Was Hitler a Christian, an atheist, or neither?
A new book takes a look at the controversial—and complicated—issue of the religious views of Adolf Hitler.
What, then, did Hitler believe? Weikart convincingly writes that, although there is no evidence that he explicitly applied the term to himself, Adolf Hitler was a pantheist. Hitler loved spending time in nature, and often spoke of nature and God interchangeably. Hitler believed that the world was willed and ordered by nature, which he gave divine properties. However, Hitler’s worldview was closer to an materialistic awe for the orderliness of the universe than to mystical panentheism. While Hitler saw nature as God, his worldview allowed little room for the supernatural. For example, Hitler did not believe in an afterlife in the way most people understand the term. Rather, his concept of the afterlife was that the collective memory of the greatness of a nation would be passed on in history. Weikart notes that while all nouns are capitalized in German, English translations of Mein Kampf—including the one billed as the “Official Nazi Translation”—consistently translate Natur as “Nature” with a capital “N.” In Weikart’s view, Hitler actually derived his anti-Semitism in part from the racist, pseudo-biological social Darwinism of German biologist Ernst Haeckel.
In fact, Hitler’s real views on Christianity were so bizarre that they would actually be amusing in their imaginative eccentricity, if not for the fact that they were part of the worldview of a psychopath whose genocidal policies killed 11 million civilians and unleashed the bloodiest war in history. Weikart writes that Hitler, like his favorite philosopher, Nietzsche, disliked Christianity, but admired the figure of Jesus Christ. In Hitler’s view, Jesus himself was a Roman or Greek (Hitler believed that the ancient Greeks and Romans were the precursors of the Nordic “master race”) killed by the perfidious Jews.
Nonetheless, Hitler’s Religion is a work of momentous importance. One can hope that it will end the dispute on Hitler’s religion for good. After its publication, the intellectually honest atheist will no longer be able to falsely maintain that Hitler was a Christian, while the intellectually honest Christian who cares about being precise will have to give a more nuanced response than “Hitler did not believe in God.” He did, but Hitler’s God was vastly unlike the God of Christianity.
