WAS ADOLPH HITLER A CHRISTIAN?

So often, we are confronted and even silenced with the claim that Hitler was a Christian. Instead, the evidence overwhelmingly proves that he wasn’t. However, as a master politician, he had claimed that he was carrying out God’s work. In the face of the God-hating Marxists, many voters understandably found Hitler’s professed goals appealing. Instead, Hitler was clearly a pagan, who had been promoting the “religion of blood” and ethnicity:

·       “The claim to be the representatives of a new paganism was not just a personal idiosyncrasy of a few minor figures in the Nazi regime. The conviction of being in the vanguard of a new ideological force in European culture was an integral part of Nazi thinking. Among the most prominent features of this new paganism can be discerned in the exaltation of the personality of Adolph Hitler, the propagation of the ‘religion of blood’ and the attempts to provide pagan equivalents for outdated Christian ceremonies.” (J.S. Conway, “The Nazi Persecution of the Churches”)

Actions speak louder than words. J.S. Conway wrote:

·       By 1939, only 2% of the university student body was enrolled in theological students as compared to 6% in 1933.”

·       In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least 2/3 were arrested and the remainder escaped…No less than 214 were executed…By 1940 only 20 priests were left in their parishes.

Carroll and Shifflet added:

·       Christian schools disappeared altogether by 1940. ‘The Catholic German Center Party’ was extinguished; Christian trade unions were undermined; religious youth groups were bullied and vilified, and their sporting events, camps, parades, and uniforms banned. Monks and nuns by the hundreds were brought up on bogus charges of currency violations and sexual perversions. Carols and nativity plays were barred from classrooms; crosses gradually stripped from hospitals and schools; the religious press censored and circumscribed;…and theological faculties at universities starved of replacements. (Christianity on Trial)

While Hitler pretended that he was a Christian, he presented a very different face when he spoke among his ministers:

·       “The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child.  Both are inventions of the Jew.” - Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 7

·       “Pure Christianity—the Christianity of the catacombs—is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics.” (Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ed (2000). Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944. Trans. N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens (3rd ed.). New York: Engima Books)

Hitler also justified his policies of racial cleansing by appealing to Darwin:

·       “The law of selection justifies this incessant struggle, by allowing the survival of the fittest.  Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature.  Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.”- Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens, trans., (Oxford, 1953), Hitler's Table-Talk, p. 51

In his recent book, “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart attempts to pinpoint the beliefs had been central to Hitler’s worldview and his genocidal rampage. Darwinism was one of them:

·       Since Hitler thought that nature was God, he believed that morality was defined by conforming to nature’s laws.  One of the natural laws he thought most important was the Darwinian struggle for existence, which produced evolutionary progress.  Since the struggle in nature was vicious and resulted in the strong destroying the weak, Hitler considered it good and right to viciously destroy the weak.  He thought this would bring about a better world with superior humans.  He thought he had divine approval for annihilating the allegedly inferior races and people with disabilities.

Darwinism fit comfortably alongside of Hitler’s belief in Pantheism:

·       Since Hitler thought that nature was God, he believed that morality was defined by conforming to nature’s laws.  One of the natural laws he thought most important was the Darwinian struggle for existence, which produced evolutionary progress.  Since the struggle in nature was vicious and resulted in the strong destroying the weak, Hitler considered it good and right to viciously destroy the weak.  He thought this would bring about a better world with superior humans.  He thought he had divine approval for annihilating the allegedly inferior races and people with disabilities. (Weikart)

In Mein Kampf, written while Hitler was imprisoned in the 1925-26, he shrewdly restricted his hate-mongering to the Jews rather than to the Christians:

·       ...the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

·       The black-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people. The Jew uses every possible means to undermine the racial foundations of a subjugated people. (Book 1 Chap 11)

However, after Hitler came into power, “German Christianity” was introduced to replace the Church in Germany, which asserted the superiority of the German people and the National Socialist State:

·       “You are born into your people, my child, of a German mother. Your father is a German. And you belong to the German people just as every part of your body belongs to you. You are a link in a great chain, a part of the whole. Alone, you are nothing, but when you live for your people you are everything. Your people’s destiny is your destiny. Its struggles and sorrows, its joys and its miseries, are yours. All Germans are your brothers. You may not think, want or do anything that harms your people! The history of your people is great and glorious, and you can be proud of it. The days of betrayal and the years of shame that Germany had to endure between 1918 and 1933 are a warning to you. You must work and create for the resurrection of your Fatherland.”

·       “The greatness of your people calls you to loyalty! Never forget that Frederick the Great and Bismarck were your brothers, as are those heroes of the World War who sleep in foreign soil or in the depths of the sea! The war memorials in the streets of the cities and the market places of the villages call to you. Never forget that we cheerfully shed our blood for you, for Germany’s holy soil, for the good and the life of this great people!” (Werner May, Deutscher National-Katechismus 2nd edition (Breslau: Verlag von Heinrich Handel, 1934), pp. 22-26)

Perhaps what was most revealing of Hitler’s religion was a song sung by the Hitler youth:

·       “We are the joyous Hitler youth; We do not need any Christian virtue; Our leader is our savior; The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone; We want to be pagans once again.”

What the youth had been taught was an expression of the religion of Hitler – the eradication of anything Christian.