This week I debated whether Hitler was really a Christian, on London radio, with historian Richard Weikart of the Discovery Institute, hosted by Justin Brierley. I’ve been on Brierley’s Unbelievable? show before. Last time I was literally in London so I could join him in the studio. This time I was a call-in guest. He’s a great host. And he runs a good informal debate when he has opposing guests on, as he has done with me both times now. Last time, it was me with Mark Goodacre, discussing the historicity of Jesus. This time, it was me with Richard Weikart, discussing the religion of Hitler. That show just aired and went online, so you can listen to it now. Brierley did a good job of having both our cases presented so they can be compared. And considering the limited time, I think it’s a fair discussion, even if unavoidably incomplete.
The Book in Contention
Weikart’s new book, Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich is actually fairly thorough, well researched, and not ridiculous. You only need to read it with due caution, as he misinterprets evidence, misconstrues context, and leaves some evidence out (I’ll give examples shortly), but apart from that there is nothing so thorough you’ll ever find elsewhere, and he carefully cites all his sources, so it’s a goldmine for anyone who wants to debate, think about, or study Hitler’s religious beliefs. Some of his key assumptions and conclusions are wrong, and he does overlook some stuff. So use his book critically. But there’s nothing better to start with. If you read his book next to my chapter on the same subject in Hitler Homer Bible Christ, which updates and expands on my 2003 article in German Studies Review in ways relevant to Weikart’s treatment, I think you’ll have a complete picture. (See also my latest update on Professor Nilsson’s research expanding on mine; and further updates will appear here in future.)
Weikart concedes, and repeatedly shows from primary sources in his book, that Hitler was certainly not an atheist, nor did atheism drive his thinking. In fact, as Weikart shows, Hitler despised atheists and deemed them a threat to social order. Weikart does try to vaguely blame secularism, as having secularized anti-Semitic thought through the perversion of social Darwinism (and influencing Hitler thereby), but he does this alongside documenting the equally potent role of anti-Semitic Christianity as well. So it’s worth noting that here we have a member of the creationist Discovery Institute admitting and even proving Hitler was not an atheist, and was actually explicitly opposed to atheism. You can make good use of that in dealing with Christians who keep claiming Hitler was an atheist, or approved of atheism. (Astonishingly, even the otherwise excellent Amazon Prime series The Man in the High Castle depicts Hitler as an atheist, indeed as even banning the Bible. So even secular culture has been duped into that myth.)
But what Weikart tries to do instead, since he can’t get Hitler to be an atheist, is argue that at least he wasn’t a Christian.
Weikart tries to get to that conclusion with two tactics.
First, with a fallacy of special pleading, by using a biased definition of Christianity as only trinitarian Christianity (a requirement of membership in the World Council of Churches). That not only excludes many famous Christian sects of the past and today (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarians, Arians, Cathars, Branch Davidians, People’s Temple of the Disciples of Christ, some Quakers), but it excludes even the original Christians over the first sixty years of the movement, including Saint Paul the Apostle, and every Christian he knew. No Christians originally believed in the trinitarian view that Jesus was God. In fact that was an alien notion to Christians across the first two lifetimes of its original growth (OHJ, pp. 148-52). It was actually a later perversion of the religion, first seen in the final canonical redaction of the Gospel of John, probably originating in the early-to-mid second century (OHJ, pp. 92, 94-96, 267-69; see also Bart Ehrman on How Jesus Became God).
Even those other sects, many of which still exist (and some, like Unitarianism, were professed by prominent Founding Fathers of the United States, like Thomas Jefferson), are certainly Christian sects, historically and theologically—they grew out of Christianity, and regard themselves as the true realizations of the original Christian faith. If they can’t be called Christians because they deviate at all from the original faith, then trinitarians can even less be called Christians, because they deviate just as much in that detail alone.
Weikart wants Christians to only count as Christians if they agree with that perversion, the doctrine of the trinity, but also only if they admire the teachings of Jesus—even though they do so only selectively, just like Hitler did—and believe in his literal miracles and resurrection—even though millions of liberal Christians the world over regard his miracles, and his resurrection, non-literally; so in effect, most Christians are no longer Christians in Weikart’s view. That’s a specious way to argue. It would be more honest to just say Hitler was a liberal-minded non-trinitarian Christian. He was certainly more Christian than Thomas Jefferson (a Deist by modern description, but in fact a professing Unitarian Christian). In fact, as I’ll show, though publicly Hitler was a professing Catholic (never renounced; never excommunicated), he was privately disgusted by Catholicism, and instead was an advocate of a recently developed Christian sect known at the time as Positive Christianity.
Second, Weikart tries to shoehorn Hitler into the mold of a pantheist. So that not only is Hitler not a Christian because he rejects the doctrine of the trinity, but he is not even a theist, because he does not believe in a personal God. Or so Weikart wants you to believe (and perhaps, out of cognitive dissonance, wants to believe himself). And this is an attempt to make Hitler out to be practically an atheist. But the evidence that Hitler believed in a personal creator God—and a personal afterlife, which also rules out pantheism—is amply strong, and ruins Weikart’s case. Likewise the evidence that Hitler revered Jesus Christ as a central figure in his twisted soteriology.
This is what I’ll discuss below. Though I already hit some of the bullet points on the show, here I’ll give more detail, in a more organized fashion.
Mistreating the Evidence
Weikart wants to insist Hitler was a pantheist. Pantheism means the belief that the universe is God. Weikart identifies it as a strain of secularism (Hitler’s Religion, loc. 270), “the worship of nature or the cosmos as God” (loc. 321), and as even less theistic than Deism (loc. 332), in fact practically identical with atheism (loc. 3516-17). Pantheists can’t be creationists in any literal sense (not even of the Old Earth variety: loc. 4166). Nor believe in a personal afterlife of any kind (loc. 1163, 1190). And they only believe in “Providence” as the inevitable outcome of the laws of nature; not as the personal, instantiated plan of a sentient being (loc. 3690). In other words, “pantheism” really just sounds like a code word for atheism; indeed it’s really “only a polite atheism,” as Weikart quotes Shopenhauer saying.
This does not describe Hitler’s beliefs. Weikart tries to make it seem so, but only by ignoring and speciously over-interpreting the evidence, or disregarding context. As an example of ignoring evidence, in the original German text of Hitler’s Table Talk, the private notes of his secretaries on what he said over dinner or tea in his bunker (which Weikart often relies on; but correctly not trusting the only English translation in print, citing my work favorably as having suitably warned against that: loc. 4709; he works from the original German with his own translations), Hitler once remarked, “I feel good in the historical society I am in if there is an Olympus. In the place I’m entering will be the most illuminated spirits of all times” (HHBC, pp. 181-82). Weikart never mentions this passage anywhere in his book. He simply omits entirely the one clear declaration from Hitler that expressed his belief in a personal afterlife.
Similarly, as an example of over-interpreting the evidence, when Weikart says Hitler “disparaged the Christian heaven,” he doesn’t tell you that in fact he disparaged a specific kind of Christian heaven (one he considered boring), not the entire Christian concept of heaven. Hitler only spoke against the Catholic version of heaven, which valorizes pacifists and weaklings rather than the excellent and strong (and beautiful). He himself believed real heroes would go to heaven instead, “the most illuminated spirits,” not, as he regarded them, the pathetic Saints the Catholics revered. Which is a view not uncommon among Christian Nationalists in the United States today, who believe any Catholic mumbo jumbo is a pagan lie, while pinko pacifists will burn in hell, and only people who fight for their country, who “aren’t pussies,” get into heaven. Yet when, like them, Hitler attacks only one particular kind of heaven, Weikart presents this as Hitler rejecting any concept of heaven whatever. Weikart does this frequently throughout the book, so be on your guard against this reliance on non sequitur when he jumps from evidence to conclusion, case after case.
Similarly Hitler’s remarks about hell: he attacked doctrines of hell as barbaric, but not because he was a pantheist, but because he appears to have been an annihilationist—the damned would just stay dead, reabsorbed into the cosmos (Weikart presents ample evidence he believed this); only the saved would live forever in heaven (Hitler’s “Olympus” of “enlightened spirits” he was looking forward to). A great many Christians today also reject hell just as Hitler did; and annihilationism is an accepted Christian doctrine in many sects (and was probably the view of the Apostle Paul himself). So these beliefs do not make Hitler not a Christian, either.
Likewise, as passages even Weikart cites show (loc. 1145-50; and as I noted in HHBC, p. 186), Hitler appears to have held to the original Christian view, voiced in Paul, that no one, not even Jesus, rises from the dead in their original flesh (a “bestial notion,” as Hitler calls it), but in a new superior form (on this as an ancient belief, see TET, pp. 105-55; Spiritual Body FAQ; and most recently, my article Response to Pitts on the Resurrection Body). We become something else in the afterlife. And moreover, only the most “enlightened spirits” get to experience that; contrary to the “Jewish” teaching that everyone lives forever. But that the chosen do live forever, Hitler said in Mein Kampf, we “must” believe. Hitler just said he wasn’t sure what the afterlife would be like (loc. 1153); a remark that entails he believed there was one. Weikart also mistakes something Hitler said about what the Japanese believed—that people dissolve back into nature, body and soul—as being what Hitler himself believed (loc. 1160); in fact Hitler said he wasn’t going to wrack his brain trying to understand that Japanese view of the afterlife. So we can’t really get Hitler to be a denier of an afterlife, either, as hard as Weikart tries.
And as an example of disregarding context, Weikart will frequently quote Hitler saying something about “Christianity” or “Christians” that actually, when you check the context, is unmistakably referring only to Catholicism. In fact, it’s pretty clear, from instance after instance, that Hitler used the word Christentum (translated as “Christianity” when his quotes are brought into English) to mean not Christianity, but Christendom: the Catholic Church as a world historical phenomenon (HHBC, pp. 184-86). So be on your guard against that. Weikart often ignores or even conceals the telling context of these quotes. For instance, when Hitler is recorded as saying “Christianity” is “the maddest thing that a human brain has ever concocted in its delusion,” a context that got deleted was that he was talking about transubstantiation—a doctrine only taught by Catholics (and some early breakaway sects like the Copts); and thus Hitler cannot have been referring to all Christianity, as his remark doesn’t apply to Protestants, for example. This is clear not just from the context, but also, when the published German text was corrected against the original note sheets made by an eyewitness, it was determined that the text read or meant, “Christianity teaches ‘Transubstantiation,’ that is the maddest thing…”
You won’t learn of this from Weikart (loc. 1884). Yet this radically alters the thought being expressed. Hitler isn’t talking about Christianity. He is talking about Catholicism. He similarly uses the word Christentum when mocking specifically the beliefs of Italians and Spaniards (meaning Catholicism again), the worship of Saints (also distinctively Catholic), dependence on the Vatican (which can only mean Catholicism), or “elaborate Jewish rites,” which can only mean Catholic mass and rituals. Protestants can’t be accused of using “elaborate rites,” at all, much less ones that could be accused of being Jewish—that was a distinctive accusation of the Positive Christians, who taught that Catholicism was a Jewish perversion by the Apostate Paul of the true original Aryan creed instituted by Jesus. In other words, this is, once again, code for Catholic. Again and again you’ll find that every context in which Hitler uses this word, he means Catholics, not Protestants. And thus, not Christianity in the abstract sense Weikart needs for his thesis (sometimes Weikart almost admits this, e.g., loc. 1135-38). Be aware of that when you use his book. In every case, it makes an enormous and fundamental difference if Hitler was speaking about “Christianity,” or only Catholicism. And Weikart often won’t give you the data you need to answer that question for any given quote or claim.
This also reminds me to remark that Weikart relies too much on the Jochmann edition of the German text of the Table Talk (which he cites as the Monologe), proclaiming it more reliable than Picker, simply because other scholars, who didn’t read my published findings and thus whose opinions are uninformed, say so. In fact, Picker’s edition comes directly from Picker’s original unedited notes about what Hitler said each the day before (making Picker himself an eyewitness, who wrote his recollections down within 24 hours—that’s as close as you can get to Hitler’s actual words), even checked by a third party against his original note sheets (for Picker’s subsequent revised edition). The Jochmann edition, by contrast, was in fact heavily edited by the noted atheist Martin Bormann (we even have sheets showing his hand-written changes in the margins; and some entire entries are explicitly written by Bormann), and was held in custody by Francois Genoud for thirty years, with no one being allowed to see hardly any of it—and Genoud is a known conman and forger of passages in this very text. So caution is also needed when trusting any passages Weikart quotes from the Table Talk. Were they written or altered by Bormann? Or by Genoud? Weikart’s book won’t give you any guidance on that.
Positive Christianity
Notably missing from Weikart’s book as well is a serious discussion of Positive Christianity as a sect developed by German intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century. He mentions it repeatedly, even purports to describe it (e.g. loc. 1464-92), and admits Hitler advocated it (loc. 1452), but never explains what it’s doctrines were or its historical development and its specific influence on Hitler, especially through it’s most well-known articulator, Alfred Rosenberg (see HHBC, pp. 188-90). If you want a proper historical treatment of that, you should read Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus (merely mentioned in an early note but never used by Weikart; who instead tries to argue a lot with Richard Steigmann-Gall’s treatment in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, and I encourage readers to compare Weikart with what’s actually in Steigmann-Gall’s book, though Heschel is more directly on point). Positive Christianity was the sect of Christianity publicly adopted by the Nazi Party in its 25 Point Programme in 1925. So this was a public and popular sect of the time.
The doctrines distinctive of Positive Christianity were that sects and dogmas were corruptions of the original teachings of Jesus and should be abandoned for a pure true faith; that Christianity should be unified and serve the state; that Jesus was an Aryan speaking truth to power against the Jews, and died as a hero and martyr to the truth; that his teachings would lead to the salvation of all who followed them (in this life and the next); that Paul corrupted the true religion taught by Jesus by plaguing it with Jewish rituals and ideas, producing Catholicism, which was thus deemed a perversion of Christianity (making this very definitely a Protestant sect), responsible for widespread misery in history (a view of Catholicism shared by many a Protestant throughout history); and that true Christianity was also in agreement with traditional Nordic religious principles, because religious truth could be interpreted out of God’s design of nature, so those who attend to deducing God’s will from the laws and operations of nature were seeing the mind of God. In other words, because God made nature, following nature was following God’s will, because its laws and operations embody His will. Positive Christianity was also unitarian—just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses of today, and the Arians of antiquity, and many of the Founding Fathers in the American Revolution.
Hitler himself cited the teachings of Jesus, like feeding the poor, as fundamental to Positive Christianity. Even Weikart quotes him saying so (loc. 1532), with Hitler declaring, “If positive Christianity means love of one’s neighbor, 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.” Though Weikart justifiably mocks the hypocrisy of Hitler for only deeming certain persons as suitable recipients of such charity, this is also true of much of modern Christianity, which manifests plenty of rampant anti-immigrant racism, open hostility to welfare, and denigration of the poor and homeless—and that’s still going on today; the far worse hypocritical horrors of Medieval Catholics hardly need be recounted here. It’s a specious tautology to say hypocrites aren’t “real” Christians. That would mean there has almost never been a Christian in the whole of history.
Hitler also admired everything Jesus said against the Jews, such as his declarations against hypocrisy and greed, and “such lessons as serving God vs. mammon, paying dues to Caesar, and clearing the money changers” (HHBC, p. 189). Hitler, and Positive Christians generally, thus admired and followed the teachings of Jesus (not Mohammed or the Talmud or any other non-Christian religious authority), and defined themselves by that fact. That’s what makes them Christians. That they were selective in what teachings they followed, and hypocrites in their implementation, makes them no different from pretty nearly all Christians the world over. So you can’t get Hitler to not be a Christian with this information, either.
But the most distinctive and peculiar of these Positive Christian teachings are this idea of Paul as a Judaizing corruptor, creating the abomination of the “secretly Jewish” Catholic Church against the real teachings of Jesus, and the notion that Jesus was actually an Aryan condemning the Jews. They took the ancient Jewish slander, that Jesus was fathered by an adulterous liaison between Mary and a Roman legionnaire named Pantera, as not only true, but as no longer a slander but in fact a heroic fact that legitimized Jesus as their religious hero. And their view of Paul and “the disease” of Catholicism is stranger still. Yet in his private rants in the Table Talk Hitler espouses all three of these peculiar teachings—that Christ was an Aryan hero, that Paul was an apostate who Judaized Christianity, and that Catholicism was a blasphemous crypto-Judaism (HHBC, pp. 184-85, 189-90). These views are too peculiar to be coincidental, proving Hitler’s private sympathies were entirely aligned with Positive Christianity. That makes him a Christian.
Hitler didn’t just believe in a personal afterlife, too (as I already showed earlier). He also believed in the providence of God, and though Weikart tries to argue that Hitler only meant by that the inevitable outcome of the laws of nature, the context of many of his references to it does not match that interpretation. That Hitler believed God had chosen him to effect God’s will on earth and make the world a better place, and that God was helping Hitler achieve that goal by deciding the outcome of chance events (facts Weikart himself documents), really only fits the idea of a personal, sentient deity; not blind laws of physics. Hitler also thought that organized churches and creeds made a mockery of God’s providence, and he condemned anyone who makes “a mockery of Eternal Providence” (e.g. HHBC, p. 181). Hitler said “I am here due to a higher power” and believed he had to destroy atheism so “Man may be able to develop his God-given talents” (HHBC, p. 177). And he said, “if there is a God, he gives not only life, but also knowledge” and “I regulate my life on the basis of the insight given to me by God” (Table Talk entry for 13 December 1941). You have to really stretch these facts with unevidenced assumptions to twist such remarks into pantheism.
Hitler was also a creationist. He declared that “what man has over the animals, possibly the most marvelous proof of his superiority, is that he has understood there must be a Creative Power” (HHBC, p. 179-80). Following nature was following God’s laws and thus God’s will according to Hitler (Weikart himself shows this with numerous examples), and that was a doctrine of Positive Christianity. Since the laws of nature were put there by God, rejecting or defying them was rejecting or defying God. Hitler’s attitude implies a sentient plan in God’s mind; a divine intent that was to be respected precisely because it came from an intelligent Creator, someone smarter than us. And in Hitler’s condemnation of churches that rejected or opposed the findings of science, not only was he espousing in that view Positive Christianity, he was echoing even the sentiments of Saint Augustine, who likewise declared that Christianity ought not contradict scientific facts but accept them as God’s truth, and thus in turn condemned Christians who tried to deny or reject the scientific facts. Just as Hitler did.
Weikart tries to deny Hitler was a creationist by insisting that whenever Hitler refers to Nature being Eternal, he means “past eternal,” even though Hitler never says that, and such a concept is an esoteric specialized use of the word “eternal” only common in Christian apologetics decades later—and even there, apologists using the term that way, even today, know they have to say specifically “past eternal” to carry that specific meaning. Hitler never does. And so Weikart has no basis for concluding that Hitler means by “eternal” the specialized sense of “past” eternal (and thus never “created” in any literal sense). More obviously Hitler means that what God made will last forever, and can never be thwarted or undone. There is no evidence for his pantheism here either.
Finally, Weikart tries to argue Hitler wasn’t a Christian because he praised the valorism of Muslims and the pagan Japanese, and regarded their religions as producing better soldiers than Catholicism. But that’s just more anti-Catholic ranting. That he thought true Christians should be as valorous as Muslims and pagans did not make him a Muslim or a pagan. Hitler said repeatedly that he revered and follows teachings of Jesus; he never says anything about revering or following the teachings of Mohammed or the Divine Emperor of Japan. It was, again, a feature of Positive Christianity to preach strength over weakness, and to see the Catholic Worship of Saints, for example, as a corruption of the true heroism of the Aryan Jesus. Many an American “Make America Great Again” Evangelical has similar views of God “really” rewarding strength over weakness in the same way. They are in this just as Christian as Hitler.
Darwinian vs. Christian Anti-Semitism
Anti-semitism doesn’t come from Darwinian thought. Nowhere in fact did Darwinism ever make sense of hostility toward the Jews. That came entirely from Christians. Hector Avalos has already proved that the Nazi program against the Jews was entirely the same, line by line, with Martin Luther’s, and derives nothing from Darwin (see “Atheism Was Not the Cause of the Holocaust,” in John Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion). Even turning anti-Semitism into a condemnation of Jews as a corrupt race threatening Aryan blood, and not just a religion they could be saved from, predates anything Darwin wrote—it was being advocated as early as 1848 by Arthur de Gobineau, whose influence on the Nazis is well documented. Whereas in none of Darwin’s writings is there any mention of Jews or Judaism in such a fashion.
Darwin did not racialize the Jews, nor even say anything about races needing to be exterminated at all. He also did not condemn homosexuals or Jehovah’s Witnesses or black people or the Roma or the congenitally diseased, or any of the people the Nazis exterminated in camps. The idea of doing any of that evolved out of pre-Darwinian Christian Nationalism (see Infected Christianity by Alan Davies). Even the idea of eugenics, which was derived from Darwinian ideas, was widely adopted by Christian leaders and intellectuals, and thus wasn’t a distinctively secular movement. Social Darwinism, a deviant pseudoscience never espoused by Darwin, did lend support for atheists who wanted to adopt the same vile ideas. But it also just further corrupted already-racist strains of Christianity that existed even before; and it is by such strains of Christianity (most prominently in Positive Christianity), and not Darwinism directly, that the majority of Nazis were influenced.
If Christianity was so widely corrupted that way before, it can be again (and among some today, already has). And that is a caution never to forget. We must remain forever vigilant against that disease.
By contrast, while Hitler said what separates man from the animals is that he acknowledges a Creator, Darwin said that what separates man from the animals is that he recognizes the cruelty of Darwinism, and unlike the cruel indifference of nature, we have sympathy for our fellows (see “Darwin On Moral Intelligence” by Vincent di Norcia). In other words, Darwin took from his discovery of evolution by natural selection the conclusion that we are superior to animals precisely because we no longer follow such barbaric laws but actually care for the weak and sick. So why did others take the exact opposite lesson from Darwinism? When you look at what caused that radical shift, all too often—and explicitly in Nazi ideology generally and Hitler’s professed belief system specifically—it’s the introduction of Christian nationalism and Christian anti-Semitism. In other words, Darwinism by itself was compassionate. Add Christianity, and it became virulent.
Darwin in the end did not regard nature as ordained by God, and therefore had no reason to believe nature expressed the will of a superior mind. Thus he could freely condemn nature as barbaric. This is in fact the readiest conclusion of the atheist: nature is as evil as any God would have to be if one existed; in fact, the unconscionable cruelty of natural selection was evidence against the goodness of any possible God, and thus evidence against any God worthy of worship. It took the addition of theism—and at the time, the dominant theism was Christianity—to get to the opposite conclusion, that natural selection must in fact be good, because of the very fact that otherwise the God they deemed worthy of their worship would never have made the world that way.
Some Christians rebelled against the facts and stopped their ears and tried to deny God made the world in such a vile way—they became the Young Earth Creationists. But those who couldn’t live in such denial of the facts (thus becoming Old Earth Creationists) had only two remaining options: abandon their belief in a worthy God (and thus join the atheists), or abandon their belief that evolution by natural selection is cruel. And many Christians did indeed take the latter path: if God ordained the world to be that way, then that must be good, and therefore social Darwinism must be God’s will. Thus Christians who did believe nature was intelligently created and thus expressed the will of a superior mind, the very will of God Himself, were easily led to conclude, against Darwin, that the “seemingly” cruel barbarity of natural laws was in fact the very will of God and thus to be obeyed and even perfected. How could it be otherwise? Add in hundreds of years of Christian (especially Lutheran) anti-Semitism, and you get Positive Christianity.
Contrary to Hitler, Darwin wrote how moral cooperation in society, and helping the weak, was so pervasive it was obviously an evolved trait, and thus was actually the outcome of natural selection. It therefore had to be more conducive to differential reproductive success for complex social animals like humans than war and killing each other. Social Darwinists, whether Christian or atheist, tended to disregard the scientific facts Darwin pointed to, because they already had a racist, nationalist, or aristocratic disdain for minorities. They used social Darwinism as a rationalization for beliefs they already held before it. The same way Christians disgusted by homosexuality and women’s sexual liberation use their Christianity to rationalize voting for candidates who call for the Biblically ordained execution of gays and the outlawing of safe sex education. Christianity did bring with it these vile attitudes, but they could still have originated elsewhere; what Christianity mostly does is make it so much easier to rationalize them. Christians who wake up to the barbarity of these attitudes, change their Christianity, making it more humanist, by sequestering away all the vile things their Good Book commands them to (from Leviticus 20 to 1 Timothy 2). Christians who don’t, drift toward Hitler.
Conclusion
Hitler was clearly a Christian believer. You can say he was an adherent of a dark and twisted sect of Christianity. But to try and deny his Christian beliefs and roots is simply a crime against history. And trying to turn his belief in a Creator and God’s guidance of history and his own personal afterlife and reverence for the teachings of Jesus into quasi-atheistic pantheism is wholly disingenuous.
Hitler also could not have accomplished his massive enterprise to extinguish the Jews and other “undesirables” without the willing cooperation and even enthusiasm of millions of Christian bigots, of many different sects. Some Christians had the decency to oppose his plans, but they were always in the minority, and thus did not typify the Christian reaction. In fact, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom Weikart won’t even admit are Christians, were the Christians most faithfully opposed to Hitler—far more so than any of the majority sects, like the Lutherans or Catholics. Thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses were killed by the Nazi regime, most of them in concentration camps, where they were rounded up and killed as enemies of the state. All because of their strongly held Christian beliefs. But the people killing them were also the very people Weikart will admit were Christians: the Catholics and Lutherans and other mainstream sectarians who manned the camps, pulled the triggers, dropped the gas.
Gott mit uns, “God is with us,” a quotation from the Gospel of Matthew, remained the motto of the Nazi mainline army throughout the war. The horrors of the holocaust were a Christian-imagined, Christian-enacted, Christian-led atrocity. It was just an efficient realization of the dreams of mainstream Christians throughout history, from the Rhineland massacres of 1096 to Martin Luther’s declaration in 1543 that “we are at fault in not slaying them.” Hitler and the Nazis were simply a culmination of this; not of social Darwinism. It is important not to hide from history the participation of Christianity and Christian leaders, and the use of Christian, even Biblical arguments, in advancing evil causes. Trying to paint Hitler as a pantheist, which is really just a code word for crypto-atheist, does not do humanity a service. It is an attempt to hide what really happened, and what dangers really lurk within Christian ideology and the Christian mind.
We shouldn’t be trying to hide or deny the role of Christians or Christianity in creating and sustaining the Holocaust, any more than in creating and sustaining antebellum slavery, or the genocide of Native Americans. That the Bible, creationism, a belief in heaven, even revering the teachings of Jesus, can all be turned to evil purposes must not be forgotten. Trying to play games with definitions is only working to conceal the truth, not preserve it or teach it. And misusing evidence to get implausible conclusions about this that the evidence doesn’t honestly support, aims to the same unsavory end. Indeed, if we are to condemn Hitler’s Positive Christianity as “not really Christianity” because of arbitrary technicalities, we have to condemn Hitler’s social Darwinism as “not really Darwinism” for exactly the same reason. Indeed, the latter is even more clearly the case, because there is nothing in Darwin or Darwinism that endorses Hitler’s designs on the Jews and gays and “gypsies” and Witnesses. Yet there is a long, clear history of Christian leaders and Christian ideology doing so. Where Hitler got the idea then should be obvious.
Good day Dr Carrier
I am one of your patreons. Again great topic, I am no expert, but I’ve read and watched too many books, documentaries on the man to just say that: Hitler was probably the worse psychopath ever in History, even if there other people that dispute him that infamous title. I have alos read and watch alot on psychopath and seriel killer to know that psychopath will use anything to legetimate their wrongdoing, even religion… Robert Hare has written quite enough material on psychopath’s mind and motivation. So to say Hitler was christian or not is not an argument knowing so.
Especialy when you know that no one surrounding him was able to get intimate enough with Hitler to know his true motivations. From his early time in Vienna with August Kubizek to Ernst Hanfstaengl, there is nothing showing him as a christian to me. From my knowledge in reading on him, it was more occultism and the Mme Blavatski with the Golden Dawn that was the predominent belief in Germany in the 20′. Another one that was born christian and did hate Catholicism was Himmler who was more into occultism. He had in the SS castle of Wewelsburg that Black sun symbol that ornemented the floor. So nothing very christian in all these… And if I give any credit to the Book of Revelation in NT, Hitler looks more like the Anti-Christ with is inverted swastika and his dream of a Third Reich of 1000 years…
Well for me Stalin and Mao should be more the ones to be seen as atheist and even like I said what can we believe from psychopaths that will use any mean to entitled their evil purpose ??? Thx again for your topic !!
Sociopaths also have beliefs. And when caught in candid private remarks that go against their public persona, are probably telling the truth.
That’s how we catch them.
So yes, even as a sociopath, we can still infer what Hitler really believed, and what really motivated him. Why, for example, he cared about exterminating the Jews at all, rather than directing his sociopathy to other ends, as most sociopaths do. Sociopaths are products of cultural and historical influences, are shaped by the ideologies of their eras, just like everyone else.
It’s not enough to know whether Hitler was a sociopath. That explains next to nothing about the specifics of what he did.
Moreover, sociopaths occupy only 3% of any population. Far more people than that conspired with Hitler in realizing the Holocaust. So sociopathy cannot explain the Holocaust. Even non-sociopaths can endorse and facilitate genocide. The Nazi party was populated with mostly normal people. So to explain why they did what they did, “sociopathy” is not a viable hypothesis—even at all, much less sufficiently.
P.S. The occultism myth is soundly refuted by Weikart. He has an extensive chapter on it. Hitler wasn’t as into that as is claimed. It was an idea floating around in the mix of the Nazi world, but wasn’t the typical thing.
Thanx for your fast reply ! Still think that Sociopath or psychopath are too deceitive and desillusional people not to think Hitler was one. Otherwise how to explain lack total lack of remorse, even until the end asking to Albert Speer to jeopardise Europe and even Germany survival with the scorched earth policy. And yes like you said too many people involved in the Nazi scheme to be all Sp or Pp. But the most notorious ones like Hitler had several PTSD from WW1 which can lead ultimately to sociopathic behavior and the most probant case still Himmler which I have seen lately a documentary from one of his grand niece, and wow… I think then a lot can be said over that topic !! Thx again for it !!
Hitler was certainly not a psychopath, nor was he evil in the slightest.
The evidence indicates otherwise. Recent studies show that Hitler’s highest score for possible mental disorders is for Antisocial Personality Disorder, otherwise known as Psychopathy.
And since the phrase “evil person” simply describes any catastrophically malignant personality, and Hitler unmistakably exhibited a catastrophically malignant personality (not only in producing the Holocaust but in his entire murderous and fascist mechanism of enforcing control on his people, including his open tendency toward murder), Hitler was certainly both objectively and empirically evil.
I think we should be careful of going too far into the rabbit-hole of finding the ‘true’ beliefs of someone who very clearly and publicly professed certain beliefs. If some pope was revealed to have had serious doubts, but led a pious life and successfully spread Catholicism throughout the world, would anyone claim this pope was not ‘really’ a Christian? In fact, if you go to your priest and tell him that you can’t get yourself to believe in God at all, you can be fairly certain that the priest will not say you’re no longer a Christian, but rather that this is a normal thing that happens to many Christians. In the end, Christians are not really the people who believe in the Christian dogma, or even those who really try, but those who claim to believe this dogma.
Hello
I agree with your comment. We can ask ourself same question regarding Vladimir Putin and his belief in Orthodox Church… Is it to gain more popularity toward russian people has probably Hitler did. Look at how Hitler was when Hidenburg was still alive. And what happened when Hidenburg passed away. I consider Hitler as a mastermind manipulative con so nothing about what he did or said in public can be taken for real.
What we want to know is what reasons he had for doing what he did, what ideological influences actually built his mind on those issues. And secondarily, it is also still pertinent to know what ideologies he had to pretend to in order to rally millions to do those things—though that’s a separate question, it’s one I mention in my conclusion as still also important; but there remains the first question as well. We cannot explain the holocaust with “Hitler was a sociopath” because there is no reason for any sociopath to kill or care about Jews at all (or homosexuals or any of the other people targeted). “Sociopath” is neither a sufficient cause (it alone cannot explain the specific ways Hitler directed his sociopathy) nor a necessary one (millions who effected the Holocaust were not sociopaths; so it did not require being one to want to do it, and actually do it). And we have good evidence of what Hitler really thought and why (particularly as it reflects candid remarks in private and off the cuff that contradict his public stance and carefully weight rhetoric elsewhere). We also have good evidence of what he had to pretend to to mobilize a population to do what they did.
On that topic we cannot dissociate Hitler from Himmler and from Reinhard Heydrich for the Holocaust. My view first on personality disorder is that you have antisocial behaviors so any criminal activity, then you have sociopathic behaviors like Mafia, criminal biker gangs, gangters during the publuc enemy era and then psychopaths which include serial killer. So to me the most proeminent Nazi leaders were Pp or Sp. Himmler wanted the most to dechristianized the SS. He did the dirty job of Hitler who never walk into a death camp. Hitler was even mad at Himmler attempts to attack Christianity in Germany as Hitler feared that people may turn their back at them. When you consider all what Hitler did from T4 solution to invade country when he stated the contrary all fits with Robert Hare scale of psychopathy. As an example let take one of most brutal serial killer Ted Bundy and let say he would have said Jesus Christ had ordered him to butcher all those innocent women would we argue that he was a Christian or a Ppath ? And that 3 % of Sociopath or Ppath in society is that number real and factual because almost all personality disorder get that 3 % occurence… My last point is there was Waffen SS which was almost a regular army like the Wehrmacht Totenkop SS in the death camps and also Ukrainian that were also in the death camps. To my understanding those that were involved with the Holocaust had sadistic behaviors as well as the Sp or Pp personality or at least very Narcissistic behaviors. And that should be what we might consider first before looking for any religious background. Same for ISIS and Muslim… The most Sociopathic or Psychopathic personality will engage themselve in these bombing. Nothing to do with Allah as the majority don’t do so.
Hello Dr Carrier,
Last comment, I have retrieve a rare footage of a conversation between Hitler and Finnish General Mannerheim in June 1942, that shows clearly how deceiptive and manipulative Hitler was. Sure Dr Carrier that you would have met Hitler and he would have told you that he was like you totally atheist, that national socialist do not need christianity, but he has to do with those weak beliefs within german people, etc. That is the psychopath Hitler, I see. Here’s the tape translated and then the documentory over it. Perhaps you have seen both:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l85RvOvtMsw&feature=share
“The Jochmann edition, by contrast, was in fact heavily edited by the noted atheist Martin Bormann.”
I know I’m some years late to the party, but Martin Bormann was not an atheist. He was Gottgläubig.
“When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God, we do not mean what naive Christians and their clerical exploiters have in mind. …The power of nature’s law is what we call the omnipotent force or God. …We National Socialists demand of ourselves that we live as naturally as possible, that is to say in accord with the laws of life. The more precisely we understand and observe the laws of nature and of life and the more we keep to them, the more we correspond to the will of this omnipotent force.” -Martin Bormann
“[He believed that] God is present, but as a world-force which presides over the laws of life which the Nazis alone have understood. This non-Christian theism, tied to Nordic blood, was current in Germany long before Bormann wrote down his own thoughts on the matter. It must now be restored, and the catastrophic mistakes of the past centuries, which had put the power of the state into the hands of the Church, must be avoided. The Gauleiters are advised to conquer the influence of the Christian Churches by keeping them divided, encouraging particularism among them.” -George Mosse
That’s just atheism, though. God is a metaphor for nature. There is no Creator, no Providence, no Afterlife, no Intelligence behind nature.
Mr Carrier an extensive reading of this, true history, completely dissolves your arguments and your thoroughly perverse ending conclusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
This matter is far too complex for you to grasp, as you have a root bias against Christianity itself to see clearly, let alone competently comment on the complexity of all of the issues involved.
I see that you are ultimately doing the very thing which you criticize and denounce Christianity for.
You think Wikipedia is a more reliable source than actual Hitler historians?
I think you’re the one with a serious problem to fix here.
Meanwhile, why not pick an example of any fact I got wrong. And quote and cite what your source says to the contrary. Then we’ll see what happens when claims are put to the test.
How about: your entire worldview is wrong. Let’s put that to the test. And the best way to do that is to put yourself to the test.
As to Wikipedia, funny, when atheists need it to say what they want it to say, they rely on it, but when it doesn’t align with their views, suddenly it’s questionable – that’s not honest.
And honesty is everything. If you have to defraud others to uphold your entire worldview, what does that say about you and your worldview? If you do not know that you are self-deceived and that you are honestly deceiving others, then what does that say about your own ability to self-assess and correct, even the ability to perceive that you are wrong?
Surely you do understand that there is a possibility that you could be entirely wrong, and if that it true, that you would have to start from zero in order to be right. If you do not acknowledge that, then you are as religious, held in bondage by a false point of view and its limited worldview, as the people you deconstruct and have made a living on doing that very thing.
Why then not turn your talents to mercilessly deconstructing your own ideology and worldview, decades of effort in fact to balance out your life’s work, to see if it stands up as you claim. Then I’ll take you seriously, because then I’ll know you aren’t held in bondage by a mere worldview that you personally find comforting and logical – from your current level of understanding of everything.
Indeed I always assume my worldview can be wrong. That’s why I have changed worldviews so many times in my life. I have now settled on what survived every test like that. And am continually open to more tests of it, and continually do test it, indeed by the very same standards I test others.
So what “fraud” is my worldview based on? You’ve alleged this but given no evidence or examples of it.
So far as I can tell, my worldview is based on the evidence and is not deduced from that evidence by any fallacy of reasoning. And indeed you’ve stated no examples of any error or omission of logic or fact in its production. Probably because you are commenting on an article that doesn’t say anything at all about my worldview and you don’t actually know what it is or what I base it on. Get up to speed then by actually reading my book outlining it.
So I waited and nothing. You were asked to find any error I made in the article you are commenting on. You then presented none. That’s the story of you.
Meanwhile, again, if you are interested in my “worldview” (which has nothing to do with the article you are commenting on), and why it’s probably correct, read my book Sense and Goodness without God (advised by my latest updated remarks).
I am a National-Socialist and I can state categorically that National-Socialism is a panentheistic religiosity, not dissimilar to the panentheistic religiosity of Japanese Zen Buddhism.
The Positive Christianity of National-Socialism was the brainchild of Alfred Rosenberg who wanted to create a synthesis of National-Socialism spirituality with a revised Christianity in order to bring German Christians closer to the ideology of National-Socialism. It was a politically motivated and not ideologically driven concept born out of pragmatism due to the power and hostility of the Churches toward National-Socialism. Many historians and academics, due to their ignorance, and because they don’t research primary sources, but instead parrot secondary sources and ill researched papers.
Of course Hitler made positive Christian statements as a politician vying for power whose enemies including the anti-Christian Communist party competing for the hearts and minds of German Christians.
Richard Weikart’s research gets it half right. The religiosity of National-Socialism is panentheistic rather than pantheist. The panentheistic God is both immanent and transcendent. Personal and impersonal. Whereas the pantheist God is immanent and impersonal with no afterlife.
Please read my thread on Quora which contains primary source evidence that National-Socialism was/is a religion.
https://qr.ae/TUG0Ms
These were private rants not for publication until all his political enemies were destroyed, and were never directed to the hearing of any political enemies or opponents. In public, when he was in such hearing and directing statements to or at them, he took exactly the opposite stance. Exactly refuting your entire thesis about Hitler’s political motives. So evidently you reach conclusions in exact contradiction to the evidence. Maybe that’s why you’re a Nazi.
On the broader issue of religion, Nazism did not have a consistent stance on religion. Nazis were inclusive of atheists, neopagans, pantheists, Protestants, Catholics, and Positive Christians. They had a vision of a unified Positive Christian future, but it did indeed include a Creator, Divine Providence, and a personal afterlife, as well as very specific teachings about Jesus, Paul, and the moral message of the Gospels. Calling it “panentheism” isn’t very useful even if correct; it’s only correct in the same sense as it is a correct description of nearly all the world’s monotheists in practice (in contrast to their technically declared creeds).
Mr. Carrier,
I don’t think Hitler was a pantheist. Didn’t he mention the possibility of reincarnation in Table Talk?
Unfortunately it’s not clear that’s what he actually said. It’s not in the original German, but appears in a later “edited” version of the German that went through the hands of a known forger (Genoud) as well as a meddling editor before that (Bormann). And what that suspect German text even says might not match the English, which has been demonstrated to be corrupt and unreliable. I don’t have the Jochmann text on hand anymore to check. But one would need to before even beginning to trust the English translation of it.
See the latest research on the unreliability of the Table Talk (particularly the English translation, as I demonstrated in German Studies Review over a decade ago; reproduced with an expanded update in Hitler Homer Bible Christ).
Whereas it is clear Hitler said in the Table Talk (verified by the Picker edition, which was composed by an eyewitness) that he expects to go to heaven and meet famous intellectuals there. Which would contradict the notion that he believed in reincarnation instead.
IMO, the English of the entry where Hitler is made to say (labeled “23rd September 1941, evening”) “the elements of which our body is made belong to the cycle of nature; and as for our soul, it’s possible that it might return to limbo, until it gets an opportunity to reincarnate itself,” could be a garbled reference to resurrection, given the conflicting mention of “limbo” (a Catholic doctrine in no way connected with reincarnation), or the actual context might have been Hitler describing someone else’s view (a kind of error confirmed to have happened in the German elsewhere); if Hitler even said whatever underlies this suspect text.
Update: I just bought a used copy of the Monologe and this is the original German of that passage represented there:
Translated literally:
Note, “Limbo” and “reincarnate” are not in the German. And the wording is significantly different. Hitler is here saying (if indeed he said any of this) that “we don’t know” whether souls survive and come back “in some form” (he does not say what form or where or when). He then goes on to talk about how God intentionally arranged the world for survival of the fittest. So no, I have to say this passage does not support the conclusion that Hitler believed in “reincarnation.”
Dr. Carrier said …..”Pantheists can’t be creationists in any literal sense (not even of the Old Earth variety: loc. 4166). Nor believe in a personal afterlife of any kind (loc. 1163, 1190). And they only believe in “Providence” as the inevitable outcome of the laws of nature; not as the personal, instantiated plan of a sentient being (loc. 3690). In other words, “pantheism” really just sounds like a code word for atheism; indeed it’s really “only a polite atheism,” as Weikart quotes Shopenhauer saying.”
Actually that is just what you claim others do, in restricting belief in Pantheism to certain tenets. I am a Pantheist, but I have no problem with “creation”, but as an emanation of The One. The One being the energy that becomes designer and carries it out. I also believe in an afterlife, on the basis of the Law Of The Conservation Of Energy. The energy that is “me” can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only change its form. I am a part of Tghe One. And as for “providence” … in my vision of pantheism, ANYTHING is possible, as The One makes the rules. With respect, you have oversimplified Pantheism. Your God, whatever you see it as, is just too small !
Emanation is not creation. Playing semantic games is not worth anyone’s time here. You can’t change what a thing is by changing what you call it. So your observations are simply impertinent here.
Hello Dr. Carrier…
While you make the genuinely interesting suggestion that Hitler may have adhered to ‘Positive Christianity’ there are a few flaws with your research.
Firstly, defining what a Christian is. I have to disagree with both your and Weikart’s definition of a Christian, however, Weikart’s definition of a Christian is far more accurate than yours. Christians believe in the divinity i.e the deity of Jesus, that is, that Jesus is the son of God. Furthermore, Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, that humans can be saved by believing in Jesus (salvation) and that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead. Lastly, Christians says that Jesus was a Jew because the Bible says that he is a descendant of Abraham and Joseph. All Christians of any variety, whether they are Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, Mormons, Assyrians, Coptic and Jehovah’s Witnesses agree on these 5 points above. However, you correctly point out that not all Christians believe in the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the same thing. However, your definition of who a Christian is is someone who believes in God, believes that Jesus existed (and likes him) and believes in life after death. By this definition, you are making the word ‘Christian’ meaningless, because even a Muslim can be called a Christian, which I find ridiculous, because, though we honour Jesus as one of the great prophets, we do not believe that Jesus was the son of God, or that he died for our sins, thereby we do not believe in the core tenants of Christianity. You also fail to create a barrier between eccentric and traditional forms of Christianity. All the brances of Christianity that I have listed would fall under ‘traditional Christianity.’ Since you point out correctly that Hitler did not believe that Jesus was divine because (at least he thought) that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier in Galilee, and also because he did not believe that Jesus died for our sins or that he rose from the dead, he would have espoused an eccentric form of Christianity just like the corrupted and racist forms of Christianity that you are talking about, adhered to by white nationalists in the United States.
Secondly, your interpretation of and understanding of Christian theology and the German language. Rarely does Hitler mock a specific kind of Christian Church such as the Catholic Church. An example of this is the monologue of July 12th 1941, in which Hitler said that ‘Christentum’ (Christianity), not ‘Katholizismus’ (which is Catholicism) or ‘Protestantismus’ (Protestantism) is or was the worst thing to ever strike at humanity. For the most part, Hitler refers to Christianity generally, rarely does he ever make mention of a specific kind of Christianity. When he does, however, he poured scorn on it. For example, he heaped abuse on Protestantism for having broken up German unity. Then trying to say that when Hitler said ‘Christentum’ he meant ‘Catholic’ because only the Catholic Church believes itself to be the one true church is rather ridiculous, because all churches believe themselves to be the true churches, and Hitler denounces them all because he thinks that they are all equally wrong. Then, contrary to Weikart’s conclusion, Hitler did believe in an afterlife:
By their [Bormann, Goebbels, etc.] work and loyal companionship they will remain as close to me after my death as I hope my spirit will continue to dwell among them and accompany them always.
—Adolf Hitler’s Final Will and Political Testament.
“My dear Party Comrade, your death is not in vain! Our dead have all come back to life. They are marching with us not only in spirit; they are alive, too. And one of those who will accompany us into the most distant future will be this dead man. May that be our sacred vow in this hour, that we wish to ensure that this dead man take his place in the ranks of our Volk’s immortal martyrs. From his death shall hence come forth life a millionfold for our Volk.”
—Adolf Hitler. February 12th 1936.
You correctly state that this would not make Hitler a Pantheist, because Pantheists do not believe in any form of afterlife. However, this isn’t a form of personal afterlife, because though he thought that one’s soul will continue to live on, he didnt think that they would be judged for their doings, instead, his afterlife is the impact that one has on their race: a determining factor in maintaining divine consciousness in Hitler’s view. Hitler did not believe in either heaven or hell, thereby he was not an annihilationist, which is also, contrary to what you say, also not espoused by an traditional form of Christianity (though some eccentric Christians do believe in annihilationism). Additionally, Hitler’s disdain for the church’s elaborate Jewish rites, practices and beliefs could equally refer to Anglicanism, Calvinism and Lutheranism, since all Christian Churches share similarities in their theology and practices, such as, for example, Lutheran approaches to confirmation, which invalidates your claim that Hitler was only mocking Catholicism because no similar rituals are found in Lutheranism, which I think is a very absurd claim. In addition to all of this, Hitler did not subscribe to any form of Christianity after he had apostasized from the Catholic Church of his childhood. If you have a look at ‘The Devil’s Diary: Alfred Rosenberg and the Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich’ Rosenberg records that Hitler rejected Houston Stewart Chamberlains attempt to create a Germanic form of Christianity, despite him having sharing some views of Positive Christianity. For example, he did not think that the Jews were the Anti-Christ, a view that Positive Christians would espouse.
Lastly, while it is true that many of things that Martin Luther (Founder of the Protestant Reformation) advocates in his 1543 anti-Semitic tract ‘On the Jews and their Lies’, and while I can easily imagine Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther bonding in the afterlife over their mutual hatred of the Jews and Gypsies, the reasons for why the atrocities happened are entirely different. Martin Luther embraced Christian antisemitism: the belief that the Jews had killed Jesus (even thought it was the Romans), are damned eternally and will barbeque in hell for not accepting Jesus as their Lord & Savior. The reason why the Jews, not the Romans, were blamed for the death of Jesus is because Judas Iscariot (who was a Jew) betrayed Jesus and set in motion the things that led to the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross. Luther and other Christian anti-Semites have viewed the Jews as a purely religious group, and Luther’s solution to the Jewish Question was that the Jews should accept and convert to Christianity. On the other hand, Hitler had come to adopt a newer form of antisemitism which saw the Jews as a purely ethnic group, not a religious one. This was then mixed with racist Darwinian Pseudoscience, and claimed that the Jews were born with inferior genetic traits, or literally, they were born bad (deceiving, selfish and power-hungry) while the Germanic people were born with superior genetic traits in contrast to other human races. Mixed with the idea of the survival of the fittest, Hitler’s solution to the Jewish Question was (initially) deportation from Germany, starting from 1933 onwards. When war began 6 years later, deportation from Germany became more difficult due to aerial and naval blockades, so from 1939 onwards, Hitler’s solution to this was extermination. In Hitler’s mind, conversion to Christianity and assimilation to German culture was the worst thing that could happen, because they might end up corrupting the superior German race via intermingling by passing on inferior biological traits. While Darwin did not advocate specifically advocate a racial war against the Jews, for you to claim that ‘he did not advocate exterminating races’ is just wrong. If you read the ‘The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex’ he espouses the EXACT SAME ideas as Hitler. However, instead of a ‘struggle for existence’ between the Germans and the Jews, he espouses a ‘struggle for existence’ between the Europeans and the Native Australian Indians, except that Europeans were the superior race, and the Australian Indians were the inferior race. Hitler simply had to replace the former with the Germans, and the latter with the Jews. It is bigoted and anti-Christian for you to claim that it was the Christians who created hostility against the Jews and created the idea of killing races that were different from their own.
By the way, why would François Genoud, who was a Nazi sympathizer, want to portray Hitler as an atheist if Genoud himself was a pious Catholic? Wouldn’t he have wanted to fabricate the monologues to make his belief in God stronger, NOT weaker? This argument of yours does not make sense at all in anyway. Also, Mr. Martin Ludwig Bormann was NOT an atheist: Martin Bormann embraced Panentheism. In February 1940, while Bormann was planning and preparing a decree to replace religious instruction in schools, he planned to introduce a new class called ‘Moral Education.’ In this class, One of the moral laws which he wanted to include was “love for the all-ensouled nature, in which God manifests himself, even in animals and plants” a clear indication that he believed that a transcendent God created the world, and that this God is found in everything which he had created. His infamous June 1941 letter in which he states that ‘National Socialism and Christianity are incompatible’ he also said this:
‘When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God, we do not mean the same thing as naive Christians and their clerical exploiters have in mind — some anthropoid creature sitting around somewhere in the spheres. Instead, our intent is to open people’s eyes to the fact that, aside from this small planet earth, which is relatively insignificant with relation to the vast universe, there is an unimaginably great number of other celestial bodies in the universe, an infinite number of bodies surrounded as is the sun by planets and, like these planets, in turn, similarly surrounded by smaller bodies, moons. The power of nature’s law that propels these infinite bodies through the universe is what we call the omnipotent force, or God. The claim that this universal force could somehow care for the fate of each individual, of each bacillus here on earth, that it might be influenced by so-called prayers or other astounding things, rests to a great degree on the naivete or on profit-minded impertinence.”
In February 1944, he wrote to his mistress, “Anyone who feels himself to be a creature of this life, and encompassed by this life, in other words, by the will of Omnipotence, of Nature, that is to say, by the will of God, anyone who feels himself to be merely one of the countless meshes of the web we call a people can’t be frightened by the hardships of this existence.” Clearly, Bormann was not an atheist, and this is a big indicator of his Panentheism.
As for Hitler himself, I would also diagnose him with Panentheism. Panentheism is close to Pantheism, which is the belief that the universe is God, which has a lot of materialism in its theology and is close to atheism, because they both reject the belief that a transcendent higher being existed, not let created the world. However, Panentheism, is much farther away from atheism, because it is more mystical and less materialist. Hitler’s God personal and impersonal, and also immanent and transcendent, which perfectly suits a Panentheistic worldview. Otto Wagner, who recalled in his memoirs a 1930 discussion with him in regards to religion, recalled that Hitler had said this:
“In the beginning there was an urge!’ This urge has existed from eternity! This urge was the creation of God, and God himself was in this urge. And the urge was the spark of life, which resides in us as well.”
—Otto Wagner: The Memoirs of the Confident
“For me, God is the Logos of St. John, which has become flesh and lives in the world, interwoven with it and pervading it, conferring on it drives and driving force, and constituting the actual meaning and content of the world.”
—Otto Wagner: The Memoirs of the Confident
Hitler’s wartime monologues confirm this impression:
“The German is serious in everything that he undertakes. He wants to be either a Christian or a Heathen. He cannot be both. For our people it is decisive whether they acknowledge Christianity with its effeminate pity-ethics, or acknowledges the strong, heroic belief in God in Nature.”
—Hitler’s Table Talk.
“When one says that God provokes the lightning, that’s true in a sense; but what is certain is that God does not direct the thunderbolt, as the Church claims. The Church’s explanation of natural phenomena is an abuse, for the Church has ulterior interests. True piety is the characteristic of the being who is aware of his weakness and ignorance. Whoever sees God only in an oak or tabernacle, instead of seeing him everywhere, is not truly pious.”
—Hitler’s Table Talk.
Likewise, Christa Schroeder recalled that Hitler’s religion was ‘The Laws of Nature’ which has suggests either Deism or Panentheism. She added:
“Science has not yet decided from which roots the human race sprang forth. We are probably the highest stage of development from some mammal or other which had developed from the reptile, and then perhaps through the apes to the human being. We are a limb of Creation and children of Nature and the same laws apply to us as they do to all living beings. In Nature, the law of the jungle has been in force from the beginning. All those unsuitable to live, and the weak, are trampled underfoot. Man, and above all the Church, have made it precisely their goal to keep alive by artificial means the weak, those unfit for life and the invalids.”
—He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Secretary
Here she sketched his commitment to a deified nature as tightly knit with his view of human evolution and morality. Despite his belief in a deified nature, I dont think that he should be considered a Pantheist, because Hitler seems to have believed in life after death, although his comments on an afterlife are extremely vague and his views of the afterlife are extremely unusual:
By their [Bormann, Goebbels, etc.] work and loyal companionship they will remain as close to me after my death as I hope my spirit will continue to dwell among them and accompany them always.
—Adolf Hitler’s Final Will and Political Testament.
“My dear Party Comrade, your death is not in vain! Our dead have all come back to life. They are marching with us not only in spirit; they are alive, too. And one of those who will accompany us into the most distant future will be this dead man. May that be our sacred vow in this hour, that we wish to ensure that this dead man take his place in the ranks of our Volk’s immortal martyrs. From his death shall hence come forth life a millionfold for our Volk.”
—Adolf Hitler. February 12th 1936.
Because of their materialistic thinking, Pantheists deny any form of an afterlife. In Hitler’s mind, however, one’s soul will continue to live on and their impact on their race is a determining factor in maintaining divine consciousness.
Hitler’s goal was with the advancement of the human race by killing of the inferior, is to help create an evolutionary society in which man co-evolves with the divine creator until man himself finally becomes divine so that the German people go with God as immortal. In his view, Hitler was genuinely fulfilling his God’s will, even pleasing him, but not in the way that freethinkers portray it: Adolf Hitler was not fulfilling the Abrahamic God’s, but the Panentheistic God’s natural will and cultivating a closeness between him and the German people.
Thats my take on it… Thanks for reading! Cheers!
Everything you just argued is already refuted by my article in German Studies Review and the Epilogue to that that you’ll find in Hitler Homer Bible Christ. So you are basically just ignoring my arguments and gainsaying them by just repeating the same claims I already refuted. I suggest you actually consult my article and its epilogue and trust real peer reviewed scholarship and not specious apologetics. See (as you were instructed to do) Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus and Richard Steigmann-Gall’s The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945.
First of all, I already have read your book, as well as Weikart’s book, Heschel’s book, Steigmann-Gall’s book and Hasting’s book, and I have used multiple primary sources ranging from memoirs, diaries, testimonies, recollections and his public and private writings as well as some secondary sources which support what I wrote above and refutes both your conclusion and Weikart’s conclusion.
So I am no “specious apologist” as you say I am, and had I been a Catholic apologist, I would have been trying to argue that Hitler was an atheist.
But Hitler was NOT an atheist as he actively rejected atheism in private:
I’m convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse. An educated man retains the sense of the mysteries of nature and bows before the unknowable. An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal) as soon as he perceives that the State, in sheer opportunism, is making use of false ideas in the matter of religion, whilst in other fields it bases everything on pure science. That’s why I’ve always kept the Party aloof from religious questions.
Hitler was NOT a Pantheist, and he explicitly rejected Pantheism in a monologue on February 26th 1942:
‘What is ruining Christianity today is what once ruined the ancient world. The Pantheistic worldview would not suit the conditions of the period. As soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world was bound to collapse.’
This, by the way, comes from the German version of the monologues, which are considered to be authentic and reliable, and are used by leading historians such as Ian Kershaw to study Hitler’s worldview.
Also, I have defined Christianity in a fair manner. I’ve used the universal definition of a Christian, which is someone who thinks that Jesus is the son of God born a Virgin (thus is fully human and fully divine), was crucified by the Romans, absolved all humans from our sins by dying, rose from the dead and went to heaven. A Christian also believes that believing in Jesus will save you, and that Jesus will return right before Judgement Day. If I was an apologist, I would have defined a Christian as someone who loves his neighbour, doesn’t kill and turns the other cheek. And since I haven’t defined a Christian that way you cannot call me an apologist. Hitler rejected all forms of Christianity, both traditional and eccentric, as has been evidenced by the diaries of Rosenberg and Goebbels, where in both he rejects Positive Christianity in 1939 with Goebbels and Houston-Stewart Chamberlains’ Germanic Christianity in 1941 with Rosenberg.
So he was NOT a Christian of any kind.
Hitler DID embrace Panentheism because held the view that God created the world and was found in everything, Like you say Hitler DID believe in a personal God and an afterlife, which rules out Pantheism. However, he also thought that Nature WAS divine and did not adhere to any, even the most warped views, about Jesus and the Gospels but to the ‘Laws of Nature’ to protect the Germans.
I fail to see what your point is. Nothing you have presented answers anything in the article you claim here to be commenting on. Could you please address the content of the article?
I have already addressed the content of this article by using primary and secondary sources to refute both yours & Weikart’s conclusions and the arguments that you use to get to your conclusion both on this article & in your book, in both of which you try to argue that the man who didn’t believe in any of the central teachings of Christianity but had eccentric ideas about its central figure was somehow “a Christian”.
Your try to back up your already ridiculous claims via very convoluted and ultimately incorrect arguments:
Your definition of who a Christian is would be criticized by anyone with even the most basic understanding of Christian theology. A Christian is NOT someone who believes in God, has positive ideas about Jesus and also believes in the afterlife. By your definition, I AM also a Christian, despite the fact that Islam does not believe in most of the central teachings of Christianity except for the virgin birth, the resurrection and the 2nd coming of Jesus. He did NOT believe in any of these things at all. Weikart’s definition DOES exclude some Christians such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witness but it includes most Christians (Catholic, Protestant & Orthodox). Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses can still be considered Christian because although they do NOT believe in the Trinity, they DO believe in the vast majority of central Christian teachings. Arians and the Unitarians are heretical Christians (Pseudo-Christian) because they deny multiple central aspects of the faith (such as the infallibility of the Bible and original sins) while still believing in other central Christian teachings (such as the divinity of Jesus and his resurrection). The Cathars cannot be considered Christian, first and foremost, because they are POLYTHEISTIC: believing in a good God (God of the New Testament) and evil God (God of the Old Testament, who also created the devil) and also because they reject Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, him dying for our sins and most of all, his divinity. Branch Davidians and People’s Temple are religious cults and are not considered to be formal branches of Christianity, so cant be called “famous sects of Christianity” as you claim they are. Liberal Christians still believe in the more mystical elements of their faith such as the resurrection in some way. For example the American Anglican Bishop John Shelby may not believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but believes that Jesus’ soul rose from the dead and this aspect is still a central part of his faith. There is no historical record to suggest that Hitler had any belief in the resurrection.
Secondly, your extremely ridiculous arguments that the monologues were heavily edited by Bormann, who was an atheist and wanted to strengthen/exaggerate Hitler’s views to make sure that they matched his own, and that Genoud was a Catholic who wanted to make Hitler look like an atheist by distorting the monologues when really he was a Christian. Bormann embraced not atheism but Panentheism:
‘When we National Socialists speak of a belief in God, we do not mean the same thing as naive Christians and their clerical exploiters have in mind — some anthropoid creature sitting around somewhere in the spheres. Instead, our intent is to open people’s eyes to the fact that, aside from this small planet earth, which is relatively insignificant with relation to the vast universe, there is an unimaginably great number of other celestial bodies in the universe, an infinite number of bodies surrounded as is the sun by planets and, like these planets, in turn, similarly surrounded by smaller bodies, moons. The power of nature’s law that propels these infinite bodies through the universe is what we call the omnipotent force, or God. The claim that this universal force could somehow care for the fate of each individual, of each bacillus here on earth, that it might be influenced by so-called prayers or other astounding things, rests to a great degree on the naivete or on profit-minded impertinence.”
So your argument that Bormann “the atheist” falls apart there, because he was NOT an atheist. And why would Genoud (who you admit was an ardent Nazi sympathizer) want to make Hitler look like an atheist when Genoud himself was a Catholic (and Hitler was himself raised a Catholic)? Wouldn’t he want to make Hitler belief in God stronger NOT weaker? Quite why Genoud wanted to make Hitler look an atheist does not make sense to me. Then, although you correctly state that the English monologues are NOT reliable and may be based on faulty transcripts, the sources that you have used such as Picker’s original German version of the monologues and Bormann’s book have been used by professional historians for decades now, and they have not upset the consensus that Hitler was NOT a Christian because even in the original German Hitler’s comments on the churches are very critical.
Then, the Catholic Church was NOT created by Paul. Infact there was no such thing as the ‘Catholic Church’ until the 1054 East-West Schism, which was caused by the theological dispute between Greek and Roman theologians. These clergymen ended the dispute by separating the Nicene Christian Church (which was the official church of the Roman Empire, and later the Byzantine Empire) into the Roman Catholic Church (which created Western Christianity) and the Greek Orthodox Church (which created Eastern Christianity). Your claim that ‘he was only referring to Catholicism’ because there no similar beliefs, practices and rituals in Protestantism and Orthodoxy are absurd. Example is the Catholic Church is NOT the only church that sees itself as ‘the one true church’. Infact ALL the churches see themselves as ‘the one true church’ and Hitler denounced them all for all being equally wrong. Then your to claim that Catholics believe in a version of heaven so totally different from Protestants is so ridiculous that I’m skeptical that you actually believe in this nonsense. All Christians believe in the SAME kind of heaven and hell, although Catholics also believe in purgatory, and middle-plank between heaven and hell. Hitler did NOT believe in either heaven, hell or even purgatory. His version of the afterlife is not consistent with traditional forms of the afterlife. Annihalationism is NOT “an accepted Christian teaching in many sects” and no traditional form of Christianity adheres to this/ At best, it is adhered to by some eccentric Christians, who still, btw, adhere to other central Christian beliefs. Italians and Spaniards may be mostly Catholic, but there is a Protestant and Eastern Orthodox minorities, so Hitler was ‘not only referring to Catholicism.’ Then, Hitler’s disdain for “elaborate Jewish rites” can also refer to Lutheran and Anglican confirmations, since they are exactly the same as Catholic confirmations, and all Christian Churches perform mass in the same way, which ruins your claim that “it could only refer to Catholicism.”
Then, ‘Positive Christianity’ ISN’T a sect of Christianity and on the contrary, its goal was NOT to be a sect of Christianity, as Steigmann-Gall states:
“The Nazi approach to confessionalism displayed a general disregard for doctrine. Positive Christianity was not an attempt to make a complete religious system with dogma and ritual of its own: it was never formalised into a faith to which anyone could convert. Rather, this was primarily a social and political worldview meant to emphazise those qualities in Christianity that could end sectarianism”
Steigmann-Gall makes it very clear that this was only an attempt to allow devout German Lutherans and German Catholics to accept Nazi ideology and to also continue accepting their own Catholic and Lutheran views and beliefs. And both could accept Jesus as God, the Virgin Birth, the Trinity and the Resurrection, while also thinking Jesus had been an “Aryan” and reading gospel references to the Jews generally through the prism of Nazism. So even if Hitler DID adhere to ‘Positive Christianity’ (which he did NOT adhere to, and the only statement calling himself a ‘Positive Christian’ is a public statement from an early 1939 speech) he cannot be considered a Christian. To be a Christian, he would have to adhere to other main Christian beliefs. And he did not.
Lastly, while it is true that many of things that Martin Luther (Founder of the Protestant Reformation) advocates in his 1543 anti-Semitic tract ‘On the Jews and their Lies’, and while I can easily imagine Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther bonding in the afterlife over their mutual hatred of the Jews and Gypsies, the reasons for why the atrocities happened are entirely different. Martin Luther embraced Christian antisemitism: the belief that the Jews had killed Jesus (even thought it was the Romans), are damned eternally and will barbeque in hell for not accepting Jesus as their Lord & Savior. The reason why the Jews, not the Romans, were blamed for the death of Jesus is because Judas Iscariot (who was a Jew) betrayed Jesus and set in motion the things that led to the crucifixion of Jesus on the cross. Luther and other Christian anti-Semites have viewed the Jews as a purely religious group, and Luther’s solution to the Jewish Question was that the Jews should accept and convert to Christianity. On the other hand, Hitler had come to adopt a newer form of antisemitism which saw the Jews as a purely ethnic group, not a religious one. This is something he held onto from the very beginning of his career to the very end of his political career. So the Holocaust WAS NOT a “Christian-imagined, Christian-enacted, Christian-led” atrocity, because he killed the Jews on racial, not theological grounds.
As shown above, Hitler was NOT an atheist, Christian or a Pantheist, and all of your points are either wrong, irrelevant or distort the facts significantly. Hitler was NOT a Christian of any kind, and unlike you, Weikart is not playing a game driven by personal prejudices, ideology and distancing Hitler’s beliefs from your own, except in his final conclusion of him being a Pantheist. While Christians have a history of religious intolerance and the clerical hierarchy were no saints either (see the Inquisition, Crusades and witch-hunts) to say that the Holocaust was motivated by Christianity is just wrong. It was motivated by racism, not religious intolerance. There are plenty of things that you can fault Christians for, but why run the risk of looking like a fool?
No, Mustafa, you aren’t addressing my article at all. You are just stringing together a bunch of assertions and non sequiturs, none of which address any of my evidence or any of my inferences from that evidence to any of my conclusions.
And all you do when this is pointed out is continue to just repeat yourself. The repeated gainsaying of a position is simply not an argument against it.
I have already addressed the content of this article by categorically refuting your arguments as well as your conclusion and Weikart’s conclusion.
Hitler was NOT a Christian of any flavour, eccentric or traditional, and you are trying to argue otherwise by inventing an bizarre, wide, and incorrect definition of what a Christian is. Your definition of who a Christian is is someone who believes in God, believes that Jesus existed (and likes him) and believes in an afterlife of some sort. By your definition of Christianity, I can also qualify as a Christian, and so can the vast majority of non-Christians. This is despite the fact that I reject most of the central teachings of Christianity, with the exception of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, his resurrection and his 2nd coming. Hitler didn’t embrace any of the central teachings of Christianity, and my own views are closer to Christianity than Hitler’s. Then there is your list of the people that Weikart’s definition of who a Christian is supposedly “excludes”. Quakers are Protestants so Weikart’s definition doesn’t exclude them. Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses can still be Christians (and are excluded from Weikart’s meaning) because though they reject the Holy Trinity, they still espouse and believe in the vast majority of what are regarded to be the central teachings of Christianity. The Unitarians and Arians are heretical branches of Christianity because they deny multiple important aspects of Christianity (such as original sin and the Bible’s infallibility) while still espousing major Christian beliefs (such as the Virgin Birth and divinity of Jesus) so are classified as Pseudo-Christian. Cathars cannot be considered Christian because they are Polytheistic, believing in an evil God (the God of the Old Testament) and a good God (the God of the New Testament), which is a rejection of Christianity’s first commandment: that there is only one God. And the Branch Davidians and People’s Temples are cults and not forms of Christianity, so they are excluded from any normal definition of Christianity. So to sit and here and claim that the man who held none of even the most basic beliefs of Christianity while having some peculiar ideas about Christianity’s central figure that taught some things and then died and stayed dead is somehow “a Christian” is absurd. Hitler cannot even be classified as a heretical Christian, let alone a “devout believer” as you claim. And while liberal Christians like the American Bishop John Shelby-Spong don’t believe that Jesus’ physical body rose from the dead, they believe that it was his soul rose from the dead and see it as a mystical reality. There is no historical record to suggest that Hitler believed in this at all.
Secondly, Steingmann-Gall makes it very clear that ‘Positive Christianity’ was not a branch of Christianity at all. On the contrary, in Steigmann-Gall’s own words, “Positive Christianity was not an attempt to make a complete religious system with dogma and ritual of its own: it was never formalised into a faith to which anyone could convert. Rather, this was primarily a social and political worldview meant to emphazise those qualities in Christianity that could end sectarianism. Positive Christianity was never an attempt to create a practicable ‘third confession’ but was a strategy to allow believers in the two established denominations, Catholic or Lutheran, to embrace Nazism’s political ideology without hesitation.” In other words, it was basically an attempt to co-opt Christianity in Germany and bring them inline with the Nazi agenda. So even if Hitler adhered to this, he couldn’t be considered a Christian, because it was not an attempt to create a new branch of Christianity. It was not formalized into a faith of its own.
Then, Paul didn’t create the Catholic Church: Roman clergymen and theologians did, after having dispute on Christian theology with their Greek counterparts, who responded by creating the Orthodox Church, and lead to the East-West Schism of 1054. The Romans were responsible for creating Western Christianity (which started with Roman Catholicism, from which Protestantism evolved in the 16th-century) and Eastern Christianity (which started with Orthodox Christianity). Many, but not all Italians and Spaniards are Catholic. There is 1,500,000 Spanish Protestants living in Spain, and 440,000 Italian Protestants. And then to claim that Hitler “only referred to Catholicism” because there are no similar rituals in the Protestant and Orthodox Church is just as absurd as your claim that Spanish and Italians are “only Catholic”. Lutheran approaches to confirmation are exactly the same as Catholic approaches to confirmation, and there are plenty of rituals that the Catholic Church shares with all Protestant Churches (Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist, Anabaptist and Methodist) and the Orthodox Church, which makes a nonsense of your claim that “it only can refer to Catholicism”. Annihilationism is not a teaching which has ever been espoused by any form of traditional Christianity, and at best, preached by the heretical forms of Christianity. While Hitler did believe in an afterlife, he did not believe in either hell, purgatory or heaven:
“Perhaps the adherents of the Roman Church call this ‘paganism.’ That may well be so. In that case, Christ was a pagan. I call pagan their distortions of Christ’s ideas and teachings, their cults, their conception of hell and purgatory and heaven, and their worship of saints.”
Otto Wagener: The Memoirs of a Confidant.
So Hitler was not an annihilationist, like you are trying to suggest. Darwin may have not condemned the Jews, Gypsies or Slavs but Hitler definitely embraced a Darwinian morality and mentality, believing that those who are holding back society should be eliminated and that those who are not will survive and thrive:
“In Nature, the law of the jungle has been in force from the beginning. All those unsuitable to live, and the weak, are trampled underfoot. Man, and above all the Church, have made it precisely their goal to keep alive by artificial means the weak, those unfit for life and the invalids.”
-Hitler as quoted by Christa Schroeder.
Hitler was also NOT a Pantheist:
‘What is ruining Christianity today is what once ruined the ancient world. The Pantheistic worldview would not suit the conditions of the period. As soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world was bound to collapse.’
Point I’m trying to make is that Hitler was a non-Christian but didn’t embrace either ‘Positive Christianity’ or Pantheism, but embraced Panentheism, as you can see by my quotes above.
You are simply arguing by gainsaying. That is not an argument. To argue against the premises of an argument, you must give reasons for why they are false, not just insist they are false; and those reasons have to be legitimate, they can’t just be “made up.” And to argue against the conclusion of an argument, you must identify a fallacy of inference between premises and conclusion—as in, an actual fallacy. You can’t just “insist” the conclusion doesn’t follow. And non sequiturs (citing evidence that has no actual bearing on anything I said) don’t work either.
You are not responding to any of my actual premises or arguments. You are just making assertions and gainsaying what I said.
If you ever want to address my actual evidence and my actual arguments, let me know. But this impertinent drivel is a waste of everyone’s time here.
How important was Hitler’s Christianity in WW2? Did it only influence the Nazis to kill Jews or did it also influence them to kill the occult practicing gypsies, the gays, and the “godless” communists?
Did christianity play a significant role in starting WW2?
I suspect Christianity was not required for WW2 simpliciter because the precipitating conditions were unrelated (the failure and treatment of Weimar Germany made WW2 almost inevitable) and the necessary conditions could have been replaced (Hitler could have simply been swapped out with the equivalent of a Stalin; fascists don’t require religion as a motive, they only use it when available as a tool).
What Christianity did was cause the Holocaust. That would not have happened if Christians had not invented anti-Semitism and the concept of justifying and even motivating the murder of gay people and “unbelievers” and “pagans” (as opposed to dominating them with selective murder instead).
However, this does not mean there could not have been a comparable development. Removing Christianity from history would probably have removed most of its resulting evils. But some nonzero probability always remains that someone else would invent some of them. Hence we see Stalin engaging in mass murder for entirely more pragmatic reasons (to simply eliminate his actual enemies, instead of imaginary ones); likewise the Japanese in China.
Religion is just one kind of fascist ideology that can motivate mass murder. There are nonreligious fascist ideologies that can as well. The lesson is that all fascist ideologies are evil—hence, most religion is evil, not because it is the only evil ideology, but because it is one instantiation of an evil ideology.
Judeo-Christian-Islamism has been fundamentally fascist since almost its inception because it all shares the same fascist textbook and playbook (see The Will of God: 24 Evil Old Testament Verses), and attempts to liberalize them generally fail to gain wide traction (see Dear Christian: You Might Be Worshiping the Antichrist and What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad).
The Japanese were quite religious, do you think the Asian front of WW2 was also secular?
https://www.dukeupress.edu/japans-holy-war
the “equivalent of a stalin” would mean centuries of divinely ordained autocrats assisting in consolidation of power and seminary training influencing the style of tyranny, Christian heritage is complicit here as well
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjQs_QjSwc&t=1h45m2s
As the historian Alan Bullock in his book “Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1991)” explained:
“The fact that it was a Church education helped to form the mind of a man who was to become known for his dogmatism and his propensity for seeing issues in absolute terms, in black and white. Anyone reading Stalin’s speeches and writings will notice their catechistic structure, the use of question and answer, the reduction of complex questions to a set of simplified formulas, the quoting of text to support his arguments. The same Church influence has been noted by biographers in his style of speaking or writing Russian: ‘declamatory and repetitive, with liturgical overtones.’ ”
in the book of acts there is a story about killing bourgeoisie landowners who fail to give all of their money to the community. That’s not merely communism, that’s Stalinism.
in “Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism” By Erik van Ree it says
“As Stalin noted in 1952: “Jesus Christ also suffered, and even carried his cross, and then he rose up to heaven. You, then, have to suffer too, in order to rise up to heaven””
Stalin’s personality cult was record breaking
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/65719-most-statues-raised-to-oneself
And even to this day the church printed a calendar celebrating Stalin, the church has a history of collaboration with stalin, this is hardly the stuff of secularism
I fail to see the relevance of any of this data here.
The question is how much of WW2 was influenced by religion, given Hitler based his actions on Christianity and the rampant antisemitism that already existed throughout europe, and that the Japanese called it a holy war, and even in the example of the Soviets they had a popular song called “sacred war” then can we really say it was a secular conflict?
And much like how Hitler had a concordat, Stalin also had a concordat in 1943 during the war
The Nazis wore belt buckles that said “god is with us” so we do we not take them at their word that they really believe this is a holy war?
I fail to see the connection. Correlation is not causation. “Everyone in 1939 was religious in some abstract way” does not get you to “religion caused the war” any more than “Everyone in 1939 had a liver” gets you to “livers caused the war.”
It’s also a bit dodgy to redefine religion halfway through the argument. If just any ideology counts as a religion, then you aren’t really talking about religion anymore, but ideology. And that ideology was a contributing cause of the war is too trivial a statement to be of any use. It’s like saying “politics caused the war.”
Why can we say Christianity caused the holocaust but can’t say the same regarding WW2? What are the requirements to classify a war as being caused by religion rather than religion just being correlated.
Their belt buckles said god is with us, not “let’s get their livers” or “politics is with us”, they could have kept it a private matter but it was quite public.
Do you agree that some ideology like Nazism caused WW2? And isn’t Nazism just mystic racism anchored to a personality cult and thus too close to a religion for comfort, they had a whole positive Christianity campaign
What caused WW2? Or is it too complex of a question?
WW2 was caused by the economic conditions of Weimar Germany, and our interference with Japan’s access to oil. Christian beliefs were not relevant (it would have started had all humans on Earth been atheists, for example, and all else remained the same).
The Holocaust, however, makes no sense at all but as an outcome of peculiar Christian beliefs (it would not have happened had all humans on Earth been atheists, for example, and all else remained the same).
Does this mean WW2 was unavoidable for the Germans and Japanese given the conditions? If the Germans and japanese were atheists who wanted to solve things peacefully would there have been no way to do it given the attitude of America and the others?
And why did America decide to set its differences aside and make an ally of Germany and Japan in the end? Did they just want an ally against communism?
Also by that criteria can’t we say that slavery and the annihilation of the native Americans had nothing to do with Christian beliefs and that the will to rob and exploit is what drove the perpetrators and that they would have killed them even if the perpetrators were atheists?
There is no connection between “being an atheist” and “wanting to solve things peacefully.” Atheists can be ruthless fascists, just as Christians can be pacifists. You seem to have some strange idea about how political viewpoints form and survive.
The Germans went to war because their response to economic hardship was militant fascism. It did not have to be. And there isn’t anything about being atheist or not that alone is going to decide which way a population goes. Japan went to war because it already was a militant fascist state.
Losing the war changed the mindsets of both nations. Which is why we could ally with them. But the reason we wanted to is because that was a primary war objective: to remove militant enemies from the playing board (in preparation for the already-expected coming war with Russia), and not being ruthless fascists ourselves, colonization and genocide were no longer recognized as valid tools to that end. That crazy idea of “choice” that you seem to have a hard time grasping.
And they did not “just ally against communism.” Even in respect to fears of expansionist Russia, that actually had nothing to do with communism (that was a shibboleth, a target of propaganda; not, as Thucydides would say, “the real reason” for anything). All would have proceeded the same even if Russia were a capitalist state. It still would have been militant, fascist, and expansionist, and still have been a threat to the world and every nation in it.
As for the separate issues of slavery and genocidal colonialism, those are themselves subjects with their own unique histories. You seem to have a hard time with understanding the world is not black and white. Every institution has its own history, and cannot simply be assumed “the same” as every other. And not every phenomenon is “predominately” either caused or not caused by one thing; different things have different mixtures of causes.
The matter is therefore never whether “religion” (a term you keep defining in weird ways and changing the meaning of) or “Christianity” (a term you also never define and seem to have a hard time understanding) was “at all” causally related or not. It can be in different degrees and different ways.
The only thing that matters for statements about what caused what is if you remove the thing you are testing as a cause, will the effect go away.
And to do that test, you have to specify what the effect is; and then the answer will differ per effect. You can’t keep changing what effect you are talking about (war in general is not the same effect as specific wars; specific wars are not the same effects as completely unrelated things like slavery or colonialism; genocide is not the same effect as a specific genocide, like the Holocaust; and so on). You need to pick a lane. Stop wandering off topic.
To illustrate what I mean: the genocide of Native Americans has little in common with the genocide of the Jews. That they are both genocide is abstractly true, but causally irrelevant. What caused each are entirely different things, with entirely different histories.
So, one at a time:
Slavery is as old as civilization and was never built on a religious foundation. The only difference between Christian slavery and pre-Christian slavery is that Christian slavery was vastly more horrific and dehumanizing. Christianity did not cause slavery. It made it far worse. It also provided an irrational defense of it (God’s Word) that did not before exist, making it harder to get rid of. In that respect the American Civil War was caused by Christianity (or more specifically, a virulent American brand of it); absent which, a more rational course for ending slavery would have proceeded (as it did in other Christian empires).
We can test this by removing the cause: remove virulent American Christianity, replace it with, say, “Canadian Christianity,” and there would have been no Civil War. The course of history would have looked more like this. It is true that that course was wrecked by a political decision: the U.S. Constitution and its Horrible Compromise (the 1619 Project is right about that). But that was itself a product of a virulent brand of Christianity (softer Christianities would never have gone there, as evinced by the fact that in the 1700s none did); and the readiness to murder hundreds of thousands of people to “keep” slavery was also caused by this same murderous brand of Christianity, without which the southern states would not have been able to muster the armies they did.
Now to the completely unrelated situation of colonialist genocide:
Most other empires effected colonialism without such substantial efforts at genocide. America built its empire almost uniquely on a genocidal model. Unlike the British or indeed even Spanish empires (even as worse as the Spanish were than the British), who ruled by occupation and oppression, keeping native populations as subjects (and resorting to genocide only in rare and isolated cases, not as systematic policy), America routinely (as policy) cleared its occupied colonies of natives by violence (primarily through mass murder and expulsion), and then repopulated the depopulated areas with colonists. This is why the American empire is literally the only empire to have survived the Age of Empires intact. We killed everybody who could take it back.
This makes the American case unique. Compare it to other oppressive regimes (Australia and Canada for example), there are many overlaps in terms of soft genocide (reeducation, eugenics, ghettoing, isolation and exploitation), but the direct brute genocidal policy of the U.S. (in abject and continuous violence) has no parallel.
So how you explain this behavior globally is not going to be the same. The American case must have a particular and different cause than the others. And the role of religion is going to be varying (sometimes only as a mediating cause, a means to an end that would have been sought without it; but sometimes as an efficient cause, without which the effect would not have happened).
For example, America without its particularly vicious brand of Christian belief and worldview would have looked more like Australia and Canada, still genocidal but in much more indirect ways. Whether these nations would have been that way without Christianity at all is arguable, but harder to prove. If we look at the most successful pre-Christian imperial models (Persia, Rome), they operated entirely differently, integrating local cultures much more readily, rather than trying to destroy, isolate, or oppress them (any more than they already oppressed their own citizens). This at least lends credence to the hypothesis that Christianity caused the whole genocidal mode of colonization (it’s hard to identify any other difference that could be responsible for the difference in outcome); and the worst form of Christianity (American Christian Nationalism) caused the worst form of that. But whether this hypothesis holds up on a final analysis depends on a wider examination of the conditions and what changed between the Roman Empire and the Age of Exploration and what of those changes can be credited to Christianity (as in, would not have happened but for the presence of Christianity).
This has no relationship to the Holocaust, which targeted specifically religiously identified victims. It was not a merely instrumental means to land acquisition but involved literally picking targets out of their own population to eliminate, and for reasons that had no objective basis, but a solely religious one (even “gypsies” and “homosexuals” were targeted as heathens and biblical abominations, respectively). There literally would never have been a Holocaust without Christianity. The genocides of native peoples at least had credible alternative causes (requiring us to compare causal hypotheses to ascertain the one most probable among them); the Holocaust did not (without Christianity, the probability it would have happened anyway approaches zero).
I was trying to figure out how inevitable WW2 was given the conditions and I used slavery and the colonization of the Americas as an example because you mentioned them elsewhere as examples
in a similar way can’t we test ww2 by removing the cause, removing virulent German Christianity, “Positive Christianity”, and replace it with “Quaker Christianity,” and thus blame just about every atrocity on Christianity (or claim it was exacerbated by a “vicious brand of Christian belief”) including WW2? were international wars (such as the thirty years war or the world wars) even a thing before Christianity? europe seemed alot more united under the Roman empire rather than under Christianity
didn’t Persia abolish slavery with the Cyrus cylinder and the Athenians abolish slavery in the solonian constitution?
You are now confusing religion with ideology.
For example you could replace Positive Christianity with the Neofascist Atheism of Martin Bormann and still get WW2.
It is tautological that if you replace any belief system with an anti-war system you won’t get war. That’s because of anti-war ideology, not the status of it being religious.
And no. Persia never abolished slavery. Neither did the Athenians.
The Cyrus cylinder allowed free subjects to return to their homelands; it had nothing to do with slaves. The Athenian constitution prohibited the enslavement of citizens (its economy continued to run on the enslavement of foreigners; slaves ended up thus comprising a majority of the population, exactly as under the Roman Empire, which had the same law). This is also what the Bible did (forbidding chattel slavery for citizens, allowing instead indentured servitude, but allowing and indeed commanding the chattel enslavement of non-citizens).
Then can’t we just use “war ideology” as our control variable and thus say that Christianity has been coincidental to atrocities such as the holocaust and that Christian antisemitism could be easily replaced by an atheist anti-Semite. Can’t we just say that antisemitism is the control variable here?
Can’t we always say that only certain bad characteristics are the problem rather than the religion and that nothing is truly founded on religion.
How did Martin Bormann manage to get a high position if he was an atheist and if Hitler’s Christianity has been important in the regime? It’s odd that this happens in a religious regime
You are back to conflating the war and the Holocaust.
Why?
If there were no Christianity there would be no Holocaust. But there would still be a WWII. The war was not fought against the Jews; that was simply opportunism (the war was used as an opportunity to complete a side-goal caused by Christianity). The war was fought because of fascism, nationalism, and economics (like most wars). The Holocaust was not a goal of fascism, nationalism, or economics, apart from its purely Christian motives.
That’s why these are not the same things and cannot be conflated, causally or ontologically.
As to why some atheist Nazis were tolerated:
Nazism was anti-ecumenical, i.e., it did not like there being churches separate from the state. Its goal was to unify the world under a single government that would simultaneously be the singular Christian authority. To achieve that goal it was diplomatic: it allowed Nazi neo-pagans and atheists who at least sung the party line of Platonic Christianity (Christianity as public symbol and metaphor).
This is actually almost identical to modern American Neoconservative ideology (wherein religion is the opiate of the masses and that is why the government must pretend religion is true and employ and control it rather than deny it). Marxist ideologies took the same premise and went the other direction (trying to deny and remove religion). Nazism equated atheism with Marxism when it took that form; but did not when it took a Neoconservative form.
So, if Bormann had been a New Atheist, he’d not have been accepted by his Nazi peers; but because Bormann took a Neoconservative position on religion, akin to Leo Strauss and (probably) Dick Cheney, he fit in. This is also how closet atheists and ideologues (like Strauss and others) gained influence and power under the first Bush administration (and why you will read accounts of religious lobbyists being laughed off in private by an administration that publicly pretended to align with them for votes).
How can we differentiate between a religious war and a war fought over “fascism, nationalism, and economics”, we can always say the holocaust was about economics because they thought jews were bad for the economy, and wasn’t Nazi Germany nationalistic and fascist? it’s not like Nazi Germany was a democratic country without any economic woes and without nationalistic feelings
how much of the holocaust was caused by Christianity? does that also include the “three million Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), two million Poles and 400,000 other ‘undesirables’.”
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/65499-largest-mass-genocide
Are you implying dick Cheney is an atheist?
Religion means an organized set of superstitious beliefs about the supernatural world.
Fascism means an organized set of pseudorational beliefs about the natural world.
But in general the way you distinguish between causes is remove one and see what happens. Remove Lutheranism (and its entire history of Christian, Bible-based antisemitism) and there would be no Holocaust (as in: a mass extermination of Jews and Gypsies and Gays). But there would still be a fascist reaction to the post-WWI political theatre and the collapse of the Weimar regime.
Case in point: no religion was involved in causing the Japanese to go to war. That was all realpolitik. Religion played a small role in prosecuting the war and making it harder for them to get out of the war, but remove that religion, and the war still happens (and looks more like the European theatre instead of the Pacific).
The Soviet purges also prove the point: no Holocaust. They did not target religiously categorized peoples (Jews and Gypsies and Gays). They were realpolitik, targeting actual material enemies of the state. Germany had already captured the majority public (in fact it was a popular uprising) and so never needed to do that on such a scale (they killed lots of political opponents, but nowhere near as many). Stalin was trying to push against massive public opinion, and so had to kill massive amounts of opponents (he was basically fighting a civil war).
Likewise the Soviets and Poles killed by Germany: they were not targeted for religious reasons, they were literally POWs, enemy combatants. So, yes, remove religion, and you still get war atrocities against POWs (Japan did the same). But you don’t get the Holocaust. No Russians or Poles were thrown in ovens. And they weren’t targeted for purely superstitious reasons.
And yes. Cheney is a neocon. Pretending to public religion (while believing atheism is the only rational reality) is their doctrine (explicitly articulated by Strauss and other thought leaders in that movement).
One question, if you would be so kind to answer. What relationship did the Catholic Church have with National Socialism? Did you condemn him or cooperate?
You mean, did they condemn him or cooperate.
Publicly, the Catholic Church cooperated. Privately it had reservations and some priests defied the Vatican and resisted.
Wikipedia has a long article on this threading the needle. But more authoritative are the academic books I cite in this article (by Susannah Heschel and Steigmann-Gall). See also the critical article by David Kertzer which addresses new documents pertaining (there is an interview with him about his book on it at PBS).
Were the Jews, gypsies, and gays the only ones religiously targeted or were there others too?
in WW2 it’s easy to “remove one and see what happens” because it had so many fronts, how do we decide if it was religious or not in other wars that didn’t have so many fronts like Putin’s war or the deluge?
were only the antisemitic killings in the deluge religious or was the war at large religious too? with Protestant Sweden Catholic Poland and orthodox Ukraine&Russia? how do we decide where religious influence starts and ends?
or how about deciding if Putin’s ongoing war is a sacred war? Putin says it is and he’s receiving church support outside of Russia too, but is it really religious?
You keep going off the rails. You need to pick a lane.
What do you actually want to discuss? The causes of the war, or the treatment of POW and political prisoners, or the causes of the Holocaust (the Holocaust) specifically? Because those aren’t the same things. Pick one. Then ask a question about that one thing.
in WW2 it’s easy to “remove one and see what happens” because it had so many fronts, how do we decide if it was religious or not in other wars that didn’t have so many fronts like Putin’s war or the deluge?
were only the antisemitic killings in the deluge religious or was the war at large religious too? with Protestant Sweden Catholic Poland and orthodox Ukraine&Russia? how do we decide where religious influence starts and ends?
or how about deciding if Putin’s ongoing war is a sacred war? Putin says it is, but is it?
Counterfactual history is epistemically foundational to all history as a science. You cannot claim X caused Y if you cannot work out the effect of removing X from the causal system. All history thus operates by doing this.
It is thus not hard at all to evaluate what the primary motives for the war were and thus what would have happened if you removed one. This is why the history of WW2 and the Holocaust completely diverge historically. The Japanese (and even the Russians, who started the war as Hitler’s ally) clearly were fully motivated with zero interest in a Holocaust. The same can be worked out for the Germans (they had entirely clear and strong motives completely unrelated to the Holocaust, which would have remained even without Christianity as a worldview). And this has indeed been worked out in all serious histories of the war. So you might want to go actually read some.
There is no intelligible analog to Putin’s current war. It involves no Holocaust, or associated motive. It is not motivated by Christian beliefs either, but by Putin’s own narcissistic and nationalist beliefs, which would remain without Christianity, which for him is only a tool, not a motive (as has always been the case in Russia).
The other examples make even less sense as analogs. Whether some other war has complex motives hard to untangle has exactly nothing to do with whether we can distinguish the motives leading to WW2. So it doesn’t even matter if such other wars exist (and you have only alleged they do, not shown it; but showing it would get you nowhere, because those aren’t WW2).
And you still haven’t picked a lane. What do you even mean to be talking about? Please identify one of the subjects I listed and stick to that.
Didn’t Stalin also have a plan to execute Jews but simply died too early to do so?
When you say “as has always been the case in Russia” does that also include Christianity being used as a tool in the stalin era?
Regarding the Lane, let’s stick to the causes of the war, specifically counter-apologetics to arguments like “the Nazi high command had too many atheists(Hermann Goring, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher) and occult and neo-pagan Teutonic notions and thus can’t be blamed on Christians but rather on pagans and atheists”
Was Hermann goring even an atheist?
No.
Yes.
That’s not a lane. That’s a hodgepdge of unrelated questions. Christianity did not cause the war, so it won’t matter if there were (let’s say) a majority of atheists and pagans in the Nazi high command.
So those are two separate lanes. In fact, five different lanes: Do you want to discuss the causes of the war? Or do you want to discuss whether those specific three guys (out of the dozens in leading positions much less the whole party supporting them) were “atheists or pagans” in contradistinction to Christians? Or do you want to discuss whether the Nazi party was mostly “atheists or pagans” in contradistinction to Christians? Or do you want to discuss what this being the case (if it even were) had to do with anything? And if so, what? (The association of Nazis with “the occult,” meanwhile, is a myth.)
You have added lanes. I asked you to nix them down to one.
As for Göring, Rosenberg, and Streicher: Rosenberg was an isolated figure in Nazi intellectualism, whose anti-Christian views were rejected by the Nazis, and retooled into Positive Christianity against his intentions, so he cannot be held as representative; the only basis for accusing Göring of being non-Christian is a tabloid book by a Christian priest who presents no evidence but his own dubious recollections (deathbed remarks often being fabricated by Christians, there is nothing in this to be trusted); and Streicher was secretly an atheist of some kind (he confesses it in a post-arrest interview). [That is incorrect. We have a better source. Correction below.] I could add Martin Bormann, who was also an atheist Nazi. But these guys were outnumbered by crazy Christians like Hitler, to the point that they even had to hide their atheism from their peers (Streicher), or faced criticism for it (Bormann).
The apologetic you are quoting is a typical fabrication of Christian apoloists today who disingenuously label any Christianity they don’t agree with as “atheist” or “pagan,” or treat mere aesthetics or incidentals (such as ethnic adaptations of or inclusions in Christianity) as eclipsing the entire faith system they are incorporated in. Which is dishonest word gaming, not legitimate history. They likewise use cherry picking fallacies (four Nazis were atheists; therefore most Nazis were atheists; therefore atheism caused Nazism and Nazism was atheist). Stick to real historians, and actual peer reviewed history, please.
If you want to know about this, there are two excellent peer reviewed studies by real historians, which I cited in this very article you are commenting on. I suggest you read them: The Aryan Jesus and The Holy Reich.
Didn’t Goring say “I don’t believe that I will go to either heaven or hell when I die. I don’t believe in the Bible or in a lot of things which religious people think.”?
According to whom? That tabloid Christian priest claiming exclusive access to a deathbed confession?
Check your source.
The Nuremberg Interviews
By Leon Goldensohn page 132
Okay. That’s a solid source.
But that also has Goering say he disagreed with and would not by himself have supported the Holocaust.
So was Goering a Christian or not? What am I supposed to conclude?
Probably not. As I said “That’s a solid source.”
I just finished listening to the very interesting debate on YouTube.
There was one particular point that Weikart made toward the end of the debate that you never actually got around to responding to. And unless I’m missing something I don’t see where in this blog article you responded to that directly.
Weikart stated the following (paraphrasing here) :
“On the issue of Darwinism and the competition between races. Read the “Descent of Man”, Darwin spent of good deal of time talking about competition between races.
And talks about lower races and higher races, and how the Australian races are being beat out in the struggle for existence by the superior European races.
Darwin has an entire section called “The extinction of races” dedicated to this topic. Whereas nowhere in Christianity do you anything about the extinction of entire races.”
So can you please respond to that argument specifically?
Thanks.
Martin Luther (father of Protestant Christianity) wrote about the extinction of the Jewish race. His entire platform for that is identical to the Nazi Party platform for that (line by line, as shown by Avalos in The Christian Delusion). There is no mention of any such platform in Darwin. Darwin never calls for any organized extinguishing of any race. And does not mention Jews at all.
Likewise, the idea that black people are a race inferior to whites was invented by Christians and endorsed by theologians, particularly in the Catholic Church (I recently discussed this in Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America). In fact the very concept of “black” and “white” people was a Christian invention (to paraphrase W.E.B. DuBois, “Before the age of exploration,” i.e. the 15th century, “there were no white people,” and he’s right: no such concept existed until then; and then the concept was invented to establish a superiority-inferiority matrix to justify enslaving Africans, and dominating Native Americans).
Classifying the Jews as an inferior people condemned by God began in second century Christianity, and possibly earlier (it already appears in the NT). Classifying other races likewise (e.g. with “the curse of Ham”) began in earnest with the Age of Exploration (see The Christian Origins of Racism). Long before Darwin. And Nazi policy resembles these; it resembles nothing in Darwin.
By contrast, Darwin did not promote the idea of races being biologically inferior—he actually challenged this claim. Darwin is misquoted (often deliberately) by people like Weikart (who is actually a liar; a lot of what he claims about history in all his books is false; so I wouldn’t trust anything from him). They take passages where Darwin is talking about culture, and represent them as talking about biology; or passages about biology, and represent them as talking about policy. For example, when Darwin predicted the natural extermination of nonwhites, he gives as causes cultural choices, not biological properties.
This is well explained in Did Darwin Promote Genocide?
But as an example, here are Darwin’s actual words:
In other words, Europeans are not biologically superior to (say) Africans—their superiority is a happenstance of cultural development. Hence, they did not have “superior biological stock” in the Greeks; they simply learned from their books—culture, not biology.
When it comes to biology (where Darwin did think there could be selectable differences in the races; though nothing that entailed any moral judgment or domination of them), he did not prescribe but lamented the loss of other races when he said “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world,” by which he does not mean genocide, but simply natural extinction (which, ironically, Darwin attributed not to their being less intelligent, but to reproducing less—exactly the opposite of racist fearmongering about nonwhites—and he attributes this to cultural choices, e.g. how long mothers choose to nurse their young, and not biological differences).
When Darwin describes actual genocide, he describes it as “cruel,” a “train of evil,” that “originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.” So, unlike Hitler, Darwin condemned stances that would evolve into Hitler’s as cruel and evil and grounds for censure.