That entry may be forged. It is not present in Picker’s edition, which casts doubt on it having actually been made by Heim (as Picker had all of Heim’s entries before Picker’s tenure and published them).

It also is in context about organized religion (he is talking about “the Churches” and how they need to be subordinated to “the State”), not his own Positive Christianity as he is made to defend throughout the Table Talk—and even here: he is made to go on to say he is not advocating atheism but a proper, non-superstitious belief in God that serves the State and not the Churches.

It also isn’t accurately translated, but it would be a chore to retranslate the whole thing in context (it’s absurdly long, several pages, an additional reason to doubt its authenticity).

So its suspect nature is already enough to dismiss it. I briefly discuss such examples in my afterword to my original GSR article Hitler Homer Bible Christ pp. 188-90. But see now especially my New Update article (which reveals nothing in the Table Talk is actually the words of Hitler), and my article on Hitler’s alleged pantheism.

“If anyone has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can’t satisfy them with the Party’s program. Time will go by until the moment when Science can answer all the questions.

So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of Science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.”

Adolf Hitler, The Fate of Christianity, Hitler Table Talk, pp. 59-60

1. “occupied Poland” = “what is now Poland.” Germany already controlled regions within the borders of Poland before the War, and the Wolf’s Lair was within those regions.

2. The original LOC documents have been returned to Germany and reside at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfeld. So their location is known. The Bormann-Vermerke (the complete German draft procured by Genoud, which in his possession may have always been a photocopy and never an original) and Picker’s notes (and the stenographs of Heim that he collected and worked from as well) are lost.

3. Dr. Nilsson is a postdoc researcher at Uppsala, not a professor.

4. Nilsson is finding that even the later years in the English appear to be translated from the French (with some few exceptions), so possibly Genoud did in fact have all of it then and little to none of the English was ever based on seeing the real German. Nilsson is also finding evidence that the translators might never have seen even the French text but had to translate from Genoud’s dictation (producing peculiar errors only explicable if that were the case). This evidence may be surveyed in forthcoming publications!

Thanks for the interesting post!