I have written many times before on the strange history of my scholarly involvement in the so-called “Table Talk” of Adolf Hitler. The most prominent example is the inclusion of my peer reviewed article in German Studies Review, with a new epilogue and commentary, in my book Hitler Homer Bible Christ. It’s the inclusion of that very chapter that lent the Hitler name to the title. But I’ve also been following the work of Mikael Nilsson, a Swedish professor of modern European history who was inspired by my GSR publication to go full Dan Brown on the mysterious Table Talk, researching every conceivable aspect of what on Earth happened with this dubious document and its bizarre history—traveling the globe, speaking to living witnesses or their surviving family, trolling countless archives, of letters and contracts and court records, getting a look at everything from transcripts of lost interviews to often overlooked details like old dust jackets of long-out-of-print editions. I’ve discussed the progress of Nilsson’s work before (in Hitler’s Table Talk: An Update and Hitler’s Table Talk: Another Update). But now, his outstanding book documenting all of this, and everything he discovered, is available as Hitler Redux: The Incredible History of Hitler’s So-Called Table Talks, published under the auspices of the Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right. Which publication I spoke about recently on the In Time show, an episode you might enjoy viewing.
I highly recommend getting a copy of Nilsson’s book and reading it. In fact for more than one reason. Firstly, of course, it is now the definitive account of the Table Talk and the history of its origin, editing, and use. Nothing could be more thorough. From analysis to bibliography, it is the unrivaled one-stop shop for understanding this text’s historiography, and will probably always be. Secondly, it is a fascinating and valuable example of writing the historiography of a text, and how historians of the modern era have such astounding access to source materials that historians of antiquity can only dream of. It is thus a paradigmatic example of how to do history, when such materials actually exist to get at. And thirdly, which relates to my interest (and one you possibly share) in the history of Christianity, it exemplifies a singular important lesson: that even with such vast access to source material, even living witnesses and multiple eyewitness testimony, it can still prove impossible to get at the actual truth behind a myth, and that even when things were written down within a matter of mere days the “official” version of what someone said or did can be wildly distorted by what others thought or wanted them to have said or done; never mind adding to that layers and layers of different persons transmitting this information over decades. And if that’s so for this text, just imagine how much more true this is for the history of Jesus and the early Church.
Myth vs. History
The grand “myth” of the Table Talk is that it is a collection of the verbatim words of Hitler recorded by eyewitnesses and spoken in candid privacy, thus granting us direct access to Hitler’s true thoughts and feelings. This turns out to be untrue in several respects. But on that foundation other myths arose, from the myth that the only English translation ever published (even still the only one being reprinted) accurately reflects the original German (as I proved for GSR, it simply doesn’t; it was derived from a fraudulently doctored French translation, and thus is wholly unusable), to the myth that it reveals Hitler knew nothing about the Holocaust (in fact the notes comprising the Table Talk assiduously avoid and thus lack any reference to secret military or civil policy at all, demonstrating such were among the subjects Hitler avoided discussing when these notes were made) or that he was an ardent atheist (as I proved for GSR, and have noted with further examples in the epilogue I added in HHBC, the original German shows quite the opposite; Nilsson confirms that conclusion).
It was that last myth that led to my involvement, when in 2002 Dan Barker and the Freedom from Religion Foundation hired me to look into the authenticity of the most common “quotes” from Hitler that Christians kept circulating, depicting Hitler denouncing Christianity as a fraud. All of them (curiously) came from this same text. That led me down a rabbit hole of surprise and perplexity that I did my best to get to the bottom of. What I found overturned a long-standing consensus in Hitler Studies (and as such, my article on it for GSR is now often footnoted in published Hitler research now), as I uncovered the fact that the English translation these Christians were using was fraudulent—particularly in the quotes they were using not at all correctly representing the German. I also found a lot else to be suspicious about, but left those questions for Hitler historians hopefully to resolve. Shockingly, though that English translation had been in print and relied upon almost unquestionably for fifty years, almost no one had ever noticed what I uncovered. Publicly, Nilsson found a single exception: Ron Rosenbaum had discovered it, and reported it in his 1998 book Explaining Hitler, but that also went largely ignored; and Nilsson finds in private papers many people had noticed it even long before that, but never reported their finding, or even actively concealed it. Nilsson found my article was the first publication ever to gain this fact wide attention, and even then, the most even I could do was establish the need for much closer scrutiny of the Table Talk as a source. A decade later, Nilsson took up the call. I gave him what help I could, but his research continued vastly beyond any I could do, and has concluded in a marvel of historiographic literature.
As I’ve shown before, it is not the case that myth “can’t” eclipse history within mere decades. The story of the Table Talk shows that myth can eclipse history in a matter of mere years. And without someone like Nilsson taking on the task and still having access to all that evidence remaining (evidence the kind of which is forever lost in the case of Christianity and thus can never be got at now, nor ever was then), the actual history that a myth has eclipsed would never be recovered, or even in any way exposed. Indeed, in the case of the Table Talk, it wasn’t—even after the attention of multiple professional modern critical historians across decades of inquiry. Had Dan Barker and the Freedom from Religion Foundation not paid me to look into it half a century later, I would not have found even what I did, much less published it in GSR (nor, evidently, would anyone else have—with the sole and unnoticed exception of Rosenbaum, the entire field of Hitler historians had simply not even thought to do it, continuing instead to use and trust the Table Talk as a source). And had I not done that, Nilsson would not have been inspired or even thought to have built an entire research project around it, digging up and uncovering an entire mountain of myths, legends, and lies.
Needless to say, no such people even existed in antiquity to do this for Christianity (see my chapter on the difference between between the skills and methods of modern vs. ancient historians also in Hitler Homer Bible Christ); much less did any do it, or anything close (see my demonstration and discussion of that point in Chapters 7, 13, and 17 of Not the Impossible Faith). So from Nilsson’s book we can see how easy it would be—even now but especially in ancient times—to doctor a history and leave it unchallenged in the record for all eternity (see, for example, my recent article How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity).
In Hitler Redux, Nilsson not only uncovers countless myths and lies—exposing a lot of what’s been claimed that definitely isn’t true, some of what at least is true, and what remains unknowable despite being asserted as known, or despite what we would very much like to know—but also throughout his account of getting to the bottom of everything he produces a continuing “after action report” of sorts on the performance of academic history in this matter. The whole field pretty much gets a very poor grade. Historian after historian failed horribly in their critical methodology or even honesty, dropping the ball repeatedly, and thus ending up helping to grow and validate the myth of the Table Talk rather than questioning and exposing the reality as should have been their job. For every historian who has touched this subject of inquiry, Nilsson analyzes what they got wrong and, often through a study of their private contracts and papers and correspondence, how and why they got it wrong. This book is thus a handy case study in historical methodology: what historians should, and shouldn’t, be doing when handling sources and developing and testing theories about history.
By the conclusion, you start to get the clear picture, as did Nilsson, that a lot of what went wrong had to do with what one single con artist—the unrepentant Swiss Nazi banker François Genoud—did to manipulate decades of historians into doing his bidding by replicating and validating his own myths and fabrications. A single man behind it all; mostly invisible to the public, as his involvement was barely if ever even mentioned in historical treatments and third-party publications of the Table Talk, and thus all his devices and manipulations went unnoticed until Nilsson uncovered them all. I was among the first to signal this might be the case, as it was my article in GSR that exposed the first evidence of Genoud being the actual fraud behind it, when I uncovered how he doctored his own French translation, and that the English translation was based on that—for reasons I then did not know and could not explain; Nilsson uncovers the hidden truth: Genoud had forced by secret contract everyone involved in producing the English edition—publishers, translators, and its editor and endorser, the renowned Hitler historian Hugh Trevor-Roper—to only use his French as their base text. Nilsson explores various reasons why Genoud did that, though certainty may never be ours, as his motives Genoud took with him to the grave…along with the original manuscript, apparently—no version of which survives (apart from a few pages recovered by the U.S. Army after the war, which I was also for some reason the first to publicly reference beyond merely mentioning they exist; it appears Nilsson may have also located three other notes from it copied from Genoud’s archive that have still never been published, p. 241). In fact, apart from those few sheets (and a mere handful of some photocopied pages reproduced in various places), no person still living has even seen the original notes forming the Table Talk. So really getting to the bottom of things here may be forever impossible now.
You might be wondering how much we can say the Table Talk, even the various surviving German versions (and there are now at least four, and none are in complete agreement), is also fake. The English translation certainly is, at least in all pertinent respects. As also the French contrived by Genoud, upon which doctored text was also based a fraudulent Italian edition as well as the English. But Nilsson found that what German versions we actually have any published edition of now are authentic in the very loose sense of “not forged by Genoud.” There really were notes taken down in Hitler’s bunker of things he was remembered to have said, by people who were there, and those notes were really collated and heavily rewritten by Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann (notably, infamously, a Christian-hating atheist; there were some of those in the Nazi party, though they were fairly rare, and Hitler wasn’t one of them). And all the varying published German versions do derive from that Bormann manuscript in one way or another. But there are a great many problems with those surviving German texts that still render them highly unreliable (not least the fact that they all disagree). Nilsson extensively explains and demonstrates this point throughout his book.
Problems with Even the German Text
One thing I learned from Nilsson’s book is perhaps something I should have figured all along: Nazis are liars. This is so reliable a prediction I think we can fairly assert it as a Law of the Universe, “If there is a Nazi, they are a liar.” Nilsson proves this repeatedly. Practically every Nazi anyone has ever cited or relied on in reconstructing the history and reliability of the Table Talk, Nilsson catches in at least one demonstrable lie; often several lies; sometimes outrageous lies. This includes every producer, editor, and transmitter of the Table Talk itself. Even those who weren’t Nazis engaged in cover-ups, obfuscations, distortions, misleads, and, sometimes, outright lies, actively deceiving and misleading the public as well as fellow scholars. It’s fascinating as a historian to see how access to a modern scale of source material allows someone like Nilsson to actually prove this, time and again. It powerfully reminds us of how suspicious we ought to be of ancient source material, for which we have almost none of the means Nilsson had at his disposal to test the veracity of our sources today.
This goes far beyond what I uncovered in GSR, that Genoud faked Hitler’s attacks on “Christianity” (the ones Christians keep quoting; those were written by Genoud, and translated by others at his insistence into English and passed off as a translation of the German). When we get back to the source text, the “original” German edited by Bormann, it becomes clear that Hitler was a believing Christian (see my article No, Hitler Wasn’t a Pantheist), albeit having adopted the stance of the peculiar Nazi sect called Positive Christianity. Whereas publicly he remained a Catholic, privately he ridiculed Catholicism as a perversion of the true Christian message and the Vatican as really just a corrupt, ridiculous, power-hungry institution; in other words, pretty much the position of almost any Protestant of his day. Hitler’s views thus correctly got at in what German survives of the Table Talk simply echo views that “were developed and present already in Mein Kampf, and thus contain essentially nothing new at all” (Nilsson, p. 41). His hostility was always against not Christianity but institutionalized religion, “the Church,” as something the state needed to do away with, and replace with every man’s free exercise of an “enlightened” personal Christian faith, in service to the state (very much similar to White Evangelical Christianity today). This context in turn becomes essential to interpreting the more vague passages in the German text, where often the German word Christentum, frequently today translated as “Christianity,” clearly in context always meant for Hitler only Catholicism; likewise the coinage Judenchristentum (Nilsson, pp. 41-42), as Hitler often explained Catholicism to be a Jewish corruption of the original “Aryan” Christianity, under the tainting influence of the “Jewish” Paul. In turn, the German text preserves Hitler’s clear condemnation of atheism (Nilsson, pp. 42-43).
But that isn’t the only problem. The German text is also frequently corrupt. This goes even beyond overt cases where Bormann completely rewrote things Hitler said in the German, removing and adding material, sometimes multiple sentences in Bormann’s own voice (a frequent problem with the text Nilsson points out historians have yet to properly untangle: which German material is actually the words and thoughts of Bormann, a rabid atheist, rather than even a summary of the views of Hitler, an avid, albeit unorthodox, Christian believer). The pages recovered by the U.S. Army (probably, Nilsson shows, from a bombed-out Nazi headquarters in Munich) show extensive rewrites of the original notes in Bormann’s own handwriting; and Nilsson finds many other examples of entire entries written or altered by Bormann. But even apart from that, what Nilsson shows is that all the notes comprising the Table Talk are really just the reminiscences of witnesses, composing in their own words, and from memory as much as a day or more later (only sometimes relying on scant notations made, of single words or partial sentences), what they “thought” Hitler said or meant; and Nilsson is able to prove on many occasions they definitely got it wrong.
For example, in one instance regarding a conversation about Christianity, one of the notemakers, Heinrich Heim, confused Hitler’s quotation of Alfred Rosenberg denouncing Pauline Christianity, i.e. Catholicism, for Hitler himself denouncing all Christianity (Nilsson, pp. 43-44). A comparison of a corresponding entry in Rosenberg’s own diary shows Rosenberg recording only that Hitler agreed on one point, that the German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain had been mistaken to try and “rehabilitate” the Apostle Paul as a real Christian. Heim then recorded this as Hitler saying “Chamberlain’s error was to be a believing Christian,” not at all an accurate account of Hitler’s point (or even Rosenberg’s).
For another example, Nilsson shows that another of the notetakers, Henry Picker, misunderstood something Hitler had said about international banking. Nilsson consults records from other witnesses to the conversation Hitler would have been relating, and thus shows Picker had contrived his own reconstructed “transcript” of Hitler saying something he never did (Nilsson, pp. 68-70). Picker also frequently screwed up names and timelines in his “reconstructions” of things Hitler said, thus falsely attributing his own historical mistakes to Hitler (e.g. Nilsson, pp. 75, 79, 99, 124, 209). Ironically, Picker once claimed Hitler himself had become outraged by inaccuracies in Heim’s recorded recollections of what he’d said (Nilsson, p. 94), and a later editor attests to seeing Bormann’s handwritten note on an entry by Picker arguing Picker had confused who was speaking at the time and thus misreported someone else’s thoughts as Hitler’s (Nilsson, pp. 347-48), which are the sort of observations that do not bode well for the remaining collection, as by all accounts, Bormann was unreliable, and Hitler only rarely checked the notes for accuracy himself (the one instance he caught out, he found out about only by accident). Picker also says he was shocked at the more anti-vatican slant Bormann would add to Hitler’s statements in his edited version (as Picker puts it, “Bormann, in whom underlying confrontations with the churches [such statements] fit excellently into, wanted to have heard it, while I hadn’t heard it,” Nilsson, p. 186). Nilsson confirms by various lines of evidence that Bormann did this, so we know Picker is telling the truth here. This makes even Hitler’s anti-Catholic statements in the Table Talk somewhat questionable.
We similarly find every notetaker engaged in deleting or adding or altering entries to suit their own agendas or assumptions about what Hitler said or what they wanted him to have said. Some editions even omit names and details from the notes (or even whole notes) that this or that publisher considered too embarrassing (the basic thinking being, “We can’t publish Hitler saying that”), which only further compromises the Table Talk as a historical source. Not only Heim, but also particularly Picker, did this, who published his own “edited” versions of some of the German he kept for himself (which thus did not go through the hands of François Genoud). And there are two different versions of even Picker’s German text in print, as he edited it twice. And as we don’t have his original pages—they are now lost—and (as Nilsson shows) Picker (as also Heim) frequently lied about practically everything to do with the Table Talk, we can’t know how much of that editing is Picker and how much actually goes back to Hitler. And even insofar as any goes back to Hitler, Nilsson shows it is not the exact words of Hitler, but just Picker’s or Heim’s (or others’) own skewed summaries of what they think they recalled Hitler saying—dispelling the long-perpetuated myth that the German of the Table Talk was ever a transcript from a stenograph dictation of Hitler’s exact words as he spoke. Nilsson well shows there is no meaningful truth in that legend at all.
Worse, Nilsson shows Picker lied when claiming his published text predated the editing of Bormann; and we know from the recovered pages in Munich that Bormann’s rewrites were extensive, to the point of ensuring we can almost never know if we are reading just Bormann’s words, rather than Hitler’s—even when consulting the two conflicting German editions published by Picker! Much less the later German edition of “most” of the other notes held by Genoud. To complicate things even further, a third Nazi composing some of these notes (the fourth being Bormann himself, who wrote several entries entirely), Arnold Hans Müller, may have been a hard-core Christian who despised hostile remarks against the church (Nilsson, p. 203); notably, I think none of the notes attributed to him even mention religion.
Nilsson engaged a much closer comparison of all the different versions, in all languages, than anyone before. He thus uncovered all manner of new peculiarities. Of particular interest to atheists is an occasion in which the German evidently showed Hitler saying, regarding Christian passion plays, something to the effect of, “In recognizing the importance of this spectacle, and by encouraging it, who can say that I do not act irreproachably Christian.” That is from the French edition of Genoud. But in what may be an earlier version of the German (Picker’s attempt to go back to the notes prior to Bormann’s handwritten corrections), this was written in third person narrative as a recollection about what Hitler said: “In recognizing the tremendous importance of these festivals for the enlightenment of all coming generations, he [i.e. Hitler] is an absolute Christian.” This looks like what was actually originally written down, possibly the next day as a recollected memorandum on what may have been an hour’s long discourse for all we know. It’s a third person recollection, not direct speech; which Bormann and others, Nilsson shows, tended to rewrite into first-person direct speech. But note also how much else changed even in the particular wording, and thus how many ways the meaning has also been changed in the process. It’s pretty hard to get back to what Hitler actually originally said here.
That is point number one. But point number two is more unsettling. For we know the English edition of the Table Talk was produced by translating Genoud’s French. And yet…that edition simply omits this passage altogether. It is extremely strange that a passage in which Hitler himself boasts of being a good Christian got somehow “deleted” from the English translation—the one Christians today are scouring for evidence of Hitler’s atheism. So much for that project. Another example pertains to the Holocaust, where Nilsson finds a statement attributed to Hitler in the Table Talk derives from Genoud’s French which altered the surviving German into making Hitler refer to his extermination of the Jews as a “rumor.” In the German, it is stated as a fact (Nilsson, p. 257).
One Confusion to Disentangle
There is one place I got lost in the book, and that’s when Nilsson attempts to nail down a hypothesis as to how the English text came to have certain peculiarities (pp. 265-66). He develops and argues for the hypothesis that Genoud must have also created a fake back-translation into German from his own fraudulent French and passed that off to the Trevor-Roper-edition translators as the original German, in order to hide his fraud (as otherwise they’d discover his French edition deviates substantially from the German). No evidence of this directly exists; it’s a hypothesis Nilsson has to argue for from a few weird instances of translation in the English that are hard to explain otherwise. But if someone were to skip to this section and read it in isolation, one could be misled into thinking Nilsson is arguing that the whole Table Talk was translated from that faux German manuscript. But that’s not what he means; rather, he means that it was translated “almost entirely from the French” (p. 270) and indeed is usually “a direct translation” from the French “word for word” (p. 187; cf. pp. 240, 243, 258, 270, 293, 312, etc.), but this fake German manuscript was occasionally used to “check” and “correct” that translation from time to time, resulting in a few telltale errors that can be plausibly explained no other way. Thus, Nilsson may have uncovered one of the ways Genoud conned the translators into not noticing his French translation was fraudulent.
I suspect there is a better hypothesis than Nilsson seems to propose, that rather than Genoud fabricating an entire 1000-page fake German text, he only faked any pages the translators asked for when they were uncertain how to translate the French and wanted to compare it to the German in those cases. When they asked for those pages, he faked them as needed. They evidently were since destroyed (as no other evidence of them exists, apart from the effects this process had on the English as uncovered by Nilsson). But this is a quibble. The bigger problem is that the section in which Nilsson defends his hypothesis is confusingly written in a way that could mislead a reader into mistaking even what his hypothesis is, such that it appears to contradict his preceding and following chapters in which Nilsson adamantly maintains that the English directly derives from the French, not a faked German version of the French.
As Nilsson shows (and as I showed in GSR in even more detail), there are countless errors in the English that can only be explained as mistakes made from reading the French, and the English routinely matches the French vocabulary and syntax with such unnatural precision that it even causes a lot of poor or amateurish translations (where, for example, a French word is “translated” by finding the English word that most looks like the French word, rather than actually means the same thing). This is impossible from a fake German translation of the French. Indeed, that’s the case even apart from the fact that, as Nilsson points out, French was Genoud’s native language and he wrote the French text in question, so he could hardly have so badly mistranslated it (for example, he would never confuse a ne que construction with ne que pas, as the English translators did; and no such grammatical form exists in German to create that confusion with). Moreover, had Genoud just faked a whole German version, he would never have mandated in his secret contract with Trevor-Roper that the English only be translated from his French. He’d have just given them the German forgery. This is why I suspect Genoud did not forge a German version; he just forged pages here and there as needed to appease the English translators’ occasional requests to check it (indeed, Nilsson documents several cases where Genoud made excuses for delays in answering similar requests, thus establishing the very pattern I’m talking about). And this is more or less what Nilsson is proposing too (there is “evidence in the text that clearly points to a German text having been used in a few instances,” p. 270, which, he showed, cannot have been the real German text later published).
And How I Unexpectedly Became a Bizarre Part of History
As Hitler Redux is a history of the Table Talk text, I am now a part of that history. I come up a lot in Nilsson’s book. And not just in the obvious sense I’ve mentioned already—that he cites and builds on my work in GSR proving the English edition was fraudulently based on the bogus French edition, and raising numerous other questions yet (at that time) to be answered about even the original German. Nor just in the sense that he corrects some of my work. For example, I misread an instance of casual German cursive in my attempt to recover the name of the person who found the lost pages recovered by the U.S. Army; and I was too gullible in trusting what eyewitnesses and even prestigious historians were claiming about the text—although to be fair, I had no idea they were all lying, a fact Nilsson had to spend years crossing the globe to discover and expose. Rather, I mean I am now a part of the history of this text in an even more bizarre sense: an entire section of Hitler Redux deals with what Nilsson rightly calls “the bizarre affair” of the “new” Enigma edition of the Table Talk (published in 2007), which to a large extent is about me, and my interactions with the CEO of Enigma Books at the time, Robert Miller (pp. 364-83).
I had forgotten about all that, though indeed years ago I supplied Nilsson with copies of all my correspondence with Miller, which becomes crucial source material for Nilsson’s study of what on Earth happened with that Enigma edition. It is now quoted and described extensively in Nilsson’s penultimate chapter. The TL;DR of what happened is this: in response to my published study in GSR, Enigma asked me to produce a new English translation from the actual German (which still to this day has never been done), and I told them I’m the wrong guy for that job, but would gladly take a position as editor for the project, if they met my terms—which mostly involved academic standards I required them to meet, which Nilsson notes was the first time any historian had insisted on such standards in the treatment of this text. None of which standards, it turns out, Enigma had any interest in meeting. They gave up on the project and just reprinted the old bogus English translation instead; mostly, as far as I can tell, for financial reasons. The only thing they added was a new preface by an esteemed Hitler historian I had recommended to them, Gerhard Weinberg, who had provided valuable assistance to me in completing my research for GSR in 2003 and is most notable for being the first person in history to alert historians to the existence of the more-or-less original German pages from the Table Talk recovered by the U.S. Army in Munich (which is how I got in touch with him back in 2002). Weinberg’s note was pretty much ignored for fifty years. Now, he got to cite my article in the Enigma preface and explain that the enclosed Table Talk text was bogus.
The strange turn is that when Nilsson asked Miller why he abandoned the required academic project I recommended and simply reproduced the old fraudulent (and thus entirely useless) English translation of yore, Miller proceeded to shower Nilsson with a litany of lies and lunacy—evidently unaware that I had already given Nilsson our entire correspondence. Nilsson shared Miller’s whackadoo correspondence with me, and in result of which, I am now in the history books as responding, “Wow. Off his rocker.” (Nilsson, p. 375). That entire story is now here told by Nilsson in amusing detail (I found myself laughing repeatedly while reading it). Miller tried to insist it was false that the English was translated from the French, despite literally every actual historian and expert, even his own hire Weinberg, telling him otherwise. He also tried to slag me off as an incompetent amateur, calling me (amusingly) a mere “Latinist.” In fact I had at the time an M.Phil. in history from Columbia University (subsequently earning my Ph.D. as well) and it is precisely my training there in German, French, historical methodology and textual criticism that allowed me to discover and formally publish my findings regarding the Table Talk, which not only passed peer review at German Studies Review but also convinced and was independently confirmed by two notable historians in modern history: Nilsson and Weinberg! Needless to say, Nilsson adequately debunks all of Miller’s accusations and exposes him asserting a number of lies and weird confusions, in every case with documentation (so Nilsson never had to rely on my or anyone’s competing testimony), concluding that “it seems as if almost nothing that Miller has said about this affair has been the truth” (Nilsson, p. 376). Indeed the whole Miller affair really is shockingly bizarre. And entertaining to read.
Conclusion
For all of these reasons, I highly recommend reading Hitler Redux. It contains a lot of not just fascinating history, but fascinating historiography as well. You will witness first hand what it is like to do history, and how historians can (and can’t) fact-check public-facing assertions by diving into private and often almost lost source material of all kinds. You’ll see lie after lie exposed and debunked. You’ll see a myth exploded by a careful inquiry. And you’ll see all the ways even prominent Hitler historians really screwed the pooch here, and why you should always be careful in trusting historians at all—it will also arm you with ideas of what then to look for to tell when you might not be hearing the whole story; when it is, in other words, that you should be at your most suspicious. And, of course, read it to get a full account of how certain we can now be that “all illusions” of any version of the Table Talk (German or otherwise) “faithfully reproducing Hitler’s statements are obsolete and to no avail” (Nilsson, p. 200), which is important, because the “table talks have been used by almost every historian writing about Hitler, National Socialism, and Nazi Germany since 1951” yet “have cited [these notes] as if [they] contained Hitler’s words ad verbatim” (Nilsson, p. 384). It’s not even securely the case that they capture his words at all.
You’ll also learn many unrelated things from this book that you might find particularly interesting for other reasons. For example, one of the sources involved in unraveling the history of the Table Talk manuscript is a certain Nazi by the name Paul Dickopf. We learn Hugh Trevor Roper had secretly tapped him as a source in British intelligence (or else as an American intelligence liason there) asking what they knew about this shady character François Genoud. You heard that right. A Nazi intelligence officer was recruited to work for British and American intelligence immediately after the war. Moreover, apart from confirming to Trevor-Roper that Genoud was indeed with Nazi intelligence and Dickopf had been his handler (itself not very surprising):
[Dickopf] later became the fourth president of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) 1965-1971 as well as president of Interpol 1968-1972, whose HQ, ironically, was housed in the same building as the former Gestapo, at which time he was a paid agent working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In this position Dickopf recruited many former Nazis into Interpol.
(Nilsson, pp. 260-61)
Uh. Yeah. So, all that happened. Hitler Redux is full of eye-opening gems like that, and touches on all manner of far-reaching things, from WWII art thievery rings to Winston Churchill’s drinking habits.
The only criticisms I have of Redux are that it does contain a number of trivial typos (most of which may just be errors in translating thoughts in another language into English, with grammatical and spelling mistakes like “cite something as authoritative when they,” “make them a better manuscript,” “they accurately reflects,” “that kind of sources,” “this account conflict[s] somewhat,” “Irving never refer[s] to,” “that they [are] forgeries,” “to the extent that [he] ought to have done,” “words or statement[s],” and Bormann in one instance becomes “Bromann” and in another instance “trial” becomes “trail,” etc.), but those are easily overlooked and not a major problem. And sometimes Nilsson’s wording can create confusions, though I found those to be resolved by any complete reading of the book, or else didn’t matter. For example, it is often not clear when “copies” or “photocopies” are mentioned, what exactly is meant in each case (photoplates and photoprints and even photostats are not the same thing as xeroxes, xeroxes are not the same thing as dittographs, and dittos are not the same thing as carbon copies, and none of these are the same thing as manually hand-typed copies). Likewise there is the confusion I already noted regarding Nilsson’s hypothesis of a forged German version being involved in producing the English, which one can only untangle by fully reading earlier and later chapters. But neither of those defects undermines the tremendous quality and value of the work overall.
Dear Mr. Carrier, thanks for this fascinating review – I’ll definitely check out this book (event though I’m a only layman with no relation to historical studies whatsoever)!
One minor detail: you mentioned “Münich” (at least) three times in your text. As a German native speaker, I would think that you either meant “München” (the German name of the city) or “Munich” (the English translation of the name of the same city) but not “Münich” (even though it looks pretty funny).
Keep up the amazing work, Thanks!
S. Schöning
Oh yes! Of course. Correcting that now.
It will be interesting to see the Christian apologists publish retractions of all their claims that Hitler was an atheist.
You kid, but the big problem is that even if some of the leading “luminaries” did (like if we got Thiel and Comfort and Ham and Craig and Licona to all use this messaging proactively), the meme has been established among the hoi polloi and the average preachers. Just like those creationist lies so embarrassing even AiG instructs people not to use them and yet still can be easily spotted in the wild.
I suspect Hitler’s statements about his admiration for Islam in those table talks are wildly distorted if not faked. It certainly didn’t mesh with his actual policy: why didn’t he back a Bosnia independent from Croatia then? How come when he met with the Mufti of Jerusalem he refused to back Arab independence? Why did he dislike Himmler forming Balkan units including Bosnian ones? Why did he compare his war against the Soviet Union to the reconquista in Spain? I don’t have any interest in defending Islam, but it sounds like another distancing tactic from Churches. Francis Nicosia did a good book on that topic and it’s amazing how little actually happened in that supposed “alliance” so many allege took place on that front.
On the article itself, I’m a little confused: do you think Hitler was anti-Catholic or just that is the best case someone could make from the table talks if they are to be trusted at all?
Actually, Hitler’s statements about Islam in the actual German text (remember, the English translation is not reliable) are similar to his statements about the pagan Japanese therein as well, and actually do indeed quite fit his worldview and temper. Like most racists, he could speak admiringly of isolated traits he believed the master race should adopt more often, similar to a racist admiring “how” big and strong and great at sports “black men” are. This does not mean he has no plans to wipe them out eventually, or that he thought they were his equals and should be treated as such in his war strategy.
Indeed, Hitler even occasionally says the same of Catholics, e.g. their obedience impressed him, while then turning around and completely attacking and mocking Catholics. And yes, in the German, in context, all his anti-Christian stuff is actually anti-Catholic stuff (e.g. attacking the Vatican or specific uniquely Catholic beliefs like transubstantiation), and sounds identical to any Protestant of that era, many of whom said literally exactly those same things, and this was characteristic of the Nazi sect of Positive Christianity as well, so when we also see Hitler privately supporting weird tenets of that sect (such as that Paul is a traitor who ruined Christianity and Jesus was an Aryan fathered by a Roman soldier), it all fits together: Hitler was privately, it seems, a Positive Christian (while publicly maintaining himself as a Catholic, although as Nilsson observed, his PosiChristian stuff leaks out even in his public works as well, so we can actually corroborate this angle without trusting the Table Talks completely).
That’s a fair point to make, although specifically on the idea he preferred Islam to Christianity seems made up (the only other source I can find for that is Speer), wasn’t there a statement along the lines of “they will always be closer to us than France” that was just in the French translation? I can’t remember.
It’s just that people assumed an alliance from a questionable source. You definitely nailed it with the point of a racist admiring a certain perceived traits of what he otherwise views as “inferior”. Hitler praised Stalin’s brutality despite being a fervent anti-Communist for example.
On the reliability of the German source material: do you think that it is still overall viable for Historians? Obviously more so than the translations, but how much do you think was hearsay or an agenda being pushed by Bormann to make Hitler’s views to reflect his own?
Hitler did not say he prefers Islam to Christianity. Hitler almost never talks about Christianity in the TT; those lines are usually in fact regarding Catholicism. Which he clearly did despise. He saw Islam as a simpler faith, less corrupted by Judaism (remember, he thought Catholicism was crypto-Judaism) and less governed by an institution competing with the state (the Vatican divided loyalties, which was not to the taste of any fascist who wanted loyalty solely to state-and-party), and generating more “self-sacrificing” soldiers (he said the same of Japanese paganism).
On the German material, “overall” would be too strong a word. My article above explains the problems that have to be overcome before trusting anything from the TT in the German. Bormann’s distortions (in some cases even outright fabrications) are rife, as are the agendas and errors of even the contributors (Picker, Heim, and Müller). So source-wise, it’s a mess. To take anything from it as actually Hitler requires a case-by-case analysis of its content, context, whose hands are annotated as being involved in composing it, and external corroborating or supporting material.
For example, in this case, how confident am I that Hitler said what the German of the TT has regarding Muslims and the Japanese? Mildly. As in, I don’t think it’s made up, but I am also not highly certain of that; and I am fairly certain even if it captures the gist of something he said, it likely does not capture his exact wording. And what little confidence I do have is based on its congruence with Hitler’s thought everywhere else attested, and the overall evidence that he was indeed secretly an anti-Catholic Positive Christian, with which these sentiments are wholly unsurprising (in fact it would be odd, and thus more to be remarked upon, if Hitler didn’t think something along those lines).
P.S. And in case it wasn’t clear, when Hitler says he admires Muslim faith more than Catholic, he is not saying he would prefer Islam replace it. He fully intends it to be destroyed—as well as Catholicism. What he wanted in its place was a “purer” Christianity, which he would have wanted to adopt more from those features he admired in Islam, i.e. he would want Christianity to be a simpler faith, less institutional, and more fanatically devoted to the Volksreich. That is not the same thing as thinking the Koran should replace the Bible or Germans should convert to Islam. Hitler very definitely believed Christianity was the only true and pure faith suited to the German people, history, and character. He only wanted it to evolve into a form that had less Jewish baggage and a return to (what he believed were) its originally better ideas, some of which ideas he saw in a few religions he otherwise despised and thus could still envy in them. But envying those ideas did not amount to envying those whole religions. And he would surely have believed those ideas were already native to Christianity and thus merely had to be recovered, not borrowed from foreign cults.
What is extraordinary to me is that “Christianity” can be defined so loosely that someone who believes that “Paul is a traitor who ruined Christianity and Jesus was an Aryan fathered by a Roman soldier” can still be thought of as having some association with Christianity, at least if that name is to retain any meaningful definition. Instead, the author assures us, “it all fits together.” It certainly does with respect to Hitler’s fundamental unbelief in Christianity, not merely unbelief in Catholicism. It seems to me that he has quite inadvertently confirmed the Christian conclusion while rightly debunking any false citations in particular.
We are somehow to conclude that Hitler believed that a Jew was the Savior of the world? In no historic account of Christianity does Jesus fit the Positivist (i.e., Nazi) redefinition of Him as being something or someone else. In the New Testament, Peter is also already accounting Paul’s writings as Scripture (2 Pet. 3:15-16), so if Paul is to be dispensed with, then this account of Peter must be as well. What is objectively left of belief, then, in Christ or Christianity, and upon what ground?
The New Testament records Jesus as conditioning anyone’s friendship with Himself as being dependent upon that person’s adherence to His teachings (John 15:13-15). This supposed belief of Hitler in Jesus and Christianity compelled Hitler to humble himself in his manner of thought and life–to be an obedient disciple and imitator, loving his enemies, doing good and praying for those who persecuted him, etc., just as Jesus instructs? Obviously no one who knows the life and teachings of Jesus and the life of Hitler would believe for a moment that the latter actually believed in the former, even if Hitler had been taught to do so as a child and needed this portrayal in public for reasons of political expediency (knowing his audience). If someone was watching my response one day when my neighbor called and told me that my house was on fire, that person could tell quite easily whether or not I actually believed in my neighbor and his word to me. Hitler is no different with respect to Jesus.
You must not be paying attention. Hitler adopted the views of Positive Christianity (a self-named sect of Christianity), which included the teaching that Jesus was not Jewish, but an Aryan, whose teachings were against the Jews.
Christianity does indeed manifest in all kinds of bizarre ways, from Mormonism to Episcopalianism. And most Christianity today looks nothing like the Bible. The only thing all Christian sects have in common is the belief that something about Jesus secures some kind of salvation. Anyone who claims to follow Jesus as their moral exemplar for public and personal good is a Christian. Full stop. Everything else is bickering over details.
Positivist Christianity wasn’t even a thing. It was just made up by the Nazis to serve their own self-interests. Hitler “adopted” nothing. He and his Party created it wholesale. I’m afraid that your rationalizations are highly impacted by your own biases, unfortunately. I certainly agree that most of what is called Christianity today looks nothing like the Bible, but as a historian you would know that, from the beginning of recorded Christian history, that has always raised the question of what could, and could not be, accurately described as Christian.
When the Person of Christ Himself as historically identified is denied, as Hitler and his Positivists do, let alone His teachings, how does their belief still constitute “Christianity”? If I just randomly decide that Jesus was, in fact, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (as atheists like to propose as being God in their own brilliant way)–and I do this seriously and develop an entire interpretive theology to go with it–am I still a Christian? According to the New Testament, Jesus Himself denies that anyone who does not believe Him and follow His teachings still belongs to Him, the Apostles do the same (e.g., 1 John 2:4), and the earliest Christian leaders and apologists after the Apostles do the same (e.g., Clement of Rome states “We are justified by our works and not our words,” and Justin Martyr writes, “Let those who are not found living as [Jesus] taught be understood not to be Christians, even though they profess with the lips the teachings of Christ”).
You, or the entire academic community collectively, can claim that anyone or anything is a Christian, but that certainly does not mean that it is in the least true or accurate with respect to the actual definition of Christianity set forth by Christ and Christians from the earliest records. Hitler had forsaken every notion of belief or expectation that could be identified as Christian. You’re apparently just desperate for that not to be the case.
All Christian sects are “made up.” Including Catholicism and Evangelicalism and Mormonism.
So that argument doesn’t work either.
All Christianities today ignore something Jesus taught, reinterpret it to mean something other or more than he taught, or add to what he taught; usually all three, and usually abundantly. So doing that can never disqualify anyone from being a Christian. Unless it disqualifies everyone from being a Christian.
Positive Christianity indeed has more in common with the entire history of Medieval Christianity: the Nazi program against the Jews was line-by-line identical to Martin Luther’s. Anti-semitism has always been a strong and pervasive component of nearly all Western Christianity until relatively recently (and pockets even still retain it).
You can’t make that legacy go away with verbal legerdemain. You cannot change what something is by changing what you call it. You need to accept your dark history and deal with it. Not attempt to deny it with rhetoric.
Again, I am astonished that this work even had to be done.
When you move out of studying Hitler himself and look at the Nazi Party, the consensus from what I’ve seen is actually really clear. The Nazis were a theological goulash (to quote Folding Ideas); after all, the account here of the Table Talk’s creation points to Catholics and atheists sharing a party. Teutonic revivalism was also a big part of it. But despite all this, the majority were always Christian (“God Is With Us” on belt buckles, etc.) So the idea that Hitler himself was some utterly inveterate atheist, despite his otherwise fairly conventional way of thinking that emphasized tradition, was already of low plausibility. (And relevance: since the Nazi Party was ultimately a Christian phenomenon, since it never would have gotten power if large swaths of Christians were not fundamentally okay with Nazi politics, blaming atheism on it is blaming the cryptococcosis in an AIDS patient on the crypto rather than the AIDS.
All of that means that Hitler historians as a group accepted a really unexpected and non-trivial conclusion, that Hitler had managed to virtue signal incredibly well about religious beliefs he didn’t have (among other pretty remarkable conclusions), without doing the basic due diligence to actually read in the original German. None of them wanted to see if they could do what you did and see if you could interpret even the poor English translation as a positive Christianity argument rather than an atheist argument. Which actually suggests that the academy has very few people who actually know actual fascists, given that if you know fascists you know that them being hyper-critical of Christian tropes doesn’t mean they’re not Christian nor atheist.
I hope that this conclusion starts to be examined and checked by the broader community, so that I don’t have to constantly go into the weeds on this one.
Hi Richard, you have confused the English-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain with the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Appeasement and Munich sell-out infamy.
Redux is excellent, thanks for sowing the seed.
Ah! Important. Fixing. Thank you.
(And that makes much more sense.)
There is this guy named “TIK” on YouTube thats claiming in the comment section of his video that “Hitler waged a war against the Church” and Christians and says he’s going to tackle that subject at some point. I know of persecution of particular priests, but the whole church? Is there any validity to that?
It would depend on what they mean. Were some Christians and Christian institutions targeted by the Nazis? Yes (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses went to the camps). Did the Nazis dislike Christian institutions that proclaimed their independence from the state? Yes (e.g. Positive Christianity held that the Vatican was a subversive organization because it pretended to be an ultimate authority and did not serve the interests of the state; and many Nazis wanted Christianity united under the state ideology of Positive Christianity, without an “institution” telling them correct doctrine but just as individual professions and practices of the faith).
In no way did they wage war on all Christendom. Just on Christians and Churches who did not support them. And in no way did they intend to abolish Christianity once victorious. Just the institutions that continued to proclaim their independence. Christianity was to be united and in their view “liberated” under Nazi rule.
I should also add, that sometimes when Christians make wild claims like this, they are implying a fallacy by exclusion: they want you to think that “if” the Nazis persecuted any Christians that “therefore” the Nazis supported atheism. To the contrary, though some Nazis were atheists (and some even neopagans), overall the Nazis had very little sympathy with atheists and Hitler outright condemned them—and neopaganism, though more respected, was not very popular. Their religious ideal was represented primarily in the sect of Positive Christianity, which was a distillation of certain trends in German Lutheranism. And Nazism cannot be understood without understanding that.
What are thoughts on “The Holy Reich” by Richard Steigmann-Gall? He argued in that book that it differed on a case basis, and that Hitler himself had conflicting views. He does point out that even with the Protestant churches there was a distancing from Nazism.
It varies as he says, across every spectrum: there were pro and anti Nazi factions and indifferent and opportunist factions within Catholicism and Protestantism, and most Nazis were Christians of some variety (very small minorities were atheists or neopagans), and Hitler’s vision for the future of Germany was entirely Christian, albeit ideally without churches, or only churches in service of the state.
See also Susannah Heschel’s The Aryan Jesus.
If someone claims to be a follower or a great admirer of Richard Carrier, it means that the person who is making the claim should have read all the works of Richard Carrier and agree with a major portion of Richard Carrier’s thesis or works, on the contrary, if the person who claims that he is a follower of Richard Carrier but have not read any of the Richard Carrier’s work, but still he identifies himself to be a huge follower of Carrier, then such a person is obviously a dubious person, with some hidden agenda.
The same goes with Hitler, Hitler did claim that he was a great follower of Jesus, Jesus was his lord, etc, but Hitler had nothing but total contempt for the Old Testament, but Jesus’s life was all about full filling the prophecies of OT, Jesus saw OT as divine revelation, but Hitler trash-talked OT in his speeches and private conversation, Jesus spoke positively about the Characters in OT, but Hitler again attacked the Characters in OT.
In the New Testament, it is clearly recorded that Jesus held the OT/Torah in very high regard for Torah, but Hitler attacked this Torah on numerous occasions, now how can Hitler be called a follower of Jesus or even a Christian when he attacked the Torah, a text which Jesus held in high regard?
In this case, it doesn’t matter if Hitler had his own brand of Christianity, it cannot be acknowledged since Hitler is standing in total contradiction to Jesus’s words spoken in NT, he attacked the sacred text of OT which Jesus saw as divine.
My case is simple and straight, Hitler attacked the OT, which Jesus held in high regard, it is as clear as day that an act of attacking OT and the characters in OT is totally opposite to Jesus’s view on OT.
There is no doubt Hitler did not hew to much Jesus actually taught. But almost no Christians do. Evangelical Christians in the U.S. break almost every instruction Jesus gave: they are pro war, pro violence, pro death penalty, pro wealth-hoarding, insist on public prayer, swear by God all the time, reject Torah observance, etc. So one cannot assess “whether someone is a Christian” by whether they hew to every single thing Jesus was made to have said. If that’s your standard, Christianity hasn’t existed for well over a thousand years now, and no Christians existed in Hitler’s day.
That response is partly true–Evangelicals as a whole have indeed embraced ideals fundamentally contrary to Jesus’ teaching (and to that extent are either bad Christians or not Christians at all)–and that response is partly ridiculous and ignorant generalization.
You could truthfully characterize the conservative Amish / Mennonite church communities or the traditional Quakers as they existed in the early days of the US in the same way? In addition to being the very first people to protest against slavery in the colonial US (Germantown, 1688, as Mennonites were arriving from Germany and mingling with Quakers), it is worth remembering what the future president, James Madison, had to say about those churches in the Founders’ effort to separate church and state.
Could even many conservative Catholic (incl. Eastern / Anglican) societies be characterized the same as Evangelicals in those respects? Of course not. Your conclusion, in particular, raises the specter of biases that have found their way into your professional work as well. I do appreciate you disclosing the highly-biased special interest that paid for your work.
I don’t follow your argument here.
Are you saying Evangelicals can be defined as not Christians but Catholics and the Amish can?
That makes no sense. Catholics and the Amish in no way adhere to the original Christian teachings either. Indeed, Jesus never said anything against slavery, so being abolitionists is adding to Christianity, not simply adhering to it. But they also adopt all kinds of bad teachings contrary to Jesus as well. There is no sect that comes close to perfectly replicating all the teachings of the New Testament. All sects deviate in some way. All of them.
So there simply can’t be any useful definition of Christian that is “someone who adheres without fail to every single teaching in the New Testament.” That would mean no Christians exist anymore. The religion is gone.
And any definition of Christian by which “Evangelical Christians” aren’t Christians is clearly defective. That isn’t how the word is used by almost anyone on the planet, least of all Evangelical Christians—who are usually the ones making the claim that Hitler isn’t Christian, yet they are hardly more Christian by that standard than he was.
No. The universal definition of Christian is: believing some aspect and teaching of Christ leads to some kind of salvation. Salvation through Christ. Beyond that all sects disagree on every single detail of what kind of salvation and how it is achieved through Christ. Those sects remain Christian. Just as much as Hitler does.
“Are you saying Evangelicals can be defined as not Christians but Catholics and the Amish can?” I am saying that there have always been certain church communities that have been very devoted to living in accordance with the teachings of Christ historically, just as there have been sweeping movements of those who do not, such as the positioning and practices of the Evangelicals that you point out (much like the compromise of politics and the church-state hybrid of Emperor Constantine which came to fruition in the 4th century, creating the “Roman Catholic” church). There are catholic societies that completely disavow those changes, just as the conservative Anabaptists (Mennonites / Amish / etc.) often still do as well. Suggesting that such people disappeared a thousand-plus years ago is a curiously ignorant claim for a historian. From the standpoint of the most ancient Christian beliefs and lifestyle, they at least strive to maintain them. Benjamin Franklin noted that he could see this kind of humility in Brethren churches of his time as well, whom he appreciated for not contriving these firm, published stances doctrinally in case they later found that they were mistaken and had changed or innovated in some aspect.
“Indeed, Jesus never said anything against slavery, so being abolitionists is adding to Christianity.” Really? The Scriptures acknowledge the fact of slavery and dealing with it as a fact of life in the world, but in light of your statement and Jesus’ teaching, we would just have to say this, then: According to Jesus, so long as you are willing to be someone else’s slave, then that person can be your slave. Right? Everyone knows “the Golden Rule” in Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 7, “Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” So He enjoins a standard by which His followers are not to do to anyone else what they would not want done to them. It appears that the Quakers and Mennonites in their first published objection to slavery in the colonies in 1688 understood Jesus’ teachings much better than today’s “educated” Atheists who claim this sort of nonsense all the time.
I don’t see anything relevant in your response.
Hitler’s Positive Christianity (as Nazi Positive Christianity generally) is not meaningfully different from any other anti-Semitic Christian Nationalism today, and not substantially different from White Evangelical Christianity generally (just different in trivial shifts in targets and dogmas). So there is no way to claim Hitler was not a Christian without a specious (and entirely arbitrary and circular) abuse of language.
You have not been able to reverse this observation.
As to the trivia of abolitionism (Hitler was as against slavery as modern Americans are, with our own bought-and-sold work-camp slaves, so that hardly bears any relevance here), Jesus literally said let people enslave you (if they force you to go one mile, go two). He never once said abolish slavery or that slavery was wrong. To the contrary, he repeatedly used slavery as a moral model for God’s governance of the universe. And his nearest followers agreed: the NT goes on to command slaves be obedient; Matthew says not one jot or tittle of God’s law is to vanish, and slavery is explicitly commanded by God in the OT; etc. So to get “abolitionism” out of Jesus requires adding to what he taught, reinterpreting it. So, “adding to what he taught, reinterpreting it” can never alone make you not a Christian, unless you admit no Christians exist anymore, nor have any existed for thousands of years.
You just can’t get a No True Scotsman fallacy to work here. You really need to give up trying.
I will respond one final time. I believe that it is crucial for readers to understand why you insist that Jesus, His apostles, and their disciples in the oldest historical records not be allowed to define what Christianity is and is not—not be allowed to define their own terms and meanings and to set the boundaries of the Faith themselves. You must hold that right-to-define instead, despite obviously being unaware of the import and application of so elementary a Christian foundation as the Golden Rule, which a first-grader in a genuinely Christian family would be taught at home and in the church community. The Golden Rule was clearly beyond Hitler’s grasp as well, and that of many others like him; available only to children and the childlike as Jesus Himself said would be the case. (Jesus said that few would be saved, not many; and applied this “many” to those who called Him “Lord” as well.) Rome, or the Evangelicals, or the Mormons, or Martin Luther (who was indeed a source and justification for Hitler’s hatreds), or some other historical sect or ahistorical cult or theology must instead be your defining exemplars—anyone or anything except Jesus, and the most ancient Christian Faith and those who have imperfectly but seriously adhered to it (whom you must pretend don’t exist). This is essential not only to your beliefs but to justify the attitudes and the outcomes that are common to your own faith (system of belief and enslavement—if Hitler is insisted upon as a Christian than no one should hesitate to describe Atheists as people of faith, especially since everyone serves somebody, as Bob Dylan sang, even if it is only themselves). This colors the attempt to be an objective historian as surely as being a devout Roman Catholic or devout (“radical”) Muslim does—and quite sad when the fruits of these determined biases throughout your faith have cost others as much as they have, and undoubtedly will even more in the future, just as unfaithful “Christians” have and will.
Let us be very clear here: In terms of the most ancient Christian historical record, Hitler was not a Christian by any possible conception of that term that is historically faithful in antiquity; no more than Vlad the Impaler was. It’s just that Atheists need Hitler to be a Christian so badly, given the outcomes of their own most impactful world leaders in such a short span of history. In addition to the appeal of an Apostle to someone who had become a Christian and was the owner of an escaped slave, who then also became a Christian, found in the New Testament book of Philemon, and additional instruction that obedient slaves should gain their freedom if they can (strange how you mentioned none of these parts of the New Testament), and the ancient Christian, Clement of Alexandria, arguing specifically (contrary to your interpretation) that the Mosaic Law taught “not to wrong anyone belonging to another race, and bring him under the yoke, when there is no other cause to allege than difference of race, which is no cause at all, being neither wickedness nor the effect of wickedness … We admit that the same nature exists in every race, and the same virtue” (see Acts 10:34-35 and Galatians 3:28 in the Bible), below is the summary spirit of anti-semitism, racist bigotry, and enslavement that you refer to as voiced by another prominent, ancient Christian, describing what changed in becoming a Christian because of who they were as a people in how they lived, including in that respect. None of this was written anywhere near recent times, and the degree that others claiming to be Christians have departed from that Holy Spirit in which this writer below was discipled, very much out of character for his time and place in the world, to that degree they have departed from that same Faith (see Jude 3-4 in the Bible). I have already specified examples of those who, on the whole, have not departed from its essence—and across many centuries of time. Many have died at the hands of the Catholics and the Protestants as well as political regimes, including some at the hands of the US as a result of their non-resistant refusal to fight–in Alcatraz and in Leavenworth, along with the Native families that were burned to death at Gnadenhutten, Ohio:
“…We who formerly delighted in fornication now embrace chastity alone; we who formerly used magical arts dedicate ourselves to the good and unbegotten God; we who valued above all things the acquisition of wealth and possessions now bring what we have into a common stock, and share with everyone in need; we who hated and destroyed one another and on account of their different manners would not live with men of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them, and pray for our enemies…”
Thank you for correcting the text of Table Talk. Hopefully it is as certain as it is possible to be now, with no additional German text discovered at some point that comports more with the French edition.
You are evidently trying to ignore the fact that you have been refuted. Because nothing you just said is remotely relevant to what we were discussing.
“Christianity” was not defined by Jesus. The word does not exist in any NT text except Acts and 1 Peter, where it isn’t defined, nor do either quote Jesus. In fact Acts says “Christian” was a word assigned to Christians by non-Christians. In Greek it means “partisans of Christ,” as in, anyone who claims Christ as their leader or exemplar. Hence the word in English refers to anyone who claims to follow Christ as their savior.
Mormons are Christians. Episcopalians are Christians. Jehovah’s Witnesses are Christians. Evangelicals and Catholics are Christians. Not a single one of those groups adheres to New Testament Christianity. They all ignore substantial amounts of its teachings (including directly from Jesus). They all add teachings not included. And they all change or reinterpret teachings contrary to what they originally were.
So you can’t claim someone who does those things isn’t a Christian—unless you wish to admit that no one is a Christian. No Christian religion remains anywhere on Earth. It died out thousands of years ago.
But then you have to come up with a new word for all these people calling themselves Christians. That of course is legerdemain. You can’t change what things are by changing what you call them.
People call themselves Christians because they believe they follow Christ, even though not a single one does in your sense. So “your sense” clearly isn’t what they or anyone means by the word. They mean what they mean by the word. That is simply what a Christian is nowadays. It is what the word has come to mean. And you can’t change that.
It is foolish to try and hide your history with word games anyway. Nazis were, by and large, as Christian as anyone. And all that they did that we loathe was built on centuries of Christian ideology. There is little substantial difference between Hitler and Martin Luther, other than that Hitler had more advanced technologies and a nation-state to do his will, and thus could accomplish things Luther had only longed for.
What does this mean for all those Hitler biographies? So many, such as A. N. Wilson’s, draw heavily on these Table Talks. It seems that many interpretations and explications of Hitler fall on their face with this revelation. Especially the Catholics who want to paint Hitler as anti-Christian.
Nilsson discusses this point a few times in his book; and indeed, the main takeaway is that this is a scandal that tends to lead historians to want to ignore it, precisely because it might call into question so much of what they’ve published.
However, Nilsson also points out that most of the main conclusions history has reached about Hitler stand well sufficiently on ample and diverse evidence not in the Table Talk. He points out a great deal rests easily enough on just Mein Kampf, if you actually read it. The more so when including speeches and letters and such.
So it isn’t like we’d radically revise our understanding of Hitler if we nixed the Table Talk as a reliable source. It would only nix this or that pet theory that depended solely on material in the Table Talk…and anything you can’t corroborate outside the Table Talk, one ought to have been at least a little suspicious of from the start.