In “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart has
written that atheists gladly cite the fact that Hitler had proclaimed himself a
“Christian”:
·
ON APRIL 12, 1922, HITLER PROCLAIMED TO A crowd
in Munich that he was a Christian: “My Christian feeling directs me to my Lord
and Savior as a fighter. . . . As a Christian I do not have the duty to allow
the wool to be pulled over my eyes, but I have the duty to be a fighter for the
truth and for what is right. . . . As a Christian I also have a duty toward my
own people.” Those who want to prove Hitler was a bona fide Christian
frequently reference this passage. Strangely, their attitude seems to be Hitler
said it, I believe it, and that settles it. Of course, they conveniently ignore
the many other things Hitler said about God and religion.
Behind closed doors, Hitler was singing a different song:
·
Otto Strasser, a leader in the early Nazi
movement who broke away from Hitler in 1930, told his brother in the late 1920s
why he was increasingly dissatisfied with Hitler: “We are Christians; without
Christianity Europe is lost. Hitler is an atheist.”
For many “Christians,” Hitler was a source of hope in light
of the very powerful opposition, Communism and their outspoken contempt for
Christianity. Despite Hitler’s appeal, the Catholic Church had banned its
parishioners from joining the Nazis before Hitler had come to power. According
to Weikart, this helped to explain the early opposition to Hitler:
·
The White Rose, a student resistance movement at
the University of Munich that espoused Catholicism, wrote in a 1942 anti-Nazi
pamphlet, “Every word that issues from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says
peace he means war and when he most sinfully names the name of the Almighty, he
means the force of evil, the fallen angel, Satan.”
Meanwhile, it seems that the Lutheran Church, the largest
German church, had, from the 18th century, largely abandoned their traditional
faith:
·
Beginning in the eighteenth century and
increasing dramatically through the nineteenth century, German Protestantism
had largely adopted theological liberalism, especially in the university
theology faculties. Theological liberalism tended to dismiss many parts of the
Bible as historically unreliable and rejected the miraculous. It opposed the
idea of the inherent sinfulness of humanity and stressed the immanence rather
than the transcendence of God.
This compromise had opened their door to pantheism,
panentheism, positivism, and even spiritism. Weikart cites Heine to highlight
the compromised status of the Church:
·
In 1835, the poet Heinrich Heine asserted,
“Nobody says it, but everyone knows it: pantheism is an open secret in Germany.
We have in fact outgrown deism. We are free and want no thundering tyrant.”
However, they were ripe to substitute one “thundering
tyrant” for another. Weikart is convinced that Hitler represented one breed of
pantheist who believed that serving god was a matter of acting as an agent of
natural selection to remove the inferior races:
·
Hitler’s devotion to nature as a divine being
had a grim corollary: the laws of nature became his infallible guide to
morality. Whatever conformed to the laws of nature was morally good, and
whatever contravened nature and its ways was evil. When Hitler explained how he
hoped to harmonize human society with the scientific laws of nature, he
emphasized principles derived from Darwinian theory, especially the racist
forms of Darwinism prominent among Darwin’s German disciples. These laws
included human biological inequality (especially racial inequality), the human
struggle for existence, and natural selection. In the Darwinian struggle for
existence, multitudes perish, and only a few of the fittest individuals survive
and reproduce.
Accordingly, after he came to power, Hitler proclaimed that
his vision was Volk-centered, rather than Christ-centered. Nevertheless, he was
glad to make use of Christian terminology:
·
This “miracle of renewal in our people (Volk),”
Hitler suggested, came about not as a “gift from heaven for unworthy people”
but because they had fanatically sacrificed for the “resurrection of a Volk.”
“It is the faith in our Volk that has made us small people (Menschen) great,”
Hitler pronounced. The future, he believed, was auspicious because the German
Volk was “born again.”
However, after Hitler consolidated his power, mention of
“God” was removed in favor of a modified statement of faith: “One Empire—One
Volk—One Führer!” Nevertheless, Hitler’s movement was also “messianic,”
according to Weikart:
·
The messianic thrust of the Hitler cult
manifested itself frequently, as in this Hitler Youth song at the 1934
Nuremberg Party Rally: “We are the joyful Hitler Youth We need no Christian
virtue For our Führer Adolf Hitler Is ever our Mediator. No pastor, no evil
one, can hinder Us from feeling as Hitler’s children. We follow not Christ but
Horst Wessel, Away with incense and holy water. The church can be taken away
from me, The swastika is redemption on the earth, It willI follow everywhere,
Baldur von Schirach [leader of the Hitler Youth], take me along!
Hitler’s religion was one of race and world conquest,
according to Weikart. Therefore, when it came to strictly spiritual matters
that didn’t conflict with Hitler’s vision, he was tolerant:
·
Hitler was completely apathetic about religious
practices in his personal life, and he did not really care what others believed
about the nature of God or the afterlife. He consistently tried to separate
politics from religion, insisting that Nazism as a political movement was
neutral on religious questions. As long as the churches or other religious
organizations allowed him to rule this world, they could say whatever they
wanted about the spiritual realm.
With few exceptions, they allowed him to rule, even to their
bloody end. However, Hitler’s holocaust had been foreseen. In “Twilight of the
Idols,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
·
They are rid of the Christian God and now
believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality…
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian
morality out from under one’s feet.
Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable
and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have
consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had foreseen the
holocaust back in 1832:
·
It is to the great merit of Christianity that it
has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not
destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then
will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.
Once again, we are hearing their battle cry.
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