Religious views of Adolf Hitler

Hitler's youth

Adolf Hitler was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Hapsburg Austria. However, reliable historical details on his childhood are scarce. According to Hitler historian Ian Kershaw, the reflections Hitler provided on his own life in Mein Kampf are "inaccurate in detail and coloured in interpretation", while information that was given during the Nazi period is "dubious", as can be the postwar recollections of family and acquaintances.

Hitler was baptised as a Catholic in the same year he was born during 1889. Hitler's father Alois, though nominally a Catholic, was somewhat religiously skeptical and anticlerical, while his mother Klara was a devout practising Catholic.

A.N. Wilson wrote: "Much is sometimes made of the Catholic upbringing of Hitler... it was something to which Hitler himself often made allusion, and he was nearly always violently hostile. 'The biretta! The mere sight of these abortions in cassocks makes me wild!'" Hitler boasted of expressing scepticism to clergyman-teachers when taught religious instruction school.

Hitler attended several primary schools. For six months, the family lived opposite a Benedictine Monastery at Lambach, and on some afternoons, Hitler attended the choir school there. Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf that at this time he dreamed of one day taking holy orders. Hitler was confirmed on 22 May 1904. Rissmann relates a story where a boyhood friend claimed that after Hitler had left home, he never again attended Mass or received the sacraments.

According to Rissmann, as a youth Hitler was influenced by Pan-Germanism and began to reject the Catholic Church, receiving confirmation only unwillingly. Biograpger John Toland wrote of the 1904 ceremony at Linz Cathedral that Hitler's confirmation sponsor said he nearly had to "drag the words out of him... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him".

In 1909, Hitler moved to Vienna. According to Bullock, his intellectual interests there vacillated and his reading included "Ancient Rome, the Eastern religions, Yoga, Occultism, Hypnotism, Astrology, Protestantism, each in turn excited his interest for a moment... He struck people as unbalanced. He gave rein to his hatreds—against the Jews, the priests, the Social Democrats, the Habsburgs—without restraint".

Adulthood and political career

Kershaw wrote that few people could really claim to "know" Hitler, who was "a very private, even secretive individual", able to deceive "even hardened critics" as to his true beliefs. Hitler's public and private statements on religion were often in conflict. Hitler typically tailored his message to his audience's perceived sensibilities. In private Hitler scorned Christianity to his friends, but when out campaigning for power in Germany, he publicly made statements in favour of the religion. According to Guenter Lewy, Hitler was not excommunicated from the Catholic Church prior to his death.

Hitler's private religious beliefs

Comments recorded by Hitler's intimates, such as Joseph Goebbels, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann, indicate that Hitler was hostile to Christianity, but wary of its impact on politics. Ian Kershaw wrote that, while Hitler would occasionally tell his inner circle that he wanted to delay the "church struggle" out of political considerations, his inflammatory remarks gave his underlings license to intensify it.

Historians on Hitler's religious beliefs

Alan Bullock was an early and influential biographer of Hitler who saw the dictator as a rationalist and materialist, not only in his "dismissal of religion" but also in his "insensitivity to humanity", with no feeling for the spiritual or emotional side of human existence. Bullock wrote that Hitler's belief in himself echoed Hegel's views that heroes were above conventional morality and the role of "world-historical individuals" as the agents by which the "Will of the World Spirit", the plan of Providence is carried out. Hitler, wrote Bullock, came to see himself as "a man with a mission, marked out by Providence, and therefore exempt from the ordinary canons of human conduct". Bullock concluded: "It is in this sense of mission that Hitler, a man who believed neither in God nor in conscience ('a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcision') found both justification and absolution". Following his early military successes, Hitler "abandoned himself entirely to megalomania" and the "sin of hybris", an exaggerated self-pride, believing himself to be more than a man.

According to Max Domarus, Hitler had fully discarded belief in the Judeo-Christian conception of God by 1937, but continued to use the word "God" in speeches — but it was not the God "who has been worshiped for millennia", but a new and peculiarly German "god" who "let iron grow". Thus Hitler told the British journalist Ward Price in 1937: "I believe in God, and I am convinced that He will not desert 67 million Germans who have worked so hard to regain their rightful position in the world." license to intensify it.

According to Laurence Rees, "Hitler did not believe in the afterlife, but he did believe he would have a life after death because of what he had achieved." Rees saw no evidence that Hitler ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church". He wrote that "the most coherent reading of Mein Kampf" is that Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, but did "not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual 'soul'."

Hitler was neither "practising Christian," nor "thorough atheist", wrote Richard Overy. But Overy sees Hitler as skeptical of all religious belief.

Richard J. Evans wrote that "Hitler emphasised again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition [-] 'In the long run', [Hitler] concluded, 'National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together'". According to Evans, Hitler repeatedly called Nazism a secular ideology founded on science, which in the long run could not co-exist with religion.. In Hitler's political relations dealing with religion he readily adopted a strategy "that suited his immediate political purposes."

Samuel Koehne of Deakin University wrote in 2012: "Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not. But it remains very difficult to ascertain his personal religious beliefs, and the debate rages on." While Hitler was emphatically not "Christian" by the traditional or orthodox notion of the term, wrote Koehne, he did speak of a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, "conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing..." and that "For this reason, some recent works have argued Hitler was a Deist". Author Konrad Heiden has quoted Hitler as stating, "We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany."

In his writings on Hitler's recurrent religious images and symbols, Kenneth Burke concluded that "Hitler's modes of thought are nothing more than perverted or caricatured forms of religious thought".

Julian Baggini writes that Hitler's Germany was not a "straightforwardly atheist state," but one which "sacrilized" notions of blood and nation.

Through 1933 and into 1934, Hitler required a level of support from groups like the German conservatives and the Catholic Centre Party in the Reichstag, and of the conservative President von Hindenberg, in order to achieve his takeover of power with the "appearance of legality". During this period, he gave a number of undertakings not to threaten the German churches. On 21 March 1933, the Reichstag assembled in the Potsdam Garrison Church, to show the "unity" of National Socialism with the old conservative Germany of President von Hindenburg. Two days later, the Nazis secured passage of the Enabling Act, granting Hitler dictatorial powers. Less than three months later all non-Nazi parties and organizations, including the Catholic Centre Party had ceased to exist.

Following a meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a man who had "courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church—went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious". In November 1936 the Roman Catholic prelate met Hitler at Berghof for a three-hour meeting. He left the meeting convinced of Hitler's religiosity and wrote "The Reich Chancellor undoubtedly lives in belief in God. He recognises Christianity as the builder of Western culture". Nazi General Gerhard Engel also wrote that Hitler was a believer, having written in his diary that in 1941 Hitler had stated: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."

Kershaw cites Faulhaber's case as an example of Hitler's ability to "pull the wool over the eyes of even hardened critics", demonstrating Hitler's "evident ability to simulate, even to potentially critical church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity".

According to Max Domarus, although Hitler did not "abide by its commandments", he retained elements of the Catholic thinking of his upbringing even into the initial years of his rule: "As late as 1933, he still described himself publicly as a Catholic. Only the spreading poison of his lust for power and self idolatry finally crowded out the memories of childhood beliefs and in 1937 he jettisoned the last of his personal religious convictions, declaring to comrades, 'Now I feel as fresh as a colt in the pasture'", wrote Domarus. Ultimately, Domarus believed, Hitler replaced belief in the Judeo-Christian God with belief in a peculiarly German "god". He promoted the idea of God as the creator of Germany, but Hitler "was not a Christian in any accepted meaning of that word." Domarus also points out that Hitler did not believe in organized religion and did not see himself as a religious reformer. Alan Bullock argued that though Hitler retained some regard for the organizational power of Catholicism, and respected what he called its 'great position', he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which Hitler said, if taken to their conclusion, "would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure". It was, Hitler thought, "a religion fit only for slaves."

The biographer John Toland, noted that, in the aftermath of an attempted assassination in 1939, Hitler told dinner guests that Pope Pius XII would rather have seen the "plot succeed" and "was no friend of mine". Later in his biographical study, Toland wrote that in 1941 Hitler was still "a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite his detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within himself 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—so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty." (for the official Catholic position against Nazi racism in the 1930s see Mit brennender Sorge). Derek Hastings sees Hitler's commitment to Christianity as more tenuous. He considers it "eminently plausible" that Hitler was a believing Catholic as late as his trial in 1924, but writes that "there is little doubt that Hitler was a staunch opponent of Christianity throughout the duration of the Third Reich."

Speer on Hitler's religious beliefs

In his memoirs, Hitler's confidant, personal architect, and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, wrote: "Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church...", yet "he conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him":

The Goebbels Diaries also remark on this policy. Goebbels wrote on 29 April 1941 that though Hitler was "a fierce opponent" of the Vatican and Christianity, "he forbids me to leave the church. For tactical reasons."

According to Speer, Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann, relished recording any harsh pronouncements by Hitler against the church. Speer considered Bormann to be the driving force behind the regime's campaign against the churches. Speer thought that Hitler approved of Bormann's aims, but was more pragmatic and wanted to "postpone this problem to a more favourable time":

Hitler, wrote Speer, viewed Christianity as the wrong religion for the "Germanic temperament": Speer wrote that Hitler would say: "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?" Speer also wrote of observing in Hitler "quite a few examples", and that he held a negative view toward Himmler and Rosenberg's mystical notions.

Bormann on Hitler's religious beliefs

Martin Bormann, who was serving as Hitler's private secretary, persuaded Hitler to allow a team of specially picked officers to record in shorthand his private conversations for posterity. Between 1941 and 1944, Hitler's words were recorded in transcripts now known as Hitler's Table Talk. The transcripts concern not only Hitler's views on war and foreign affairs, but also his characteristic attitudes on religion, culture, philosophy, personal aspirations, and his feelings towards his enemies and friends. Speer noted in his memoirs that Bormann relished recording any harsh pronouncements made by Hitler against the church: "there was hardly anything he wrote down more eagerly than deprecating comments on the church". Within the transcripts, Hitler speaks of Christianity as "absurdity" and "humbug" founded on "lies" with which he could "never come personally to terms."

The widespread consensus among historians is that the views expressed in Trevor-Roper's translation of Table Talk, are credible and reliable, although as with all historical sources, a high level of critical awareness about its origins and purpose are advisable. The remarks from Table Talk accepted as genuine include such quotes as "Christianity is the prototype of Bolshevism: the mobillization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society." Alan Bullock's seminal biography Hitler: A Study in Tyranny quotes Hitler as saying, "Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure"; found also in Table Talk, and repeats other views appearing in Table Talk such as: the teachings of Christianity are a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and survival of the fittest.

Michael Burleigh contrasted Hitler's public pronouncements on Christianity with those in Table Talk, suggesting that Hitler's real religious views were "a mixture of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzschean contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral anti-clericalism." Richard Evans also reiterated the view that Nazism was secular, scientific and anti-religious in outlook in the last volume of his trilogy on Nazi Germany: "Hitler's hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war;" his source for this was the 1953 English translation of Table Talk. Table Talk has the dictator often voicing stridently negative views of Christianity, such as: "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity."

Transcripts contained in Table Talk have Hitler expressing faith that science would wear away religion. On 14 October 1941, in an entry concerning the fate of Christianity, Hitler says: "Science cannot lie, for its always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It's Christianity that's the liar. It's in perpetual conflict with itself." Religion will crumble before scientific advances, says Hitler: "The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity."

Hitler wanted his movement aloof from religion, fearing a pact with the churches would collapse: "I'm convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse. An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science. That's why I've always kept the Party aloof from religious questions.".

According to Table Talk, Hitler believed that Jesus' true Christian teachings had been corrupted by the apostle St Paul, who had transformed them into a kind of Jewish Bolshevism, which Hitler believed preached "the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only god. This is what caused the death of the Roman Empire."

In Table Talk, Hitler praised Julian the Apostate's Three Books Against the Galilaeans, an anti-Christian tract from AD 362, in the entry dated 21 October 1941, stating: "When one thinks of the opinions held concerning Christianity by our best minds a hundred, two hundred years ago, one is ashamed to realise how little we have since evolved. I didn't know that Julian the Apostate had passed judgment with such clear-sightedness on Christianity and Christians. ... Originally, Christianity was merely an incarnation of Bolshevism the destroyer. Nevertheless, the Galilean, who later was called the Christ, intended something quite different. He must be regarded as a popular leader who took up His position against Jewry.... and it's certain that Jesus was not a Jew. The Jews, by the way, regarded Him as the son of a whore—of a whore and a Roman soldier. The decisive falsification of Jesus's doctrine was the work of St. Paul. He gave himself to this work with subtlety and for purposes of personal exploitation. For the Galilean's object was to liberate His country from Jewish oppression. He set Himself against Jewish capitalism, and that's why the Jews liquidated Him. Paul of Tarsus (his name was Saul, before the road to Damascus) was one of those who persecuted Jesus most savagely."

Richard Carrier made some isolated comparisons of passages from the German, French and English editions of Table Talk, and found in each case that the English edition by Trevor-Roper was a translation of the French edition by Francois Genoud, rather than from the German editions; and also that the French translation contained significant distortions, which generally heightened the impression of Hitler's hatred for Christianity. Carrier concluded that "the Trevor-Roper edition is to be discarded as worthless." However, Carrier found that three German versions "have a common ancestor, which must be the actual bunker notes themselves", and recommended that scholars needed to work directly with the German editions.

In his introduction to a 2013 edition of Trevor-Roper's Table Talk, Gerhard Reinberg agreed that the Trevor-Roper edition "derives from Genoud's French edition and not from either of the German texts." After examining Trevor-Roper's personal correspondence and papers, Mikael Nilsson concluded that Trevor-Roper was fully aware of the fact that his edition was based on the French text, but failed to reveal the problems in public.

Goebbels on Hitler's religious beliefs

The Goebbels Diaries, written by Hitler's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, provide important insights into Hitler's thinking and actions. In a diary entry of 28 December 1939, Goebbels wrote that "the Fuhrer passionately rejects any thought of founding a religion. He has no intention of becoming a priest. His sole exclusive role is that of a politician." In an 8 April 1941 entry, Goebbels wrote "He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity."

In 1937, Goebbels noted Hitler's approval of anti-Christian propaganda and the show trials of clergy. Hitler's impatience with the churches, wrote Kershaw, "prompted frequent outbursts of hostility. In early 1937 he was declaring that 'Christianity was ripe for destruction', and that the Churches must yield to the "primacy of the state", railing against any compromise with "the most horrible institution imaginable". In his entry for 29 April 1941, Goebbels noted long discussions about the Vatican and Christianity, and wrote: "The Fuhrer is a fierce opponent of all that humbug".

In 1939, Goebbels wrote that the Fuhrer knew that he would "have to get around to a conflict between church and state" but that in the meantime "The best way to deal with the churches is to claim to be a 'positive Christian'."

In another entry, Goebbels wrote that Hitler was "deeply religious but entirely anti-Christian." Goebbels wrote on 29 December 1939:

Goebbels notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had "expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity." Hitler, wrote Goebbels, saw the pre-Christian Augustan Age as the high point of history, and could not relate to the Gothic mind nor to "brooding mysticism".

The diaries also report that Hitler believed Jesus "also wanted to act against the Jewish world domination. Jewry had him crucified. But Paul falsified his doctrine and undermined ancient Rome."

Other sources

The Anschluss saw the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in early 1938. The Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had traveled to Germany to meet Hitler, who, according to Schuschnigg's later testimony, went into a threatening rage against the role of Austria in German history, saying, "Every national idea was sabotaged by Austria throughout history; and indeed all this sabotage was the chief activity of the Habsburgs and the Catholic Church." This ended in Hitler's ultimatum to end Austrian independence and hand the nation to the Nazis.

Following the 1944 assassination attempt in the "20 July plot", Hitler reportedly credited his survival to divine intervention. German deputy press chief Helmut Suendermann declared, "The German people must consider the failure of the attempt on Hitler's life as a sign that Hitler will complete his tasks under the protection of a divine power".

In 1945, his sister Paula was recorded as having stated "...I don't believe he ever left the [Catholic] church. I don't know for sure." Albert Speer wrote after the war that Hitler had "no real attachment" to Catholicism, but that he never formally left the Church, though he planned a "reckoning" with it in due course.

Hitler's public rhetoric about religion

In Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Bullock added that Hitler, like Napoleon before him, frequently employed the language of "divine providence" in defence of his own personal myth, but ultimately shared with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin "the same materialist outlook, based on the nineteenth century rationalists' certainty that the progress of science would destroy all myths and had already proved Christian doctrine to be an absurdity":

Historian Joachim Fest wrote, "Hitler knew, through the constant invocation of the God the Lord (German: Herrgott) or of providence (German: Vorsehung), to make the impression of a godly way of thought."

Despite his private views, Hitler had an "ability to simulate, even to potentially critical Church leaders, an image of a leader keen to uphold and protect Christianity [from Bolshevism]" wrote Kershaw, which served to deflect direct criticism of him from Church leaders, who instead focused their condemnations on the known "anti-Christian party radicals".

Hitler and "Positive Christianity"

In 1920, the aspiring revolutionary, Adolf Hitler, included use of the term "Positive Christianity" in the 1920 Nazi Party Platform. Non-denominational, the term could be variously interpreted, but allayed fears among Germany's Christian majority as to the oft expressed anti-Christian convictions of large sections of the Nazi movement. The Platform promised to support freedom of religions with the caveat: "insofar as they do not jeopardize the state's existence or conflict with the moral sentiments of the Germanic race". It further proposed a definition of a "positive Christianity" which could combat the "Jewish-materialistic spirit".

In 1922, a decade before Hitler took power, former Prime Minister of Bavaria, Count von Lerchenfeld-Köfering stated in a speech before the Landtag of Bavaria, that his beliefs "as a man and a Christian" prevented him from being an anti-Semite or from pursuing anti-Semitic public policies. Hitler turned Lerchenfeld's perspective of Jesus on its head, telling a crowd in Munich:

In a 1928 speech, he said: "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian."

The Nazi-backed "positivist" or "German Christian" movement sought to make the evangelical churches of Germany an instrument of Nazi policy. Adherents promoted notions of racial superiority and race destiny. Hitler backed the formal establishment of the "German Christians" in 1932. It was nationalistic and anti-Semitic and some of its radicals called for repudiation of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) and the Pauline epistles of the New Testament—because of their Jewish authorship.

In a proclamation to the German Nation February 1, 1933, Hitler stated, "The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and co-operation. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national life." On 23 March 1933, just prior to the crucial Reichstag vote for the Enabling Act which effectively dissolved Parliamentary government in Germany, Hitler described the Christian faiths as "essential elements for safeguarding the soul of the German people" and "We hold the spiritual forces of Christianity to be indispensable elements in the moral uplift of most of the German people." "With an eye to the votes of the Catholic Centre Party", wrote Shirer, he added that he hoped to improve relations with the Holy See.

He promised that the passing of the Enabling Act would not threaten the Reichstag, the President, the States or the Churches. Hitler secured passage of the Act, but did not honour these promises. Key voting blocs which Hitler needed to persuade to drop their opposition to a Nazi Government were the Catholic Centre Party and German conservatives. He pursued their votes with a mix of intimidation, negotiation and conciliation.

In light of later developments, Rees wrote, "The most persuasive explanation of [Hitler's] statements is that Hitler, as a politician, simply recognised the practical reality of the world he inhabited... Had Hitler distanced himself or his movement too much from Christianity it is all but impossible to see how he could ever have been successful in a free election. Thus his relationship in public to Christianity—indeed his relationship to religion in general—was opportunistic. There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church". Although personally skeptical, Hitler's public relationship to religion was one of opportunistic pragmatism. Use of the term "Positive Christianity" in the Nazi Party Program of the 1920s is commonly regarded as a tactical measure. Richard Evans concluded his statements on Hitler's religious views by suggesting that the gap between Hitler's public and private pronouncements was due to a desire not to cause a quarrel with the churches that might undermine national unity.

Use of the term "positive Christianity" in the Nazi Party Program of the 1920s is commonly regarded as a tactical measure, but Steigmann-Gall believes it may have had an "inner logic" and been "more than a political ploy". Steigmann-Gall concluded that Hitler was religious at least in the 1920s and early 1930s, and that he saw Jesus as an Aryan opponent of the Jews.

Samuel Koehne, a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, working on the official Nazi views on religion, answers the question Was Hitler a Christian? thus: "Emphatically not, if we consider Christianity in its traditional or orthodox form: Jesus as the son of God, dying for the redemption of the sins of all humankind. It is nonsense to state that Hitler (or any of the Nazis) adhered to Christianity of this form."

In Jan. 1934, Hitler angered the churches by appointing the neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist. He launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants under a unified Protestant Reich Church under the Deutsche Christen movement, but the attempt failed—resisted by the Confessing Church. In The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Susannah Heschel noted that the Deutsche Christens differed from traditional Christians by rejecting the Hebrew origins of Christianity. In public statements made during his rule, Hitler continued to speak positively about a Nazi vision of Christian German culture, and his belief in an Aryan Christ. Hitler added that Saint Paul, as a Jew, had falsified Jesus' message—a theme Hitler repeated in private conversations, including, in October 1941, when he made the decision to murder the Jews.

Ian Kershaw said that Hitler had lost interest in supporting the Deutsche Christen from around 1934. However, in a speech 26 June 1934, Hitler stated:

The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavour to protect both the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from interference with their doctrines (Lehren), and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of today.

In 1937, Hans Kerrl, Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs, explained "Positive Christianity" as not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor in "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, but rather, as being represented by the Nazi Party: "The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation", he said.

The propaganda machinery of the Nazi party actively promoted Hitler as a saviour of Christianity, and Nazi propaganda supported the German Christians in their formation of a single national church that could be controlled and manipulated.

Religion in Mein Kampf

In Mein Kampf (1925-7), which was written while he was in prison after his failed 1923 putsch, Hitler combined elements of autobiography with an exposition of his racist political ideology . The personal reflections contained within Mein Kampf are nevertheless inaccurate and unreliable. In the work, Hitler uses the words "God", "the Creator", "Providence" and "the Lord".

Laurence Rees described the thrust of the work as "bleak nihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy: "What's missing from Mein Kampf", wrote Rees—"and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should—is any emphasis on Christianity"—though Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, concluded Rees, "the most coherent reading of Mein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul"... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed."

Paul Berben wrote that insofar as the Christian denominations were concerned, Hitler declared himself to be neutral in Mein Kampf—but argued for clear separation of church and state, and for the church not to concern itself with the earthly life of the people, which must be the domain of the state. According to William Shirer, Hitler "inveighed against political Catholicism in Mein Kampf and attacked the two main Christian churches for their failure to recognise the racial problem...", while also warning that no political party could succeed in "producing a religious reformation".

Richard Steigmann-Gall saw evidence of a "Christian element" in Hitler's early writings. In Mein Kampf, Steigmann-Gall saw "no indication of [Hitler] being an atheist or agnostic or of believing in only a remote, rationalist divinity, writing that Hitler referred continually to a providential, active deity."

"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."

"His [the Jewish person's] 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 to 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."

Steigmann-Gall argued that Hitler's references to Jesus, God as the "Lord of Creation" and the necessity of obeying "His will" reveals that Christianity was fused into his thinking. "What Christianity achieves is not dogma, it does not seek the outward ecclesiastical form, but rather ethical principles.... There is no religion and no philosophy that equals it in its moral content; no philosophical ethics is better able to defuse the tension between this life and the hereafter, from which Christianity and its ethic were born," Hitler stated.

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that Jesus "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."

Hitler wrote of the importance of a definite and uniformly accepted Weltanschauung (world view), and noted that the diminished position of religion in Europe had led to a decline in necessary certainties—"yet this human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of religious belief." The various substitutes hitherto offered could not "usefully replace the existing denominations."

Examining how to establish a new order, Hitler argued that the greatness of powerful organizations was reliant on intolerance of all others, so that the greatness of Christianity arose from the "unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defence of its own teaching." Hitler rejected a view that Christianity brought civilization to the Germanic peoples, however: "It is therefore outrageously unjust to speak of the pre-Christian Germans as barbarians who had no civilization. They never have been such." Foreshadowing his conflict with the Catholic Church over euthanasia in Nazi Germany, Hitler wrote that the churches should give up missionary work in Africa, and concentrate on convincing Europeans that is more pleasing to God if they adopt orphans rather than "give life to a sickly child that will be a cause of suffering and unhappiness to all." The Christian churches should forget about their own differences and focus on the issue of "racial contamination," he declared.

When he arrived in Vienna as a young man, Hitler claimed, he was not yet anti-Semitic: "In the Jew I still saw only a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith." He thought that anti-Semitism based on religious, rather than racial grounds, was a mistake: "The anti-Semitism of the Christian-Socialists was based on religious instead of racial principles." Instead, Hitler argued that Jews should be deplored on the basis of their "race."

In an attempt to justify Nazi aggression, Hitler drew a parallel between militantism and Christianity's rise to power as the Roman Empire's official state religion:

"The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new state of affairs be constructively created. Political parties are inclined to compromises; philosophies never. Political parties even reckon with opponents; philosophies proclaim their infallibility."

Elsewhere in Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks of the "creator of the universe" and "eternal Providence." 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:

"The völkisch-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."

In Mein Kampf, Hitler saw Jesus as against the Jews rather than one of them: "And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God."

Derek Hastings writes that, according to Hitler's personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, the strongly anti-Semitic Hieronymite Catholic priest Bernhard Stempfle was a member of Hitler's inner circle in the early 1920s and frequently advised him on religious issues. He helped Hitler in the writing of Mein Kampf. He was killed by the SS in the 1934 purge.

Hitler and atheism

During his career, and for a variety of reasons, Hitler made various comments against "atheistic" movements. He associated atheism with Bolshevism, Communism, and Jewish materialism. In 1933, the regime banned most atheistic and freethinking groups in Germany—other than those that supported the Nazis. The historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that Hitler courted and benefited from fear among German Christians of militant Communist atheism. "The aggressive spread of atheism in the Soviet Union alarmed many German Christians", wrote Blainey, and with the National Socialists becoming the main opponent of Communism in Germany: "[Hitler] himself saw Christianity as a temporary ally, for in his opinion 'one is either a Christian or a German'. To be both was impossible. Nazism itself was a religion, a pagan religion, and Hitler was its high priest... Its high altar [was] Germany itself and the German people, their soil and forests and language and traditions".

In early 1933, Hitler publicly defended National Socialism against charges that it was anti-Christian. Responding to accusations by Eugen Bolz, the Catholic Centre Party Staatspräsident of Württemberg, that the National Socialist movement threatened the Christian faith, he said:

Hitler's speech referred to the political alliances of the Catholic aligned Centre Party with parties of the Left, which he associated with Bolshevism, and thus, atheism. Eugen Bolz was forced from office soon after the Nazis took power, and imprisoned for a time. Later he was executed by the Nazi regime.

During negotiations leading to the Reichskonkordat with the Vatican, Hitler said that "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith." However, as Hitler consolidated his power, schools became a major battleground in the Nazi campaign against the churches. In 1937, the Nazis banned any member of the Hitler Youth from simultaneously belonging to a religious youth movement. Religious education was not permitted in the Hitler Youth and by 1939, clergymen teachers had been removed from virtually all state schools. Hitler sometimes allowed pressure to be placed on German parents to remove children from religious classes to be given ideological instruction in its place, while in elite Nazi schools, Christian prayers were replaced with Teutonic rituals and sun-worship. By 1939 all Catholic denominational schools had been disbanded or converted to public facilities.

In a radio address October 14, 1933 Hitler stated, "For eight months we have been waging a heroic battle against the Communist threat to our Volk, the decomposition of our culture, the subversion of our art, and the poisoning of our public morality. We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion. We owe Providence humble gratitude for not allowing us to lose our battle against the misery of unemployment and for the salvation of the German peasant."

In a speech delivered in Berlin, October 24, 1933, Hitler stated: "We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." In a speech delivered at Koblenz, August 26, 1934 Hitler said: "There may have been a time when even parties founded on the ecclesiastical basis were a necessity. At that time Liberalism was opposed to the Church, while Marxism was anti-religious. But that time is past. National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity. The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles."

Role of religion in the Nazi state

Prior to the Reichstag vote for the Enabling Act under which Hitler gained the "temporary" dictatorial powers with which he went on to permanently dismantle the Weimar Republic, Hitler promised the German Parliament that he would not interfere with the rights of the churches. However, with power secured in Germany, Hitler quickly broke this promise. He divided the Protestant Church and instigated a brutal persecution of the Jehovah's Witnesses. He dishonoured a Concordat signed with the Vatican and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany. William Shirer wrote that, under the leadership of Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, backed by Hitler, the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if they could."

In office, the Nazi leadership co-opted the term Gleichschaltung to mean conformity and subservience to the National Socialist German Workers' Party line: "there was to be no law but Hitler, and ultimately no god but Hitler". Nazi ideology conflicted with traditional Christianity in various respects. Nazis criticized Christian ideals of "meekness and guilt" on the basis that they "repressed the violent instincts necessary to prevent inferior races from dominating Aryans". The Nazi-backed "positivist" or "German Christian" church sought to make the evangelical churches of Germany an instrument of Nazi policy.

By 1939, Evans noted, some 95% of Germans still called themselves Protestant or Catholic, while only 3.5% 'Deist' (gottgläubig) and 1.5% atheist. Most in these latter categories were "convinced Nazis who had left their Church at the behest of the Party, which had been trying since the mid 1930s to reduce the influence of Christianity in society". John Conway notes that the majority of the three million Nazi Party members continued to pay their church taxes and register as either Roman Catholic or Evangelical Protestant Christians, "despite all Rosenberg's efforts."

Another alternative was the Gottgläubig" (lit. "believers in god") position. This was non-denominational and nazified, often described as predominantly based on creationist and deistic views. Heinrich Himmler was a strong promoter of the gottgläubig movement and didn't allow atheists into the SS, arguing that their "refusal to acknowledge higher powers" would be a "potential source of indiscipline". This was coupled with a strong antipathy to Christianity among SS officers 'that far exceeded traditional anti-clericalism,' with priests portrayed as 'befrocked homosexuals', and deliberate elision between Christianity, Judaism and Communism. Instead, they were encouraged to see Hitler as a Messianic figure and to adopt the religious aura that surrounded him for themselves as well.

Persecution of the Churches

According to Robert S. Wistrich Hitler thought Christianity was finished but wanted no direct confrontation for strategic reasons. For political reasons, Hitler restrained his anti-clericalism and refused "to let himself be drawn into attacking the Church publicly, as Bormann and other Nazis would have liked him to do. But he promised himself that, when the time came, he would settle his account with the priests of both creeds. When he did, he would not be restrained by any judicial scruples". German conservative elements, such as the officer corps, opposed Nazi efforts against the churches. According to Geoffrey Blainey, when the Nazis became the main opponent of Communism in Germany, Hitler saw Christianity as a temporary ally.

Hitler issued a statement saying that he wished to avoid factional disputes in Germany's churches. He feared the political power that the churches had, and did not want to openly antagonize that political base until he had securely gained control of the country. Once in power Hitler showed his contempt for "non-Aryan" religion and sought to eliminate it from areas under his rule. Within Hitler's Nazi Party, some atheists were quite vocal, especially Martin Bormann.

Hitler often used religious speech and symbolism to promote Nazism to those that he feared would be disposed to act against him. He also called upon religion as a pretext in diplomacies. The Soviet Union feared that if they commenced a programme of persecution against religion in the western regions, Hitler would use that as a pretext for war.

Steigmann-Gall argues that Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism, as Protestantism was more liable to reinterpretation and a non-traditional readings, more receptive to positive Christianity, and because some of its liberal branches had held similar views. According to Steigmann-Gall, Hitler regretted that "the churches had failed to back him and his movement as he had hoped." Hitler stated to Albert Speer, "Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England."

Even after the rupture with institutional Christianity (which he dated to around 1937), Steigmann-Gall saw evidence that Hitler continued to hold Jesus in high esteem, and never directed his attacks on Jesus himself. Though anti-Christians later fought to "expunge Christian influence from Nazism" and the movement became "increasingly hostile to the churches", Steigmann-Gall wrote that even in the end, it was not "uniformly anti-Christian". However, he admits that by holding this position he "argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it."

Historian John S. Conway wrote that Steigmann-Gall made an "almost convincing case" and was "right to point out that there never was a consensus among the leading Nazis about the relationship between the Party and Christianity," but that "The differences between this interpretation and those put forward earlier are really only ones of degree and timing. Steigmann-Gall agrees that from 1937 onwards, Nazi policy toward the churches became much more hostile... [he] argues persuasively that the Nazi Party's 1924 program and Hitler's policy-making speeches of the early years were not just politically motivated or deceptive in intent... Steigmann-Gall considers these speeches to be a sincere appreciation of Christianity... Yet he is not ready to admit that this Nazi Christianity was eviscerated of all the most essential orthodox dogmas. What remained was the vaguest impression combined with anti-Jewish prejudice. Only a few radicals on the extreme wing of liberal Protestantism would recognize such a mish-mash as true Christianity."

Roman Catholicism

In effort to counter the strength and influence of spiritual resistance, Nazi security services monitored clergy very closely. Priests were frequently denounced, arrested and sent to concentration camps. At Dachau Concentration Camp, the regime established a dedicated Clergy Barracks for church dissidents.

Hitler possessed radical instincts in relation to the Nazi conflict with the Catholic and Protestant Churches in Germany, and though he occasionally spoke of wanting to delay a struggle against the Church and was prepared to restrain his anti-clericalism out of political considerations, his "own inflammatory comments gave his immediate underlings all the license they needed to turn up the heat in the 'Church Struggle', confident that they were 'working towards the Führer'". As with the "Jewish question", the radicals pushed the Church struggle forward, especially in Catholic areas, so that by the winter of 1935–1936 there was growing dissatisfaction with the Nazis in those areas. Kershaw wrote that in early 1937, Hitler again told his inner circle that though he "did not want a 'Church struggle' at this juncture", he expected "the great world struggle in a few years' time". Nevertheless, wrote Kershaw, Hitler's impatience with the churches "prompted frequent outbursts of hostility. In early 1937 he was declaring that 'Christianity was ripe for destruction', and that the Churches must yield to the "primacy of the state", railing against any compromise with "the most horrible institution imaginable".

After the Enabling Act, Hitler moved quickly to eliminate Political Catholicism in Germany. Amid intimidation, the Bavarian People's Party and Catholic Centre Party had ceased to exist by early July. Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen meanwhile negotiated a Reich Concordat with the Vatican, which prohibited clergy from participating in politics. "The agreement", wrote Shirer, "was hardly put to paper before it was being broken by the Nazi Government". Almost immediately Hitler promulgated the sterilisation law, and began work to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. Clergy, nuns and lay leaders began to be targeted, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or "immorality". In Hitler's bloody night of the long knives purge of 1934, leading Catholic dissidents Erich Klausener and Edgar Jung of Catholic Action were murdered, as was Adalbert Probst, the national director of the Catholic Youth Sports Association, and Catholic anti-Nazi journalist Fritz Gerlich. Catholic publications were shut down. The Gestapo began to violate the sanctity of the confessional. Goebbels noted heightened verbal attacks on the clergy from Hitler in his diary and wrote that Hitler had approved the start of trumped up "immorality trials" against clergy and anti-Church propaganda campaign. Goebbels' orchestrated attack included a staged "morality trial" of 37 Franciscans.

Marshall Dill noted that the list of Nazi affronts to and attacks on the Catholic Church is long. The attacks tended not to be overt, but were still dangerous; believers were made to feel that they were not good Germans and their leaders were painted as treasonous and contemptible. The state removed crucifixes from the walls of Catholic classrooms and replaced it with a photo of the Führer.

By early 1937, the church hierarchy in Germany, which had initially attempted to co-operate with Hitler, had become highly disillusioned and Pope Pius XI issued the Mit brennender Sorge encyclical—accusing the Hitler regime of violations of the Concordat and of sowing the tares of "open fundamental hostility to Christ and His Church", and denounced the pagan myth of "blood and soil".

Hitler's invasion of the predominantly Catholic Poland in 1939 ignited the Second World War. Kerhsaw wrote that, in Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of the East, "There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches". Hitler instigated a policy of murdering or suppressing the ethnic Polish elites: including religious leaders. He proclaimed: "Poles may have only one master – a German. Two masters cannot exist side by side, and this is why all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed." Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 members (18%) of the Polish clergy, were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps.

Protestantism

According to Bullock, Hitler considered the Protestant clergy to be "insignificant little people, submissive as dogs" and lacking in a religion to be taken seriously.

Nevertheless, efforts by the regime to impose a "positive Christianity" on a state controlled Protestant Reich Church essentially failed, and resulted in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church which saw great danger to Germany from the "new religion".

Kershaw wrote that the subjugation of the Protestant churches proved more difficult than Hitler had envisaged. With 28 separate regional churches, his bid to create a unified Reich Church through Gleichschaltung ultimately failed, and Hitler became disinterested in seeking supporting the so-called "German Christians" Nazi aligned movement. The Church Federation proposed the well qualified Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh to be the new Reich Bishop, but Hitler endorsed his friend Ludwig Muller and the Nazis terrorized supporters of Bodelschwingh. Muller's heretical views against St Paul and the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible quickly alienated sections of the Protestant church. Not all the Protestant churches submitted to the state, which Hitler said in Mein Kampf was important in forming a political movement. Pastor Martin Niemöller responded with the Pastors' Emergency League, which resisted Muller's efforts in making the Protestant churches an instrument of Nazi policy. The movement grew into the Confessing Church, from which some clergymen opposed the Nazi regime. By 1940 it was public knowledge that Hitler had abandoned advocating for Germans even the syncretist idea of a positive Christianity.

By 1934, the Confessional Church had declared itself the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany, but Muller had failed to form a united Protestant movement behind the National Socialist Party. To instigate a new effort at coordinating the Protestant churches, Hitler appointed another friend, Hans Kerrl to the position of Minister for Church Affairs. A relative moderate, Kerrl initially had some success in this regard, but amid continuing protests by the Confessing Church against Nazi policies, he accused dissident churchmen of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of "Race, blood and soil". He rejected the Apostle's Creed and called Hitler the herald of a new revelation.

The pretension of the Hitler regime that all Protestant churches in Germany should be subsumed under the leadership of the German Christians served as an impulse to action for other Christian leaders who saw the racist, ultra-nationalistic, and totalitarian emphases of the German Christian church as incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When those not in agreement organised their opposition and, calling themselves the Confessing Church, publicly proclaimed articles of faith that denied the position of the German Christians, they eventually came under severe persecution by the State. About the end of March 1935 six hundred of the principal leaders of the Confessing Church were arrested and many others received visits from the Gestapo to emphasize the government's point of view concerning these matters. Later, there were new arrests, and it began to be known that those who had been taken away were ending up in concentration camps. Given the totalitarian atmosphere of Nazi Germany at that time, it would be ingenuous to believe that these measures against the Confessing Church and in support of the policies of the German Christians might have been taken without Adolf Hitler's consent. The Confessing Church seminary was banned. Its leaders, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer were arrested. Implicated in the 1944 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, he was later executed.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses were numbering around 30,000 at the start of Hitler's rule in Germany. For refusing to declare loyalty to the Reich, and refusing conscription into the army, they were declared to be enemies of Germany and persecuted. About 6,000 were sent to the concentration camps.

Plans to destroy the Christian churches

In the long run, Hitler intended to destroy the influence of both the Catholic church and the Protestant church:

Bullock wrote that, "once the war was over, Hitler promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches". Phayer wrote that "By the latter part of the decade of the thirties church officials were well aware that the ultimate aim of Hitler and other Nazis was the total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion. Since the overwhelming majority of Germans were either Catholic or Protestant this goal had to be a long-term rather than a short-term Nazi objective." According to Shirer, "under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler—backed by Hitler—the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists". Gill wrote that the Nazi plan was to "de-Christianise Germany after the final victory". Dill states, "It seems no exaggeration to insist that the greatest challenge the Nazis had to face was their effort to eradicate Christianity in Germany or at least to subjugate it to their general world outlook." According to Bendersky, it was Hitler's long range goal to eliminate the churches once he had consolidated control over his European empire.

In 1999 Julie Seltzer Mandel, while researching documents for the "Nuremberg Project", discovered 150 bound volumes collected by Gen. William Donovan as part of his work on documenting Nazi war crimes. Donovan was a senior member of the U.S. prosecution team and had compiled large amounts of evidence that Nazis persecuted Christian churches. In a 108-page outline titled "The Nazi Master Plan" Office of Strategic Services investigators argued that the Nazi regime had a plan to reduce the influence of Christian churches through a campaign of systematic persecutions. "Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [of church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion," said the report. The most persuasive evidence came from "the systematic nature of the persecution itself."

In Hitler's scheme for the Germanization of Eastern Europe, there was to be no place for Christian churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progress on the 'Church Question'. 'But is clear', noted Goebells, himself among the most aggressive anti-church radicals, 'that after the war it has to be solved... There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view". Bullock wrote that "once the war was over, [Hitler] promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian churches, but until then he would be circumspect": Writing for Yad Vashem, the historian Michael Phayer wrote that by the latter 1930s, church officials knew that the long term aim of Hitler was the "total elimination of Catholicism and of the Christian religion".

In his memoirs, Hitler's chief architect Albert Speer recalled that when drafting his plans for Hitler's "new Berlin", when he told Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann that he had consulted with Protestant and Catholic authorities over the locations for churches: "Bormann curtly informed me that churches were not to receive building sites."

Historian Marshall Dill wrote that if the regime could not eradicate Christianity, it hoped at least to subjugate or distort it to a Nazi world view. Dill noted that a major obstacle for the Nazis was that they could not justifiably connect German faith communities to the corruption of the old regime, because the Weimar had no close connection to the churches. Because of the long history of Christianity in Germany, Hitler could not attack Christianity as openly as he did Judaism, communism, or other political opponents.

Influence of Ancient Indian religions

Hitler's choice of the Swastika as the Nazis' main and official symbol was linked to the belief in the Aryan cultural descent of the German people. They considered the early Aryans of India to be the prototypical white invaders and the sign of the Swastika to be a symbol of the Aryan master race. The theory was inspired by the German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who argued that the ancient Aryans were a superior Nordic race from northern Germany who expanded into the steppes of Eurasia, and from there into India, where they established the Vedic religion.

Hitler's views on Islam

Among eastern religions, Hitler described religious leaders such as "Confucius, Buddha, and Muhammad" as providers of "spiritual sustenance". In this context, Hitler's connection to Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, who served as the Mufti of Jerusalem until 1937 — which included his asylum in 1941, with the honorary rank of an SS Major-General, and had a "respected racial genealogy" — has been interpreted by some as a sign of respect rather than as a relationship born out of political expediency. Starting in 1933, al-Husseini, who had launched a campaign to free various parts of the Arab region from British control and expel Jews from both Egypt and Palestine, became impressed by the Jewish boycott policies which the Nazis were enforcing in Germany, and hoped that he could use the anti-semitic views which many in the Arab region shared with Hitler's regime in order to forge a strategic military alliance that would help him eliminate the Jews from Palestine. Despite al-Husseini's attempts to reach out to the Third Reich, Hitler refused to form such an alliance with al-Husseini, fearing that it would weaken relations with Britain, and early relations between the two would be solely based on anti-Semitic ideology.

During the unsuccessful 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, Husseini and his allies took the opportunity to strengthen relations with the Third Reich and enforced the spread of Nazi customs and propaganda throughout their strongholds in Palestine as a gesture of respect. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would follow al-Husseini's lead. Hitler's influence soon spread throughout the region, but it was not until 1937 that the Nazi government agreed to grant al-Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood's request for financial and military assistance.

Nazi-era Minister of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer acknowledged that in private, Hitler regarded Arabs as an inferior race and that the relationship he had with various Muslim figures was more political than personal. During a meeting with a delegation of distinguished Arab figures, Hitler learned of how Islam motivated the Umayyad Caliphate during the Islamic conquest of Gaul and was now convinced that "the world would be Mohammedan today" if the Arab regime had successfully taken France during the Battle of Tours, while also suggesting to Speer that "ultimately not Arabs, but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire." Hitler said that the Germans would have become heirs to "a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and in subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the German temperament."

According to Speer, Hitler stated in private, "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?"

Similarly, Hitler was transcribed as saying: "Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers [...] then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world."

Hitler's views on Arabs

Speer has stated that when he was discussing with Hitler events which might have occurred had Islam absorbed Europe: "Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country." Hitler was also quoted in the early war years stating, "We shall continue to make disturbances in the Far East and in Arabia. Let us think as men and let us see in these peoples at best lacquered half-apes who are anxious to experience the lash."

Mysticism and occultism

According to Bullock, as a young man in Vienna, Hitler's reading included Occultism, Hypnotism, Astrology, but his interest was brief. Bullock found "no evidence to support the once popular belief that Hitler resorted to astrology" and wrote that Hitler ridiculed those like Himmler in his own party who wanted to re-establish pagan mythology, and Hess who believed in Astrology. Albert Speer wrote that Hitler had a negative view toward Himmler and Rosenberg's mystical notions. Speer quotes Hitler as having said of Himmler's attempt to mythologize the SS:

In a 1939 speech in Nuremberg, Hitler stated: "We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else—in any case something which has nothing to do with us."

According to Ron Rosenbaum, some scholars believe the young Hitler was strongly influenced, particularly in his racial views, by an abundance of occult works on the mystical superiority of the Germans, like the occult and anti-Semitic magazine Ostara, and give credence to the claim of its publisher Lanz von Liebenfels that Hitler visited him in 1909 and praised his work. John Toland wrote that evidence indicates Hitler was a regular reader of Ostara. Toland also included a poem that Hitler allegedly wrote while serving in the German Army on the Western Front in 1915.

The seminal work on Ariosophy, The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, devotes its last chapter the topic of Ariosophy and Adolf Hitler. Not at least due to the difficulty of sources, historians disagree about the importance of Ariosophy for Hitler's religious views. As noted in the foreword of The Occult Roots of Nazism by Rohan Butler, Goodrick-Clarke is more cautious in assessing the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels on Hitler than Joachim Fest in his biography of Hitler.

While he was in power, Hitler was definitely less interested in the occult or the esoteric than other Nazi leaders. Unlike Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess, Hitler rejected astrology. Nevertheless, Hitler is the most important figure in the Modern Mythology of Nazi occultism. There are teledocumentaries about this topic, with the titles Hitler and the Occult and Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail.

Comparing him to Erich Ludendorff, Fest writes: "Hitler had detached himself from such affections, in which he encountered the obscurantism of his early years, Lanz v. Liebenfels and the Thule Society, again, long ago and had, in Mein Kampf, formulated his scathing contempt for that völkish romanticism, which however his own cosmos of imagination preserved rudimentarily." Fest refers to the following passage from Mein Kampf:

"The characteristic thing about these people [modern-day followers of the early Germanic religion] is that they rave about the old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality are the greatest cowards that can be imagined. For the same people who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull's horns over their heads, preach for the present nothing but struggle with spiritual weapons, and run away as fast as they can from every Communist blackjack.

It is not clear if this statement is an attack at anyone specific. It could have been aimed at Karl Harrer or at the Strasser group. According to Goodrick-Clarke, "In any case, the outburst clearly implies Hitler's contempt for conspiratorial circles and occult-racist studies and his preference for direct activism." Hitler also said something similar in public speeches.

Older literature states that Hitler had no intention of instituting worship of the ancient Germanic gods in contrast to the beliefs of some other Nazi officials. In Hitler's Table Talk one can find this quote:

"It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund.

Jackson Spielvogel and David Redles in an article published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center assert alleged influences of various portions of the teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, the founder of The Theosophical Society with doctrines as expounded by her book "The Secret Doctrine", and the adaptations of her ideas by her followers, through Ariosophy, the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, constituted a popularly unacknowledged but decisive influence over the developing mind of Hitler. The scholars state that Hitler himself may be responsible for turning historians from investigating his occult influences. While he publicly condemned and even persecuted occultists, Freemasons, and astrologers, his nightly private talks disclosed his belief in the ideas of these competing occult groups—demonstrated by his discussion of reincarnation, Atlantis, world ice theory, and his belief that esoteric myths and legends of cataclysm and battles between gods and titans were a vague collective memory of monumental early events.

In his childhood, Hitler had 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. Because of these liturgical elements, Daim's claim of Hitler's Messiah-like status and the ideology's totalitarian nature, the Nazi movement, like other fascist movements and Communism, is sometimes termed a "political religion" that is anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious. However, Robert Paxton cautions that the circumstances of past fascism does not mean that future fascisms can not "build upon a religion in place of a nation, or as the expression of national identity. Even in Europe, religion-based fascisms were not unknown: the Falange Española, Belgian Rexism, the Finnish Lapua Movement, and the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael are all good examples".

Religion, social Darwinism, and Hitler's racism

Scholarly interest continues on the extent to which inherited, long-standing, cultural-religious notions of anti-Judaism in Christian Europe contributed to Hitler's personal racial anti-Semitism, and what influence a pseudo-scientific "primitive version of social-Darwinism", mixed with 19th century imperialist notions, brought to bear on his psychology.

Hitler's anti-Semitism: Religious sources

Writers including Heschel and Toland, have drawn links between Hitler's Catholic background and his anti-Semitism. During negotiations relating to the Concordat with the Catholic Church and the Nazis state in 1933, Hitler said to Bishop Wilhelm Berning: "I have been attacked because of my handling of the Jewish question. The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognised the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism the danger was no longer recognised. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implemented. I do not set race over religion, but I recognise the representatives of this race as pestilant for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions". John Cornwell quotes Hitler as saying in 1933: "The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie." Letter to the Nazi Party, 22 July 1933; John Cornwell (2008). Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. New York: Penguin, p. 118.

According to historian Lucy Dawidowicz, anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity, and that the line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther to Hitler is "easy to draw." In her The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, she writes that Luther and Hitler were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews. Dawidowicz states that the similarities between Luther's anti-Semitic writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus, although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism. Catholic historian José M. Sánchez argues that Hitler's anti-Semitism was explicitly rooted in Christianity.

Hitler viewed the Jews as enemies of all civilization and as materialistic, unspiritual beings, writing in Mein Kampf: "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." Hitler described his supposedly divine mandate for his anti-Semitism: "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." In his rhetoric, Hitler also fed on the old accusation of Jewish deicide. Because of this it has been speculated that Christian anti-Semitism influenced Hitler's ideas, especially such works as Martin Luther's essay On the Jews and Their Lies and the writings of Paul de Lagarde. Others disagree with this view. In support of this view, Hitler biographer John Toland offers the opinion that Hitler "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...".

Social Darwinism as a source of Hitler's racism

Laurence Rees noted that "emphasis on Christianity" was absent from the vision expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf,in which the universe is ordered around principles of struggle between weak and strong, rather than on conventional Christian notions. Rees argues that Hitler's "bleak and violent vision" and visceral hatred of the Jews had been influenced by quite different sources: the notion of life as struggle he drew from Social Darwinism, the notion of the superiority of the "Aryan race" he drew from Arthur de Gobineau's The Inequality of the Human Races; from events following Russia's surrender in World War One when Germany seized agricultural lands in the East he formed the idea of colonising the Soviet Union; and from Alfred Rosenberg he took the idea of a link between Judaism and Bolshevism. Hitler espoused a ruthless policy of "negative eugenic selection", believing that world history consisted of a struggle for survival between races, in which the Jews plotted to undermine the Germans, and inferior groups like Slavs and defective individuals in the German gene pool, threatened the Aryan "master race". Richard J. Evans wrote that his views on these subjects have often been called "social Darwinist", but that there is little agreement among historians as to what the term may mean, or how it transformed from its 19th-century scientific origins, to become a central component of a genocidal political ideology in the 20th century.

Richard J. Evans noted that Hitler saw Christianity as "indelibly Jewish in origin and character" and a "prototype of Bolshevism", which "violated the law of natural selection". In the decades between Charles Darwin and the mid-twentieth century, various historians have noted that the concept of "Social Darwinism" had been vaunted by both "proponents of altruistic ethics", and by "spokesmen of a brutally elitist morality", but in many of its exponents, it took a rightward shift at the close of the 19th Century, when racist and imperialist notions joined the mix. According to Evans, Hitler "used his own version of the language of social Darwinism as a central element in the discursive practice of extermination...", and the language of Social Darwinism, in its Nazi variant, helped to remove all restraint from the directors of the "terroristic and exterminatory" policies of the regime, by "persuading them that what they were doing was justified by history, science and nature".

According to Fest, the Nazi dictator simplified Arthur de Gobineau's elaborate ideas of struggle for survival among the different races, from which the Aryan race, guided by providence, was supposed to be the torchbearers of civilization. In Hitler's conception, Jews were enemies of all civilization, especially the Volk. Sherree Owens Zalampas wrote that, although Hitler has been called a "Social Darwinist, he was not such in the usual sense of the word, for, whereas Social Darwinism stressed struggle, change, the survival of the strongest, and a ceaseless battle of competition, Hitler, through the use of modern industrial technology and impersonal bureaucratic methods ended all competition by the ruthless suppression of all opponents." Henri Ellenberger considered his understanding of Darwinism incomplete, and based loosely on the theory of "survival of the fittest" in a social context, as popularly misunderstood at the time. Similarly the historian Karl Dietrich Bracher has argued that it would be wrong to believe that Hitler's views were formed through the discipline of close study and that rather Hitler had drawn on, 'a chance reading of books, occasional pamphlets, and generalisations based on subjective impressions to form the distorted political picture which became the Weltanschauung' that dominated his future life and work. An example from Hitler's formative Vienna years was the influence of Lanz von Liebenfels, whose programme spread 'the crass exaggerations of the social Darwinist theory of survival, the superman and super-race theory, the dogma of race conflict, and the breeding and extermination theories of the future SS state', and whose Ostara publication was widely available in the tobacco kiosks of Vienna. In Mein Kampf, p. 59, Hitler recounts the genesis of his anti-Semitism and says his 'books' are polemical pamphlets bought 'for a few pennies'.

In Hitler's belief, God created a world in which different races fought each other for survival as depicted by Arthur de Gobineau. The "Aryan race," supposedly the bearer of civilization, is allocated a special place:

"What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and the reproduction of our race ... so that our people may mature for the fulfilment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. ... Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence."