Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview (11 page)

41
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 430, emphasis in original.

42
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 624.

43
Firpo Carr,
Germany’s Black Holocaust, 1890–1945: The Untold Truth!
(Los Angeles: Scholar Technological Institute, 2003).

44
George L. Mosse,
Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism
(New York: Howard Fertig, 1978), 81.

45
Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, 132.

46
Rudolf Semmler,
Goebbels: The Man Next to Hitler
(London: Westhouse, 1947), 26.

47
Arthur Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946), 230.

48
Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
, 105.

49
Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
, 105.

50
Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
, 105.

51
Keith,
Evolution and Ethics
, 105.

52
Jerry Bergman, “Darwinism as a Factor in the Twentieth-Century Totalitarianism Holocausts,”
Creation Research Society Quarterly
39, Vol. 1:47–53.

53
Edwin Black,
War against the Weak: Eugenics and American’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 2003); Harry Bruinius,
Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity
(New York: Knopf, 2006).

54
E. Jackel,
Hitler’s Weltanschauung
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1972).

55
Joachim C. Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership
(New York: Pantheon, 1970), 273.

56
Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich
, 99

57
Rudolf Höss,
Commandant of Auschwitz: Autobiography of Rudolf Höss
(Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1959), 110.

58
Victor,
Hitler: The Pathology of Evil
, 187.

59
Richard Weikart,
From Darwin to Hitler
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Paul Weinding,
Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

60
Cited in Haaretz Service, “DNA tests reveal Hitler’s Jewish and African roots,”
Jewish World
(August 24, 2010): 1.

Was Adolf Hitler a Christian?

INTRODUCTION

I
t is claimed by some, especially by atheists and critics of Christianity, that Adolf Hitler was a Christian because he was baptized as a Catholic, was never excommunicated, was once an altar boy, at times used Christian vocabulary and even talked about the Almighty’s blessings on his work.
¹
Some then argue against Christianity, asking, “How could Christianity be true when it has such examples as the believing Christian Adolf Hitler (some even adding that he was a devout Christian)?”

Richard Dawkins takes the approach that Hitler may not have been a Catholic or a Christian, but he was not an atheist either. Dawkins further argued that “Hitler’s…anti-Semitism owed a lot to his never-renounced Roman Catholicism.”
²
Dawkins later wrote that “Hitler was born into a Catholic family, and went to Catholic schools and churches as a child…never formally renounced his Catholicism, and there are indications throughout his life that he remained religious.”
³
Dawkins then quotes a man who was very close to Hitler, Rudolf Hess, who once stated that Hitler was a good Catholic Christian, and German General Gerhard Engel who claimed Hitler told him, “I shall remain a Catholic for ever.”
⁴
Dawkins does not openly state, but implies by these quotes and several like it, that Hitler was at least a theist, if not a Catholic. Some go even farther than Dawkins’ modest claim about Hitler. For example, Wayne Paulson writes:

My overall motivation is to help hasten the day when all religions will become extinct. I view them as being very harmful to society and to individuals. Their irrational nature allows for the justification of any belief and atrocity. After all, if the God of Christianity commits murder, torture, genocide, and advises cannibalism (still practiced today in the Eucharist), what is so terrible about killing a few more thousand people in a god’s name? The recent attack on the World Trade Center is but one example of the danger of such beliefs. The Nazi Holocaust is another—a direct consequence of centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism by Christianity—primarily the Catholic and Lutheran churches.
Hitler, a Roman Catholic Christian
, finally carried it out—in the most Christian country in the world, with the willing support of the public, and with Swastika flags flying proudly in the churches.
⁵

This paragraph, although based on certain valid observations, is irresponsible. One atheist website goes so far as to claim that Hitler was not only a Christian but “agreed with the modern ‘intelligent design’ creationists,” and was also “a religious fanatic, a Christian and a creationist.”
⁶
Obviously, whether or not Hitler was a Christian is, at best, only indirectly related to Christianity’s validity, but the question has come up so often that it is necessary to address in some detail this claim.

HITLER’S ATTITUDES TOWARD CHRISTIANITY AS A YOUTH

Hitler clearly had strong, even vociferous anti-religious feelings as an adult, as did most high-level Nazi party leaders. Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic, but his father was an active agnostic. Hitler eventually rejected his mother’s religion and adopted his father’s worldview. When very young, Hitler was a “small, pale choirboy…pious believer,” but as he got older he leaned more and more toward his father’s “free-thinking attitude.”
⁷
Hitler scholar George Victor wrote that Hitler “grew up anti-Christian and a near atheist.”
⁸

Hitler’s closest childhood friend, August Kubizek, wrote that for the entire time he knew Hitler, he (Hitler) not only never attended mass, but refused to go with his mother when she attended. She was very disappointed and begged him to go to mass but, evidently, she eventually came to “terms with the fact that her son wanted to follow another path” —his father’s.
⁹
Hitler was obviously very influenced by so-called free thinkers. He once excitedly told Kubizek about a book he was reading on “the Church witch-hunts” and “on another occasion one about the Inquisition,” both of which made him outraged against the church. Hitler made his own religious beliefs very clear as an adult: “I myself am a heathen to the core.”
¹⁰

HITLER’S VIEWS ABOUT CHRISTIANITY

The antagonism of Hitler and the Nazis to Judaism is well known. In short, the Nazis drew “on a crude form of Darwinism” in order to define themselves “as a racial group bent on world domination.”
¹¹
Although Hitler often claimed Germany’s war was about such traditional reasons as the need for more
lebensraum
(living space for the superior race to expand into), he made it clear that he “hated Christianity” and eventually was going to eradicate it after the war ended.

One reason for Hitler’s fervent opposition to Christianity was that he believed that “it had crippled everything noble about humanity.”
¹²
In words reported to be Hitler’s, “The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity.”
¹³
Hitler was influenced by one of his idols, Alfred Rosenberg, who taught that the Old Testament was a Jewish book, and for this reason Christianity, which is based on the Hebrew Scriptures, must be eliminated from Germany.
¹⁴

His reasoning was based on his belief that Christianity was an “illegitimate” Jewish child and, as a Jewish child, it was swine like its parent—both needed to be eradicated. Although Hitler singled out the Jesuits for special scorn, all of Christianity was “Jewish Christianity,” which was comparable with “Jewish Bolshevism.” Hitler considered Christianity the “invention of the Jew Saul.”
¹⁵
In short “the Aryan race had been conquered by the Semitic spirit in the form of Christianity. Christianity was…a Semitic import, which had weakened the fabric of the Aryan race by virtue of introducing moral commandments, which protected the weak from the strong.”
¹⁶
Hitler concluded that Judaism and Christianity were both evil, calling them Bolshevists, swine or worse, and for this reason, both had to be destroyed.
¹⁷

This view of Hitler influenced most of the leaders of the Nazi hierarchy. One Nazi official wrote, the reason he resigned from the Christian church was because as a “National Socialist and opponent of Jews, it is impossible for me to continue to belong to present-day Christianity, because it is supported by the Old Testament, which is Jewish and friendly to Jewish things.”
¹⁸
He stressed that “Christianity and Bolshevism” were “two versions of the eternal revolutionary Jewish threat” and that when Germany exterminates these plagues they will have performed a deed for the good of humanity.
¹⁹
The Nazis used the state-controlled schools and universities to achieve this goal. Consequently, a

major priority of Nazi educators was the liberation of the fierce Germanic instincts which more than a thousand years of foreign influence had repressed; and in their estimation, Christianity bore a major responsibility for blunting the expression of that Germanic spirit. The new German schools would help create a militarized society which would both purge the national spirit and promote the high-tension ethos which accepted war as a normal condition in a life of struggle.
²⁰