"I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."[10]. Hitler’s private statements were more mixed. There are negative statements about Christianity reported by Hitler’s intimates, Goebbels, Speer, and Bormann.[11]. 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?[12] Though Hitler spoke against traditional Christianity in general, he in fact may have been referring to Catholicism, according to Steigmann-Gall. In any event, "No matter how much he vituperated against Christianity or the churches, Hitler gave no indication that he was now agnostic or atheistic: He displayed a continued attachment to a belief in God."[13]
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, but viewed traditional Christianity as a corruption of the original ideas of Jesus[14], who Hitler thought of as an Aryan opponent of the Jews.[15] In 1927 he said: "My feelings 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."[16][17]Hitler did not believe in a "remote, rationalist divinity" but "in one providential, active, deity."[18]. In Hitler's belief God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival along social darwinist lines. He often referred to "Providence" guarding and guiding the "Aryan race", supposedly the bearer of civilisation, in its fight against the Jews, supposedly the enemies of all civilisation.
As some branches of liberal Protestantism also had similar views, Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism.[19] 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."[20], stating according to Albert Speer: "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England”.
Hitler from childhood 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.[21]. 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".[22] Hitler himself, however, deplored the idea that Nazism was in any way a religion.
Speer claims Hitler remained a member of the Catholic church until his suicide, although he also notes that Hitler said "he had no real attachment to it."[23].
Notable Hitler biographer John Toland wrote of Hitler's religion and its effect: "Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god..." Professor Guenter Lewy, author of "The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany" quotes Hitler as saying that he "... regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of our national life."
According to historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, much is known about Hitler's views on religion through Hitler's book, Mein Kampf.[24] In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote neither as an atheist, nor an agnostic, nor as a believer in a remote, rationalist divinity; instead he expressed his belief in one providential, active, deity:
"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."[24]
Elsewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler makes it clear that "creator of the universe" and "eternal Providence" are synonyms he uses for God. 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.
Hitler's religious beliefs demonstrated the anti-Semitic view that Jesus was an Aryan rather than a Jew, and saw himself as acting according to what he described as "true Christianity." Hitler write:
"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.
Hitler writes of his Christian influence on his view of Jews:
"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. Of course, the latter 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, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-- and this against their own nation."