Religious views of Adolf Hitler
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The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time. During the beginning of his political career, Hitler publicly expressed favorable opinions towards traditional Christian ideals, but later abandoned them.[1][2] Most historians describe his later posture as adversarial to organized Christianity and established Christian denominations.[3][4] He also criticized atheism.[5]
Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother, Klara Hitler, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; his father, Alois Hitler, was a free-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church.[6][7] In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived.[8] According to John Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler's confirmation sponsor had to "drag the words out of him ... almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him".[9] 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 ..." Michael Rissmann notes that, according to several witnesses who lived with Hitler in a men's home in Vienna, he never again attended Mass or received the sacraments after leaving home at 18 years old.[10]
In a speech in the early years of his rule, Hitler declared himself "not a Catholic, but a German Christian".[11][12][13][14][15] The German Christians were a Protestant group that supported Nazi Ideology.[16] Hitler and the Nazi Party also promoted "nondenominational"[17] positive Christianity,[18] a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament.[19][20] In one widely quoted remark, he described Jesus as an "Aryan fighter" who struggled against "the power and pretensions of the corrupt Pharisees"[21] and Jewish materialism.[22] Hitler spoke often of Protestantism[23] and Lutheranism,[24] stating, "Through me the Evangelical Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England"[25] and that the "great reformer" Martin Luther[26] "has the merit of rising against the Pope and the Catholic Church".[27]
Hitler's regime launched an effort toward coordination of German Protestants into a joint Protestant Reich Church (but this was resisted by the Confessing Church), and moved early to eliminate political Catholicism.[28] Even though Nazi leadership was excommunicated from the Catholic Church,[29] Hitler agreed to the Reich concordat with the Vatican, but then routinely ignored it, and permitted persecutions of the Catholic Church.[30] Several historians have insisted that Hitler and his inner circle were influenced by other religions. In a eulogy for a friend, Hitler called on him to enter Valhalla[31] but he later stated that it would be foolish to re-establish the worship of Odin (or Wotan) within Germanic paganism.[32] Most historians argue he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons and that his intentions were to eventually eliminate Christianity in Germany, or at least reform it to suit a Nazi outlook.[33]