Hitler had contempt for Christianity but that did not stop him from trying to use it to support his wicked agenda. like many politicians both past and present Hitler spoke out of both sides of his mouth and invoked God's name in order to gain support. He patronized Christianity to prevent having to fight the Christian-based church. As Anton Gill explained in his An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945:
indent]For his part, Hitler naturally wanted to bring the church into line with everything else in his scheme of things. He knew he dare not simply eradicate it: that would not have been possible with such an international organization, and he would have lost many Christian supporters had he tried to. His principal aim was to unify the German Evangelical Church under a pro-Nazi banner, and to come to an accommodation with the Catholics."[/indent]
But as he grew in power his anti-Christian remarks increased in frequency as he began to see Christianity as a threat to the Nazi’s domination of Germany.
"It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood," he said in 1933. His countrymen would have to make a choice: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both." In the same year he is supposed to have told Hermann Rauschnig that he intended "to stamp out Christianity root and branch."
In the next couple years Hitler started arguing that Christian worship was a sign of weakness, and that it should be replaced by reverence for the nation and the state (the latter two embodied by the Nazi Party of course).
According to Albert Speer (the Nazi Minister of Armaments from 1942 to 1945, who served as Hitler's main architect before this period), on page 96 of his "Inside the Third Reich," at the conclusion of speculating on history Hitler often remarked:
“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…."
Another telling quote comes from Allan Bullock’s "A Study in Tyranny," who cites Hitler as saying:
"I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would have never 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."
Note also that when his private secretary, Martin Bormann, declared publicly in 1941 that "National Socialism [Nazism] and Christianity are irreconcilable" Hitler didn't raise much if any objection. Borman went on to say that Christianity's influence in the leadership of the people "must absolutely and finally be broken."
According to "The Face of the Third Reich" by Joachim Fest, Bormann stated that
"When we National Socialists speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God."[1]
Keep in mind that Hitler put Bormann in charge of maintaining Nazi orthodoxy so his opinions almost certainly mirrored what Hitler believed.
One of the primary sources for the evidence revealing Hitler’s increasingly anti-Christian rhetoric and sentiment would have to be the controversial Table Talk[2]. From it we get such gems as:
- "Christianity is an invention of sick brains"
- "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"
- "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."
- "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity ... The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity"
- "I shall never come to terms with the Christian lie . . . Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity"
- "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."
In it he apparently accepted a largely Nietzschean explanation of Christianity as being a conspiracy of the Jews for a slave revolt against their Roman conquerors:
- "Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society"
But as they say, actions speak louder than words. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, members of the clergy were specially targeted. For instance, in West Prussia two-thirds of the 690 parish priests were rounded up with only those that fled escaping. After only a month in custody 214 of those priests were executed while by the end of 1940 only 20 (about 3.5%) were left in their parishes.
Further, according to testimony presented by several top Nazi officials including Albert Speer, Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Alfred Rosenberg at the Nuremberg Trials, the Nazi’s had a plan to eliminate Christianity altogether.
You might find this, The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches put together by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, an interesting read.
Many historians have argued that even before their rise to power the Nazis had intended to obliterate Christianity wherever they gained control:
- Joseph W. Bendersky, "A concise history of Nazi Germany" (2007)
- Marshall Dill, "Germany: A Modern History" (1970)
- Jack R. Fischel, "Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust" (2010)
- Roger Griffin, "Fascism's relation to religion" (2006)
- George Lachmann Mosse, "Nazi culture: intellectual, cultural and social life in the Third Reich" (2003)
- William L. Shirer, "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany" (1990)
- Eliot Barculo Wheaton, " The Nazi revolution, 1933-1935: prelude to calamity:with a background survey of the Weimar era" (1968)
Wheaton probably put it most succinctly when he wrote that the Nazis sought to "to eradicate Christianity in Germany root and branch." But Hitler well understood that it wouldn't be wise to start a "Kulturkampf" against Christianity until after the Nazis had eliminated their other enemies first. Doing so prematurely would be disastrous.
The fact is that Hitler had little use for Christianity except to act as window dressing and ultimately sought to replace Christianity with Nazism.
1. As Jehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote in "The Trauma of the Holocaust: Some Historical Perspectives":
"[Hitler and the Nazis] wanted to go back to a pagan world, beautiful, naturalistic, where natural hierarchies based on the supremacy of the strong would be established, because strong equaled good, powerful equaled civilized. The world did have a kind of God, the merciless God of nature, the brutal God of races, the oppressive God of hierarchies."
2. It's accuracy has been questioned by many but in this case, as can be seen by the other sources I listed, the claims made in this case are supported
Leave a comment: