Many ideologues want the world’s most reviled man to belong to “the other side”. There are some Christians who claim Hitler was a pagan who led an “atheistic regime” or even that he was an atheist himself. On the other hand, many atheists claim he was a devout Catholic or at least some kind of Christian who was cosy with the churches. So what is true? Was Adolf Hitler an atheist, a neo-pagan occultist or a devout Christian? Or was he none of these things?

In September 2010 the then pope, Benedict XVI, made a speech during his visit to Britain attacking “atheist extremism” and “aggressive secularism”. In it he noted that “in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society”. His direct association of Hitler with atheism triggered outrage from secularists and atheists, who objected to this on historical grounds. Richard Dawkins was livid, and responded in characteristic style with an counterblast titled “Ratzinger is an Enemy of Humanity” (The Guardian, Sept 22). He begins by calling the Pope a “leering old fixer” and notes:

The unfortunate little fact that Ratzinger was in the Hitler Youth has been the subject of a widely observed moratorium. I’ve respected it myself, hitherto. But after the pope’s outrageous speech in Edinburgh, blaming atheism for Adolf Hitler, one can’t help feeling the gloves are off.

This is pretty churlish, even for Dawkins, given that the young Ratzinger came from a known anti-Nazi family and avoided joining the Hitlerjugend for as long as he could, only doing so when it became compulsory to prevent retaliation against his parents. But Dawkins has never let facts and fairness get in the way of a bit of vicious spite. Warming to his theme, Dawkins declared:

Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Or at least he was as much a Roman Catholic as the 5 million so-called Roman Catholics in this country today. For Hitler never renounced his baptismal Catholicism.

Of course, Dawkins then has to acknowledge that this was a pretty nominal sort of Catholicism at best, but stresses that “Hitler certainly was not an atheist”, notes Hitler’s many references to divine “Providence”, cites the (pre-Nazi) motto “Gott mit uns” (God with Us) on the Wehrmacht’s belt buckles and observes “no wonder Hitler received such warm support from within the Catholic hierarchy of Germany”. On this latter point he cites John Cornwell’s largely debunked book Hitler’s Pope (1999) to declare that “Benedict’s predecessor, Pius XII, is not guiltless” (on the reality of Pius XII’s opposition to Hitler and Nazism see The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”?).

This exchange about Hitler’s religious views is fairly typical. Both parties want Hitler to belong to the opposition. And both have to resort to some fancy footwork to do so. This is because the question of what Hitler believed is, in fact, far from straightforward and so any sufficiently motivated ideologue can find what appears to be support for their view that Hitler is “one of theirs, not one of ours”. In fact, many of Hitler’s statements about his beliefs are unreliable, ambiguous, contradictory and often incoherent. So what can we make of the competing claims about them?

Hitler the Occultist?

The idea that Hitler was some kind of occultist or neo-pagan is common in popular culture and so often stated as though it is a well-known fact. Raiders of the Lost Ark has a character assure Indiana Jones that “Hitler’s a nut on the subject. He’s crazy. He’s obsessed with the occult” and the entire plot revolves around Hitler’s supposed fixation on ancient religious artefacts. The comic book series Hell-Boy and some of the recent super hero movies about Captain America are based on the same assumed idea. It is certainly a powerful image and one that seems to make sense – surely someone so evil must have been obsessed with strange powers and dark forces and could not possibly have had “normal” religious beliefs and ideas.

So the idea of Hitler as an occultist who dabbled with dark supernatural powers also exercises those who write at the kooky and esoteric end of the “non-fiction” spectrum. In 1973 British esoteric writer Trevor Ravenscroft had a minor bestseller with his book Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind the Spear Which Pierced the Side of Christ. Ravenscroft claims Hitler was a crazed occultist who was obsessed with the “Holy Lance” found in the treasury of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna; one of four such relics claimed to be the spear that pierced Jesus on the cross. According to Ravenscroft, Hitler wanted to use the power of this holy relic for his own dark military ends. As it turns out, most of what Ravenscroft claims is total nonsense, derived mainly from the strange author’s “psychic visions”.

The truth is, however, that Hitler had no such “obsession” and generally regarded most occultism as ridiculous or irrational. Esoteric and occultist ideas were very much in the air in Germany in the early twentieth century and there is good evidence from his reading that Hitler had some interest in them. And there certainly were high ranking members of the Nazi regime who had more than an interest – Rudolph Hess, Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg in particular clearly were believers in many of these ideas. This means that there was an strong influence from some of these concepts and systems on Nazi ideology. The parallels between aspects of Ariosophy – the esoteric systems of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels – and Nazi ideas is very clear. The idea of a prehistoric Aryan civilisation in ancient Germania that had core cultural elements preserved in modern German society that needed to be nurtured and revived was central to Nazi ideals, as was the idea these Germanic Aryans were superior to other “races”. Hitler certainly did have contact with those who accepted the more esoteric forms of these ideas, as it was a discussion circle of the Listian Thule Society that led to the establishment of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP – German Workers’ Party), which Hitler joined in 1919 and transformed into the Nazi Party (NSDAP – National Socialist German Workers’ Party) once he became its leader. Hess and Rosenberg were both members of the Thule Society, as were other leading early Nazis, such as Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart, and Karl Harrer.

While there was some influence of these occult ideas on Nazism, their influence on Hitler personally is far less clear. There are certainly some parallels between Hitler’s ideas and those of List and Lanz, but these are mostly ideas that were widely discussed and written about at the time. The elements that were unique to the esoterics and occultists, on the other hand, are generally not found in Hitler’s speeches, writings or reported discussions. Whereas they took pseudo scientific and pseudo historical claims about Aryans and ancient Germanics and added an occult or religious layer to them, Hitler generally stuck to the crackpot science and history and gave it a more political edge. Nicholas Goodridge-Clarke’s excellent study of the connections between the esoteric and occult fringe and the Nazis, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (Aquarian Press, 1985), actually concludes, despite its title, that Nazism did not really have occult roots. Goodridge-Clarke notes that “Ariosophy is a symptom rather than an influence in the way that it anticipated Nazism.” (p. 202) Hitler did have an enthusiasm for some of the strange ideas that overlapped with those of the Ariosophists, such as Viennese engineer Hanns Hörbiger’s kooky “World Ice Theory“, but these were more pseudo scientific theses rather than occult systems.

Similarly, while other leading Nazis did indulge in neo-pagan Germanicism and the revival of some kind of supposed ancient Germanic pagan religion, Hitler regarded this side of the Volkisch movements to be rather absurd. Himmler dabbled with a odd mix of medieval Christian-inspired esotericism, occult ideas and neo-paganism, while Alfred Rosenberg, Robert Ley and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach embraced the defiantly pagan and anti-Christian German Faith Movement. Hitler, on the other hand, found all of this to be little more than play acting and was fairly scornful of some of its practicioners:

The characteristic thing about these people 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.

(Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ch. 12)

Abert Speer recalls Hitler laughing at Himmler’s neo-pagan revivalism behind the SS leader’s back saying:

What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it?

(Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 143)

In public Hitler constantly emphasised the political and scientific basis for the Nazi ideology. In a speech at the Nuremberg Rally on September 6, 1938, he insisted that “the National Socialist Movement will not tolerate subversion by occult mystics in search of an afterlife”.

When Hess made his flight to Britain in May 1941, the enraged Hitler blamed his deputy’s belief in the occult and what he called “the astrological clique”. According to Hans Frank, Hitler declared “it is thus time radically to clear away this astrological nonsense.” A campaign against occult, esoteric and astrological groups and figures was ordered by the similarly vehemently anti-occult Martin Bormann and enthusiastically carried out by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. As another Nazi anti-occultist, Goebbels was delighted with the result, gloating that:

All astrologers, hypnotists, Anthroposophists, etc., arrested and their entire activity crippled. Thus finally this swindle has ended. Peculiarly not a single clairvoyant foresaw that he would be arrested. A bad professional sign!

(Goebbels, diary entry, June 13, 1941)

Despite the imaginings of both pop culture and crackpot theorists, Hitler was not “obsessed with the occult” and was not a neo-pagan. He held a number of crackpot ideas, but he sincerely believed them to be scientific and, at the time, a few of them did have a degree of respectability. But none of them were religious in nature and any overlap between occult or esoteric ideas of the time and his thinking was due to a common environment rather than any spiritual or transcendental beliefs on his part. Hitler actually regarded himself as something of a rationalist.

Hitler the Atheist?

Pope Benedict XVI is far from the only person to casually associate Hitler with atheism. Lumping Hitler in with actual atheist despots like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and then blaming their mass murders on atheism is a lazy trope among a certain variety of Christian apologist. But even in his own time there were people who declared him to actually be an atheist. Ernst Hanfstaengl was an American-German businessman who became a personal friend of Hitler and even took part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. He fell from favour in 1937 and eventually fled to the west. In his 1957 memoir Unheard Witness, Hanfstaengl said Hitler “was to all intents and purposes an atheist by the time I got to know him, although he still paid lip-service to religious beliefs and certainly acknowledged them as the basis for the thinking of others.” (p. 72) The high ranking SS officer and SD leader Walter Schellenberg had a similar recollection, stating in his memoir:

Hitler did not believe in a personal god. He believed only in the bond of blood between succeeding generations and in a vague conception of fate or providence. Nor did he believe in a life after death. In this connection he often quoted a sentence from the Edda, that remarkable collection of ancient Icelandic literature, which to him represented the profoundest Nordic wisdom: “All things will pass away, nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds.”

Schellenberg, The Schellenberg Memoirs, ed. Louis Hagen, p. 112

Early Nazi and later opponent to Hitler, Otto Strasser, was even more blunt, stating categorically that he opposed him because “we are Christians [and] without Christianity Europe is lost. Hitler is an atheist.” (Strasser, Hitler and I, trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, p. 93)

However, against these observations we have quite a body of evidence to the contrary, indicating that Hitler did indeed believe in a God in some sense and even in a personal God, and so was definitely not an atheist at all. Throughout his life, in his writings, in speeches and in private conversation Hitler made repeated references to God, “the Creator”, the Almighty” and “Providence” that, taken together, indicate at least a form of theism. In Mein Kampf he repeatedly invokes God as his inspiration for his racist ideology, writing for example of how Germans must “put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created” (p. 405). Similarly he wrote that”

The folkish-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 fulfil 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.

(Mein Kempf, p. 562)

He also makes references to “God”, “the Almighty”, “the Creator” and “Providence” in speeches throughout his career. For example, soon after being named Chancellor he addressed a crowd in Berlin on February 1, 1933, stating:

May God Almighty give our work His blessing, strengthen our purpose, and endow us with wisdom and the trust of our people, for we are fighting not for ourselves but for Germany.

On March 19, 1934, he addressed original Nazi Party members in Munich, declaring:

 God first allowed our people to be victorious for four and a half years, then He abased us, laid upon us a period of shamelessness, but now after a struggle of fourteen years he has permitted us to bring that period to a close. It is a miracle which has been wrought upon the German people…. It shows us that the Almighty has not deserted our people, that He received it into favour at the moment when it rediscovered itself. And that our people shall never again lose itself, that must be our vow so long as we shall live and so long as the Lord gives us the strength to carry on the fight.

Several times after the failed assassination attempt of July 20 1944 Hitler thanked God for saving his life. For example, in a radio broadcast later that day he stated:

I thank Providence and my Creator, not for saving my life, but for making it possible for me to endure my cares and pursue the task which my conscience commands me.

Of course, Hitler was a politician and a master manipulator and so his writings, speeches and public statements could be regarded with some scepticism as a result, with good reason. But his confidantes such as Speer and Goebbels are all in agreement that, at least in some sense, Hitler’s belief in God was sincere.

He certainly had little time for open atheism, which he associated with Communism, Socialism and nihilistic philosophies. As Richard Weikart observes:

Every time he discussed atheism overtly, both publicly and privately, he rejected it, associating it with the Marxist Social Democrats, the Communist Party, or the Bolsheviks. In the electioneering phase of his career, he regularly slammed the Catholic Center Party for cooperating with the Social Democrats, who—he often asserted —were atheists.

Weikart, Hitler’s Religion, Regnery, 2016, p. 63)

Again, there was a clear political edge to this animus, but all other evidence indicates Hitler’s distaste for atheism was genuine. On coming to power the Nazis closed down atheist and freethinker organisations and several recollections of conversations with Hitler have him talking about how atheism reduces humans to an animal state. In one reported monologue in February 1942 he said:

“What gives humans an advantage over animals, perhaps the most wonderful proof for the superiority of humans, is that he has comprehended that there must be a creative power!”

(Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941–1944: Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, ed. Werner Jochmann, pp. 301–2, quoted in Weikart,)

Of course, exactly what kind of God Hitler believed in is far from clear and extremely difficult to discern. As with Hitler’s ideas about most things, his statements are oblique, often confusing and his thinking on the matter probably fairly incoherent. In Hitler’s Religion (2016) Weikart makes a lengthy case that it was less a traditional Christian-style personal deity and more of a pantheistic conception of a universal divine. On the other hand, Richard Steigmann-Gall insists in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (2003) that “Hitler gave no indication … of believing in only a remote, rationalist divinity” and notes that in Mein Kampf “Hitler intones more than a naturalist pantheism devoid of Christian content” (p. 26). Weikart presents a far more extensive and well-developed case than Steigmann-Gall on this point but, again, the complications of Hitler’s public and private statements, his political motivations in his writings and some contradictory reported statements make it hard to discern any clear theology behind his utterances on the matter. This is very likely because there really was no coherent conception of God in Hitler’s mind.

What is often overlooked in all this often contradictory evidence is the fact that, while he was not an atheist, he was heavily influenced by rationalist ideas and considered his beliefs entirely rational and scientific. Atheists who try to claim Hitler was a Christian or even a devout Catholic regularly talk about his Catholic upbringing, his devout mother and the fact he was baptised and confirmed into the Catholic faith. This ignores the fact that the young Hitler rejected Catholicism in his teens, had to be forced to agree to his confirmation and stopped attending Mass even before he left home. But less often mentioned is the fact that while his mother was devout, his father was something of an anti-religious sceptic who read freethought literature and often poured scorn on all forms of faith. Judging by his later writings and conversations, his father seems to have had more of a lasting influence on the young Hitler.

By all accounts, Hitler’s father Alois was a domineering bully and Hitler was far closer to his rather more indulgent mother Klara. In many respects Hitler rebelled against what he considered to be his father’s petty bourgeois civil servant’s ambitions, but on matters of religion he seems to have been closer to his father’s scepticism than his mother’s faith. In adult life Hitler presented himself as something of a questioning doubter in religion classes as a youth and this is supported to a large extent by the recollections of his childhood friend August Kubizek, who said that by Hitler’s teens “his father’s freethinking attitude won the upper hand”. (Kubizek, Adolf Hitler: Mein Jugendfreund,1953, p. 114).

This early influence and some of Hitler’s later reading would explain why elements of his world view and some of his arguments, while not actually atheistic, may have seemed so to others. Hitler often used arguments used by anti-theists to this day, condemning Christianity, for example, for the excesses of the Inquisition and the witch hunts. Kubizek recalls the teenaged Hitler making these arguments and in a 1927 correspondence with a Catholic priest who had formerly been a Nazi supporter, Hitler vehemently disputed the claim Christianity had ended “Roman barbarism”, citing the burning of heretics, the destruction of the Aztecs and Incas and the African slave trade as examples of Christian barbarity. Hitler held ancient Greek and Roman civilisation in high regard and considered it to be “Aryan” and so worthy of admiration. So he decried the Christian destruction of ancient temples and railed against what he understood as the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria as a “Jewish-Christian deed”. Given that these examples are mainstays of atheist polemic to this day, it is perhaps not too surprising some of his contemporaries mistook him for an atheist himself.

But he clearly was not. Whatever his conception of God, Hitler was definitely a theist. His beliefs about Jesus and therefore Christianity, on the other hand, were complex and typically difficult to untangle. They actually form the real crux of the debate over his beliefs and what they may mean.

Hitler the Christian?

When Richard Dawkins turned to the issue of Hitler’s beliefs in the contretemps with Benedict XVI noted above, he found things fairly cut and dried. After all, Hitler openly and proudly declared himself a Christian. Dawkins quotes a speech made in Munich (“the heart of Catholic Bavaria” Dawkins adds helpfully) in 1922:

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who – God’s truth! – was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after 2,000 years, with deepest emotion I recognise more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.

(Hitler, speech made April 12, 1922)

What could be clearer than this? Dawkins goes on to note that this was “just one of numerous speeches, and passages in Mein Kampf, where Hitler invoked his Christianity”. For Dawkins and other atheists who are lazy when it comes to anything like historical analysis, this settles the matter – Hitler said he was a Christian and so he was one. The 1922 quote is now regularly seen online, presented as definitive proof that Hitler was a Christian.

But, as is the case so often with Hitler, things are not that simple.

In 1922 Hitler was the leader of a small right wing party with a membership of just 3,300 and little recognition outside Bavaria. And Bavaria was, as Dawkins notes, overwhelmingly Catholic. As a result, the opponents of the fledgling Nazi Party attacked them as being anti-Catholic and anti-religious. Few of those who cite the 1922 speech bother to put it into this context and see what Hitler was saying and what he was responding to and almost none quote what Hitler said just prior to his statement “as a Christian”:

I would like to appeal here to a greater man than I: [Bavarian Prime Minister] Count Lerchenfeld. He said in the last Landtag that his feeling ‘as a man and Christian’ prevented him from being an anti-Semite. I say: my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter …

So Hitler is not offering some unprompted avowal of his devout faith, but is trying to counter and undermine a rejection of anti-Semitism that was based on Christianity. In a country where 62.7% of people were Protestants, 32.5% were Catholics and only 4.8% were Jewish, non-Christians or otherwise unbelievers, Hitler could not possibly have won support if he had presented himself and his party as non-Christian. He was a consummate politician, a careful manipulator and a skilled liar and he did all he could to drive home his ideological objectives while not alienating the public. Hitler was careful to cultivate an image of himself and of his Party which allowed the Christian majority of Germany to embrace his ideology.

Weikart gives a vivid example of this (literal) image management in Hitler’s Religion. In 1932, while Hitler was still striving to win power at the ballot box, photographer Heinrich Hoffmann released a collation of carefully curated photos of Hitler titled Hitler wie ihn keiner kennt (“Hitler as no-one knows him”). This included a shot of Hitler leaving the Marienkirche, a Catholic church in Bremerhaven, on April 23, 1932. In the 1932 edition of the book the photo, supposedly by chance, included a cross in the background directly over Hitler’s head and Hoffmann’s caption reads “A photographic chance event becomes a symbol: Adolf Hitler, the supposed ‘heretic,’ leaving the Marinekirche [sic] in Wilhelmshaven.”

Whether this was actually a “chance event” is questionable – as Weikart notes, “the photo looks too good to be true”. But as carefully-placed propaganda it served to counter the charge that Hitler was a “heretic” and presented him in a quite literal holy light.

What is interesting is later editions of Hoffmann’s book, which had become very popular, have both a different photo and a different caption. By 1938 the book no longer depicted Hitler with the cross above his head and the new caption reads: “Adolf Hitler after sightseeing at the historic Marinekirche [sic] in Wilhelmshaven.”

So, now safely in power, Hitler is no longer associated with a conveniently appearing cross image and the original caption’s implication that the “supposed ‘heretic'” was worshipping in the church also vanishes, replaced by the note that he was simply “sightseeing”. The changes are telling. It is also interesting that Richard Steigmann-Gall’s book The Holy Reich, which argues that Hitler and the Nazis were more Christian than is often supposed, uses the 1932 version of the photo as its cover image.

On the whole, however, Steigmann-Gall makes a solid case. With 95% of Germans and, therefore, the majority of Nazi Party members Christians, the Party clearly did find a way to accommodate Christianity – it could hardly do otherwise in that context. Steigmann-Gall shows how this accommodation of Christianity by the Nazis and of Nazism by most German Christians has been downplayed by a lot of historical analysis and details the complex interplay by which two seemingly incompatible ideologies found quite a bit of comfortable common ground; something many later Christian commentators have found quite uncomfortable. This process of accommodation began early. Point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Program (25-Punkte-Programm) reads:

24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility.

(NSDAP 25-Punkte-Programm, 1920, attributed to Gottfried Feder)

The wording here is deliberately careful. There is a deliberate stress on support for Christianity without the Party “binding itself confessionally to any one denomination”. The Nazis wanted to ensure believing Christians could embrace their ideology, but without placing their Party on one side or the other of Germany’s Catholic/Protestant sectarian divide. The caveat on “freedom of religion” on the condition that it does not “endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race” is most clearly aimed at the Jewish faith and Jewish people, who the Nazis would obviously exclude from any assurance of freedom. But it also serves to exclude any expression of Christian faith that runs counter to the Nazis’ racist ideology. This is why this item in the Party’s platform stresses it “advocates …. a positive Christianity”. That refers to a highly strange approach to Christianity that made it compatible with Nazi beliefs.

“Positive Christianity” was a label used for a set of ideas that was peculiarly German and actually pre-dated the Nazis. German Christianity, and particularly German Protestantism, had always had something of a highly nationalist strain. After all, Protestantism itself began in Germany with a German objecting to the ultramontane power of a distant pope and initially flourished thanks to the support and protection of German princes. Under the Second Reich, a form of ultranationalist Christian theological tendency arose – again, mainly Protestant – which saw Germany as a nation favoured by God and an instrument of divine will in the world. With the outbreak of the First World War this became a stridently bellicose “war theology”, with many pastors preaching the need for ultimate victory and, as the War dragged on, decrying calls for an an armistice by the Vatican, socialists and many liberal Protestants. With Germany’s defeat in 1918, this theological view did not fully die out and festered into a theological justification for a resurgent Germany accompanied by anti-Semitic resentment about the nation being “stabbed in the back”.

Strangely, alongside this conservative and nationalist German Protestant theological strain was a liberal Protestant school of thought which also later fed into the Nazis’ “Positive Christianity”. Uriel Tal’s Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870-1914 (Cornell, 1975) details how, while usually decrying actual racial anti-Semitism, many prominent German liberal theologians’ attitude to Judaism was deeply intolerant, casting it as “the withered branch of the Old Testament” and “petrified pharisaism”. Tal argues that these theologians supported the political and social emancipation of German Jews in 1871 in the belief that this would lead to a greater integration of Jews into German life and, therefore, to mass conversion to Christianity. When this did not occur, many liberal Protestants reacted by arguing for a total doctrinal separation of Christianity and Judaism, with some even contemplating if the Old Testament still had any place in modern Christian theology.

Both these theological traditions influenced the thinking of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British philosopher and Germanophile who settled in Germany and married composer Richard Wagner’s daughter, Eva von Bülow. Chamberlain’s book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1899) was a key text for the Pan-Germanic Völkisch movement and so highly influential on Nazi ideology. Foundations argued that the “Teutonic” peoples were the pinnacle of the “Aryan” race (along with Celts, Slavs Greeks and Latins) and were the successors of Greek and Roman civilisation, saving Europe from domination by the Jews and other Semitics. Chamberlain argued that Jesus had not been a Jew but, as a Galilean and (according to Chamberlain) a descendant of the Amorites, he was actually an “Aryan”. Chamberlain was influenced by his friend, the liberal Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack, who rejected anti-Semitism per se, but sincerely believed and fervently hoped Judaism would “disappear completely”.

These were the origins of the “Positive Christianity” espoused by the early Nazi movement. It depicted German Christianity as part of the Germanic leadership of the “Aryan” peoples in a centuries-long fight against Jewish domination. Jesus was therefore an “Aryan” fighter against “the Jews”, with his teachings later hijacked by the Apostle Paul. “Positive Christianity” was therefore a way Nazis who were Christians could reconcile their nationalist and virulently anti-Semitic ideology with their faith. It was also a way the Nazis could keep Germany’s sectarian divide from causing division in the Party, since it was (theoretically) denominationally neutral and stressed that it was above sectarian divisions.

This context makes many of Hitler’s statements about Christianity and Jesus more explicable. The 1922 speech quoted by Dawkins, for example, is clearly an expression of a conception of Jesus as an “Aryan” who was “a fighter” and who “seized the scourge to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and adders” in “his fight against the Jewish poison”. It is significant that the main episode in the gospels that Hitler referred to was this incident where Jesus drives the money-changers from the Temple (see Matthew 21:12–17, Mark 11:15–19, Luke 19:45–48 and John 2:13–16), arguably the only act of violence by Jesus in any of the gospel accounts. Later in 1922 Hitler made reference to this episode again, once more justifying Nazi violence in the face of criticism by a rival party:

In any case I am of the conviction that no big difference exists between the whip of Jesus and a rubber truncheon, and the example of Jesus is more valuable to me than the sweet platitudes of [the Bavarian People’s Party].

(Hitler, speech made November 2, 1922)

Again, on April 13 1929, he assured his listeners that if Jesus were in Bavaria he would crack his whip and drive out the (Catholic) Bavarian People’s Party. Like Chamberlain and others before him, Hitler believed that Jesus had not been a Jew and claimed he was most likely the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier and so an “Aryan”. In Mein Kampf he repeatedly made it clear he believed Jesus had been crucified because he opposed Jewish materialism.

So Hitler did share some of the odd ideas of some nationalist German Christians which had influenced the so-called “Positive Christianity” embraced by most Nazis who were Christians. But does this mean Hitler was, in any sense, a Christian himself?

If we examine his statements about Christianity and compare them to the central and fundamental doctrines that define Christianity, even in its broadest sense, the answer is clearly “no”.

Of course, the difficulty here is that “Christianity” has taken many forms and it is difficult, or even impossible, to formulate a definition of it that encompasses absolutely all of its variants down the centuries. In Hitler’s Religion (2016) Weikart works with the deliberately broad and ecumenical definition adopted by the World Council of Churches, which says its membership encompasses all churches that :

… confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures, and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

(World Council of Churches, “The Basis of the WCC”)

This definition encompasses almost all forms of Christianity today and has the claim that Jesus is in some sense our “saviour” and is also “God”, along with a reference to the three persons of the Trinity as the core of Christian belief. To this we could probably add some kind of belief in the Resurrection and an afterlife as key elements common to almost all forms of Christianity. Of course, Christian beliefs about these things vary and there are some (very few) forms that do not have perhaps one of these elements. But these things can be said to form the basis of a difference between someone who simply has some ideas about who or what Jesus was and someone whose religious beliefs about those things constitute a form of Christianity.

The idea of “Jesus Christ as God” is primary and central in the definition above. But when we look at what Hitler said about Jesus, in his writings, his speeches and reported conversations, we see no sign that he believed Jesus was in any sense divine or was anything other than a human being, albeit a remarkable and admirable one. In The Holy Reich Richard Steigmann-Gall gives the impression that, on at least one occasion, Hitler did indeed refer to Jesus as God. In his rendering of the April 12, 1922, speech he renders one sentence as:

They point me toward the man who, once lonely and surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews and called for battle against them, and who, as the true God, was not only the greatest as a sufferer but also the greatest as a warrior.

(Steigmann-Gall, p. 37, my emphasis)

But Weikert points out that this is a mistranslation. The phrase in the original is “wahrhaftiger Gott” – a common German emphatic interjection meaning something like “by God’s truth!” or perhaps “good God!” So the sentence is translated as ” … and summoned men to fight against them and who – God’s truth! – was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.” To render it as a claim that Jesus was God is deeply misleading. There is simply no evidence that Hitler regarded Jesus as divine.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that there is also no evidence that he regarded him as, in any sense, the Second Person of the Trinity or had any belief in the Trinity at all. The April 12, 1922, speech does have Hitler calling Jesus “my Lord and Saviour”, but this is the only place he ever does so and it is not clear in what sense he regarded Jesus as a “Saviour”, if he really did at all. It certainly does not seem to be in the sense that his death and resurrection saved humanity from sin, since several references indicate he did not believe Jesus rose from the dead at all.

In a revealing Christmas speech in 1926 Hitler talked about how Jesus had been killed by the Jews and how Hitler himself was going to complete Jesus’ work. A Nazi report on the speech summarised him as saying that “[t]he work, which Christ had begun, but could not finish, he – Hitler – would complete” (Hitler, speech on December 18, 1926, in Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Augenzeugenberichten, p. 266 – quoted in Weikart, p. 86). This reflects Hitler’s consistent conception of Jesus as an anti-Semite and “fighter”, but it also shows he considered Jesus’ death left his mission “unfinished” – an idea completely incompatible with any belief that Jesus rose from the dead and totally at odds with the idea he was the “Saviour” by merit of that death and resurrection. This fits with the recollection of Otto Wagener, another confidante of Hitler’s. In his memoir Wagener recalls Hitler telling him:

“Immediately after the death of Christ, whom the reactionaries crucified, they set about exterminating, at least imprisoning and depriving of their rights, all those who had accepted Christ before his death. Christ’s body was removed from the tomb, to keep it from becoming an object of veneration and a tangible relic of the great new founder of a religion!”

(Wagener, Hitler – Memoirs of a Confidant, ed. and trans. Henry Ashby Turner, Yale, 1978, p. 316)

The idea that belief in the Resurrection began because the body of Jesus was stolen from his tomb by the Jewish authorities was a common one at the time, so it makes sense that Hitler accepted this naturalistic explanation. This means he saw Jesus’ death as the end of Jesus’ career and had no belief he rose from the dead in any sense. Hitler’s references to Jesus as “Aryan” because he was actually the son of a Roman soldier also means he did not accept another key Christian belief – the Virgin Birth.

On the subject of an afterlife, his associates recall that Hitler was consistently derisive about any traditional conception of life after death, particularly any ideas about purgatory, heaven and hell, which he associated with the rejected Catholic teachings of his youth. Wagener recalls Hitler saying that Catholics may have a problem with his views on God as a divine force permeating the universe, and declared:

“Perhaps the adherents of the Roman Church call this ‘paganism.’ That may well be so. In that case, Christ was a pagan. I call pagan their distortions of Christ’s ideas and teachings, their cults, their conception of hell and purgatory and heaven, and their worship of saints.”

(Wagener, p. 224)

Here Hitler not only rejects the standard Christian view of an afterlife but also, again, associates his doctrinally unorthodox views with those of Jesus. But while he did not have anything like a Christian conception of an afterlife, he does appear to have some broad conception of individuals returning to a collective divine cosmic consciousness after death. In Mein Kampf he talks about nature’s capacity to impose population control when required, whereby “all those who are less strong and less healthy are forced back into the womb of the eternal unknown”. An entry by Goebbels in his diary also indicates some idea of Hitler’s that the dead are spiritually subsumed into “the Volk” in some sense. Goebbels notes his disagreement with Hitler on this, noting that a belief in an individual survival in the afterlife is essential and saying – contra Hitler – “One cannot make do by saying, he goes again into his Volk (people) or into his native soil” (Goebbels, diary entry for December 14, 1941, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich, Teil II: Diktate 1941–1945, Band 2: Oktober–Dezember 1941, Munich, 1996, p.507).

If there is a point in anyone’s life where they usually contemplate the possibility of a personal afterlife, it is when they themselves are facing imminent death. Leading Nazi and close friend to Hitler, Albert Speer, records that he met Hitler not long before his suicide in the Berlin bunker in April, 1945. He recalls Hitler saying “Believe me, Speer, it is easy for me to end my life. A brief moment and I’m free of everything, liberated from this painful existence.” (Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Avon Books, 1970, p. 605). Once again, this strongly implies he had no belief in any kind of individual afterlife or existence after death.

What emerges from all these references is that while Hitler, like most people, had views on who Jesus had been, nothing about them indicates any of them could be called religious, let alone Christian in any coherent sense. He did not believe Jesus was divine, did not see him as part of the Trinity, did not think his death saved humanity, did not believe he rose from the dead, did not believe he was born of a virgin and did not believe in any individual afterlife. His ideas about the central figure of Christianity tended more toward sceptical and secular ones, where Jesus was a man and a great teacher, not the Messiah or God incarnate. He also absorbed the peculiarly German nationalist ideas that Jesus was an “Aryan” and an anti-Semite who was a “fighter” against the Jewish “brood of vipers and adders”. But he saw this through the lens of his racist political ideology, rather than anything essentially religious. He was, quite clearly, not a Christian.

This means that Dawkins’ conveniently naïve interpretation of Hitler’s 1922 claim he was, in some sense, “a Christian” is typically lazy and facile, as are almost all similar atheist claims he was a Christian. That he was not a Christian was quite clear to those who knew him, from his childhood friend August Kubizek, who recalled his teenaged rejection of Christianity, to his confidantes like Goebbels and Speer, to his general circle. When the vehemently anti-Christian Nazi leader, Martin Bormann, ordered that all religious music be banned from German radio and performances, Reich Chancellery propagandist Walter Tiessler argued against the move, noting that Hitler himself enjoyed Wagner’s Christian-themed opera Parsifal, and saying “if the Führer as a non-Christian” can enjoy this kind of music, “we as National Socialists need be no more negative [about it] than the Führer” (quoted in Steigmann-Gall, p. 250). As already noted, Hitler’s non-Christian status was so well-known that some who knew him even characterised him, wrongly, as “an atheist”.

So it would take a special kind of anti-Christian ideological zeal to go beyond the naive assessment of Dawkins and, in the face of the evidence that Hitler was in no way a Christian, argue that in fact he … was one. But there is someone who has that both that bias and that zeal. Enter, yet again, Dr Richard Carrier (PhD.)

Anyone unaware of Carrier who checks his credentials may wonder why someone with a doctorate specialising in the perceptions of proto-scientists in the Early Roman Empire would be buying into the issue of Hitler’s religious beliefs. But those who know him will understand that Carrier is an anti-Christian activist first and foremost, so he feels happy to enter any historical debate that allows him to pursue that ideological agenda. Carrier also considers himself an all-knowing polymath and an authority on everything; from philosophy and psychology to New Testament Studies and probability theory, and even charges people for online courses of lectures on several of these subjects in which he is totally untrained and unqualified. “There’s a sucker born every minute”, as P.T. Barnum probably did not actually say.

The subject of things people did not actually say is pertinent here though, since the only piece of published historical research by Carrier that other historians actually take seriously involves alleged quotes by Hitler. In 2003 Carrier published “‘Hitler’s Table Talk’: Troubling Finds.” (German Studies Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 2003, pp. 561–576) in which he argued that the standard French and English translations of the “Table Talk” transcriptions are “entirely untrustworthy”. Unsurprisingly, Carrier focuses on several statements by Hitler in which he is vehemently anti-Christian and which are often used as evidence of his animus against Christianity. He takes twelve of these statements and argues that the 1952 translation of the “Table Talk” documents into French by François Genoud distorts their meaning and make them seem more overtly anti-Christian than they are. Further, he argues that the standard English translation of these statements derives from Genoud’s French translation rather than the German original and so is similarly distorted.

Several other scholars have endorsed these findings to a certain extent. In a foreward to a new edition the standard English edition of the transcriptions, Gerhard Weinberg acknowledges Carrier’s findings (Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed. 2003. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, Engima Books, p. xi) and more recent historians have been careful to refer to the original German as a result of them. In Hitler’s Religion, Weikart also acknowledges Carrier’s findings saying:

In an interesting piece of detective work, Richard Carrier demonstrates convincingly that the English version of Hitler’s Table Talk is based on the translation of a problematic and possibly inauthentic text. Thus, I do not use nor cite the English translation of Hitler’s Table Talk.

But he goes on:

However, even Carrier admits that the two German editions edited by Henry Picker and Werner Jochmann are generally reliable. Carrier was hoping that debunking Hitler’s Table Talk would demolish the image of Hitler as an anti-Christian that many scholars have built on this flawed document. Unfortunately for Carrier, Hitler is every bit as anti-Christian in the Jochmann and Picker editions.

(Weikart, “Note on Sources”, p. 238)

Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich was published before Carrier’s paper, but since then he has responded to critics of his book by insisting that “I refer to the controversies surrounding this source” and noting he also referred to the German originals rather than just the English translation (see “Christianity and the Nazi Movement”, Journal of Contemporary History, 42 (2), pp. 185-211, p. 208). Ultimately, Steigmann-Gall believes that the “Table Talk” documents support the idea that Hitler was anti-Christian, though he believes this was a later development and represented a change in Hitler’s ideas and attitudes (see the “Conclusion” in The Holy Reich, particularly the discussion on p. 265).

All of which means that while the various issues with the “Table Talk” material, including some with the the German text also, makes it problematic, the idea that Hitler was not a Christian is still clear from all remaining relevant material anyway. So how exactly does Carrier maintain, as he definitely does, that Hitler was, in fact, “a believing Christian”? As is usual with Carrier, he does so via some shifty footwork, applied sophistry and a remarkable capacity to convince himself of absurd lines of reasoning.

Carrier states categorically that “Hitler was a believing Christian” though he qualifies this with the slight caveat “albeit having adopted the stance of the peculiar Nazi sect called Positive Christianity.” (Carrier, “Hitler’s Table Talk: The Definitive Account”, April 26, 2021). In December 2016, Carrier debated Richard Weikart on this point on the “Unbelievable” podcast, hosted by Christian broadcaster Justin Brierley.

In this discussion and on his blog, Carrier argues that Hitler’s supposedly “anti-Christian” statements were actually more anti-Catholic, anti-clerical or anti-church statements and that he was a Christian, because “his positions were very much in line with this bizarre sect of Christianity called ‘Positive Christianity’ developed by Nazis and Nazi sympathisers in the early twentieth century” (“Debate: Adolf Hitler – Christian, Atheist, or Neither? Richard Carrier vs Richard Weikart” – 13.45 mins ff).

So Carrier argues that Hitler held many of the same ideas about Jesus that were embodied in the “Positive Christianity” endorsed by the Nazis and so was a member of this “sect”. Carrier admits that it was not a very orthodox form of Christianity and refers to it as “peculiar” and “bizarre”, but insists that it was a sect of Christianity nonetheless. The problem with this is that “Positive Christianity” was not a sect of Christianity at all. On the contrary, its whole aim was to not be a sect of Christianity and to be wholly above sectarian divisions. It was an approach to Christian ideas that allowed members of the various sects and denominations of Germany to maintain their beliefs and practices while still accepting Nazi ideology. Its whole intention was to be “above the confessions” – not to be an alternative to the denominational options for believing Nazi Christians, but to allow Nazism to bridge the sectarian divisions in German society.

Steigmann-Gall makes this absolutely clear in his detailed discussion in The Holy Reich, particularly in his second chapter “Above the Confessions: Bridging the Religious Divide” (pp. 51-85). He states categorically “positive Christianity was never an attempt to create a practicable ‘third confession'” (p. 11), but was a strategy to allow believers in the two established denominations, Catholic or Protestant, to embrace Nazism’s political ideology without hesitation. He notes the emphasis placed on “bridging the confessional divide” in expressions of the Party’s ideology, such as those by Reich Education Minister Bernhardt Rust, who lamented “the German Volk, split into two religions” (p. 45), but argued they could find common ground in the shared ethical teachings of Christianity, which he said were upheld by Nazi social programs. Other proponents of the compatibility Nazism and “positive Christianity” pushed the idea of Jesus as an “Aryan” and an anti-Semite that Hitler also accepted and so framed “true” Christianity as fully in line with the Nazi agenda.

Steigmann-Gall argues against the idea that this was part of a cynical attempt to co-opt the churches and argues that it represented a genuine belief in this compatibility. But he emphasises that this approach was not based on doctrine:

The Nazi approach to confessionalism displayed a general disregard for doctrine. Positive Christianity was not an attempt to make a complete religious system with dogma and ritual of its own: it was never formalised into a faith to which anyone could convert. Rather, this was primarily a social and political worldview meant to emphazise those qualities in Christianity that could end sectarianism.

(Steigmann-Gall, p.84)

So “Positive Christianity was not a “sect” – quite the opposite. It was a way Nazi believers could stay within their sects and continue to accept those sects’ dogmas without this dividing Nazism along sectarian lines or making Nazism exclusive to one sect or another. Catholics could be ideological Nazis while maintaining distinctly Catholic doctrines and Protestants could do the same. And both could accept Jesus as God, the Virgin Birth, the Trinity and the Resurrection, while also thinking Jesus had been an “Aryan” and reading gospel references to the Pharisees, Saducees and “the Jews” generally through a Nazi and racist lens.

So Carrier’s attempt to claim Hitler was part of some kind of “bizarre sect” because he shared some of the “Positive Christianity” ideas about Jesus is simply wrong. To be a Christian he would have to have held those ideas while also accepting the key doctrines of Christianity. And he did not.

Carrier tries to get around this by arguing that Christianity takes and has always taken many forms and so Hitler’s ideas about Jesus can still be encompassed by Christianity in some sense. In his commentary on his debate with Weikart (“No, Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist”, Dec 18, 2016) he says Weikart uses “a biased definition of Christianity as only trinitarian Christianity” which “excludes many famous Christian sects of the past and today (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarians, Arians, Cathars, Branch Davidians, People’s Temple of the Disciples of Christ, some Quakers”. This is true, but Weikart only uses the World Council of Churches statement because it is widely accepted and, as he notes, it encompasses “most” forms of Christianity, not all. We can accept that trinitarianism does not, on its own, define what is or is not a form of Christianity, but that leaves several other key doctrines which are generally accepted in some form by Christians but were not accepted by Hitler.

As already noted, various statements by Hitler show he did not accept the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation or any form of divinity for Jesus and did not believe Jesus rose from the dead in any sense. Carrier tries to quibble that “millions of liberal Christians the world over regard his miracles, and his resurrection, non-literally”, but even the ones who do so still believe in these things in some sense – particularly the Resurrection. Highly liberal Christians like John Shelby-Spong do not believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead, but consider “the Resurrection Event” as a mystical reality and central to their faith. There is no sign that Hitler had anything like even that belief.

So Carrier has to somehow maintain that, despite holding none of the central doctrines of Christianity and despite merely having some “peculiar” ideas about him as a man who taught some things and then died and stayed dead, somehow Hitler was “a Christian”. This is absurd. By this bizarre definition, basically anyone who has any ideas about Jesus as a person at all is, apparently, “a Christian”. That clearly makes no sense, though it shows the depths of sophistry that obsessed anti-Christian ideologues will go to so they can avoid conceding a point.

Conclusion

Hitler was not an atheist. Exactly how he conceived of the God he believed in is unclear thanks to his often incoherent and contradictory statements on the subject, but he did believe in a God and rejected atheism. Hitler was not a pagan or an occultist. He held some strange ideas, but they tended to be more pseudo scientific than mystical and he was something of sceptic about such things and prided himself on his rationalism. Hitler was not a Christian. He clearly had a conception of Jesus that he admired, but it was based on dubious and often crackpot ideas of Jesus as a man and it was not based on any of the key doctrines of Christianity. Despite Richard Carrier’s tangled attempts, there is no coherent and reasonable way to define Hitler as a Christian in any sense.

The Nazi attitude to Christianity was complex and evolved over time. In the Party’s early years it could not afford to alienate the majority Christian population and so worked hard to make Nazism as compatible with Christianity as possible and to present Hitler as, if not a believer, then not an enemy of Christianity. Once in power this general approach was maintained, though some elements in the Nazi leadership became far more overtly anti-Christian. Himmler, Goebbels and, especially, Bormann were clearly anti-Christian but were restrained for the sake of morale during the War. Most historians agree that Hitler too was largely anti-church, though Steigmann-Gall believes this was a later development. A great deal of evidence indicates that the Nazi elite intended to suppress Christianity as a major threat to Nazi ideology and objectives in the long term

No-one wants Hitler on their team and many want him to belong to “the other side”. As it happens, Hitler’s beliefs on religion as on many things are not neatly categorised. But on the question of “atheist, pagan or Christian?” the only accurate answer is “none of the above.”

Further Reading

Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (University of North Carolina Press, 1997)

Nicholas Goodridge-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (Aquarian Press, 1985)

Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Richard Steigmann-Gall The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Religion, (Regnery, 2016)