Hitler and Nazism: “Gott Mit Uns”?

“History is currently being distorted by the millions of Christians who lie

to have us believe that the Holocaust was not a Christian deed.”
- evilbible.com1

“Only mankind and above all the church have made it their aim to keep
alive the weak, those unfit to live, and people of an inferior kind.”
- Adolf Hitler2

September 2010 saw an internet pantomime explode into the mass

media. On his visit to Britain, Pope Benedict XIV denounced “aggressive
secularism”3, and claimed the Nazis were intent of “eradicating God”.
Thousands turned out on protests against the Pope, led by spokesmen
like Richard Dawkins, who called the Pope “an enemy of humanity” and
blamed Hitler's “dirty work” on “the millions of good Christian Germans
with Gott mit uns on their belt buckles”4.

It's hard to get more polarised than that.

I would give particular credit to three sources that have helped to cause
this sloppy revisionism:
• Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, blaming the
(mostly Christian) German people as a whole for having a
particularly vicious brand of anti-Semitism, and thus enabling the
Holocaust
• John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, blaming Pius XII and the Catholic
Church for sympathising with the Holocaust
• The 'Hitler quotes' internet meme, listing excerpts from Hitler's
speeches and works for public consumption in which he claims to
be doing God's work

Of these, Goldhagen's thesis has been rejected by most historians of the

Holocaust5, and Cornwell has conceded under intense pressure his
argument was too harsh and seriously misrepresented Pius XII's “scope
for action”6. The lists of Hitler quotes are still doing the rounds.7

A reading of the primary sources and a look at the majority of scholarship

1 http://www.evilbible.com/hitler_was_christian.htm
2 Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary, p.108
<<http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ie1FsnzQkfUC&lpg=PP1&dq=inauthor%3A%22Traudl
%20Junge%22&pg=PA108#v=onepage&q&f=false>>
3 http://richarddawkins.net/articles/518808-pope-s-holyroodhouse-speech-transcript
4 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/22/ratzinger-enemy-humanity
5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioners#Reception
6 For example, references on <<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler
%27s_Pope#Criticism_of_Cornwell.27s_work>>
7 http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/09/list_of_hitler_quotes_in_honor.php
on the Third Reich shows that Hitler and the Nazis were nowhere near as
cosy with Christianity as some like to believe. I want to look other
sources for Hitler's beliefs, and at the historical record of Nazi hostility
towards the churches and their resistance.

Firstly, though, let's cut to the conclusion: Hitler was probably not an
“atheist”, and most definitely wasn't a Christian. Many Nazis were
opposed to atheism, which they equated with Communism, but they
were also seriously opposed to traditional Christianity, hence their
redefinition of it in terms like “Positive Christianity” as early as their 1920
party programme.8 As the sources should show, this was akin to atheists
actually worshipping Kim Il-Sung - which happened in North Korea as
Marxism transformed into Juche. Of course that makes them something
other than atheists, in the same way that Nazified perversions of
Christianity make them something other than Christians.

The Holocaust

It is all too common to hear statements like “the rank and file Germans
who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians,
almost to a man”9.
• No, the perpetrators of the Holocaust were not rank and file, they
were the SS. Those running the concentration camps, and the
Einsatzgruppen (death squads), were SS. To join, it was necessary
to be a fanatical Nazi, totally committed to the master race.
• Some, like their leader Heinrich Himmler, subscribed to the mystical
side of the Nazi ideology, promoted by the original ideologue Alfred
Rosenberg, that believed in Thule (imagine a Nazi Atlantis) as the
home of the Aryan race, and placed emphasis on pre-Christian
religions. A society attached to the SS, the Ahnenerbe, was set up
to send out intrepid explorers (remember Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade?) to “discover” evidence that the Aryans were rulers
of the world in prehistory.
• Many SS were undoubtedly pulled from the ranks of Nazi churches
(see above), but as Michael Burleigh points out, the ranks of the SS
were “anti-clerical circles”10. The core emphasis of white supremacy
was against Christianity.

Nazism and the Churches

The Nazis persecuted Catholic and Protestant churches resistant to

8 http://www.hitler.org/writings/programme/
9 http://richarddawkins.net/comments/518842
10 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, 2001, p.191
<<http://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=kOoYlu8aUJMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA191#v=onepage&q&f=false>>
Nazism, resulting in imprisonments, murders, mass murders, and
executions. There are many sources for this, including a large number of
documents produced at the Nuremberg Trials, for example The
Persecution of the Christian Churches11.

Catholicism
The Catholic churches in Germany, and particularly Pius XII, the Pope in
wartime, are accused by many of supporting Nazi anti-Semitism. One
example is John Cornwell's book Hitler's Pope, of questionable historical
worth, as noted previously.

There are examples of senior Catholic resistance to Nazism. In 1937,

Pope Pius XI published an encyclical12 specifically to the German Reich
expressing concern over the direction of the Nazi state after the
Concordat, and explicitly attacking the racism and arrogance of the state.
As an encyclical, it was read at every Catholic church simultaneously. As
a result, the Gestapo arrested many senior Catholics on invented
charges. The Nazi state-censored media did not report it. Another critic of
the regime was the Bishop of Munster. Catholics were imprisoned or
executed for distributing his sermons against euthanasia.13 One of Pope
Pius XII's first acts was the publication of another attack on racism.14

Protestantism
The Protestant Christian churches in Germany were carved into two
broad camps by the Nazis - those who continued to preach traditional
Christianity, the Confessing Churches, and those who were sympathisers
or who toed the line. As was the norm in all walks of life in Nazi Germany,
you had to sign up or face sanctions. Wings of the Hitler Youth were
compulsory, as a certain Benedict XIV knows.

Nazi 'Christianity' found its origins in the Deutsche Christen (German

Christians), which began as an enthusiastic Nazi pressure group within
the German Evangelical Church. This was merged into one national state
church soon after Hitler gained power in 1933. Saturated by the dogmas
of the Deutsche Christen, anti-Semitic propaganda was used to reshape
Christianity to suit the Nazis. The state church became an ideologically
motivated, wildly changed, revisionist version of the Christian message,
that rejected the Old Testament and Jews from membership, replaced
Christian festivals with Nazi ones15, ejected and persecuted pastors who
were not paying lip-service to Nazism, and sang hymns to Hitler as

11 http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/pdf/Nuremberg_3/Vol_X_18_03_02.pdf
12 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_14031937_mit-
brennender-sorge_en.html
13 http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1572
14 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-
xii_enc_20101939_summi-pontificatus_en.html
15 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History <<http://books.google.co.uk/books?
id=kOoYlu8aUJMC&lpg=PP1&dq=michael%20burleigh%20%22third%20reich
%22&pg=PA264#v=onepage&q=festivals&f=false>>
Germany's promised redeemer. The “blasphemy” of the state church had
been picked up on by Pius XI in his 1937 encyclical.

In 1935 a large league of churches, the Confessing Churches, declared

independence under the Barmen declaration.16 They went on to play a
large part in the German resistance. Leaders were arrested; Dietrich
Bonhoeffer was executed; Martin Niemoller spent eight years in
concentration camps, and as he famously said, “finally they came for me
- and there was no-one left to stand up for me.”17

An interesting example of the Nazification of Protestantism is Walter

Grundmann's institute at the University of Jena, set up with the aim of
de-Judaising Christianity to turn it into a tool for white supremacy.18 In the
totalitarian Nazi state, church worship incorporated Fatherland-worship
(including hymns to Hitler). It was a syncretic Nazi religion, a total
mockery of traditional Christianity, Protestant and Catholic. Those who
stood up to the Nazis, and their policies of racism and forced euthanasia,
were made to suffer the consequences.

Hitler

Hitler invoked God and “Providence” in speeches. Hitler understood the

value of propaganda. Like American presidential candidates today, it's
political suicide NOT to pretend you share the belief of the majority of the
electorate, if you actually don't. The Germany he siezed control of with
what the historian Anthony Beevor called a “veneer of legality” was a
Christian country. As the sources show, Hitler's public pronouncements
and Hitler's private views are different. There are an enormous number of
sources by people who knew Hitler, including other top Nazis, and it
might take a PhD thesis to sift through them all, but here are a handful.

Traudl Junge
Author of 'Until the Final Hour', aka 'Downfall', was Hitler's secretary and
privy to his dinner speeches and crazy outbursts about being banned
from Xbox Live19. She remembered him as “not belonging to any church”
and opposing Christianity for its love-thy-neighbour approach and the
churches for generally being “outdated, hypocritical institutions”. “The
law of nature was his religion.”20

Wilfried Daim
Austrian author, published a photograph in 1985 of what is alleged to be

16 <<http://www.ucc.org/beliefs/barmen-declaration.html>>
17 <<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came>>
18 Peter Head, The Nazi Quest for an Aryan Jesus
<<http://www.antoniolombatti.it/NaziQuestJesus.pdf>>
19 <<www.youtube.com>> Hitler Downfall parodies...
20 Traudl Junge, Until The Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary, 2004, p.108
an internal Nazi document that proposed the “unconditional abolition” of
Christianity immediately after the war, and its replacement with a Fuhrer-
cult.21 It shows Hitler's signature and comments of approval. Its survival
is surprising as the Nazis had a scorched-earth policy towards
incriminating documents, hence the lack of direct evidence of Hitler
ordering the Holocaust.22 Whether or not it is genuine, which is hard to
verify considering the original has not been made available for scholars,
it does at least tie in with Hitler's 1944 plans for rebuilding Linz as a
model city after the war, which contained a wide array of cultural
buildings, a Hitlerzentrum (Hitler centre) - but no churches!

Adolf Hitler
There are sources claiming to be records of Hitler's private monologues,
including:
• Rauschning, Hitler Speaks
• Hitler's Table Talk

Rauschning is mostly regarded by a fantasist by historians, including Ian

Kershaw, who in his massive biographies of Hitler “on no single occasion
cited Hermann Rauschning's 'Hitler Speaks', a work now regarded to
have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.”23
Nevertheless, Rauschning's name crops up in lists of copy+paste Hitler
quotes by people who want to prove a point.

Hitler's Table Talk contains many quotes on Christianity, including “the

heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity”,
and “Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing
more senseless”. These quotes are from the Trevor-Roper edition. There
are various versions and the provenance is debatable.24 In the Henry
Picker edition, Hitler does not make these attacks, but still insists that
Jesus was Aryan, not Jewish, was against the Jews, and that St Paul (by
promoting the message of grace) ruined the original religion, which Hitler
thinks of as partial justification for his anti-Semitism (the rest was
supplied by “scientific” social Darwinism handed down from the likes of
Houston Stewart Chamberlain) . What is certain is that all these views
are far more in keeping with the actual Nazi persecution of the churches
than the inevitable public sympathy Hitler expressed towards God and
Christianity.

21 <<http://www.contra-mundum.org/schirrmacher/NS_Religion.pdf>> p.4
22 This is picked up on by Holocaust deniers - as an incredible leap of logic! The lack of such a
document does allow for genuine debates over the level of personal involvement of Hitler in
the Holocaust, but it doesn't suggest against all the evidence that there was no Holocaust.
23 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, 1998, p. xiv.
24 <<http://ffrf.org/legacy/fttoday/2002/nov02/carrier.php>> See a discussion here by the
atheist author Richard Carrier, with the caveat that historians generally do not take the Nazi
apologist David Irving as a credible source of information. Along the same lines, Carrier
doesn't mention that Irving argues elsewhere that Picker's edition of Table Talk was the
unreliable one. <<http://www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/Table_Talk/Picker.html>>
Conclusion

It's easy to bring up a list of quotes from Hitler's speeches where he

claims to have God on his side, and feel like that's the end of the
argument. History isn't like that, and it's too easy a solution - as shown
by the willingness to accept it by people who already dislike Catholicism
and/or Christianity. There are other sources of Hitler's opinions that
depict him as hostile, and these are in keeping with the wealth of
evidence on the Nazis' deny-yourselves-or-face-the-consequences
attitudes towards the churches.

It's a sad fact of life that history does get rewritten by people for
ideological purposes today as much as in the past. See, for example,
Margaret Macmillan's book The Uses and Abuses of History.