Hitler's Religion

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This is a well-researched, well-reasoned book that supports its conclusion with a keen addition to primary source material.

The issue of Hitler's religion is an evergreen topic in modern culture, with every side willing to award the prize to another side. The stakes are presumably high since Hitler is as close to the incarnation of the anti-Christ as modern culture is likely to recognize.

I've been plowing the same issue as a Catholic amateur historian who has been sucked into the interminable “Hitler was a Catholic” and “look at these pictures of Catholic priests giving the Hitler salute” with, usually, atheists on the internet. As a result, I've taken to reading many of the sources that author Richard Weikart bases his book on. After reading these memoirs, it is hard for me to imagine anyone taking seriously the notion that Hitler was a Catholic, or any kind of Christian believer. One of the texts that I thought that was particularly revelatory was this observation from

““Here in Munich he lived the life of a bachelor who did not care for any sort of family life. For example, on Christmas Eve he would give all of his followers leave to visit their families; then he and his adjutant Bruckner would go to motoring through the countryside because he wished to escape the Christmas atmosphere, which he thoroughly disliked. No amount of talk could change his attitude in this matter.” (p. 150.)”

I noted this observation in my review of [[ASIN:162914388X The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reichs Press Chief]]. Hitler's antipathy to Christmas is part of a theme that runs through Dietrich's memoir - Hitler disliked Christianity. I haven't seen any other history book pick up on this significant by minor detail, so I was particularly delighted and impressed and surprised to see Weikart mention it in his book. In my view, this is a small but significant detail that shows Weikart's attention to the mass of data that is available - and often ignored or unread - by other analysts.

Weikart structures his book around the following chapters/issues:

1. Was Hitler a religious hypocrite?

Weikart's answer is clearly in the affirmative. Hitler's public and private pronouncements were largely at odds with each other, although his private statements were fairly uniform over the years and with respect to different conversations with different interlocutors. Weikart demonstrates good historiographic restraint in pointing out the contradictory things said or written by Hitler and acknowledging that neither the private or the public Hitler has any particular credibility and that both public and private utterances should be critically assessed. This book is most certainly not about cherry-picking quotes to reach a foregone conclusion. Based on the contradictory positions that Hitler took, Weikart's conclusion that “[Hitler]was a religious chameleon, a quintessential religious hypocrite” seems inarguable.

2. Who influenced Hitler's Religion?

While reading this chapter, I felt like a mountain climber who scales a previously unclimbed mountain only to discover a candy wrapper.

For years, I have been hearing about Nietzsche's influence on Hitler, but for the most part, it is hard to find any direct evidence that Hitler read Nietzsche (But see Hanfstaengle [[ASIN:B00M6G3KW6 Hitler: The Memoir of the Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Fuhrer]].) On the other hand, Hitler's interest in Schopenhauer has been attested by various sources. I always considered that to be a kind of pose, but recently I have been reading Schopenhauer to see if I could find the significance of Schopenhauer for Hitler. I have read no other source that discusses this issue.

Weikart supplies the key that unlocks the mystery. Knowing Schopenhauer was a basic part of being an educated German, and Schopenhauer's philosophy - as convoluted as it was (See [[ASIN:0192802593 Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction]] - provided a kind of pantheism that Weikart demonstrates pervades Hitler's comments about nature and God and Providence and fate and the rest of the transcendent nouns. I was personally gratified and enlightened by this exposition of a difficult and seemingly minor (to us, today) philosopher.

3. Was Hitler an Atheist.

Weikart concludes that Hitler was not an atheist in that he did believe that there was a transcendent impersonal power that somehow controlled the universe by establishing the laws of nature, particularly evolutionary laws. Hitler's constant identification of God with Nature and Fate or Providence was not a pose, according to Weikart, as if Hitler were a materialistic atheist who believed that reality was ultimately material simply mouthing religious sounding words.

Weikart's identification of Hitler with pantheism or panentheism seems to explain the confusion of Hitler's various statements. However, I am not sure that it necessarily lets “atheism” off the hook. Modern atheists like to define atheism as a “lack of belief in a god or gods.' This definition gets used to sweep up non-theistic religions like Buddhism. If Buddhists are “atheists,” then Hitler would be an atheist, but not an atheist who believes that everything is merely matter.

4. Was Hitler a Christian?

As I noted previously, no one who actually reads Hitler's private utterances (or critically considers his abuses of Christianity) would seriously claim that Hitler was a Christian. Weikart in this chapter pulls together the many sources from people who knew Hitler on a day to day basis - his photographer and secretary and driver and fellow party members - in detail to dispel this bit of propaganda. As a Catholic, I appreciated the following;

“In his diaries, Goebbels confirmed that Hitler camouflaged his religious position to placate the masses. Based on his conversations with Hitler more than a year before the Nazis came to power, Goebbels wrote that Hitler not only wanted to withdraw officially from the Catholic Church but even wanted to “wage war against it” later. However, Hitler knew withdrawing from Catholicism at that moment would be scandalous and undermine his chances of gaining power. Rather than commit political suicide, he would bide his time, waiting for a more opportune moment to strike against the churches. Goebbels, meanwhile, was convinced the day of reckoning would eventually come when he, Hitler, and other Nazi leaders would all leave the Church together.15 If Hitler was being frank with Goebbels, then his public religious image was indeed a façade to avoid offending his supporters. If, on the other hand, Hitler was simply telling Goebbels what he wanted to hear, then Hitler was still masking his true religious thoughts and feelings.”

And:

“By the time Hitler left home in 1907 to live in Vienna, he was already estranged from Catholicism. Brigitte Hamann, who has done the closest analysis thus far of Hitler's Vienna years, reports that no sources ever mentioned Hitler going to church in Vienna. Further, Hamann claims that almost all the eyewitness accounts of Hitler's time in Vienna note his hatred of the Catholic Church. One source reported that around 1912, “Hitler said the biggest evil for the German people was accepting Christian humility.” This certainly jibes with Hitler's later outlook. Though the source base is scant, the evidence we do have suggests that Hitler had a negative view of Catholicism already while living in Vienna from 1907 to 1913.61”

And:

“Even when he publicly announced his Christian faith in 1922 or at other times, Hitler never professed commitment to Catholicism. Further, despite his public stance upholding Christianity before 1924, he provided a clue in one of his earliest speeches that he was already antagonistic toward Christianity. In August 1920, Hitler viciously attacked the Jews in his speech, “Why Are We Anti-Semites?” One accusation he leveled was that the Jews had used Christianity to destroy the Roman Empire. He then claimed Christianity was spread primarily by Jews.68 Since Hitler was a radical anti-Semite, his characterization of Christianity as a Jewish plot was about as harsh an indictment as he could bring against Christianity. Hitler was also a great admirer of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whom he considered fellow Aryans. Blaming Christianity for ruining the Roman Empire thus expressed considerable anti-Christian animus. Hitler often discussed both themes—Christianity as Jewish, and Christianity as the cause of Rome's downfall—later in life.”

One of the “tells” of Hitler's estrangement from Catholicism was his celebration of Luther as a German hero, something Catholics were not likely to do. Weikart is absolutely enlightening in explaining the significance of Schonerer and his Los von Rom movement, again, another detail that is often overlooked by historians on the subject.

5. Did Hitler want to Destroy the Churches?

Weikart's answer is that Hitler wanted to subordinate the churches into playing the role of supporting National Socialism, but when this became obviously impossible, Hitler planned to reduce church ability to interfere after the war. Weikart emphasizes that Hitler believed that the issue was pre-determined in any event: National Socialism represented science, while Christianity represented science-denying superstition. It was obvious to Hitler that National Socialism would supplant Christianity, although Christianity might remain as a way of rendering the lesser races more tractable.

6. Did Hitler derive his anti-Semitism from Christianity?

For Weikart this is another complicated question. On the one hand, Christian antisemitism determined the Jews as a possible victim people, but on the other hand, National Socialism introduced something new into antisemitism - scientific racism. With scientific racism - whether “scientific” is put in scare quotes or not - Jews became a racial problem rather than a religious problem. Hitler despised Christianity for permitting Jews to assimilate by baptism. Further, Nazi antisemitism was latently anti-Christian; burning the Torah on Krystalnacht was tantamount to burning the Bible since the Torah was the first part of the Bible. Weikart's conclusion is judicious:

“It is apparent that Hitler's own reasons for embracing anti-Semitism had little or nothing to do with Christianity or religion. He continually denied that the Jews were a religion, viewing them instead as a race. He rarely invoked Christian themes when railing at the Jews, but he often invoked science, nature, and reason. However, this does not get Christianity entirely off the hook for preparing the soil for the Holocaust. The secularized version of anti-Christian anti-Semitism that became prominent in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Germany was grafted onto the earlier Christian version of anti-Semitism. Centuries-old caricatures of the Jews were reinterpreted as Jewish biological traits. Further, the Christian churches in Germany and Austria continued to peddle a good deal of anti-Jewish animosity in the early twentieth century, thus giving succor to the Nazi anti-Semitic juggernaut. Both Christian anti-Semitism and anti-Christian anti-Semitism—thus, both religion and secularization—were necessary conditions for the advent of the Nazi Holocaust. The anti-Semitic message that Hitler preached, however, was far more anti-Christian than Christian.”

7. Was Hitler an occultist or pagan?

Weikart argues with strong evidence that Hitler was neither. Certainly, Hitler put down the zany excesses of Himmler and Hess and argued for science. on the other hand, Hitler was attracted to the lunatic “World Ice Theory” theories of Hanns Horbiger and to theories about the Atlantean origins of the Nordic race - and, frankly, to us moderns “race theory” pushes its way into craziness, if not the occult. Further, Pius XI accurately condemned National Socialism as a form of “paganism” for turning race into an idol.

Weikart's essential point, however, is that Hitler fancied himself as a rationalist rather than a mystic. Hitler's arguments and worldview were self-conceived as rational and based on science. In some way, the World Ice Theory and Atlantis were scientific propositions, which could be proven or disproven scientifically. Weikart observes that “.... According to his own opinion, Hitler did not think in mystical-esoteric, but in rational categories.”75 Hitler was certainly diabolically evil, but he did not base his evil philosophy on occultism or neo-paganism.”

Hitler obviously came out of a milieu that viewed paganism and occultism as normal and obvious. In that milieu, Hitler comes across as mildly hostile to occultism and to paganism in the form of Woden worship. Hitler was not personally an occultist or pagan, although he tolerated those who were.

8. Who was Hitler's Lord?

Internet Atheists love quoting Hitler's statement that he was doing the “Lord's work,” but they never ask “who was this Lord”? Weikart answers this question by examining the pantheist/panentheist worldview that probably formed the third-largest religious worldview in Germany. Weikart describes Martin Bormann - who is usually described as an atheist - as a pantheist. In a culture that rated Schopenhauer as one of the major philosophers, pantheism was a viable option.

For Weikart, the “Lord” was “Nature,” which implied the totality of natural forces that controlled the universe and directed evolution toward the production of rational human beings. Atheists deny the influence of Darwin on Hitler, often pointing out that Hitler doesn't quote Darwin. Weikart includes in his book the following:

“Two other associates of Hitler testify that belief in Darwinian evolution was integral to his ideology. Wagener remembered a conversation in the summer of 1931 when Hitler professed, “Everywhere in life only a process of selection can prevail. Among the animals, among plants, wherever observations have been made, basically the stronger, the better survives. The simpler life forms have no written constitution. Selection therefore runs a natural course. As Darwin correctly proved: the choice is not made by some agency—nature chooses.” This not only demonstrates Hitler believed in Darwinian natural selection, but it also suggests he saw the process as nonteleological, i.e., not directed by some deity. Wagener claimed that Hitler based his support for killing the weak and the sick on this vision of natural selection.9 Otto Dietrich generally concurred, stating that Hitler's “evolutionary views on natural selection and survival of the fittest coincided with the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel.” Hitler was not an atheist, according to Dietrich, but believed in a Supreme Being who “had created laws for the preservation and evolution of the human race. He believed that the highest aim of mankind was to survive for the achievement of progress and perfection.” Thus, evolutionary thought was central to Hitler's goals and policies.”

That would seem to place Hitler's constant references about “struggle for survival” in its natural context.

9. Was Hitler a Creationist?

Hitler often made theological references to “creation” and “creator.” These references have been seized on by atheists to paint Hitler as a kind of fundamentalist. Weikart explains that the context of these quotes usually involve a process that leads to the formation or emergence of a race or species. In other places, Hitler is very specific about the “struggle of existence” giving rise to higher forms of life.

10. Was Hitler's morality based on religion

Weikart should not have to point out that Hitler's morality was not bourgeoise Christian morality. Where Hitler appeared to defend a Christian moral principle, such as opposing abortion, he did not do so because of Christian concern for the sanctity of life, but for the ends of his racial theory. Thus, Hitler opposed abortion for Germans because he wanted more Aryans, but he was in favor of promoting abortion for Jews. Likewise, Hitler was openly opposed to Christian morality where it would interfere with his racial goals. For example, Hitler opposed the concept of fidelity in marriage because that would limit the number of racially pure Aryans, a very bad thing in Hitler's views. Hitler had no problems with killing the sick or disabled in the interests of eugenics, and, in fact, seemed to favor the extermination of 70 to 80% of children born in the interests of creating a stronger and healthier race. As Weikart notes: “Hitler's morality was based on what he perceived to be the will of nature, not on the Ten Commandments or any other religious revelation.”

In sum, this is an engaging, well-researched, well-sourced book that arrives at a defensible position on an obscure issue. For those of us, interested in footnotes and following up on factual claims, it is well-footnoted. I hope that this book gets wide circulation so that we can move from myths to solid historiography.