HITLER’S RELIGION IN A FALTERING CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

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.