WAS HITLER A DEDICATED ATHEIST? A DEVOUT CATHOLIC? OR A WILD AND WEIRD OCCULTIST?
The correct answer is none of the above
Having managed to kill tens of millions one way or another, and being responsible for vast amounts of suffering over just a dozen years, whether the evil Hitler was irreligious, or godly and in that case in what matter, is a constant matter of discussion and dispute. Often contentious. To a fair extent those of a given non/religious basic opinion would naturally prefer that he had not been of that particular non/religious opinion. To wit, it is common for Christian conservatives to contend that of course Adolf was a god denier and Darwinist with no morality, who presented himself as some sort of false deity to the German Volk. It is a regular part of their education system, as I know from what I have been told by its students. Atheists often see the church member Fuhrer as a Catholic. Others opine he was deep into the occult, as was his Holocaust committing henchman Himmler. Still others propose Hitler was a follower of Nazi theology.
By the turn of the century I was tired of the contending ideas of what the Nazis were about on assorted matters, including non/theistic. So I did a deep dive into the subject and produced a two-part article for Free Inquiry(https://www.concordatwatch.eu/gregory-s-paul-great-scandal-christianitys-role-in-the-rise-of-the-nazis-part-1--k38075; https://www.humanizm.net.pl/gregory2.pdf).
Specific to H, he was born into an Austrian middle-class family. Austria was strongly Catholic, and his mother was a devout churchgoer who did her best to bring up her son in the organization, he being a choirboy. H’s father was more skeptical about affairs divine. The latter was very abusive, and H did not think much of him, the future Fuhrer adored his mother. H was always a member in good standing of the Roman Catholic Church who paid his church taxes until the end -- he like all fascists was never excommunicated or at risk of it (on religious grounds, Goebbels was kicked out for marrying a Protestant). In the late 1800s the deeply anti-Semitic RCC was a hard right religious brand (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-competing-global-industries-the) operating under the anti-Democratic, anti-free speech Vatican 1 that demanded complete compliance with the one true representative of Christ on Earth from members and clergy. H admired that particular point in principle.
But not in regards to himself. A big-headed and correspondingly not particularly bright blowhard with a moderate education, who was an avid and gullible reader of pseudointellectual/scientific tracts and tomes, H did not follow either of his parents’ belief systems. Adolf did not write an autobiography and explain in detail his thinking on the subject, but his writings (including Mein Kampf), speeches. and comments (including Table Talk) provide a broad outline of his beliefs. We know he believed in supernatural divine powers. Based in part on personal experience. Again and again and again and again H survived one deadly threat after another. It started in the Great War when he served on the frontlines fighting the fellow Aryan British. Although not an over-the-top field soldier, he was in constant danger and lucky to survive the general slaughter over four years. Including being seriously gassed which could have killed him (that experience may be a reason he strongly disapproved of using chemicals in combat in WW2). During the general retreat as the war ended, H claimed that a British soldier had drawn a bead on him, but did not fire either because of sympathy, or gun failure. H survived the Beer Hall Putsch that left some around him dead. As Fuhrer he survived an astonishing number of assassination efforts, some of which should have killed him as they did others on occasion (see https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/why-the-belief-that-the-creator-of-846). That H survived until 1945 is truly remarkable. Not surprisingly, the already much to full of himself supernaturalist H was convinced his survival could only have been via divine intervention to save him for important Earthly purposes – much as does Trump and his MAGA base. After not being blown up by a bomb that killed people at a podium shortly after H left earlier than scheduled in 1939, he told his entourage that the “fact that I left the Bürgerbräukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence’s intention to let me reach my goal.” After again not being done in by a bomb that detonated a few meters from him in 1944, H told the German nation that he regarded that “as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence to continue on the road of my life as I have done hitherto.” There is not the slightest evidence that H was in any way an atheist. Thus, the real question is what kind of theist was he.
In Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism (Oxford University Press) Derek Hastings details how the Nazis party, founded in Munich Bavaria both of were deeply Catholic, was largely founded by members of the church. Some active believers such as Himmler, others already heretical as per H. Despite the obvious heresies, the German branch of the RCC provided significant support to the nascent party which was helping suppress the openly godless German Bolsheviks. This could only have been done with the approval of Rome, which ran a tight ship. Much of the German press was outraged by the open Catholic-Nazis connection, which included clerics writing loathsome anti-Semitic tracts in party publications. The devilish collaboration of convenience ended as an over-confident H decided to make a run via a Mussolini style putsch at taking over Germany, which is two-thirds Lutheran. To do that he had to recruit large numbers of Protestants including the General Ludendorff who, along with Hindenburg, had lost the war and they both became heroes of the Volk go figure. This caused the RCC to drop interest in the heretical Nazis and warn church members to stay away from the Nationalist Socialists – pushing Himmler to make a switch from Catholic to occultist.
The Nazis Party believed in religious freedom. Really, they did. As long as one was not a Jew, what a Deutsche Aryan believed was not all that critical. This was tacit party policy, Himmler made it explicit for his SS. Catholic, atheist, Protestant, Nordic-Germanic occultist – all were OK. Just toe the secular side of the party line. Hitler never targeted anyone who was fine with his rule regarding their religious beliefs. There was no Nazis theological Bible, and the general, flexible theology was something along these lines. There is of course a creator God like duh, and only Aryans – with the Deutsche Volk being the very best followed by Nordic and British – were specially created by said God with immortal souls with post death access to a sort of Valhalla. Most other races had evolved in some vague Darwinian way or another from beasts and lacked magical souls, so when dead they were really truly dead. Being animals without much in the way of smarts, they were best suited for slavery. The exception were Jews who, as Jesus charged in the gospels, were the children of Lucifer, and hence were diabolically evil and dangerously clever despite being subhuman. Thus, they had to be severely dealt with to eliminate the threat they posed to Aryanism. In Mein Kampf Jews are characterized as Satanic, with the devil being anti-Aryan. The races were involved in a vicious survival of the fittest struggle that required war and genocide to leave the Aryans on top of the global pile. But Nazism was not libertarian Ayn Rand Social Darwinian. The party was, as it was named, socialist when it came to German Aryans. None of whom were to be impoverished much less homeless, and received government support as needed to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. Your laissez faire free market capitalism was regularly criticized as immoral and heartless Social Darwiniasm. The first lavish epic Titanic film, titled Titanic (1943) produced by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, was all about how financial greed led the reckless British plutocrat owners and crew to sail the ship at top speed into an iceberg, the cads. Jesus – his father being a Roman soldier, his mother was not a virgin let’s get real here – was an Aryan sent by God to Earth to battle the Jews. The latter had sneakily contaminated the insufficiently anti-Semitic Roman Church, including corrupting Christian scriptures. If you think this rather incoherent, what form of theism is not? Pseudoscientific arguments were regularly employed by Nazis pseudoscholars, this was no more meaningful than is Christian creationism and flat-earthism. Many Nazis opted for occultist beliefs on creation and ancient celestial and earthly cataclysms, Atlantis often being involved. Not an occultist, the well-educated Goebbels did not hard push occultism onto what he knew would be a skeptical Volk. Considering himself a level-headed practical man H sometimes rolled his eyes at Himmler’s deep occultism (including the notorious Tibet expeditions), but did not interfere. Mentally unstable Hess was a fellow occultist to H’s annoyed bemusement; uber hedonist Goring and sophisticated Speer were not.
Hitler sometimes claimed to be a Catholic. What he meant is not clear. He was by no means an observant papist – ultra-arrogant H never attended mass, much less subjected his brilliant heretical great man self to confession to a mere RCC papist cleric while kneeling like a sinful penitent in a booth. Quickly arranged in exchange for the entire Catholic Centre Party having voted to make church member H chancellor and then dictator, the 1933 Nazis-Catholic Concordat required all German bishops to swear loyalty to the Reich (the accord in turn ensured the church would continue to enjoy its (still operative) income tax-stream which wealthy H paid into). With the church never seriously opposing his regime (it limited its formal objections to violations of the Concordat), and Catholic heritage H needing to not unduly upset a third of the population during an existential war, the Fuhrer could not take on Rome in a direct manner despite tense relations.
H was happy to have his largely supernaturalism believing people imagine that he enjoyed divine favor and protection in the manner of Trump. But he never presented himself as a deity in the manner of the Emperor of Japan. The military and SS oaths to H were under God. Military belt buckles declared “God is with Us.” Most insignia on Wehrmacht vehicles and Luftwaffe aircraft were the Teutonic Christian cross.
Liking his job very much and not wanting to end up in a bad way, H was careful to run a popular dictatorship that always enjoyed support from a solid majority whose ethics were far from sterling (see Robert Gellately’s Backing Hitler, Oxford University Press). The Christian population knew their nonchurchgoing Fuhrer was not a devout Catholic – that was why the RCC promoted H member for the post because they knew the Protestants would put up with a nonpapist church member, which the mainstream Lutheran churches and their flocks were fine with. Only when H’s war went seriously south in 1943 (loss of entire armies at Stalingrad and Africa, RAF firebombing Reich cities, etc.) did support slip somewhat (including some Christian military officers joining in the last effort to knock him off – when Germans learned of the failed attempt, spontaneous pro-Hitler demonstrations popped up across the nation). If he had won his war, the bulk of the Christian Volk would have been cheeringly thrilled with Herr Adolf Hitler.
Had H lived to enjoy such a victory, it is often thought that he would have attempted to push the Volk into a common form of Nazi theism blending assorted Christian and pagan notions with some occultism. Whether he really would have been into that level of theological activism is open to question. And if he was, would it have worked is another matter. His health was not the best – he had Parkinson’s or something similar (including a shaking left hand in late films) – so his postwar physical/mental condition and lifespan may have been limited. And his successor might have been less concerned about popular religiosity. If H had surrendered, sincerely repented via confession, and taken the last rites before execution, then he would have avoided Hell according to Catholic doctrine (or he could have been truly born-again and sought the grace of Christ in evangelical Protestantism). Committing suicide in his view would be an honorable act by one committed to the divine Aryan project, who had done what he could for God and his very best creations.
Raised in a conservative anti-Semitic Christian society, H was a not-particularly-bright armchair theist with a cause, who had a mish-mash of supernaturalist notions rattling around in his head. Which he sincerely thought justified his cruel policies in order to put the Master Race, Germans most of all, in their proper place at the top of a world order run on God-ordained slavery. The last item was not abnormal, the Jewish and Christian testaments are good with human bondage (https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/why-scriptural-morality-is-far-from), as were religions in general for nearly all of human history. If Adolf’s blend of theological views come across as bizarre and incoherent that is true of all religions, although most are not so toxic (see https://gspaulscienceofnonreligion.substack.com/p/the-total-toll-of-human-mass-violence). He was a dedicated opponent of Godless Satanic Judaic Bolshevism. But he was not specifically anti-atheist, his top aide Martin Bormann (who compiled Table Talk) was an anti-theist. Nor was he a churchly Catholic, the Popes despised him and he them. For the RC, H being a hard right wing thug was not the critical problem – the Vatican was good with Mussolini, Dulfess, Franco, Pavelic, et al. The issue was that H had gone too far with his anti-Semitism, and botched the war which the Holy See thought should have focused (in collaboration with the western Allies) on the atheistic USSR.