As for Nazism, Harris writes that “the hatred of Jews in Germany… was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.” Indeed, “the Holocaust marked the culmination of… two hundred years of Christian fulminating against the Jews.” Therefore, “knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.” Atheist Web sites routinely claim that Hitler was a Christian because he was born Catholic, never publicly renounced his Catholicism, and wrote in Mein Kampf, “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
How persuasive are these claims? Hitler was born Catholic just as Stalin was born into the Russian Orthodox Church and Mao was raised as a Buddhist. These facts prove nothing, as many people reject their religious upbringing as these three men did. From anearly age, historian Allan Bullock writes, Hitler “had no time at all for Catholic teaching, regarding it as a religion fit only for slaves and detesting its ethics.”0 How then do we account for Hitler’s claim that in carrying out his anti-Semitic program he was an instrument of divine providence? During his ascent to power, Hitler needed the support of the German people—both the Bavarian Catholics and the Prussian Lutherans—and to secure this he occasionally used rhetoric such as “I am doing the Lord’s work.” To claim that this rhetoric makes Hitler a Christian is to confuse political opportunism with personal conviction. Hitler himself says in Mein Kampf that his public statements should be understood as propaganda that bear no relation to the truth but are designed to sway the masses.”
The Nazi idea of an Aryan Christ who uses the sword to cleanse the earth of the Jews— what Hitler once called “Positive Christianity”— was obviously a radical departure from traditional Christian understanding, and was condemned as such by Pope Pius XI at the time. Moreover, Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not religious, it was racial. Jews were targeted not because of their religion—indeed many German Jews were completely secular in their way of life—but because of their racial identity. This was an ethnic and not a religious designation.
We can see the difference by looking at attitudes toward Jews in medieval Europe. In fifteenth-century Spain, a Jew could escape Christian persecution simply by converting to Christianity. Ferdinand and Isabella did not object to having ethnic Jews in Spain; they objected to the practice of Judaism in what they wanted to be a completely Catholic country. Hitler’s objection to Jews, on the other hand, was not religious. A Jew could not escape Auschwitz by pleading, “I no longer practice Judaism,” “I am an atheist,” or “I have converted to Christianity.” This mattered nothing to Hitler because he believed the Jews were inferior racial stock. His anti-Semitism was secular.
Hitler’s Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer’s private opinions assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great “scourges” of history, and said of the Germans, “Let’s be the only people who are immunized against this disease.” He promised that “through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity.” In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution. Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler’s leading advisers — Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann—were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany.
Some atheist writers like Christopher Hitchens have sought to push Hitler into the religious camp by pointing to Nazism as a “quasi-pagan phenomenon.” Hitler may have been a polytheist who worshipped the pagan gods, these writers say, but polytheism is still theism. This argument fails to distinguish between ancient paganism and modern paganism. It’s true that Hitler and the Nazis drew heavily on ancient archetypes—mainly Nordic and Teutonic legends—to give their vision a mystical aura. But this was secular mysticism, not religious mysticism. The ancient Germanic peoples truly believed in their pagan gods. Hitler and the Nazis, however, relied on ancient myths in the modern form given to them by Nietzsche and Wagner. For Nietzsche and Wagner, there was no question of the ancient myths being true. Wagner no more believed in the Norse god Wotan than Nietzsche believed in Apollo. For Hitler and the Nazis, the ancient myths were valuablebecause they could give depth and significance to a secular racial conception of the world.
