Adolf Hitler's Apparent Hatred of Christianity

Embarrassed at the murderous legacy of atheist Communist regimes in the twentieth century, leading atheists seek to even the score with believers by portraying Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime as theist and specifically Christian. Atheist websites routinely claim that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic, he never publicly renounced his Catholicism, and he wrote in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” Atheist writer Sam Harris writes that since “the Holocaust marked the culmination of…two hundred years of Christian fulminating against the Jews,” therefore “knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.” ~ Was Hitler a Christian? By Dinesh D'Souza

Nearly 75 years after his suicide in his Berlin bunker, people still debate about Adolf Hitler – his life, his death and his beliefs. It isn’t surprising because Hitler is the universal go-to for the example of evil. And while he wasn’t the greatest mass murderer in history (both Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin exceeded his death totals by tens of millions), there is little question that his beliefs and policies were ultimately responsible for the murder of around 25 million people including six million Jews. Evil? Even in the murky morality of relative ethics, few would be willing to claim that Hitler wasn’t evil.

Which is why in this Balkanized world people want to push him away from themselves and their group and hang him on the group that is not them. This is why Dinesh D’Souza felt it necessary to write his article quoted above explaining that Hitler was not a Christian. This is why the Christian Cadre has felt it necessary to write several articles showing that Hitler was not a Christian. Here are just a smattering of examples from the CADRE blog:

Hitler wasn’t a Christian
Hitler was a Christian?
Defining Hitler into being Christian
Yes Whoopi, there are Boneheads on Both Sides
Hitler and Nietzsche
Nazi Persecution of the Christian Churches
Time Magazine article on Christians in Germany during World War II

Still, while the argument that Hitler was a Christian is really as dead as Hitler himself, just as some people continue to believe that Hitler survived the war, some people continue to ignorantly spout this “Hitler was a Christian” nonsense.

Well, a couple of months ago, Michael S. Rosenwald took another shot at putting a stake in the heart of that old canard. A short article written by Mr. Rosenwald in the Washington Post entitled Hitler hated Judaism. But he loathed Christianity, too, shows (as the article suggests) that Hitler held contempt for Christianity.

“In Hitler’s eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves,” wrote Alan Bullock “Hitler, A Study in Tyranny,” a seminal biography. “Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle of the fittest.”

The Führer’s skepticism and devious behavior toward organized religion began innocently enough — in weekly Bible classes.

“During middle school,” Redlich wrote in “Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet,” the young pupil “made the life of his teacher of religion, Father Salo Schwarz, miserable” by adhering “to his father’s view that religion was for the stupid and old women.”

Rosenwald says that Hitler liked the architecture of Christian churches, but held everything else about the faith in contempt. He notes the Bullock book points to an episode where Hitler addressed Christianity to his aides during World War II in a rather contemptible way:

The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science ... Gradually the myths crumble. All that is left to prove that nature there is no frontier between the organic and inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.

One would have to reach pretty far to find that to be the language of a devout Christian. No, that is the language of a man who is a non-believer – in fact, it is very similar to the language I read on atheist websites and from such illuminaries as Richard Dawkins.

Rosenwald’s article closes out with more chilling quotes from Hitler.

By 1942, Hitler vowed, according to Bullock, to “root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches,” describing them as “the evil that is gnawing our vitals.”

“I can’t at present give them the answer they’ve been asking for,” Hitler said. “The time will come when I’ll settle my account with them. They’ll hear from me all right.”

But first, he had to finish off the Jews.

These are not the words of a devoted Christian. His actions were not the actions of a devoted Christian. In all sincerity, people who claim Hitler is a Christian are simply grasping at straws to avoid the obvious: not only wasn’t Hitler a Christian, he was the farthest thing from being a Christian. If Hitler had not been defeated and had completed his Final Solution against the Jews, there is little doubt that he would have considered doing the same to the Christians. That’s just the kind of guy he was.