Hitler Ate Sugar! or, What Was Hitler's Religion?
The title of this essay was a line spoken in a cartoon that came out several years ago. It was spoken by a too-good kid who was matter-of-factly explaining to a baby sitter why he and his too-good sister preferred to eat raisins that were not chocolate coated. That Hitler ate sugar was just one more reason, along with tooth decay, to avoid chocolate coated raisins. The reference in the cartoon was humorous for it really was not that outrageous compared to all of the other claims that this or that is bad because Hitler endorsed it, or allowed it, or tolerated it, or was not actively deposed by it. There are a number of people (do a web search for Religion and Hitler) who claim that Hitler was a Christian or was at least supported by Christians or at least was not opposed by Christians. Is this a 'Hitler Ate Sugar!' joke, or is there some truth to it?
History is most useful in trying to prevent bad things from the past from occurring
again in the future. Hitler was not a silly
little man; he was evil incarnate. The
politics and that philosophy that put him in power are what must be prevented in the
future. The description of those politics and
that philosophy is best read in the definitive The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shrier (who lived in
To explore this issue, this paper is divided into the following sections: a brief outline of the history of Hitler and the Nazi party; the policies of the Nazi party in regards to religion; the philosophical background of the Nazi party and of Hitler; and the relation of various Churches to the Nazi party.
A Brief Outline of the History of Hitler and of the Nazi Party
Shrier begins his work with a biography of the early Hitler. He makes the important note that what Hitler wrote regarding his early years in Mein Kampf, and what he otherwise said of himself and of the Nazi party, was often pure fiction. One could selectively quote Hitler to paint him as almost anything. Hitler lied to the German people, to the Soviets, to Neville Chamberlain, and to anyone and at anytime that it was felt to be of benefit to himself. His image was important, and was manufactured where need be. His lies were to a purpose, and that purpose was power, and what he and his party did and said after he gained absolute power was the true measure of who he was and what his philosophy was all about.
This paper will recount what is known for sure.
Hitler’s ancestors dabbled in out-of-wedlock births and inbreeding (pg 6-7). His immediate family would not stay in one place
and Hitler attended at least five different schools before finally dropping out (pg
10-11). One of them was a religious school
that he attended for two years (pg 10). His
family was listed as Roman Catholic. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, each
Germanic state was to have the religion chosen by its respective prince. The prince of
At the age of 16, Hitler immersed himself into German Mythology and German History
(pg 16). He became fiercely nationalistic. Later, having quit school, he moved to
Hitler became a student of politics. He studied the various political movements and their tactics, and determined their strengths and weaknesses. He wrote that political movements could not supplant the church (pg 23). He also wrote that a movement would have to control one or more of the institutions to succeed, and if not the church, then the Army. Hitler from that point on dedicated himself to controlling the Army (pg 77).
After WWI, Hitler was employed by the German Army to spy on political movements. One such movement was that of the National
Socialists. The word Socialist brought images
of the Soviets, so he went to a meeting. The
group was obviously not communist, and at one point Hitler lost his temper and told off a
speaker on some point. The group recognized
Hitler’s speaking ability and asked him to join.
Hitler had wanted to start a party, not join one, but he joined anyway as
the prospects of he, an unknown, starting a group seemed slim. There was a political party (the Center party) in
post-WWI
The group, of which he was now the leader, eventually included a motley assortment
of characters. Shrier makes comment of the
remarkably low moral character of the bunch: pimps, pornographers, sadists, black mailers,
morphine addicts, womanizers, and homosexuals (pg 121).
As well, he later carried on at least two out-of-wedlock relations during
his life. The first was a masochistic affair
with his twenty-year-old niece, who ultimately committed suicide as can best be
determined. The second mistress was the
better-known Eva Braun, whom he married only just before they both committed suicide. His relations to both of these women were unknown
to the common German people at the time. No
offspring came about from either union. He
never married until the very end, as it was thought that remaining a bachelor would appeal
to the women of
In the turbulent times that followed he lead an unsuccessful armed coup attempt (the ‘beer hall putsch’ in 1923) and was sent to jail for several months, where he dictated the first part of Mein Kampf. In that work he did evoke the image of a savior. But he was the savior. He would save the Germanic people, and save them not by reconciling them with any God, but save them by purifying their race, by expanding the borders of the country, and by righting past wrongs.
After leaving prison, Hitler found that the country had actually improved. The disastrous inflation was under control, the
French were leaving the Ruhr, and in general the German people saw their lot improving,
although resentment still smoldered over the punitive treaty of
The great depression was the disaster he sought. He ran for the President of Germany (post WWI Germany had a parliament, a Chancellor, and a President). He opposed the sitting President, General Hindenburg, and lost. Yet, by 1932 the Nazi party was the largest group in Parliament. He was back at it and was ultimately made Chancellor in 1933. His government in exile moved into place, and the rest is history.
The Policies of the Nazi Party in Regards to Religion
The party, as it grew in strength in the 1920’s, published a list of 25 points outlining their master plan. The 25-point plan was later clarified, but never revised. Hitler had no interest in carrying out some of the points—they were there solely for propaganda purposes. There was only one point, number 24, which dealt with religion. This was the first time that the Nazi party had much to say of religion. It is reproduced in its entirety (from Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Volume IV):
We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility. [Italics added]
The plain reading is that non-Jewish Church institutions were free to do as they wanted, so long as they did not want to oppose the Nazi party.
When Hitler first came to power in 1933 he tried to placate the Church with kind words, and those quotes are used by some to “prove” that he was a Christian. One wonders if such people would be satisfied in applying their keen detective skills to the Watergate scandal by smugly quoting Nixon’s line “…I am not a crook” thereby “proving” Nixon’s innocence. It is unfair to Nixon to mention him with Hitler, but the point is that one wonders of the psychology of one who would take Hitler’s word over the word of a politician who had merely dabbled in campaign tricks (Hitler did not burgle the opposition head quarters, he had the opposition shot in the head). Many times Hitler lied to hide his true intentions, which were revealed only later (e.g., claiming to oppose the Soviets to get the support of the German right, then signing the non-aggression pact with the Soviets, and then attacking the Soviets; claiming to support the German worker, and then banning all trade unions and even eliminating the workers’ ability to quit work at one company and then go to work elsewhere; claiming to Chamberlain that he only wanted the Sudetenland, and then invading all of Czechoslovakia).
What did the curious phrase ‘positive Christianity’ from the
25-point plan mean? It was clarified in 1937,
after the Nazis had firm power in
The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism…National Socialism is the doing of God’s will…God’s will reveals itself in German blood…Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen [the Catholic Bishop of Muenster] have tried to make it clear to me that Christianity consists in faith in Christ as the Son of God. That makes me laugh…No, Christianity is not dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed…True Christianity is represented by the party, and the German people are now called by the party and especially by the Fuehrer to a real Christianity…The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.
If that were not bad enough, the final refinement of just what ‘Christianity’ was for the Nazis was pronounced, during the war, by Rosenberg, “an outspoken pagan, who among his other offices held that of ‘the Fuerher’s Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party,’ put together a thirty point program for the ‘National Reich Church.’” It is represented below, verbatim from Shrier’s work (pg 240):
1. The National Reich
Church of
5. The National Church is determined to exterminate
irrevocably…the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into
7. The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.
13. The National Church demands immediate
cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in
14. The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been declared that the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents. It…not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.
18. The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.
19. On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf (to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.
30. On the day of its foundation the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels…and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.
The footnote in Shrier’s work references two sources for the above (he had since fled for his life from Germany), one of them The New York Times.
Shrier summed it up on page 240 of his work by writing the following:
Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests or over the quarreling of the various Protestant sects. And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”
Besides Shrier's incomparable history, some other, contemporary views may be of interest. Fritz Thyssen, one of the industrialists who had funded the early Nazi party, hoping to prevent communism, broke with the Nazi party in 1935 and fled for his life in September 0f 1939. He thought that war was mad, was disgusted over the outrageous treatment of the Jews, and came to realize that Hitler was unimaginably evil. He dictated his story in France, but did not escape the advance of Germany when war broke out and France fell. After a time the holder of the manuscript thought him dead and published it (I Paid Hitler, 1941). It was discovered, after the war, that he had been captured by the Vichey government and returned to Germany. The Nazis sent him to a concentration camp. His work is unique in that it is a first hand account made by someone who had knowledge of the inner workings of the Nazi party. His view was that the Nazis tried to co-opt the Protestant Churches by appointing a Nazi as "Bishop of the Reich" while imprisoning and harassing clergy that resisted. According to Thyssen "They wished to make German Protestantism a kind of state religion, after stripping it of all Christian principles." More revealing, according to Thyssen, "The 'German God' of the Nazis is Nature, the mysterious source from which they spring. Their act of faith consists of developing to the utmost natural forces gathered up to each individual." Of Goering, second in command in Nazi Germany, Thysen wrote that "I tried to explain to Goering what Catholicism really meant. I got the impression that his knowledge of religious problems was virtually nonexistent....'It is all superstition and stupidity,' he said."
Another contemporary, C. S. Lewis, an amateur theologian rather than a German industrialist, wrote a book in 1933 (The Pilgrim's Regress) that was an allegorical description of his path from atheism to Christianity. The book observed all of the philosophical movements of the 1920's and early 1930's. The "Swastici," along with the "Marxomanni" and the "Mussolimini" were a tribe of dwarfs under a "Mr. Savage," a blood thirsty Viking-like barbarian who sought to "drink blood from men's skulls." From that it can be clear that even before the Nazi party came to power that Christians in other lands were troubled about the movement. As an aside, during the battle of Britain, Mr. Lewis remarked that if the Nazis were to invade England that he would at least have been imprisoned for his remarks made over half a decade earlier. Another amateur theologian at the time, Dorothy Sayers, in 1940, referred to WWII as a "...war of religion. Not a civil war between adherents of the same religion, but a life-and-death struggle between Christian and pagan." and went on to say "...what we believe to be evil, Germany believes to be good. It is a direct repudiation of the basic Christian dogma on which our Mediterranean civilization, such as it is, is grounded." Both Lewis and Sayers were Protestants, and would have had nothing to loose in calling out an over-zealous Roman Catholic, if that had been what Hitler was. Instead, as early as 1933, he had been properly identified as a pagan.
The Nazi party did indeed have something to do with Christianity: it tried to get rid of it, and therefore must have seen it as a threat or at least as being philosophically incompatible with Nazism. The Nazis said so, and contemporary Christians said so. Only decades later have revisionists attempted to 'spin' history.
The Philosophical Background of the Nazi Party and of Hitler
Shrier made the point that the relatively uneducated Hitler did not have a consistent philosophy regarding anything. It was a hodgepodge of sometimes conflicting crackpot ideas. To pronounce the exact philosophy of Hitler would be speculation, but the philosophical threads that can be safely identified are as follows:
German mythology had been an interest of Hitler since he was at least sixteen years
old. Wagnerian opera in particular was dear to
Hitler (pg 101). This mythology was almost
entirely pagan, with the only Christian references tending towards blasphemy. For example, Heliand,
a 9th century epic, cast Christ in the role of a Saxon warrior king. Whereas, for example, the mythology of
Nietzsche, of course, was the half-mad atheist who considered life to be a will to power where the supermen would rule the weak. He can be considered the grandfather of National Socialism. His ridiculous rants (about the joyous murder and rape of the weak, for example) will not be recounted here, but the interested reader is directed to page 111 for an analysis by Shrier, who thought it certain that Hitler was influenced by him, and that parallels existed between parts of Mien Kampf and the works of Nietzsche.
Amazingly, the single most dominant philosophical source for the Nazi Party was the writings of a nephew of British Prime Minister Chamberlain. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the son of an English Admiral, became a German citizen after falling in love with all things Germanic. In 1882 he met Richard Wagner, and eventually married his daughter (pg 105). He actually claimed to write while possessed by a demon (pg 106) and one of his “demonic” writings was a book Foundations of the Nineteenth Century that was published in 1899. This work claimed, among other things, that Christ was not a Jew but—surprise—an Aryan. It also claimed that the Aryans, not the Jews, were God’s chosen people. The book was also horribly anti-Semitic, but apparently not because the Jews had killed Christ, or whatever, but because they simply had, according to Chamberlain, impure blood. Winston Churchill, in his history of WWII, referred to Mein Kampf as "...the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with message. The main thesis of Mein Kampf was simple. Man is a fighting animal; there fore the nation...is a fighting unit...the fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity."
Hitler’s philosophical influences did not include St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Aquinas, or even Martin Luther; much less a certain Jewish carpenter. His philosophical influences were pagan mythology, the rants of a sociopath atheist, and the writings of a self-proclaimed demon possessed racist.
The Relation of Various Churches to the Nazi Party and Government
Without evidence—actually, in spite of evidence—that both Hitler and the Nazi party were Christian, some then go to a back up plan and charge that if Hitler was not a Christian then at least the Church collaborated with the Nazis.
The relation of Roman Catholic Church to the Nazi party started as one of
opposition. The
When the Nazi party ascended to power, the Roman Church did have relations with the
new government; just as the