Hitler's religious beliefs and fanaticism
(Selected quotes from Mein Kampf)
compiled by Jim Walker
Originated: 28 Nov. 1996
Additions made: 07 July 2001
People often make the claim that Adolph Hitler adhered to Atheism, Humanism or some ancient Nordic pagan mythology. None of these fanciful and wrong ideas hold. Although one of Hitler's henchmen, Alfred Rosenberg, did undertake a campaign of Nordic mythological propaganda, Hitler and most of his henchmen did not believe in it .
Many American books, television documentaries, and Sunday sermons that preach of Hitler's "evil" have eliminated Hitler's god for their Christian audiences, but one only has to read from his own writings to appreciate that Hitler's God equals the same God of the Christian Bible. Hitler held many hysterical beliefs which not only include, God and Providence but also Fate, Social Darwinism, and ideological politics. He spoke, unashamedly, about God, fanaticism, idealism, dogma, and the power of propaganda. Hitler held strong faith in all his convictions. He justified his fight for the German people and against Jews by using Godly and Biblical reasoning. Indeed, one of his most revealing statements makes this quite clear:
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."
Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. Raised as Catholic he went to a monastery school and, interestingly, walked everyday past a stone arch which was carved the monastery's coat of arms which included a swastika. As a young boy, Hitler's most ardent goal was to become a priest. Much of his philosophy came from the Bible, and more influentially, from the Christian Social movement. (The German Christian Social movement, remarkably, resembles the Christian Right movement in America today.) Many have questioned Hitler's stand on Christianity. Although he fought against certain Catholic priests who opposed him for political reasons, his belief in God and country never left him. Many Christians throughout history have opposed Christian priests for various reasons; this does not necessarily make one against one's own Christian beliefs. Nor did the Vatican's Pope & bishops ever disown him; in fact they blessed him! As evidence to his claimed Christianity, he said:
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized 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 for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
Hitler's anti-Semitism grew out of his Christian education. Christian Austria and Germany in his time took for granted the belief that Jews held an inferior status to Aryan Christians. Jewish hatred did not spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, "On the Jews and their Lies," Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until World War II. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther.
Hitler did not have to parade his belief in God, as so many American Christians do now. Nor did he have to justify his Godly belief against an Atheist movement. He took his beliefs for granted just as most Germans did at that time. His thrust aimed at politics, not religion. But through his political and religious reasoning he established in 1933, a German Reich Christian Church, uniting the Protestant churches to instill faith in a national German Christianity.
Future generations should remember that Adolph Hitler could not have come into power without the support of the Protestant and Catholic churches and the German Christian populace.
The following quotes provides some of Hitler's expressions of his belief in religion, faith, fanaticism, Providence, and even a few of his paraphrasing of the Bible. It by no means represents the totality of Hitler's concerns. To realize the full context of these quotes, I implore the reader to study Mein Kampf.
The purpose of this text intends to dispute the claims made by Christians that Hitler "was an atheist," or "anti-religious," and to reveal the dangers of belief-systems. This text in no way attempts to give endorsement to anti-Semitism.
Quotations from Mein Kampf
Volume 1, Chapter 1, In the House of My Parents
Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Note: "Their sword will become our plow" appears to paraphrase Micah 4:3 about beating swords into ploughshares, but his tears of war more resembles Joel 3:9-10 "Beat your plowshares into swords."
I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were the battlefields on which the 'conflicts' which exist everywhere in life were decided.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 2, Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna
Fate must bring retribution, unless men conciliate Fate while there is still time. How thankful I am today to the Providence which sent me to that school!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Thus my faith grew that my beautiful dream for the future would become reality after all, even though this might require long years.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word 'Jew,' with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions.... For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought.
At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Note: Karl Lueger (1844-1910) belonged as a member of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party, he became mayor of Vienna and kept his post until his death.)
The man and the movement seemed 'reactionary' in my eyes. My common sense of justice, however, forced me to change this judgment in proportion as I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work; and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times.
-Adolf Hitler speaking about Dr. Karl Lueger of the Christian Social Party (Mein Kampf)
How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement!
My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 3 General Political Considerations Based on My Vienna Period
A man does not die for something which he himself does not believe in.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Just as a man's denominational orientation is the result of upbringing, and only the religious need as such slumbers in his soul, the political opinion of the masses represents nothing but the final result of an incredibly tenacious and thorough manipulation of their mind and soul.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be 'discovered' by an election.
-Adolf Hitler with his twist on Mark 10:25 (Mein Kampf)
Thank the Lord, Germanic democracy means just this: that any old climber or moral slacker cannot rise by devious paths to govern his national comrades, but that, by the very greatness of the responsibility to be assumed, incompetents and weaklings are frightened of.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For by employing religious force in the service of its political considerations, the crown aroused a spirit which at that outset it had not considered possible.
-Adolf Hitler on the state of Rome (Mein Kampf)
For when a people is not willing or able to fight for its existence-- Providence in its eternal justice has decreed that people's end.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party... was to assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Even less could I understand how the Christian Social Party at this same period could achieve such immense power. At that time it had just reached the apogee of its glory.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
But the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone.
Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The hard struggle which the Pan-Germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The root of the whole evil lay, particularly in Schonerer's opinion, in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, and that for this very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Protestantism as such is a better defender of the interests of Germanism, in so far as this is grounded in its genesis and later tradition; it fails, however, in the moment when this defense of national interests must take place in a province which is either absent from the general line of its ideological world and traditional development, or is for some reason rejected.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Thus, Protestantism will always stand up for the advancement of all Germans as such, as long as matters of inner purity or national deepening as well as German freedom are involved, since all these things have a firm foundation in its own being; but it combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people fulfilled their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, both together and particularly at the first flare, there really existed in both camps but a single holy German Reich, for whose existence and future each man turned to his own heaven.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Verily a man cannot serve two masters. And I consider the foundation or destruction of a religion far greater than the foundation or destruction of a state, let alone a party.
-Adolf Hitler speaking like Jesus in Matthew 6:24 (Mein Kampf)
Heaven will smile on us again.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political parties.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people.
-Adolf Hitler speaking about the leader of the Christian Social movement (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 4, Munich
But the people on top made a cult of the 'ally,' as if it were the Golden Calf.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The Golden calf occurs in Exodus 32:1-4)
Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
We must, therefore, coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
...a man does not die for business, but for ideals.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 5, The World War
Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I had so often sung 'Deutschland u:ber Alles' and shouted 'Heil' at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Indeed, nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure, and not seldom end with the exact opposite of the desired result...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 6, War Propaganda
I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Certainly we don't have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 7, The Revolution
More than once I was tormented by the thought that if Providence had put me in the place of the incapable of criminal incompetents or scoundrels in our propaganda service, our battle with Destiny would have taken a different turn.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on His ungrateful children.
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
...we must pray to the Almighty not to refuse His blessing to this change and not to abandon our people in the times to come.
-Hitler recalling a priest's speech after the defeat of WWI (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 8, The Beginning of My Political Activity
As soon as the theoretician attempts to take account of so-called 'utility' and 'reality' instead of absolute truth, his work will cease to be a polar star of seeking humanity and instead will become a prescription for everyday life.
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea...
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to depend on human beings...
If this were not so, the founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth... In its workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For the greater a man's works for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight, and the rarer success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The metaphors of marathon runners, and the wreath (crown) of the present to achieve works for the future parallels the thought in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27: "Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that you may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.")
To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 10, Causes of the Collapse
Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of the heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hastily and indifferently, people tried to pass by the unpleasant truths, as though by such an attitude events could be undone. No, the fact that our big city population is growing more and more prostituted in its love life cannot just be denied out of existence; it simply is so.
...it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation. But this applies only to profanation of the blood and the race.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Avenged to the tenth generation appears in Deuteronomy 23:2-3)
Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
How truly wretched was the attitude of pre-War Germany on this one very question! What was done to check the contamination of our youth in big cities? What was done to attack the infection and mammonization of our love life? What was done to combat the resulting syphilization of our people?
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Mammonization refers to the New Testament word "mammon" [Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:9,11,13] which alludes to riches, avarice, and worldly gain personified as a false god)
The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles.
The first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the 'image' of God.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(See Genesis 1:27 for man created in God's image.)
Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...
Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
-Adolf Hitler sounding like the Moral Majority (Mein Kampf)
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The works of Mortiz von Schwind, or of a Bo:cklin, were also an inner experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
How widespread the general disunity was growing is shown by an examination of religious conditions before the War. Here, too, a unified and effective philosophical conviction had long since been lost in large sections of the nation. In this the members officially breaking away from the churches play a less important role than those who are completely indifferent.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine-- an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular-- right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply so their own ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Also noteworthy is the increasingly violent struggle against the dogmatic foundations of the various churches without which in this human world the practical existence of a religious faith is not conceivable.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all efficacy.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The attack against dogmas as such, therefore, strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state, and , as the latter would end in a total anarchy of the state, the former would end in a worthless religious nihilism.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 1, Chapter 11, Nation and Race
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following:
(a) Lowering of the level of the higher race;
(b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness.
To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator. And as a sin this act is rewarded.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!'
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Man's dominion over earth appears in Genesis 1:26)
...the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(See Genesis Chapter 3)
...that is why the prophet seldom has any honor in his own country.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
("For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country." John 4:44)
The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-- and this against their own nation.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Great founder here, of course, refers to Jesus. The "whip to drive from the temple" comes from John 2:15, "And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple..." Interestingly, Hitler often carried a whip with him. There's at least one photograph with him posing with a whip in hand in Werner Maser's "Hitler's Letters and Notes.")
At times of the bitterest distress, fury against him finally breaks out, and the plundered and ruined masses begin to defend themselves against the scourge of God.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(For one example of God's fury and anger, see Isaiah 63)
This game is repeated again and again, and in it the role of the so-called 'German princes' is just as miserable as that of the Jews themselves. These lords were really God's punishment for their beloved peoples and find their parallels only in the various ministers of the present time.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
They [German princes] made a pact with the devil and landed in hell.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If we consider how greatly he has sinned against the masses in the course of the centuries, how he has squeezed and sucked the blood again and again; if furthermore, we consider how the people gradually learned to hate him for this, and ended up by regarding his existence as nothing but punishment of Heaven for the other peoples, we can understand how hard this shift must be for the Jew.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
First, therefore, he goes about making up to the people for his previous sins against them. He begins his career as the 'benefactor' of mankind. Since his new benevolence has a practical foundation, that the left hand should not know what the right hand giveth; no, whether he likes it or not, he must reconcile himself to letting as many people as possible know how deeply he feels the sufferings of the masses and all the sacrifices that he himself is making to combat them.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The left/right hand paraphrase derives from Matthew 6:3)
But even more: all at once the Jew also becomes liberal and begins to rave about the necessary progress of mankind.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a Jewess.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The idea of the devil and the Jew came out of medieval anti-Jewish beliefs based on interpretations from the Bible. Martin Luther, and teachers after him, continued this "tradition" up until the 20th century.)
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Peoples which bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Providence did not bestow her reward on the victorious sword, but followed the law of eternal retribution.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Eternal retribution comes from Christian doctrinal thought as referring to eternal hell when one who physically dies in his sins without Christ. Christians to this day take Hell or the "Lake of Fire" (Rev. 19:20) as real and literal.)
Volume 1, Chapter 12 The First Period of Development of the Nationalist Social German Worker's Party
Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents uphold it as the sole correct movement, and push it past other formations of a similar sort.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
...absolute intolerance also provides long growth.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
No more than a famous master can be replaced and another take over the completion of the half-finished painting he has left behind can the great poet and thinker, the great statesman and the great soldier, be replaced. For their activity lies always in the province of art. It is not mechanically trained but inborn by God's grace.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Faith can remove mountains appears in 1 Corinth. 13:2)
The characteristic thing about these people is that they rave about 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.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The above statement refutes the common impression that Hitler admired ancient Nordic customs.)
A man who knows a thing, who is aware of a given danger, and sees the possibility of a remedy with his own eyes, has the duty and obligation, by God, not to work 'silently,' but to stand up before the whole public against the evil and for its cure.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 1, Philosophy and Party
Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
By helping to raise man above the level of bestial vegetation, faith contributes in reality to the securing and safeguarding of his existence. Take away from present-day mankind its education-based, religious-dogmatic principles-- or, practically speaking, ethical-moral principles-- by abolishing this religious education, but without replacing it by an equivalent, and the result will be a grave shock to the foundations of their existence.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Of course, even the general designation 'religious' includes various basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This, above all, is the fighting factor which makes a breach and opens the way for the recognition of basic religious views.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 2, The State
We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not only assures the preservation of its nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
World history is made by minorities when this minority of number embodies the majority of will and determination.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
There is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same time the holiest obligation, to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler development of these beings.
A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Hitler's concept of holy blood comes right out of the Bible. The Bronze-Age Bible authors thought that the spirit of life consisted of blood. (See Leviticus 17:11, 14). In the New Testament, God made of one blood all nations of men..." (See Acts 17:24-26). The Biblical Paul saw himself as "pure from the blood of all men." (Acts 20:26). Hitler here sees blood (life) preservation as a holy right to produce images of the Lord. This clearly forms a religious justification for racial purity and contradicts any notion of Darwinism.)
It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church.
Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the admonition finally to 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?
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
("Beings such as He Himself created," shows that Hitler believed in creationism.)
A sharp difference should exist between general education and specialized knowledge. As particularly today the latter threatens more and more to sink into the service of pure Mammon, general education, at least in its more ideal attitude, must be retained as a counterweight.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Mammon, a New Testament word [Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:9,11,13] refers to riches, avarice, and worldly gain personified as a false god. Hitler uses "mammon" or "mammonization" four times in Mein Kampf.)
For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 5, Philosophy and Organization
Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure?
...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 7, The Struggle with the Red Front
I must frankly admit that... I should probably lose all interest in life and would rather not be a German at all. But since, thank the Lord, this cannot be done, we have no need to be surprised that the health, unspoiled people avoid 'bourgeois mass meetings' as the devil holy water.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
This, it may be that centuries, dissatisfied with the form of their religious life, yearn for a renewal, and that from this psychic urge dozens and more men arise who on the basis of their insight and their knowledge believe themselves as prophets of a new doctrine, or at least as warriors against an existing one.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The main fighter for the DSP [Deutsch-Sozialistische Partei or German Socialist Party], as I have said, was Julius Streicher, then a teacher in Nuremberg. At first he, too, had a holy conviction of the mission and the future of his movement.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic struggles of individual formations, never as enterprises of coalitions.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 10, Federalism as a Mask
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 fulfill 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.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Here again Hitler shows his belief in a creationist model of human's origin.)
In the ranks of the movement [National Socialist movement], the most devout Protestant could sit beside the most devout Catholic, without coming into the slightest conflict with his religious convictions. The mighty common struggle which both carried on against the destroyer of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutually to respect and esteem one another.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 13, German Alliance Policy After the War
... the world has no reason for fighting in our defense, and as a matter of principle God does not make cowardly nations free...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If the German nation wants to end a state of affairs that threatens its extermination in Europe, it must not fall into the error of the pre-War period and make enemies of God and the world; it must recognize the most dangerous enemy and strike at him with all its concentrated power. And if this victory is obtained through sacrifices elsewhere, the coming generations of our people will not condemn us.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For this, to be sure, from the child's primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until the timorous prayer of our present parlor patriots: 'Lord, make us free!' is transformed in the brain of the smallest boy into the burning plea: 'Almighty God, bless our arms when the time comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our battle!'
-Adolf Hitler's prayer (Mein Kampf)
Volume 2, Chapter 14, Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy
...we National Socialists must hold unflinchingly to our aim in foreign policy, namely to secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitles on this earth. And this action is the only one which, before God and or German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified: before God, since we have been put on this earth with the mission of eternal struggle for our daily bread...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
And so he [the Jew] advances on his fatal road until another force comes forth to oppose him, and in a mighty struggle hurls the heaven-stormer back to Lucifer.
Germany is today the next great war aim of Bolshevism. It requires all the force of a young missionary idea to raise our people up again, to free them from the snares of this international serpent...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(devils through Beelzebub comes from Luke 11:15-19)
Never forget that the most sacred right on this earth is a man's right to have earth to till with his own hands, and the most sacred sacrifice the blood that a man sheds for this earth.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(till the ground: see Genesis 3:23)
Volume 2, Chapter 15, The Right of Emergency Defense
Viewing all this from a higher vantage-point, we can speak of one single piece of good fortune in all this misery, which is that, though men can be befuddled, the heavens cannot be bribed.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
But in the great hour Heaven sent the German people a great man, Herr von Cuno.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
References (click on a blue highlighted book title if you want it):
Helmreich, Ernst Christian, "The German Churches Under Hitler," Wayne State University Press, 1979
Hitler, Adolf, "Mein Kampf," translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971
Scholder, Klaus, "The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol 1" Fortress Press, 1977
Scholder, Klaus, "The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol 2" Fortress Press, 1977
Toland, John, "Adolf Hitler," Anchor Books Doubleday, 1976
Macfarland, Charles S., "The New Church and the New Germany," Macmillan Co.
The Christianity of Hitler revealed in his speeches and proclamations
Compiled by Jim Walker
Originated: 27 Feb. 1997
Additions: 03 Jun. 2006
Through subterfuge and concealment, many of today's Church leaders and faithful Christians have camouflaged the Christianity of Adolf Hitler and have attempted to mark him an atheist, a pagan cult worshipper, or a false Christian. However, from the earliest formation of the Nazi party and throughout the period of conquest and growth, Hitler expressed his Christian support to the German citizenry and soldiers. In the 1920s, Hitler's German Workers' Party (pre Nazi term) adopted a "Programme" with twenty-five points (the Nazi version of a constitution). In point twenty-four, their intent clearly demonstrates, from the very beginning, their stand in favor of a "positive" Christianity:
24. We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest.
Hitler's speeches and proclamations, even more clearly, reveal his faith and feelings toward a Christianized Germany. Nazism presents an embarrassment to Christianity and demonstrates the danger of faith. The following words from Hitler show his disdain for atheism, and pagan cults, and reveals the strength of his Christian feelings:
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized 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 for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922
[Note, "brood of vipers" appears in Matt. 3:7 & 12:34. John 2:15 depicts Jesus driving out the money changers (adders) from the temple. The word "adders" also appears in Psalms 140:3]
Just as the Jew could once incite the mob of Jerusalem against Christ, so today he must succeed in inciting folk who have been duped into madness to attack those who, God's truth! seek to deal with this people in utter honesty and sincerity.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 28 July 1922
In the Bible we find the text, 'That which is neither hot nor cold will I spew out of my mouth.' This utterance of the great Nazarene has kept its profound validity until the present day.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 10 April 1923
[The Bible quote comes Jesus speaking in Revelation 3:16]
In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God.... Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 13 April 1923
There are three words which many use without a thought which for us are no catch-phrases: Love, Faith, and Hope.... We are fanatical in our love for our people....
We have faith in the rights of our people, the rights which have existed time out of mind. We protest against the view that every other nation should have rights - and we have none. We must learn to make our own this blind faith in the rights of our people, in the necessity of devoting ourselves to the service of these rights; we must make our own the faith that gradually victory must be granted us if only we are fanatical enough. And from this love and from this faith there emerges for us the idea of hope. When others doubt and hesitate for the future of Germany - we have no doubts. We have both the hope and the faith that Germany will and must once more become great and mighty.
We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor - the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 01 May 1923
[Love, Faith, and Hope comes from I Corinthians 13:13 NIV]
People ask: is there someone fit to be our leader? Our task is not to search for that person. Either God will give him to us or he will not come. Our task is to shape the sword that he will need when he comes. Our task it to provide the leader with a nation which is ready for him when he comes! My fellow Germans, awaken! The new day is dawning!
-Adolf Hitler, 04 May 1923
It matters not whether these weapons of ours are humane: if they gain us our freedom, they are justified before our conscience and before our God.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 01 Aug. 1923
It will at any rate be my supreme task to see to it that in the newly awakened NSDAP, the adherents of both Confessions can live peacefully together side by side in order that they may take their stand in the common fight against the power which is the mortal foe of any true Christianity.
-Adolf Hitler, in an article headed "A New Beginning," 26 Feb. 1925
A few days ago I was in Eisenach and stood on top of the Wartburg, where a great German once translated the Bible.
-Adolf Hitler, in Schleiz, Thuringia, 18 Jan. 1927
[The great German Hitler speaks about, of course, describes Martin Luther]
We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We are determined, as leaders of the nation, to fulfill as a national government the task which has been given to us, swearing fidelity only to God, our conscience, and our Volk.... This the national government will regard its first and foremost duty to restore the unity of spirit and purpose of our Volk. It will preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will take Christianity, as the basis of our collective morality, and the family as the nucleus of our Volk and state, under its firm protection....May God Almighty take our work into his grace, give true form to our will, bless our insight, and endow us with the trust of our Volk.
-Adolf Hitler, on 1 Feb. 1933, addressing the German nation as Chancellor for the first time, Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Aug. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Except the Lord built the house they labour in vain.... The truth of that text was proved if one looks at the house of which the foundations were laid in 1918 and which since then has been in building.... The world will not help, the people must help itself. Its own strength is the source of life. That strength the Almighty has given us to use; that in it and through it we may wage the battle of our life.... The others in the past years have not had the blessing of the Almighty-- of Him Who in the last resort, whatever man may do, holds in His hands the final decision. Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward, let us never forget the duty which we have taken upon us.... We are all proud that through God's powerful aid we have become once more true Germans.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in March 1933
[Note, "Except the Lord built the house, they labour in vain" comes from Psalms 127:1 ]
The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.... The National Government regard the two Christian Confessions as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality. They will respect the agreements concluded between them and the federal States. Their rights are not to be infringed.... It will be the Government's care to maintain honest co-operation between Church and State; the struggle against materialistic views and for a real national community is just as much in the interest of the German nation as in that of the welfare of our Christian faith. The Government of the Reich, who regard Christianity as the unshakable foundation of the morals and moral code of the nation, attach the greatest value to friendly relations with the Holy See and are endeavouring to develop them.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the Reichstag on 23 March 1933
The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilent for fifteen hundred years, put them in ghettos, etc, because it recognized the Jews for what they were".... I recognize the representatives of this race as pestilent for the state and for the church and perhaps I am thereby doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.
-Adolf Hitler, 26 April 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We want honestly to earn the resurrection of our people through our industry, our perseverance, our will. We ask not of the Almighty 'Lord, make us free'!-- we want to be active, to work, to agree together as brothers, to strive in rivalry with one another to bring about the hour when we can come before Him and when we may ask of Him: 'Lord, Thou seest that we have transformed ourselves, the German people is not longer the people of dishonour, of shame, of war within itself, of faintheartedness and little faith: no, Lord, the German people has become strong again in spirit, strong in will, strong in endurance, strong to bear all sacrifices.' 'Lord, we will not let Thee go: bless now our fight for our freedom; the fight we wage for our German people and Fatherland.'
-Adolf Hitler, giving prayer in a speech on May Day 1933
This is for us a ground for satisfaction, since we desire that the fight in the religious camps should come to an end... all political action in the parties will be forbidden to priests for all time, happy because we know what is wanted by millions who long to see in the priest only the comforter of their souls and not the representative of their political convictions.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to the men of the SA. at Dormund, 9 July 1933 on the day after the signing of the Concordat.
National Socialism has always affirmed that it is determined to take the Christian Churches under the protection of the State.... The decisive factor which can justify the existence alike of Church and State is the maintenance of men's spiritual and bodily health, for it that health were destroyed it would mean the end of the State and also the end of the Church.... It is my sincere hope that thereby for Germany, too, through free agreement there has been produced a final clarification of spheres in the functions of the State and of one Church.
-Adolf Hitler, on a wireless on 22 July, the evening before the Evangelical Church Election
The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism [Nazism] is hostile to religion is a lie.
-Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1933, writing to the Nazi Party (quoted from John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope"
Among the congregations of the Protestant confessions there has arisen in the "German Christians' a movement that is filled with the determination to do justice to the great tasks of the day and has aimed at a union of the Protestant state churches and confessions. If this question is not really on the way towards a solution, in the judgement of history no false or stupid objections will be able to dispute the fact that this service was rendered by the volkisch movement at a time when, unfortunately, just as in the Roman Church, many pastors and superintendents without reason have opposed the national uprising in the most violent, indeed, often fanatical, way.
-Adolf Hitler, in a radio address on 22 July 1933 to the German people after a performance of Wagner's Christian allegory Parsifal in Bayreuth. [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
[This statement clearly refutes modern Christians who claim Hitler as favoring atheism.]
I believe that Providence would never have allowed us to see the victory of the Movement if it had the intention after all to destroy us at the end.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to old members of the Party at Munich on 8 Nov. 1933
The German Church and the People are practically the same body. Therefore there could be no issue between Church and State. The Church, as such, has nothing to do with political affairs. On the other hand, the State has nothing to do with the faith or inner organization of the Church. The election of November 12th would be an expression of church constituency, but not as a Church.
-Adolf Hitler, answering C. F. Macfarland about Church & State (in his book, The New Church and the New Germany)
While we destroyed the Centre Party, we have not only brought thousands of priests back into the Church, but to millions of respectable people we have restored their faith in their religion and in their priests. The union of the Evangelical Church in a single Church for the whole Reich, the Concordat with the Catholic Church, these are but milestones on the road which leads to the establishment of a useful relation and a useful co operation between the Reich and the two Confessions.
-Adolf Hitler, in his New Year Message on 1 Jan. 1934
Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag on 30 Jan. 1934
It would have been more to the point, more honest and more Christian, in past decades not to support those who intentionally destroyed healthy life than to rebel against those who have no other wish than to avoid disease. Moreover, a policy of laissez faire in this sphere is not only cruelty to the individual guiltless victims but also to the nation as a whole.... If the Churches were to declare themselves ready to take over the treatment and care of those suffering from hereditary diseases, we should be quite ready to refrain from sterilizing them.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech on 30 Jan. 1934
We have experienced a miracle, something unique, something the like of which there has hardly been in the history of the world. 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.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to the "Old Guard" of the Party at Munich on 19 March, 1934
The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavour to protect both the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from interference with their doctrines (Lehren ), and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of to-day.
-Adolf Hitler, on 26 June 1934, to Catholic bishops to assure them that he would take action against the new pagan propaganda
No, it is not we that have deserted Christianity, it is those who came before us who deserted Christianity. We have only carried through a clear division between politics which have to do with terrestrial things, and religion, which must concern itself with the celestial sphere. There has been no interference with the doctrine (Lehre ) of the Confessions or with their religious freedom (Bekenntnisfreiheit ), nor will there be any such interference. On the contrary the State protects religion, though always on the one condition that religion will not be used as a cover for political ends....
National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity.... For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life... These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles! And I believe that if we should fail to follow these principles then we should to be able to point to our successes, for the result of our political battle is surely not unblest by God.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934
So far as the Evangelical Confessions are concerned we are determined to put an end to existing divisions, which are concerned only with the forms of organization, and to create a single Evangelical Church for the whole Reich....
And we know that were the great German reformer [Martin Luther] with us to-day he would rejoice to be freed from the necessity of his own time and, like Ulrich von Hutten, his last prayer would be not for the Churches of the separate States: it would be of Germany that he would think and of the Evangelical Church of Germany.
-Adolf Hitler, in his Proclamation at the Parteitag at Nuremberg on 5 Sept. 1934
[Note, Martin Luther provided Germany with the seeds of violent antisemitism. Learn about Martin Luther's dirty little book.
So we have come together on this day to prove symbolically that we are more than a collection of individuals striving one against another, that none of us is too proud, none of us too high, none is too rich, and none too poor, to stand together before the face of the Lord and of the world in this indissoluble, sworn community. And this united nation, we have need of it.
-Adolf Hitler, in Berlin, 01 May 1935
What we are we have become not against, but with, the will of Providence. And so long as we are true and honourable and of good courage in fight, so long as we believe in our great work and do not capitulate, we shall continue to enjoy in the future the blessing of Providence.
-Adolf Hitler, at Rosenheim in Bavaria, 11 Aug. 1935
Only so you can appeal to your God and pray Him to support and bless your courage, your work, your perseverance, your strength, your resolution, and with all these your claim on life.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Frankfurt on 16 March 1936
In this world him who does not abandon himself the Almighty will not desert. Him who helps himself will the Almighty always also help; He will show him the way by which he can gain his rights, his freedom, and therefore his future.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Hamburg on 20 March 1936
Providence has caused me to be Catholic, and I know therefore how to handle this Church.
-Adolf Hitler, reportedly to have said in Berlin in 1936 on the enmity of the Catholic Church to National Socialism
I believe in Providence and I believe Providence to be just. Therefore I believe that Providence always rewards the strong, the industrious, and the upright.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech to National Socialist women at the Nuremberg Parteitag of 1936 [11 Sept. 1936]
I say that they can be solved; there is no problem that cannot be, but faith is necessary. Think of the faith I had to have eighteen years ago, a single man on a lonely path. Yet I have come to leadership of the German people....
Life is hard for many, but it is hardest if you are unhappy and have no faith. Have faith.
Nothing can make me change my own belief.
-Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg, 12 Sept. 1936
This is probably the first time and this is the first country in which people are being taught to realize that, of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it....
The greatest revolution which National Socialism has brought about is that it has rent asunder the veil which hid from us the knowledge that all human failures and mistakes are due to the conditions of the time and therefore can be remedied, but that there is one error which cannot be remedied once men have made it, namely the failure to recognize the importance of conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and character which are God's gift and God's handiwork. It is not for men to discuss the question of why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize the fact that it punishes those who disregard its work of creation....
As I look back on the great work that has been done during the past four years you will understand quite well that my first feeling is simply one of thankfulness to our Almighty God for having allowed me to bring this work to success. He has blessed our labors and has enabled our people to come through all the obstacles which encompassed them on their way....
Today I must humbly thank Providence, whose grace has enabled me, who was once an unknown soldier in the War, to bring to a successful issue the struggle for the restoration of our honor and rights as a nation.
-Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, 30 Jan. 1937
So long as they concern themselves with their religious problems the State does not concern itself with them. But so soon as they attempt by any means whatsoever-- by letters, Encyclica, or otherwise-- to arrogate to themselves rights which belong to the State alone we shall force them back into their proper spiritual, pastoral activity.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered in Berlin on the May Day festival, 1937
We National Socialists, too, have deep in our hearts our own faith. We cannot do otherwise. No man can mould the history of peoples or of the world unless he has upon his will and his capacities the blessing of Providence.
-Adolf Hitler, to Nazi leaders on 2 June 1937, as reported by a correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph"
I will never allow anyone to divide this people once more into religious camps, each fighting the other....
You, my Brown Guard, will regard it as a matter of course that this German people should go only by the way which Providence ordained for it when it gave to Germans the common language. So we go forward with the profoundest faith in God into the future. Would that which we have achieved have been possible if Providence had not helped us?
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Regensburg on 6 June 1937
If we pursue this way, if we are decent, industrious, and honest, if we so loyally and truly fulfill our duty, then it is my conviction that in the future as in the past the Lord God will always help us. In the long run He never leaves decent folk in the lurch. Often He may test them, He may send trials upon them, but in the long run He always lets His sun shine upon them once more and at the end He gives them His blessing.
-Adolf Hitler, at the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival on the Buckeburg held on 3 Oct. 1937
This Winter Help Work is also in the deepest sense a Christian work. When I see, as I so often do, poorly clad girls collecting with such infinite patience in order to care for those who are suffering from the cold while they themselves are shivering with cold, then I have the feeling that they are all apostles of a Christianity-- and in truth of a Christianity which can say with greater right than any other: This is the Christianity of an honest confession, for behind it stand not words but deeds.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking of the Winter Help Campaign on 5 Oct. 1937
Remain strong in your faith, as you were in former years. In this faith, in its close-knit unity our people to-day goes straight forward on its way and no power on earth will avail to stop it.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Coburg on 15 Oct. 1937
In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgement and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger.... I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty.... If Providence had not guided us I could often never have found these dizzy paths.... Thus it is that we National Socialists, too, have in the depths of our hearts our faith. We cannot do otherwise: no man can fashion world-history or the history of peoples unless upon his purpose and his powers there rests the blessings of this Providence.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech at Wurzburg on 27 June 1937
National Socialism is not a cult-movement-- a movement for worship; it is exclusively a 'volkic' political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship.... We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else-- in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will-- not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.... Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.
-Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept. 1938.
[Christians have always accused Hitler of believing in pagan cult mythology. Here he clearly expresses his stand against cults and reinforces his Christian views.]
Thus one of Europe's most serious crises will be ended, and all of us, not only in Germany but those far beyond our frontiers, will then in this year for the first time really rejoice at the Christmas festival. It should for us all be a true Festival of Peace....
-Adolf Hitler, in Berlin, 05 Oct. 1938
[This statement disputes some who claim that Hitler outlawed Christmas.]
God helps only those who are prepared and determined to help themselves.
-Adolf Hitler, 06 Nov. 1938, Weimar
The National Socialist Movement has wrought this miracle. If Almighty God granted success to this work, then the Party was His instrument.
-Adolf Hitler, in his proclamation to the German People on 01 Jan. 1939
We are indeed perhaps better able than other generations to realize the full meaning of those pious words "What a change by the grace of God".
Amongst the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so called democracies is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion. In answer to that charge I should like to make before the German people the following solemn declaration:
1. No one in Germany has in the past been persecuted because of his religious views (Einstellung), nor will anyone in the future be so persecuted.... The Churches are the greatest landed proprietors after the State... Further, the Church in the National Socialist State is in many ways favoured in regard to taxation, and for gifts, legacies, &c., it enjoys immunity from taxation.
It is therefore, to put mildly-- effrontery when especially foreign politicians make bold to speak of hostility to religion in the Third Reich.... I would allow myself only one question: what contributions during the same period have France, England, or the United States made through the State from the public funds?
3. The National Socialist State has not closed a church, nor has it prevented the holding of a religious service, nor has it ever exercised any influence upon the form of a religious service. It has not exercised any pressure upon the doctrine nor on the profession of faith of any of the Confessions. In the National Socialist State anyone is free to seek his blessedness after his own fashion.... There are ten thousands and ten thousands of priests of all the Christian Confessions who perform their ecclesiastical duties just as well as or probably better than the political agitators without ever coming into conflict with the laws of the State.... This State has only once intervened in the internal regulation of the Churches, that is when I myself in 1933 endeavoured to unite the weak and divided Protestant Churches of the different States into one great and powerful Evangelical Church of the Reich. That attempt failed through the opposition of the bishops of some States; it was therefore abandoned. For it is in the last resort not our task to defend or even to strengthen the Evangelical Church through violence against its own representatives.... But on one point it is well that there should be no uncertainty: the German priest as servant of God we shall protect, the priest as political enemy of the German State we shall destroy.
-Adolf Hitler, a speech in the Reichstag on 30 Jan. 1939
[That last sentence sums up Hitler's stand on the priesthood. Rather than standing for atheism, as today's Christians would like, Hitler attacked the priesthood only if they stood in Hitler's political path.]
If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work.
-Adolf Hitler, in his speech to the "Old Guard" at Munich on 24 Feb. 1939
Help yourself, then God will also help you!
The German people was created by Providence, not in order to obey a law which suits Englishmen or Frenchmen, but to stand up for its vital right. That is what we are there for!
-Adolf Hitler, at Wilhemshaven, 01 April 1939
I can give vent to my inmost feelings only in the form of humble thanks to Providence which called upon me and vouchsafed it to me, once an unknown soldier of the Great War, to rise to be the Leader of my people, so dear to me.
Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again. Providence granted that I might fulfill my life's task-to raise my German people out of the depths of defeat and to liberate it from the bonds of the most outrageous dictate of all times....
I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery.
-Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, 28 April 1939
As Fuehrer of the German people and Chancellor of the Reich, I can thank God at this moment that he has so wonderfully blessed us in our hard struggle for what is our right, and beg Him that we and all other nations may find the right way, so that not only the German people but all Europe may once more be granted the blessing of peace.
-Adolf Hitler, before the Reichstag, 06 Oct. 1939
[I] never lost my belief, in the midst of setbacks which were not spared me during my period of struggle. Providence has had the last word and brought me success.
-Adolf Hitler, speech of 23 Nov. 1939
It would be easier for the Devil to go to church and cross himself with holy water than for these people to comprehend the ideas which are accepted facts to us today.
-Adolf Hitler, 10 Dec. 1940, in Berlin
The conception of the new Movement, whose fundamentals can be expressed in a single sentence: "The Lord helps those who help themselves," opposed this. That is not only a very pious phrase, but a very just one. For one cannot assume that God exists to help people who are too cowardly and too lazy to help themselves and think that God exists only to make up for the weakness of mankind. He does not exist for that purpose. He has always, at all times, blessed only those who were prepared to fight their own battles....
Providence has not led us along these amazing paths in vain. On the day that the party was founded I recalled that our nation once gained immense victories. Then it became ungrateful, disunited, sinned against itself. Thereupon it was punished by Providence. We deserved our defeat. If a nation forgets itself as completely as the German nation did at that time, if it thinks that it can shake off all honor and all good faith, Providence can do nothing but teach it a hard and bitter lesson. But even at that time we were convinced that once our nation found itself again, once it again became industrious and honorable, once each individual German stood up for his nation first and not for himself, once he placed the interests of the community above his own personal interests, once the whole nation again pursued a great ideal, once it was prepared to stake everything for this ideal, the hour would come when the Lord would declare our trials at an end.
If fate should once more call us to the battlefield, the blessing of Providence will be with those who have merited it by years of hard work. When I compare myself and my opponents in other countries in the light of history, I do not fear the verdict on our respective mentalities. Who are these egoists? Each one of them merely defends the interests of his class. Behind them all stands either the Jew or their own moneybags. They are all nothing but money-grubbers, living on the profits of this war. No blessing can come of that. I oppose these people merely as the 0 champion of my country. I am convinced that our struggle will in the future be blessed by Providence, as it has been blessed up to now.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 24 Feb. 1941
But he who dares to use the word "God" for such devilish activity blasphemes against Providence and, according to our belief, he cannot end except in destruction.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking about Jews and international "warmongers," on 04 May 1941, before the Reichstag
I did not want this struggle. Since January, 1933, when Providence entrusted me with the leadership of the German Reich, I had an aim before my eyes which was essentially incorporated in the program of our National Socialist party. I have never been disloyal to this aim and have never abandoned my program....
Only when the entire German people become a single community of sacrifice can we expect and hope that Almighty God will help us. The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself.
The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.
-Adolf Hitler, in a broadcast from Berlin, 03 Oct.1941
If the Providence has so willed that the German people cannot be spared this fight, then I can only be grateful that it entrusted me with the leadership in this historic struggle which, for the next 500 or 1,000 years, will be described as decisive, not only for the history of Germany, but for the whole of Europe and indeed the whole world. The German people and their soldiers are working and fighting today, not only for the present, but for the coming, nay the most distant, generations. A historical revision on a unique scale has been imposed on us by the Creator....
The next incursion against this homestead of European culture was carried out from the distant East. A terrible stream of barbarous, uncultured hordes sallied forth from the interior of Asia deep into the hearts of the European Continent, burning, looting, murdering-a true scourge of the Lord....
From the time when the Movement I consisted of seven men, until we took over power in January 1933, the path was so miraculous that only Providence itself with its blessing could have made this possible....
Our enemies must not deceive themselves-in the 2,000 years of German history known to us, our people have never been more united than today. The Lord of the Universe has treated us so well in the past years that we bow in gratitude to a providence which has allowed us to be members of such a great nation. We thank Him that we also can be entered with honor into the ever-lasting book of German history!
-Adolf Hitler, on 11 Dec.1941 before the Reichstag
My fame, if Providence preserves my life, will consist in ... works of peace, which I still intend to create. But I think that if Providence has already disposed that I can do what must be done according to the inscrutable will of the Providence, then I can at least just ask Providence to entrust to me the burden of this war, to load it on me. I will beat it! I will shrink from no responsibility; in every hour which ... I will take this burden upon me. I will bear every responsibility, just as I have always borne them."....
Thus the home-front need not be warned, and the prayer of this priest of the devil, the wish that Europe may be punished with Bolshevism, will not be fulfilled, but rather that the prayer may be fulfilled: "Lord God, give us the strength that we may retain our liberty for our children and our children's children, not only for ourselves but also for the other peoples of Europe, for this is a war which we all wage, this time, not for our German people alone, it is a war for all of Europe and with it, in the long run, for all of mankind."
-Adolf Hitler, 30 Jan. 1942, in Berlin (note the prayer at the end of the speech.)
May therefore God give us the strength to continue to do our duty and with this prayer we bow in homage before our dead heroes, before those whom they have left behind in bereavement, and before all the other victims of this war.
-Adolf Hitler, in prayer at the end of a radio address on 15 March 1942.
I, for my part, acknowledge another precept which says that man must deal the final blow to those whose downfall is destined by God.
-Adolf Hitler, in an address to the Reichstag, 06 April 1942
In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that "General Winter," that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people....
You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.
-Adolf Hitler, 30 Sept. 1942, in Berlin
And today I stand by this same view. Fate, or Providence, will give the victory to those who most deserve it....
And when now, after 10 years, I again survey this period, I can say that upon no people has Providence ever bestowed more successes than upon us. The miracles we have achieved in the last three years in the face of a whole world of enemies are unique in history, especially the crises we very naturally often had in these years.
-Adolf Hitler, in Munich, 08 Nov. 1942
The bomb which was planted by Colonel von Stauffenberg exploded two meters to my right. It seriously injured a number of my colleagues who are very dear to me; one has died. I myself am completely unhurt apart from a few minor skin abrasions, bruises and burns. I interpret this as confirmation that Providence wishes me to continue my life's mission as I have in the past.
Few people can begin to imagine the fate which would have overtaken Germany had the assassination attempt succeeded. I myself thank Providence and my Creator not for preserving me - my life consists only of worry and work for my People - I thank him only for allowing me to continue to bear this burden of worry, and to carry on my work to the best of my ability.
Once again I take this opportunity, my old comrades in arms, to greet you, joyful that I have once again been spared a fate which, while it held no terror for me personally, would have had terrible consequences for the German People. I interpret this as a sign from Providence that I must continue my work, and therefore I shall continue it.
-Adolf Hitler, speaking about the attempt to kill him, in a radio broadcast on 20 July 1944
God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work....
Only He can relieve me of this duty Who called me to it. It was in the hand of Providence to snuff me out by the bomb that exploded only one and a half meters from me on July 20, and thus to terminate my life's work. That the Almighty protected me on that day I consider a renewed affirmation of the task entrusted to me....
Therefore, it is all the more necessary on this twelfth anniversary of the rise to power to strengthen the heart more than ever before and to steel ourselves in the holy determination to wield the sword, no-matter where and under what circumstances, until final victory crowns our efforts....
In the years to come I shall continue on this road, uncompromisingly safeguarding my people's interests, oblivious to all misery and danger, and filled with the holy conviction that God the Almighty will not abandon him who, during all his life, had no desire but to save his people from a fate it had never deserved, neither by virtue of its number nor by way of its importance....
In vowing ourselves to one another, we are entitled to stand before the Almighty and ask Him for His grace and His blessing. No people can do more than that everybody who can fight, fights, and that everybody who can work, works, and that they all sacrifice in common, filled with but one thought: to safeguard freedom and national honor and thus the future of life.
-Adolf Hitler, in a radio address, 30 Jan. 1945
Providence shows no mercy to weak nations, but recognizes the right of existence-only of sound and strong nations....
This Jewish bolshevist annihilation of nations and its western European and American procurers can be met only in one way: by using every ounce of strength with the extreme fanaticism and stubborn steadfastness that merciful God gives to men in hard times for the defense of their own lives....
We have suffered so much that it only steels us to fanatical resolve to hate Our enemies a thousand times more and to regard them for what they are destroyers of an eternal culture and annihilators of humanity. Out of this bate a holy will is born to oppose these destroyers of our existence with all the strength that God has given us and to crush them in the end. During its 2,000-year history our people has survived so many terrible times that we have no doubt that we will also master our present plight.
-Adolf Hitler, in a recorded radio address, 24 Feb. 1945
SOURCES:
Baynes, Norman H. Ed. "The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939," Vol. 1 of 2, Oxford University Press, 1942
Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," Viking, 1999
Steigmann-Gall, Richard "The Holy Reich: Nazi conception of Christianity, 1919-1945," Cambridge University Press, 2003
Online:
Adolf Hitler Speeches from www.adolfhitler.ws/
Quotes from Hitler's Henchmen and Nazi Sympathizers
compiled by Jim Walker
Originated: 24 Oct. 1999
Additions: 29 Jan. 2006
Back to Hitler index
The following provides a few quotes from Hitler's henchmen and Nazi sympathizers and how Christianity molded and influenced their beliefs. Most of Hitler's henchmen, along with the vast majority of German citizens, were brought up Christian, and thought themselves as such. Remember that Germany gave birth to Protestantism and held a large but minority of Catholics. The fact that so many Nazis practiced the Christian faith should not surprise anyone, especially considering that Germany, at the time before and during Hitler's rise, represented the most Christianized country in the word. And except for a very few who rejected orthodox Christianity (like Bormann and Rosenberg), the majority used their influence (whether through belief or political action) to support both Catholicism and Protestantism views for the 'positive" Christianity of the new Nazi party platform.
Nor can one attempt to use the tired and false ploy of trying to put the Nazi expression of Christianity into a 'political only' framework to appeal to the masses. These Nazis fully believed in their religion no less than do conservative Christian politicians of the United States. After solid research into the minds of the Nazis, from the book, The Holy Reich, Richard Steigmann-Gall put it well:
Indeed, none of the Nazis who proclaimed a positive attitude toward Christianity in public revealed themselves as anti-Christian in private. Therefore the insistence that the Nazis practiced "sheer opportunism" or placed a "tactical restraint" on their supposed hatred for Christianity "which had been imposed during the years of struggle to achieve power" cannot be sustained.
Each section below lists the person alphabetically by last name. Each quote includes the citation for the convenience of copying and pasting.
Quotes from Nazi Henchmen
Helmut Bruckner
Bruckner served as the Gauletier of Silesia. According to Richard Steigmann-Gall's research, "Bruckner sent Gregor Strasser an internal "Special Circular" he had issued to his Gau [region] officials on the party's official church-political stance. Its contents became common knowledge once a copy came into the hands of the Kirchenrat and the papers Tagliche Rundschau and Christliche Welt. As a confidential document, however, it provides a glimpse into the Nazi's feelings about the institution of the Protestant Church" [Steigmann-Gall]:
We struggle for a union of the small Protestant state churches into a strong Protestant Reich Church.... We are acting not as a party, but as Protestant Christians who only follow a call to faith from God, which we here in our Volk movement. As true members of our church we have a legitimate claim to have appropriate consideration given to the greatness and inner strength of National Socialism in church life and the church administration.
-Helmut Brucker, "Richtlinien fur Kirchenfragen," Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (10 Nov. 1932: Breslau), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Walter Buch
Buch served as Head of the Nazi Party court and Martin Bormann's father-in-law. Otto Wagener, Hitler's confidant in the Kampfzeit, named Buch as one of the only three men who "were prepared and in a position to tell Hitler their own views when they contradicted his." According to Richard Steigmann's research, Buch, a Lutheran, held his faith in high esteem and "maintained he was guided in his social thought by Martin Luther."
When Point 24 of our program says the party stands for a positive Christianity, here above all is the cornerstone of our thinking. Christ preached struggle as did no other. His life was struggle for his beliefs, for which he went to his death. From everyone he demanded a decision between yes and no.
-Walter Buch "Geist und Kampf" (speech): Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (probably given between 1930 and 1932), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Public need before private greed.... So important and meaningful is this phrase that Jesus Christ placed it in the center of his religious teaching. However, since Christ was not a politician, since his Reich was not of this world, he put the calling into other words. He taught: love your neighbors as yourself! National Socialism is therefore nothing new, nothing that a person after much consideration would not come upon as the solution to the economic plight of the Germans.
-Walter Buch Der Aufmasch, Blatter der deutschen Jugend 2 (January 1931), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Note, Point 24 refers to a section of the NSDAP party platform (the Nazi Constitution, so to speak) where it proclaims "positive Christianity" as one of its tenants.
Never more than in the last ten years has the truth behind Luther's words been more evident: "The family is the source of everyone's blessings and misforture."
-Walter Buch In a speech from 1932, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The idea of eternal life, of which the Jew knows nothing, is just as characteristic of our Germanic forefathers as it was of Christ.
-Walter Buch Der Aufmarsch, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
When Luther turned his attention to the Jews, after he completed his translation of the Bible, he left behind "on the Jews and their Lies" for posterity.
-Walter Buch [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.... From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds.
-Walter Buch "Geist und Kampf" (speech), Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Luther's eloquent words,"the intellect is the Devil's whore," confirm my belief that the human spirit of the greatest magnitude is too small to alter the laws of life. And the highest law of life is struggle.... Nothing comes from "yes, but [Zwar-Aber].
-Walter Buch written to a friend in 1929, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Rudolf Buttmann
An early member of the Nazi Party, Buttmann became a cacus leader of the Nazi Party in the Bavarian Landtag (whose other members included Schemm and Streicher), and later head of the Cultural Division of the Reich Interior Ministry. [Steigmann-Gall]
One has opportunity enough to see how our party governs in Thuringia, where party members Dr. Frick has reintroduced Christian morning prayer in school.... Not through us is religion in danger, but rather through the conditions we know of in Russia, and which they now boast of in Berlin. First we shall sweep clean the recesses of filth of the city - the cinemas and theaters - with an iron broom.
-Rudolf Buttmann,Volkischer Beobachter, 13 Dec. 1930, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Our worldview is not directed against Cathoicism or Protestantism, not against Christianity, but rather based on Christianity and against cultural bolshevism, against the false liberalism of the Enlightenment, and against materialism.
-Rudolf Buttmann,Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Jan. 1931, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Dietrich Eckart
Eckart served as one of the early key members of the National-Socialist German Workers Party and an early friend of Hitler. He also invented the term "Drittes Reich" ("Third Reich"). Eckart also coined the phrase, "Jewish materialist spirit within us and without us," used in Point 24 of the Nazi Party platform, an expression that implied a religious element in the Nazi typology. Hitler felt so indebted to Eckart he ended Mein Kampf with a tribute to him.
Christ stands never otherwise than erect, never otherwise than upright... eyes flashing in the midst of the creeping Jewish rabble... and the words fall like lashes of the whip: 'Your father is the devil' (John 8:44)
-Dietrich Eckart Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zweigesprache zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich, 1924) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
This war was a religious war, finally one sees that clearly. A war between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, Christ and Antichrist.
-Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Wonders never cease; from the deluge is born a new world, while the Pharisees whine about their miserable pennies! The Liberation of humanity from the curse of gold stands before us! But for that our colllapse, but for that our Golhotha!
-Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
[The] Jewish conception of God is of no interest to us Germans! We seek God nowhere but in ourselves. For us the soul is divine, of which the Jew, on the other hand, knows nothing. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Luke 17:21), thus God also, who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven. We feel our soul is immortal, eternal from the beginning, and therefore we refuse to be told that we are created from nothingness.
-Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919) [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The New Testament broke away from the Old /as you once released yourself from the world/ And as you are freed from your past delustions/ so did Jesus Christ reject his Jewishness.
-Dietrich Eckart Quoted in Rosenberg, Eckart [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Hans Frank
Frank acted as lawyer and senior official for the Nazi party and legal advisor for Hitler. He also served a tenure as Governor-General of occupied Poland for which he was convicted during the Nuremberg trials for his role in perpetrating the Jewish holocaust and found guilty of complicity in the murder of millions of Poles and Polish Jews. A former Protestant (his father was a Protestant and his mother a Catholic), he converted to Roman Catholicism after his arrest where he felt relieved at the prospect of atoning for his evil deeds. [The belief that one can be saved for any atrocious act demonstrates the moral flaw of Christian doctrine.]
Hitler is lonely, So is God. Hitler is like God.
-Reichminister Hans Frank (FL Schuman, "Hitler and the Nazi Dictatorship," London 1936
We are under the great obligation of recognizing as a holy work of our Volk's spirit the laws signed by Adolf Hitler's name. Hitler has received his authority from God. Therefore he is champion, sent by God, of German Right in the world.
-Hans Frank, Frankfurt-am-Main, 30 October 1935 (Aurel Kolnai, The War Against the West)
I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.
-Hans Frank, in his last statement before execution (Hans Frank from Wikipedia online encyclopedia)
Wilhelm Frick
Frick served as the NSDAP caucus leader in the Reichstag and one of only three Nazis in the original Hitler Cabinet. He was responsible for drafting many of the laws that set up the Nazi regime. Hitler appointed him as Reich Interior Minister, making him the most important "state Nazi" immediately after the Seizure of Power (Machtergreifung). Frick, a member of the Protestant Church, had jurisdiction over the affairs of the Protestant Church until the creation of the Reich Church Ministry in 1935. [Steigmann-Gall]
The party stands for positive Christianity. The National Socialist state is absolutely ready to work with the Christian churches, but the solidarity of the churches to the Volk must be a matter of course; that means that the churches must feel bound to the Volk and may never come into opposition to the National Socialist leadership of the state.
-Wilhelm Frick, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 June 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Joseph Goebbels
Goebbles served as Hitler's Propaganda Minister (Propagandaministerium). The pious Catholic parents of Joseph Goebbels raised him and his two brothers in that faith. He spoke of Hitler as "either Christ or St. John." "Hitler, I love you!" he wrote in his diary.
I converse with Christ. I believed I had overcome him, but I have only overcome his idoltrous priests and false servants. Christ is harsh and relentless.
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
I take the Bible, and all evening long I read the simplest and greatest sermon that has ever been given to mankind: The Sermon on the Mount! 'Blessed are they who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'!
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Christ is the genius of love, as such the most diametrical opposite of Judaism, which is the incarnation of hate. The Jew is a non-race among the races of the earth.... Christ is the first great enemy of the Jews.... that is why Judaism had to get rid of him. For he was shaking the very foundations of its future international power. The Jew is the lie personified. When he crucified Christ, he crucified everlasting truth for the first time in history.
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The idea of sacrifice first gained visible shape in Christ. Sacrifice is intrinsic to socialism.... The Jew, however, does not understand this at all. His socialism consists of sacrificing others for himself. This is what Marxism is like in practice.... The struggle we are now waging today until victory or the bitter end, is in its deepest sense, a struggle between Christ and Marx. Christ: the principle of love. Marx: the principle of hate.
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Christ cannot have been a Jew. I do not need to prove this with science or scholarship. It is so!
-Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksl in Tagebuchblattern (Munich, 1929), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
A Jew is for me an object of disgust. I feel like vomiting when I see one. Christ could not possibly have been a Jew. It is not necessary to prove that scientifically-- it is a fact.
-Joseph Goebbels, in his attempt to win the eternal gratitude of Hitler, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
When today a clique accuses us of having anti-Christian opinions, I believe that the first Christian, Christ himself, would discover more of his teaching in our actions than in this theological hair-splitting.
-Joseph Goebbels, Evangelisches Zentralarchiv in Berlin, 2 March 1934: Hamburg, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
When we call for the unification of the Protestant Church, we do so because we do not see how, in a time when the whole Reich is unifying itself, twenty-eight Landeskirchen can persist.... In the interpretation of the Gospel one may hold the command of God higher than human commands. In the interpretation of political realities, we consider ourselves to be God's instrument.
-Joseph Goebbels, Hannover Kurier, 29 March 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
A verbal confession cannot suffice; we require an active confession. Christianity to us is no empty form, but rather a continual action.
-Joseph Goebbels, in a speech from 1935, Volkischer Beobachter, 5 Aug. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We have a feeling that Germany has been transformed into a great house of God, including all classes, professions and creeds, where the Führer as our mediator stood before the throne of the Almighty.
-Joseph Goebbels, in a broadcast, 19 April 1936
Hermann Göring
An early member of the Nazi party and one of its principle leaders, Goring founded the Gestapo and served as the Reichsluftfahrtminister of the Luftwaffe.
We have told the churches that we stand for positive Christianity. Through the zeal of our faith, the strength of our faith, we have once again shown what faith means, we have once again taken the Volk, which believed in nothing, back to faith.
-Hermann Göring in a 1935 speech, Positives Christentum, 3 Nov. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
In the same speech, Göring attacked paganists:
Naturally there are always people at work who represent a type of provocateur, who have come to us because they imagine National Socialism to be something other than it is, who have all kinds of fantastic and confused plans, who misunderstand National Socialist racial thought and overstate their declaration to blood and soil [Blut und Boden], and who in their romantic dreams are surrounded by Wotan and Thor and the like. Such exaggerations can harm our movement, since they make the movement look ridiculous, and ridiculousness [Lacherlichkeit] is always something most harmful. When I hear that a "Germanic wedding' is to be celebrated, I have to ask: my God, what do you understand to be a Germanic wedding? What do you understand to be National Socialism?
-Hermann Göring in a 1935 speech, Positives Christentum, 3 Nov. 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
That same year, Göring married his second wife, Emmy, in a Lutheran service officiated by Reich Bishop Müller with Hitler as "Best Man." Later, he would also give his daughter Edda a Lutheran baptism. [Steigmann-Gall] To see a photo of the wedding, click here.
God gave the savior to the German people. We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he [Hitler] was sent to us by God to save Germany.
-Hermann Göring (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
How shall I give expression, O my Führer, to what is in our hearts? How shall I find words to express your deeds? Has there ever been a mortal as beloved as you, my Führer? Was there ever belief as strong as the belief in your mission. You were sent us by God for Germany!
-Hermann Göring (Reden und Aufsatze, Munich, 1938)
Although he himself [Hitler] was a Catholic, he wished the Protestant Church to have a stronger position in Germany, since Germany was two-thirds Protestant.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
The Führer wanted to achieve the unification of the Protestant Evangelical Churches by appointing a Reich Bishop, so that there would be a high Protestant church dignitary as well as a high Catholic church dignitary.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
With the Catholic Church the Führer ordered a concordat to be concluded by Herr Von Papen. Shortly before that agreement was concluded by Herr Von Papen I visited the Pope myself. I had numerous connections with the higher Catholic clergy because of my Catholic mother, and thus-- I am myself a Protestant-- I had a view of both camps.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
I myself am not what you might call a churchgoer, but I have gone now and then, and have always considered I belonged to the Church and have always had those functions over which the Church presides-- marriage, christening, burial, et cetera-- carried out in my house by the Church.
-Hermann Göring (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol.9)
Rudolf Hess
Hess edited Hitler's book Mein Kampf and served as Hitler's deputy. He emerged as a prominent figure in Nazi Germany.
You take an oath to a man whom you know follows the laws of providence, which he obeys independently of the influence of earthly powers, who leads the German people rightly, and who will guide Germany's fate. Through your oath you bind yourselves to a man who--that is our faith--was sent to us by higher powers. Do not seek Adolf Hitler with your mind. You will find him through he strength of your hearts!
-Rudolf Hess, in his speech, "The Oath to Adolf Hitler," 1934
We believe that the Führer is fulfilling a divine mission to German destiny! This belief is beyond challenge.
-Rudolf Hess, speech, 20 June 1934 (Reden, Munich. 1938, p. 25)
With all our powers we will endeavour to be worthy of the Führer thou, O Lord, has sent us!
-Rudolf Hess, address to political leaders, Munich , 21 April 1938 (Rolf Tell, Sound and Führer)
No matter what human beings do I shall some day stand before the judgement seat of the Eternal. I shall answer to Him, and I know he will judge me innocent.
-Rudolf Hess, in a statement to the Nuremberg Tribunal, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Hans Hinkel
Hinkel gained influential positions in Goebbels' Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer) and Propaganda Ministry, where he became head of both the Jewish section and the film department. [Richard Steigmann-Gall]
Through his acts and his spiritual attitude he began the fight which we still wage today; with Luther the revolution of German blood and feeling against alien elements of the Volk was begun.
-Hans Hinkel, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
To continue and complete his Protestantism, nationalism must make the picture of Luther, of a German fighter, live as an example above the barriers of confession for all German blood comrades.
-Hans Hinkel, Der Tag, 17 Feb. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Heinrich Himmler
One of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, Himmler served as the commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS) and controlled the Gestapo. He grew up as a devout Catholic and attended mass regularly. Eventually he moved away from Catholicism toward Aryan occultist beliefs, but he, nevertheless, never lost his belief in God and he thought of Jesus as an Aryan.
I swear before God this holy oath, that I shall give absolute confidence to the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people.
-Heinrich Himmler, reminding his hearers about the oath taken by all SS men as well as by the military forces (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
In ideological training I forbid every attack against Christ as a person, since such attacks or insults that Christ was a Jew are unworthy of us and certainly untrue historically.
-Heinrich Himmler, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, 28 June 1937: Berlin, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
You Einsatztruppen (task forces) are called upon to fulfill a repulsive duty. But you are soldiers who have to carry out every order unconditionally. You have a responsibility before God and Hitler for everything that is happening. I myself hate this bloody business and I have been moved to the depths of my soul. But I am obeying the highest law by doing my duty. Man must defend himself against bedbugs and rats-- against vermin.
-Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to the SS guards, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Rudolf Hoess
Hoess served as a senior Nazi official, member of the SS and Waffen-SS (with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer) and commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he held responsibility for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people.
In his Nuremberg cell, Rudolf Hoess told psychologist G.M. Gilbert how he got brought up in a rigorous Catholic tradition:
My father was really a bigot. He was very strict and fanatical. I learned that my father took a religious oath at the time of the birth of my younger sister, dedicating me to God and the priesthood, and after that leading a Joseph married life [celibacy]. He directed my entire youthful education toward the goal of making me a priest. I had to pray and go to church endlessly, do penance over the slightest misdeed-- praying as punishment for any little unkindness to my sister, or something like that.
-Rudolf Hoess (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
When asked if his father ever beat him, Hoess replied that he was only punished by prayer:
The thing that made me so stubborn and probably made me later on cut off from people was his way of making me feel that I had wronged him personally, and that, since I was spiritually a minor, he was responsible to God for my sins.
-Rudolf Hoess (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Hanns Kerrl
Born into a Protestant family in Fallersleben, Kerrl joined the NSDAP in 1923. He served as Prussian Justice Minister and later, Reich Church Minister. He also established a central "Reich Church Committee." [Steigmann-Gall] Kerrl tried to mediate between the divisions amongst the churches and stressed the religious aspect of the Nazi "positive" Christianity ideology.
The Führer wants to protect positive Christianity; this must be maintained. It is necessary, therefore, to seize upon the power of the Christian confessions which affirm the state and National Socialism, and to maintain church life.
-Hanns Kerrl, Dokumente zur Kirchenpolitik, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Kerrl strongly opposed Alfred Rosenberg's paganist and anticlerical attempts. At the end of 1939, Rosenberg sought to elevate his position from a purely party office to a more imposing state office so that he could have more control over religious issues. [Steigmann-Gall] In a meeting in 1940 to resolve the issue of Rosenberg's appointment, Kerrl noted that:
The Third Reich needs Christianity and the churches because it has nothing to replace the Christian religion and Christian morality.... His appointment will result in marked unrest among the Volk, which is precisely what we must avoid during the war under all circumstances.
Many Nazis opposed Rosenberg's post, including Hitler. In fact Hitler cited Kerrl's argument as the most compelling for canceling Rosenberg's new post. [Steigmann-Gall]
Erich Koch
Koch served as Gauleiter of East Prussia and later Reich Commissioner for Ukraine. He also functioned as President of the East Prussian Protestant Church Synod when the Third Reich began. He founded his own regional variation of the German Chrisitans (Deutsche Christen) party.
We commit ourselves, and we demand this commitment not only from the elected representatives of the church, but above all from all Protestant men and women, to service in our communities! We want to serve: through tireless recruitment to our worship; through chivalrous intervention for the poor and needy, through defence of our faith;... through true Evangelical witness in public.
-Erich Koch, as quoted in Scholder, Churches, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Only we can enter into Luther's spirit.... Human cults do not set us free from all sin, but faith alone. With us the church shall become a serving member of the state.... There is a deep sense that our celebration is not attended by superficiality, but rather by thanks to a man who saved German cultural values.
-Erich Koch, Konigsberg-Hartungsche Zeitung, 20 Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Wilhelm Kube
Kube began his postwar political life as General Secretary of the German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP). Through the DNVP he moved into the NSDAP in 1928 and served as Gauteiter of Brandenburg (later "Kurmark"). More importantly to this subject, he cofounded the German Christians (Deutsche Christen, or DC), a party within the Protestant Church that originally went by the name Protestant National Socialists. It came from Hitler's suggestion that "German Christians" served as a better name for the party. Kube wanted to "gain control of the churches" and to "bring the churches in hand." [Steigmann-Gall]
Kube had a long link with Protestantism as he had an active life in a parish community council in Berlin after the First World War and had become a member of the synod of the Diocese of Berlin. His role in founding the German Christian movement came from his conviction that Nazism represented the true interests of German Protestantism rather than from a cynical posturing for the sake of winning votes. [Steigmann-Gall]
Precisely because we affirm it, because we are convinced that Christianity and Germanhood have come together in so infinitely many respects that they cannot be separated.... We have confidence in the German state, that its politics are not opposed to Christian interests and Christian sensibilities, but rather that it will look after these interests in all circumstances.
-Wilhelm Kube, cofounder of the German Christians party (Deutsche Christen, or DC), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Joachim Ribbentrop
A fanatical Nazi and anti-semite, Ribbentrop became Hitler's favourite foreign policy advisor and served as Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945.
May God save Germany!
-Joachim Ribbentrop, his last words before his hanging, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Bernhard Rust
Rust joined the NSDAP in 1922 and Hitler appointed him as Minister of Science, Art, and Education for Prussia. Later he served as Minister of Education in Nazi Germany.
In the 150-year Wars of Religion we were, as a Reich and Volk, almost destroyed. Today we stand in a bitter struggle for existence against Bolshevism. I appeal to the Christian churches of both confessions to join with us against this enemy in defense of their living values of belief and morality.
-Bernhard Rust, Volkischer Beobachter, 9 Feb. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
If anyone can lay claim to God's help, then it is Hitler, for without God's benevolent fatherly hand, without his blessing, the nation would not be where it stands today. It is an unbelievable miracle that God has bestowed on our people.
-Bernhard Rust, in a speech to a mass meeting of German Chrisitans on June 29, 1933 [Helmreich]
Since Martin Luther closed his eyes, no such son of our people has appeared again. It has been decided that we shall be the first to witness his reappearance.... I think the time is past when one may not say the names of Hitler and Luther in the same breath. They belong together; they are of the same old stamp [Schrot und Korn].
-Bernhard Rust, Volkischer Beobachter, 25 Aug. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We have not fought to build a paganistic temple, but to unite the German Volk for all eternity. We do not build temples against the Christian church, we do not want Valhalla as a substitute for a Christian heaven.
-Bernhard Rust, Das Evangelische Deutschland, 1 July 1934, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Neither the Reformation nor the Counter-Reformation fully conquered all of Germany, nor did either create a Christian state religion. The National Socialist program commits itself to positive Christianity. However, the German Volk, split into two religions, cannot express one confession to Christian dogma, but only to practical Christianity. The two confessions can find each other in Christian ethics, whereas in dogma the Volk breaks in two.
-Bernhard Rust, Deutsche Allgmeine Zeitung, 23 March 1935, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
What Christianity achieves is not dogma, it does not seek the outward ecclesiastical form, but rather ethical principles.... There is not religion and no philosophy that equals it in its moral content; no philosophical ethics is better able to diffuse the tension between this life and the hereafter, from which Christianity and its ethic were born.
-Bernhard Rust, Reichsbote, 31 March 1935: in Bundesarchiv Potsdam, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Hans Schemm
Schemm served as the Head of the National Socialist Teachers' League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, or NSLB). After 1933 he became Bavarian Minister of Education and Culture. Throughout the Reich, Germans particularly knew Schemm for his slogan, "Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland!" He designed his speeches, famous in Bavaria, to cast Nazism as a religious revival. Police reports stated, Schemm spoke "like a pastor" and often ended his deliveries with the Lutheran hymn "A Mighty Fortress is our God."
We are no theologians, no representatives of the teaching profession in this sense, put forth no theology. But we claim one thing for ourselves: that we place the great fundamental idea of Christianity in the enter of our ideology [Ideenwelt]- the hero and sufferer Christ himself stands in the center.
-Hans Schemm, Walter Kunneth, Werner Wilm, and Hans Schemm, Was haben wir als evangelische Christen zum Rufe des Nationalsozialismus zu sagen? (Dresden, 1931), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Each confession in honor, but the common holy bond, which is tied together through both confessions, must always be emphasized on account of the German and Christian community. We all say a Lord's Prayer, we all have a Savior, we all have a Christmas celebration. The banner above both confessions is: Christianity.
-Hans Schemm, Walter Kunneth, Werner Wilm, and Hans Schemm, Was haben wir als evangelische Christen zum Rufe des Nationalsozialismus zu sagen? (Dresden, 1931), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We all say a Lord's Prayer, we all have a Savior, we all have a Christmas celebration. The banner above both confessions is: Christianity.
-Hans Schemm, Kunneth et al., Rufe des Nationalsozialismus, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The Protestant League stands very close to the NSDAP. It is consciously German and, through moral and religious power, wants to contribute to the building up of the German people.
-Hans Schemm, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, (6 March 1931: Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Note, In his original letter to Schemm, Wilhelm Fahrenhorst, head of the Protestant League, indicated that he had spoken with Göring on the NSDAP's connection to Protestantism. Source: Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (20 Dec. 1930), cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich
The Protestant League stands very close to the NSDAP. It is consciously German and, through moral and religious power, wants to contribute to the building up of the German people.... [It has] the same line as the NSDAP against the Center as [representatives of] political, ultramontane Catholicism.
-Hans Schemm, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, (6 March 1931: Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
It is henceforth the goal of the Education Ministry that every child in Bavarian schools shall be made familiar with the principles of the Christian and national state.... Religious instruction is nothing other than service to the soul of children. Faith in god and the personality of the teacher must be expressed in a realistic instruction filled with religious sincerity.
-Hans Schemm, Dokumente zur Kirchenpolitik, 27 June 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Note, Schemm reiterated these points in a document written in late June 1933, when the NSDAP no longer needed to court the political favor of the Reichstag's Christian parties. [Steigmann-Gall]
So long as the Bible was available to us only in a foreign language, so long as it was only spoken to us in Latin, we could only grasp it as things are grasped through the iron gloves of a knight: he is aware of the shape and weight , but can only feel iron. When Luther made the Bible accessible to Germans in the glorious German language, it was as if we had cast off the iron glove and with the flesh and blood of our German hand were finally able to grasp our unique character.... The older and more experienced he became, the less he could understand one particular type of person: this was the Jew. His engagement against the decomposing Jewish spirit is clearly evident not only from his writing against the Jews; his life too was idealistically, philosophically antisemitic. Now we Germans of today have the duty to recognize and acknowledge this.
-Hans Schemm, "Luther und das Deutschtum," Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (19 Nov. 1933: Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Our confession to God is a confession of a doctrine of totality.... To give ultimate significance to the totalities of race, resistance and personality there is added the supreme totalitarian slogan of our Volk: "Religion and God." God is the greatest totality and extends over all else.
-Hans Schemm, (Gertrud Kahl-Furthmann (ed.), Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk (Bayreuth, 1935), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
What went for Luther goes for us as well: only through the mirror of our blood and our race are we able to see God as he must be seen.
-Hans Schemm, (Gertrud Kahl-Furthmann (ed.), Hans Schemm spricht: Seine Reden und sein Werk (Bayreuth, 1935), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We wish for nothing as ardently as a powerful Protestant Church which stands on the foundations prepared by the great Reformer martin Luther.... It is not possible for a church to stand apart or against the Volk. Rather the church must stand in service to the Volk. The great Nazarene did not stand apart in a quiet corner.
-Hans Schemm, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Baldur Benedikt von Schirach
A prominent Nazi official, Schirach served as the head of the Hitler-Jugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) and Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter ("Imperial Governor") of Vienna.
Like many German Christians (especially Protestants), Schirach believed that Christianity and the churches did not describe the same thing. (It goes much to this reason why many American Christians who do not understand the religious conflicts in Germany, see Nazis as against Christianity, not realizing that they attacked the political aims of the churches, not Christianity itself or Jesus. This especially held more for the Protestants because many Protestants in Germany saw Catholicism as an encroachment against their faith.
They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken paganist.... I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity, but I declare just as solemnly that I will put down every attempt to introduce confessional matters into our Hitler Youth.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, in a December1933 speech in Braunschweig, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
If today he descended from Heaven, the great warrior who struck the moneychangers/ You would once again shout 'crucify!'/ And nail him to the cross that he himself carried/ But he would gently laugh at your hatred/ 'The truth remains even when your bearers are passed/ Faith remains, because I give my life...'/ And the fighter of all the world towers on the cross.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Evangelium im Dritten Reich, 1 July 1934: in Bundesarchiv Potsdam, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
In no manner does the HJ restrict the religious activities of its members. Neither in their visits to Sunday services, nor in their contribution to other church festivities, will Catholic Hitler youths be restricted by the leadership of the HJ.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Baldur von Schirach, Die Hitler-Jugend: Idee und Gestalt (Berlin, 1934), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
I hold the view that religious meetings and events in special religious youth gatherings do not contradict the HJ's totalizing claims. Every effort that aims at a deepening and intensification of religious feeling must not only be welcomed, but also led, by any youth leadership with a sense of responsibility. I believe that through the agreement with the Reich Bishop of the Protestant Chuch, the Hitler Youth has indicated that it is ready to grant the necessary space for religious education.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Schirach, Hitler-jugend, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We all believe in an almighty God. We are all, even the youngest among us, witnesses to the wonderful transformation that the Volk has experienced through His help, the transformation from impotence and destruction to strength and harmony. The Hitler Youth wants nothing less than to secure this strength and harmony for all time.
-Baldur Benedikt von Schirach, Markische Volkszeitung, 3 June 1935, Bundesarchiv Potsdam, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Ludwig Siebert
Siebert served as the Governor-General of Bavaria. Hitler had also made him the official responsible for the restoration of all the German castles in the Reich. Siebert presided over the inauguration of Hans Meiser as Bavarian State Bishop in June 1933. On that occasion Siebert expressed his desire to work with Meiser:
church and state must discuss and promote the same questions.... 1) The awakening of a sense of sacrifice; 2) The creation of the new social ethic; 3) Leading our youth to Volk and God, to Fatherland and Christianity.
-Ludwig Siebert, June 1933, Dokumente zur Kirchenpolitik, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher, the ninth child of a Roman Catholic primary school teacher, also became a school teacher in Nuremberg. He published, edited, and wrote for the German newspaper Der Stürmer and served as a prominent Nazi prior to and during World War II.
After Hitler's release from prison in December 1924, Streicher hailed Hitler's return to politics as a "gift of God," a judgement the Fuehrer never forgot.
Streicher held an enthusiam about allegations that the Jews murdered non-Jews in order to obtain blood for the feast of Passover. He charged that Jews hated Christianity and mankind in general. Streicher went to grotesque lengths in his attacks on Jews claiming the discovery that "Christ was not a Jew but an Aryan."
If the danger of the reproduction of that curse of God in the Jewish blood is finally to come to an end, then there is only one way-- the extermination of that people whose father is the devil...
-Julius Streicher paraphrasing John 8:44 as his justification for extermination (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)
Only the Jews, he shouted, had remained victorious after the dreadful days of World War I. These were the people, he charged, of whom Christ said, "Its father is the devil."
-Julius Streicher [See John 8:44, for Christ's accusation of father the devil], (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Germans must fight Jews, that organized body of world criminals against whom Christ, the greatest anti-Semite of all time, had fought.
-Julius Streicher (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
[We] relentlessly fight the shady mixing of religion and Jewish party politics, and fight to keep religion pure, as did the Lord when he threw the hagglers and usurers out of the Temple.
-Julius Streicher "Kulturkampf!" (Flugblatt): IfZ MA 740 (10 March 1924: Munich), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
During the Nuremberg trials, Streicher was asked about his participation in the Nuremberg Race laws of 1935. He responded:
Yes, I believe I had a part in it insofar as for years I have written that any further mixture of German blood with Jewish blood must be avoided. I have written such articles again and again; and in my articles I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that the Jews should serve as an example to every race, for they created the racial law for themselves-- the law of Moses, which says, "If you come into a foreign land you shall not take unto yourself foreign women." And that, Gentlemen, is of tremendous importance in judging the Nuremberg Laws.. These laws of the Jews were taken as a model for these laws. When after centuries, the Jewish lawgiver Ezra demonstrated that notwithstanding many Jews had married non-Jewish women, these marriages were dissolved. That was the beginning of Jewry which, because it introduced these racial laws, has survived throughout the centuries, while all other races and civilizations have perished.
-Julius Streicher, (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)
[Note, although Streicher had a part in the race laws, Hitler outlined his religious justification for the race laws in his private notes before he came into power. To see a translation from one of Hitler's notes, click here.]
When asked if there were any other anti-Semitic publications, other than Der Stürmer, published in Germany, Streicher replied:
Anti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries. A book I had, written by Dr. Martin Luther, was, for instance, confiscated. Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants' dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. In this book The Jews and Their Lies, Dr. Martin Luther writes that the Jews are a serpent's brood and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them...
-Julius Streicher, (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 12)'''
[For Luther's book, On the Jews and their lies, click here.]
Now it goes to God!
-Julius Streicher, as he mounted the gallows platform to his death, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Purim Fest, 1946.
-Julius Streicher, his last words before his hanging, (Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990)
Note: Purim describes a Jewish holiday, celebrated in the spring to commemorate the hanging of Haman, biblical oppressor of the Jews.
Nazis who opposed Orthodox Christianity
Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann stood as one of the few top Nazis who rejected the organized Church (he was not, however, an atheist as many falsely claim, and certainly not a occultist). At Hitler's round table, Bormann noted that the Fuehrer did not want to pursue a campaign against the churches. Only in secret did Bormann hold a grudge against the churches. He carefully avoided the rouse of suspicion of the Fuehrer. If he could not destroy the churches, he could at least demand that his subordinates pay little attention to them.
In perhaps the most misquoted statment by American Christians, incorrectly atributed to Hitler:
The Christian religion and National Socialist doctrines are not compatible.
-Martin Bormann, in a letter to Alfred Rosenberg, (Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945, Vol. 1)
[Bormann here goes against Hitler and Nazi doctrine where the Nazi party program explicitly supports "positive Christianity."]
When Martin Bormann came out with a confinential anti-Christian tract, Hitler objected. According to Steigmann-Gall, "Almost immediately after it was released, Hitler suppressed it, ordering Bormann to retract his statements and recover all the copies he had sent out." The pro-Christian Goebbels, also disagreed with Bormann's anticlerical activity, along with many other Nazis. Not only was Bormann's decree on the relation of Christianity and National Socialism done in secret, but at no time was there an official Nazi law that tried to destroy Christianity.
Bormann serves at the main reason why many think that Hitler opposed religion. In Bormann's edited transcripts of Hitler's Table Talk, he gives the appearance that Hitler opposed the Christian religion. For an examination of Hitler's Table Talk, see
'Hitler's table talk and other extraneous sources."
Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg stands as the major reason why so many American Christians think Nazism represented Nordic pagan beliefs instead of Nazi Christianity. Hitler chose Rosenberg to create a 'religion of the Blood' knowing that any form of propaganda could prove useful. However, Hitler also attempted to establish a Reich Christian Church for the future of Germany. Hitler, himself, did not believe in pagan cults.
Rosenberg charged that the true picture of Jesus had been distorted by fanatics like Matthew, by materialistic rabbis like Paul, by African jurists like Tertullian, and the mongrel half-breeds like St. Augustine. The real Christ, wrote Rosenberg, was an Amorite Nordic, aggressive, courageous, "a man of true Nordic character," a revolutionary who opposed the Jewish and Roman systems with sword in hand, bringing not peace but war (see Matthew 10:34-37).
Rosenberg later went on to say that he favored a "positive Christianity," which would purify the Nordic race, re-establish the old pagan virtues, and substitute the fiery spirit of the hero for the crucifixion.
Quotes from Nazi Sympathizers and Churchmen
(The uncited quotes below come from John Laffin's, "Hitler Warned Us," from the chapter, "Hitler as God")
Now he stands before us, he whom the voices of our poets and sages have summoned, the liberator of the German genius. He has removed the blindfolds from our eyes and, through all political, economic, social and confessional covers, has enabled us to see and love again the one essential thing: our unity of blood, our German self, the homo Germanus.
-Karl Adam, the world-renowned theologian speaking about Hitler, [Lewy]
Jews can help themselves.
-Cardinal Bertram to Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) referring to the Nazi attacks on the Jews. (quoted from John Cornewll's "Hitler's Pope")
Each April 20, Cardinal Bertram of Berlin was to send "warmest congratulations to the Führer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany" and added with "fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars."
-Cardinal Bertram (quoted from John Cornewll's "Hitler's Pope")
The Church is not to be pushed back into the sacristy, but it is expected to accomplish through its own intellectual and spiritual resources what the state seeks to do for the recovery of the nation by way of the political power at its command. To do such Catholic work, no new invitation is necessary for us.
-Cardinal Bertram, to a conference of clergy at Beuthen, [Lewy]
The significance of this ringing of bells, follows from the greatness of the event, which provides the occasion for this proclamation, and from the intention which the Catholic Church always combines with the peal of bells. We take a most earnest and warm interest in all decisive events affecting people and fatherland, and our prayers for state and authorities (1 Tim. 2:2), calling for God's blessing for Church and people, ascend unceasingly to the sky. In the same spirit the reverend clergy will urge the faithful to regard the ringing of bells on this special occasion as an exhortation for such prayer.
-Cardinal Bertram, praising the annexation of Austria in 1938, where all the church bells in Germany and Austria rang, celebrating the event, [Lewy]
The great deed of safeguarding international peace moves the German episcopate, acting in the name of the Catholics of all the German dioceses, respectfully to tender congratulations and thanks and to order a festive peal of bells on Sunday.
-Cardinal Bertram, in a 1938 telegram of appreciation to Hitler, in the name of the Cardinals of Germany, for the peaceful occupation of Czechoslovakia, [Lewy]
A review of the incomparably great successes and events of recent years and the gravity of this war which has come over us gives me, as chairman of the Fuldaer Bishops' Conference, special reason, in the name of the bishops of all the dioceses in Germany, to convey to you on your birthday the warmest felicitations. This occurs in conjunction with the ardent prayers offered at the altar on the 20th of April that the Catholics are sending to Heaven for the German people, army and Fatherland, for the state and Führer. This is being done in deep consciousness of the national and religious duty of loyalty to the present state and its rulers, in the full sense of the Divine commandment that the Saviour Himself and the Apostles have handed down. [We] protest against the suspicion, nourished by anti-Church circles and secretly disseminated by them, that our declaration of loyalty is not fully dependable.... I beg to be allowed to call to remembrance that our aims do not stand in any contradiction to the programme of the National Socialist party and that they find a clear echo in your own policy statement of 23.03.1933 and commitment of 28.04.1933. ...with the most reverend obedience, Cardinal Adolf Bertram, Archbishop of Breslau.
-Cardinal Bertram, congratulating Hitler on his fifty-first birthday in April, 1940, cited from Johann Neumann's "1945: The German churches before and afterwards"
The Creator had certainly imposed illness upon the destiny of mankind.... the most severe forms of idiocy and the totally grotesque disintegration of the personality had nothing to do with the countenance of God.... we should not maintain these travesties of human form through an exaggerated, and therefore false, type of compassion; rather we should return them to the Creator.
-Rudolf Boeckh, Chief doctor of the Lutheran Neuendettelsau Asylum in Central Franconia, in a 1937 address to the local NSDAP Ortsgruppe, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
[W]e German Catholics have not been surpassed by anyone in readiness to make sacrifices, love of our country and fidelity to the fatherland.... And in the struggle for the freedom of our fatherland after the war, a staunchly catholic man, Leo Schlageter, became the shining example of love of the fatherland unto death.
-Bishop Buchberger of Regensburg in 1935, [Lewy]
[Note, Leo Schlageter was a Nazi and a Martyr for National Socialism. To see photos of his memorial, click here.]
I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism
-Frank Buchman, William A. H. Birnie, "Hitler or Any Fascist Leader Controlled By God Could Cure All Ills of World, Buchman Believes," New York World Telegram August 26, 1936.
Its aim is a new social order under the dictatorship of the spirit of God...
-Frank Buchman, Inside Buchmanism; an independent inquiry into the Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament, Geoffrey Williamson, 1954
... Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.
-Frank Buchman, Hitler and Buchman, Reinhold Niebuhr, The Christian Century, Oct. 7, 1936
(Note, Buchman was an American Lutheran evangelist who supported Hitler and a favored a fascist-dictatorship-theocracy)
The National Socialists, as the strongest party of the right, have shown both a firm, positive relationship to Christianity.... We may expect that they will remain true to their principles in the new Reichstag.
-Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and one of the most conservative members of the Confessing Church. Quoted in Nowak, Kirche, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
We have learned from Martin Luther that the church cannot get in the way of state power when it does what it is called to do. Not even when [the state] becomes hard and ruthless.... When the state carries out its office against those who destroy the foundations of state order, above all against those who destroy honor with vituperative and cruel words that scorn faith and vilify death for the Fatherland, then [the state] is ruling in God's name!
-Otto Dibelius, General Superintendent of the Kurmark and one of the most conservative members of the Confessing Church. Gunther van Norden, Der deutsche Protestantismus im Jahr der nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung (Gutersloh, 19790, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The way has been shown to us by the Führer.
-Dean Eckert, sermon at Tegel, North Berlin, 10 February 1935 (Rolf Tell, Sound and Führer)
Luther is truly not only the founder of a Christian confession; much more, his ideas had a fruitful impact on all Christianity in Germany.
-Wilhelm Fahrenhorst, (Head of the Protestant League and a planner of Luther's day [Luthertag]), [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat, expressed its confidence in the new German [Nazi] government.
-Cardinal Faulhaber, Carroll, James, "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews,"Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001
What the old parliaments and parties did not accomplish in 60 years, your statesmanlike foresight has achieve in six months. For Germany's prestige in East and West and before the whole world this handshake with the Papacy, the greatest moral power in the history of the world, is a feat of immeasurable blessing.... May God preserve the Reich Chancellor for our people.
-Cardinal Faulhaber, in a handwritten letter of congratulations to Hitler about the Concordat between Germany and the Vatican, [Lewy]
A lunatic abroad has had an attack of madness-- does this justify wholesale suspicion of the German Catholics? You all are witnesses for the fact that on all Sundays and holidays at the main service we pray in all churches for the Führer as we have promised in the Concordat. And now one can read in big headlines of the papers at the street corners, "They pray for Hitler's death!" We feel offended on account of this questioning of our loyalty to the state. We will today give an answer, a Christian answer: Catholic men, we will now pray together a paternoster for the life of the Führer. This is our answer.
-Cardinal Faulhaber, responding to a Swiss Catholic (no less) who asked to pray for Hitler's death in 1936, [Lewy]
One wants everything avoided that could make the relationship between Church and State more difficult. One appreciates the movement particularly because of its fight against Bolshevism and immorality.
-Prelate, Ernst Föhr, relaying information about the visit of Papen and Göring to the Vatican, [Lewy]
The Führer of the Third Reich has freed the German man from his external humiliation and from the inner weakness caused by Marxism and has returned him to the ancestral Germanic values of honor, loyalty and courage...."
-Archbishop Gröber, from his Handbuch, [Lewy]
Not only as a party member but also as a Protestant woman I sand in the most thoughtful respectful and most faithful obedience in our work behind our Führer.
-Agnes von Grone, leader of the Women's Bureau of the German Protestant Church, quoted in Phayer, Women, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Through some miracle Hitler and Lundendorff were saved. The driving force [behind their suppression] was the Jesuits, who in reality govern Munich. Their aim is a creation of a purely Catholic state (Bavaria-Austria) under a "Catholic" dynasty. The Protestant north cannot assent to this.
-Pastor Hock, an ex-monk in a speech in Bavaria, 26 Feb. 1924, in reference to the putsch, Eisenbahnuberwachungsstelle Hof, "Versammlungsbericht." The report adds that "Heil Hitler!" and Heil Ludendorff!" could be heard from the audience during the speech. [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
You can see from this that we bishops, of our own free will and without compulsion, have fulfilled our national duty. I know that this declaration will be followed by a successful collaboration. With the most respectful regards and Heil Hitler!
-Cardinal Innitzer, in a letter to Gauleiter, Fritz Bürke, cited from Johann Neumann's "1945: The German churches before and afterwards"
For today's birthday sincere good wishes and assurance of unflinching co-operation in the great enterprise of creating a Germany internally united, enjoying social peace and externally free.
-Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, in a telegram from Rome to Hitler on his 44th birthday (and published in the press), [Lewy]
We joyously profess or allegiance to the German Volksgemeinschaft and feel ourselves linked to it in good as well as in bad times... In this staunchly Christian spirit we also now participate wholeheartedly in the great struggle of our people for the protection of their life and importance in the world. With admiration we look upon our army, which in courageous fighting under extraordinary leadership has achieved and continues to achieve unparalleled success. We thank God for his support. Especially as Christians we are determined to rally all our strength so that the final victory will be secured for our fatherland. Especially as believing Christians, inspired by God's love, we faithfully stand behind our Führer who with firm hands guides the fortunes of our people.
-Bishop Kaller of Ermland, in a pastoral letter in January 1941, [Lewy]
Adolf Hitler gave us back our faith. He showed us the true meaning of religion. He came to take us from the faith of our fathers? No, he has come to renew for us the faith of our fathers and to make us new and better things. Just as Christ made his twelve disciples into a band faithful to the martyr's death whose faith shook the Roman Empire, so now we witness the same spectacle again: Adolf Hitler is the true Holy Ghost.
-Hans Kerrl, addressing SA leaders, Brunswick, 19 November 1935
Our Christian duty towards this movement [Nazism] is to protect and preserve it, so that it not be silted up by naturalism, nor , caught by the age old enemy of Germanhood, wither to the roots under the alien sun of Rome.
-Hermann Kremers, Rhineland pastor, Hermann Kremers, Nationalsozialismus und Protestantismus (Berlin, 1931), Foreword, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Everything is located in God's grace. This knowledge, which our Volk has forgotten in the last years, must be reawakened in them.... We expect that our German women will view their work, their service to the German Volk, as a calling, as a command from God, as our Führer, Adolf Hitler time and again stresses how he views his office and his task as God's calling.
-Gottfried Krummacher, a member of the provincial synod of the Protestant Church and the Rhineland leader of the DC. Hamburger Nachtrichten, Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
God says as Hitler does: I do not need your assent for my own sake. I need no support. I am firmly in the saddle. God does not need your assent for His own sake, does he? He never needed it from all eternity. God says, as Hitler does: Give me your Aye. He does not need it, but we are lost without this Aye, just as everybody in the German lands is lost if he does not give Hitler his Aye.
-Johann Lohmann (Hitlerworte als Gleichisse fur Gotterworte, Bamberg, 1934, pp. 18, 19)
If a priest should heap scorn on or ridicule the concepts of blood, soil, race, he would thereby not only risk political attacks and legal prosecution, but also offend theologically and against his Church. For what is expressed in these words belongs to the especially valuable natural possessions which God has given us and which even represent the natural foundation for the supernatural possession. For that we are Christians and Catholics we certainly owe primarily to the fact that through God's providence we were born into our family environment and our fatherland and our race. [The right rank order of these values is to be clarified]... and one must help the people to incorporate all these concepts, which are presented to them with such great enthusiasm, into their religious Weltanschauung.
-Vicar General Miltenberger of Wurzburg in 1937, issued to the clergy of his diocese, [Lewy]
[We see in you] not only the authority appointed from above, but the leader who has accomplished though political power what Adolf Kolping, our founder and leader, tried to achieve by way of an intellectual transformation, namely the overcoming of liberalism and socialism.
-Johannes Nattermann, General secretary of the Catholic Journeymens's Association (Katholischer Gesellenverein) writing about Hitler, [Lewy]
The Nazis did not have to discover or create Luther as a German national reformer - he was already there, rifle at the ready.
-Heiko Oberman, [from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Our Frauenschaft flag carries the same colors as the Swastika flag, with our flag black stands out, solemn and worthy. On top shine forth the Christian cross in the color of purity, constantly warning us: "You women and mothers, be real Christians; protect Christianity in your family, rear your children to love the savior."
-Lili Otto, one of the leaders of the National Socialist Women's organization (NSF), in 1933
To the Illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership.... During the many years we spent in Germany, We did all in Our power to establish harmonious relations between Church and State. Now that the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increased Our opportunities, how much more ardently do We pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God's help, to fruition!
-Eugenio Pacelli, March 1939 (later to become Pope Pius XII), [cited from Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII]
At no time does the Lord God require of us charitable conciliation with the Jew, the mortal enemy of the Aryan character. Christ himself called the Jews "the sons of the Devil, a brood of snakes," and drove the dealers and moneychangers from the house of God with a whip.
-Hildegard Passow, one of the leaders of the NSF, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf, 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The German bishops at their recent meeting at Fulda have state in clear language the ideas and goals we have in common with the National Socialist movement. They have thereby worked out the positive foundation for our participation in the wold of the new state.
-Professor Hans Peters, a prominent Center party politician, speaking about the joint pastorial agreement by the Fulda Bishops in 1933. [Lewy]
Hitler has taken up the mighty struggle against gold. "Gold determines economic worth," says Americanism. "Man and his labor determine economic worth," declares National Socialism. According to the will of the Creator, gold has no value in itself.... Through the sins of the world economy, gold has received intrinsic value. Man and his work have been made worthless. The Hitler Movement is a large-scale protest against this world injustice. It wants to throw gold off its throne and give back man and his work their value.
-Pastor Herbert Plesch, pastor of Wolfsberg, "Um Hitler," Aufwarts: Christliches Tageblatt, 5 November 1932, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
In this serious hour when our German people must undergo the trials of a test of fire in a struggle for its natural and God given right to live... I turn to you soldiers who stand ready at the front and who bear the great and honorable responsibility of guarding and defending with the sword of the life of the German nation.... Each of you knows what is at stake for our people in these stormy days; and, in whatever is asked of you, each sees before him the shining example of a true warrior, our Führer and Supreme Commander, the first and most valiant soldier of the Greater German Reich, who is even now with you at the battlefront.
-Franz Josef Rarkowski, the Army Bishop, at the outbreak of war in September 1939, [Lewy]
The German people, who for one year now have been fighting against their detractors, have an untroubled conscience and know which nations before God and history are burdened with the responsibility for this gigantic struggle that is raging now. They also know who has wickedly provoked this war. They know that they themselves are fighting a just war, born of the necessity of national self-defense, out of the impossibility of solving peacefully a heavy and burdensome question of justice involving the very existence of the state and of correcting by other means a burning injustice inflicted upon us. They begrudged us our place in the sun and sought to destroy us forever. They sought to make us into helots, and therefore there is no question in our minds on which side right and, with it, God's help is to be found.... Other people, arrayed against us, also pray to God and implore victory. God is indeed in the same manner the father of all people, but he is not, at one and the same, the advocate of justice and injustice, of honesty and falsehood.
-Franz Josef Rarkowski, the Army Bishop, at the first anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities in Poland, [Lewy]
Many members of the Protestant Church live with their complete thought and feeling in the National Socialist movement.... The National Socialist movement passionately affirms social thought and brotherhood. Therefore it stands for a concern which is also one for the Protestant Church.... The Protestant Church must, for the sake of its calling, here and thankfully greet the great intent coming out of the National Socialist movement.
-Heinrich Rendtorff, (Lutheran Bishop [Landesbischof] of Mecklenburg,) Mecklengurgische Zeitung, 24 April 1931, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The Protestant communities of Mecklenburg should now in this hour that their state church in its faith says a joyful and strong yes to German Volkstum... to the German nation... to the German Reich.
-Heinrich Rendtorff, (Lutheran Bishop [Landesbischof] of Mecklenburg,), As quoted in Scholder, Churches, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The Protestant communities of Mecklenburg should know in this hour that their state church in its faith says a joyful and strong yes to German Volkstum... to the German nation... to the German Reich.
-Heinrich Rendtorff, as quoted in Scholder, Churches, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
There can be no doubt that Cardinal Pacelli approves of a policy of sincere co-operation by the Catholics within the framework of the Christian Weltanschauung in order to benefit and lead the National Socialist movement. From the mouths of other prominent Cardinals, too, I have heard utterances which pointed completely in the same direction.
-Baron von Ritter, Bavarian ambassador at the Vatican, (Note, Cardinal Pacelli would later become Pope), [Lewy]
He who serves our Führer, Adolf Hitler, serves Germany and he who serves Germany, serves God.
-Baldur von Schirach (speech to Hitler Youth, 25 July 1936)
For National Socialism there can be no division of religious and volkisch interests.
-Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, Head of the national Socialist Women's Organization (NSF), Kaiser, "Frauenwerk," [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
In a certain sense National Socialism is religion, for it does not require its partisans to be convinced of the rightness of its teachings but to believe in it.
-Professor Paul Schnabel, Halle University, Mitteldeutsche National Zeitung, 4 July 1935
Oath to the Führer
We stand as walls about you
With loyalty and patience.
No sacrifice is so great or hard,
We are in your debt.
We silently fight the holy war,
Which your word sanctifies for us.
We know but one thing: Victory,
And Germany's eternity.
We know that your work succeeds,
Because God is in your heart.
Peace will follow your victory,
Peace for all the world.
-Gerhard Schumann, German poet
Your loyalty on January 13 is the newest and most shining proof that the Catholics Church and German nationality are not opposites, as today it is often maintained. No--Catholicism inspires its followers with love and fidelity also to the earthly fatherland that manifests itself in joyful readiness to make sacrifices at all times.
-Bishop Ludwig Sebastian, in a pastoral letter to his diocesans in the Saar, 1935, [Lewy]
Look at a marching troop of German youths and realize what God has made them for. They are warriors by nature and their calling is to rule.
-Walter Stapel, The War Against the West, Bibl 1, 30, p. 609, London 1938
What we all have longed and striven for has become reality: we have one Reich and one leader [ein Reich und einen führer] and this leader we follow faithfully and conscientiously... For us this is not a question of personality. We know that he who stands at the head is given us by God as our leader.
-Vicar General Steinmann, to a meeting of thousands of Catholic youth, [Lewy]
One must recognize that the National Socialist movement has with great sacrifice broken a terror. Where would the millions of young people be if this movement had not existed? It has welded together classes which had been estranged from one another. I believe that especially our consciously Protestant people who stand in the National Socialist camp will particularly welcome this welding. The church can also welcome the struggle against undermining influences in our cultural life.
-Theophile Wurm, "Frage einer kirchlichen Stellungnahme zu den gegenwartigen politischen Verhaltnissen und Bestrebungen": Bundesarchiv Potsdam, (2-3 March 1933:Berlin), [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
From Newspapers, Periodicals and Letters
The Jew was created by God to act the traitor everywhere.
-Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit monthly publication, cited in John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope"
"Christ's Spirit - SA Spirit!": We interpret in the Gospel not a word, but the spirit. We see in the seed, in the model of our Savior not only that he does good and shuns evil, but also that he struggles.... Jesus was not locked up in a church, waiting for the throng.
-Der S.A. Mann, Volkisher Beobachter supplement, 18 Jan. 1930, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
"Under the Cross,": To us Christianity is not an empty phrase, but a glowing life. It lives through us and in us.... Thus is the strength of the nation gathered under the sign of the cross. When the red beast threatens us, or the well-behaved philistine [sittsame Spieber]... sneers at us, we look up to the Cross and receive the doctrine of struggle.
--Der S.A. Mann, 11 Dec. 1930, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
[Note this comes from a publication from the SA (Storm Section {Sturm Abteilung}, also called stormtroopers), Hitler's own private army.]
The German Volk are united not only in loyalty and love for the Fatherland, but also once more in the old German beliefs of Luther [Lutherglauben]; a new epoch of strong, conscious religious life has dawned in Germany.
-"Luther weist den Weg," Chemnitzer Tageblatt, 1 Nov. 1933, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
Adolf Hitler to thee alone we are bound. In this hour we would renew our solemn vow; in this world we believe in Adolf Hitler alone. We believe that National Socialism is the sole faith to make our People blessed. We believe that there is Lord God in heaven, who has made us, who leads us, who guides us and who visibly blesses us. And we believe that this Lord God has sent us Adolf Hitler, that Germany might be established for all eternity.
-Schulungsbrief, April 1937. Bibl. 1, 35, p. 222 Nathaniel Micklem, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church, OUP 1939
[T]he person of Hitler has become the symbol of the faith of the German nation in its existence and future.
-from an article in Stimmen der Zeit, a Jesuit monthly publication, [Lewy]
The German State School is a confessional school only in the sense [that it confesses] the German state and the Volksgemeinschaft in the spirit of positive Christianity. The liberation of the German State school from the shackles of the Concordat is to be effected as soon as possible.
-from the National Socialist Parents' League (Nationalsozialistische Elternbund, or NSEB) manifesto, [cited from Richard Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich]
The value and meaning of authority attain particular importance especially in our Holy, Catholic Church and have led to that complete determination and victorious strength of resistance which even our enemies admire. We Catholics, therefore, do not find it at all difficult to appreciate the new, strong stress on authority in the German state.
-part of the joint pastoral letter from the Fulda Bishops' conference of May 30-June 1, 1933, [Lewy]
Reich und Kirche [Church and State] is a series that has the purpose of serving the building of the Third Reich by uniting the forces of the National Socialist state and Catholic Christianity. The series is motivated by the conviction that no basic conflict exists between the natural renaissance of our people to be witnessed today and the supernatural life of the Church. In fact, the restoration of the political order calls for its completion through the resources of religion. To awaken and deepen the understanding for this undertaking is perhaps the biggest spiritual task of contemporary German Catholicism, and its best contribution to the success of that great work of German renewal to which the Führer has summoned us.... Being entirely German and entirely Catholic, the series will examine and promote the relations and encounter between Catholicism and National Socialism and it will point the way toward the kind of fruitful co-operation that is outlined in the Reichskonkordat.
-Announcing the aims of Lortz and Schmaus' new series of books, Reich and Kirche, published with ecclesiastical permission, [Lewy]
[While thanking God] we did not forget to thank the man who has preserved the peace for us and yet at the same time has achieved the freedom of our German brothers in Bohemia. Together with the German cardinals, the entire Catholic community in the Greater German Reich thanks the Führer for the act of peace...
-from the diocesan Sunday paper of Munich praising Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, [Lewy]
This we want to do herewith and ask that the following request, which is also stated in the declaration, will be received with favour:
Namely that a commission from our midst is given the chance to person ally explain the true situation either to Mr. Reichskanzler himself or to the minister of internal affairs. Alternatively, we ask Mr. Reichskanzler to appoint a commission of men who do not have any religious prejudice against us - men who do not have professional religious interests but are solely interested to comply to the just principles as they were set up by the Reichskanzler himself - to investigate our situation impartially. The principles mentioned, refer to paragraph 24 of the program of the National Socialistic German Party of Workers, which reads:
"We demand the freedom of all religious denominations within the state, as far as they do not endanger the state itself or violate the moral values of the German race.
The party as such represents the viewpoint of positive Christianity without being attached to any particular denomination. It fights against the Jewish-materialistic spirit inside and outside of us and is convinced that any recovery of the German people can only take place from the inside out."
We are fully convinced that, once we have been judged impartially, based firstly upon God's word and secondly upon the above mentioned paragraphs, the national government of Germany will find no reason to prevent us from our church services and missionary activities.
We are looking forward to your kind approval, which we hope to receive soon, and want to assure our highest respect to you, honorable Mr. Reichskanzler.
Yours faithfully
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society Magdeburg
-Translation of part of a letter of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, German Branch, Wachtturmstraasse 1-19, Magdeburg/Germany, sent to Hitler (Reichskanzler)
(Click here to see a copy of the original German version).
[Note, the Watchtower represents the organization of Jehovah's Witnesses. Although many JWs were sent to concentration camps (for political, not religious reasons), their leaders sympathized with Hitler's positive Christianity movement.]
Sources (click on a blue highlighted book title if you want to obtain it):
Carroll, James, "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews,"Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001
Cornwell, John, "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII," Viking, 1999
Helmreich, Ernst Christian, "The German Churches Under Hitler," Wayne State University Press, 1979
Laffin, John "Hitler Warned Us: The Nazis' Master Plan for a Master Race," Brasseys Inc., 1995
Lewy, Guenter, "The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany," Da Capo Press, 1964
Neumann, Johann, "1945: The German churches before and afterwards", 1995
Snyder, Louis L., "Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990
Steigmann-Gall, Richard "The Holy Reich: Nazi conception of Christianity, 1919-1945," Cambridge University Press, 2003
Trial of The Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 -- 1 October 1946, Published at Nuremberg, Germany, 1947