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Hitler's Religious Beliefs and Fanaticism
( Selected quotes from Mein Kampf and Hitler's henchmen )
"People often make the claim that Adolph Hitler adhered to Atheism, Humanism or that his religion involved ancient Nordic pagan mythology. None of these fanciful and wrong ideas hold. Although one of Hitler's henchmen, Alfred Rosenberg, did undertake a campaign of Nordic mythological propaganda, Hitler and most of his henchmen did not believe in it (see the last part of this text). Many American books, television documentaries, and Sunday sermons that preach of Hitler's "evil" have eliminated Hitler's god for their Christian audiences, but one only has to read from his own writings to appreciate that his God equals the same God of the Bible. Hitler held many hysterical beliefs which not only include God and Providence but also Fate, Social Darwinism, and politics. He spoke, unashamedly, about God, fanaticism, idealism, dogma, and the power of propaganda. Hitler held strong faith in all his convictions. He justified his fight for the German people and against Jews by using Godly and Biblical reasoning. Indeed, one of his most revealing statements makes this quite clear:
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: *by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.*"
Although Hitler did not practice religion in a churchly sense, he certainly believed in the Bible's God. He got raised as a Catholic and went to a Catholic school. Much of his philosophy came right out of the Bible, and more influentially, from the Christian Social movement. The German Christian Social movement remarkably resembles the Christian Right movement in America today.
Hitler's anti-Semitism grew from his Christian education. Christian Germany in his time took for granted the belief that Jews held an inferior status to German Christians. Jewish hatred did not spring from Hitler, it came from the preaching of Catholic priests, and Protestant ministers throughout Germany for hundreds of years. The Protestant leader, Martin Luther, himself, held a livid hatred for Jews and their Jewish religion. In his book, "On the Jews and their Lies," Luther set the standard for Jewish hatred in Protestant Germany up until World War II. Hitler expressed a great admiration for Martin Luther.
Hitler did not have to prove his belief in God, as so many American Christians do now. He did not have to justify his Godly belief against an Atheist movement. He took his beliefs for granted just as most Germans did. He did not have to preach God to his audience. His thrust aimed at politics, not religion. Although, through his politics he had wanted to create a German Reich Church to instill dogmatic beliefs in the German populace.
Future generation should always remember that Adolph Hitler could not have come into power without the support of Christian believing people.
The following quotes provides some of Hitler's expressions of his belief in religion, faith, fanaticism, Providence, and even a few of his paraphrasing of the Bible. It by no means represents the totality of Hitler's concerns. To realize the full context of these quotes, I implore the reader to read Mein Kampf.
The end of this text provides a few quotes from Hitler's henchmen. This text represents but only a sampling of the full extent of the influence of Christianity upon the Third Reich. These quotes provide a quick source of Hitler's and the Nazi leaders belief in God.
Lastly, an addendum includes quotes from Protestant leader, Martin Luther. Although Hitler carried out atrocities against the Jews, Martin Luther and generations of following believers set the stage for World War II and the Holocaust.
The purpose of this paper intends to reveal the dangers of belief-systems, and in no way attempts to give endorsement against the Jewish people.
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Volume 1, Chapter 1, In the House of My Parents
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Their sword will become our plow, and from the tears of war the daily bread of future generations will grow.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Note: "Their sword will become our plow" appears to paraphrase Micah 4:3 about beating swords into ploughshares, but his tears of war more resembles Joel 3:9-10 "Beat your plowshares into swords."
I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I thank Heaven that a portion of the memories of those days still remains with me. Woods and meadows were the battlefields on which the 'conflicts' which exist everywhere in life were decided.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 2, Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna
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...God have mercy!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Fate must bring retribution, unless men conciliate Fate while there is still time. How thankful I am today to the Providence which sent me to that school!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Thus my faith grew that my beautiful dream for the future would become reality after all, even though this might require long years.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The more the linguistic Babel corroded and disorganized parliament, the closer drew the inevitable hour of the disintegration of this Babylonian Empire, and with it the hour of freedom for my German-Austrian people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Not until my fourteenth or fifteenth year did I begin to come across the word 'Jew,' with any frequency, partly in connection with political discussions.... For the Jew was still characterized for me by nothing but his religion, and therefore, on grounds of human tolerance, I maintained my rejection of religious attacks in this case as in others. Consequently, the tone, particularly that of the Viennese anti-Semitic press, seemed to me unworthy of the cultural tradition of a great nation.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Note: Karl Lueger (1844-1910) belonged as a member of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party, he became mayor of Vienna and kept his post until his death.) The man and the movement seemed 'reactionary' in my eyes. My common sense of justice, however, forced me to change this judgment in proportion as I had occasion to become acquainted with the man and his work; and slowly my fair judgment turned to unconcealed admiration. Today, more than ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times.
-Adolf Hitler speaking about Dr. Karl Lueger (Mein Kampf)
How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christian Social movement! My views with regard to anti-Semitism thus succumbed to the passage of time, and this was my greatest transformation of all.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: *by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.*
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 3 General Political Considerations Based on My Vienna Period
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A man does not die for something which he himself does not believe in.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The Western democracy of today is the forerunner of Marxism which without it would not be thinkable. It provides this world plague with the culture in which its germs can spread.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Just as a man's denominational orientation is the result of upbringing, and only the religious need as such slumbers in his soul, the political opinion of the masses represents nothing but the final result of an incredibly tenacious and thorough manipulation of their mind and soul.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
God forbid!
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf) nadir
Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be 'discovered' by an election.
-Adolf Hitler with his twist on Mark 10:25 (Mein Kampf)
Thank the Lord, Germanic democracy means just this: that any old climber or moral slacker cannot rise by devious paths to govern his national comrades, but that, by the very greatness of the responsibility to be assumed, incompetents and weaklings are frightened of.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
For by employing religious force in the service of its political considerations, the crown aroused a spirit which at that outset it had not considered possible.
-Adolf Hitler on the state of Rome (Mein Kampf)
For when a people is not willing or able to fight for its existence-- Providence in its eternal justice has decreed that people's end.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party... was to assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Even less could I understand how the Christian Social Party at this same period could achieve such immense power. At that time it had just reached the apogee of its glory.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
But the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone. Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The hard struggle which the Pan-Germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The root of the whole evil lay, particularly in Schonerer's opinion, in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, and that for this very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Protestantism as such is a better defender of the interests of Germanism, in so far as this is grounded in its genesis and later tradition; it fails, however, in the moment when this defense of national interests must take place in a province which is either absent from the general line of its ideological world and traditional development, or is for some reason rejected.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Thus, Protestantism will always stand up for the advancement of all Germans as such, as long as matters of inner purity or national deepening as well as German freedom are involved, since all these things have a firm foundation in its own being; but it combats with the greatest hostility any attempt to rescue the nation from the embrace of its most mortal enemy, since its attitude toward the Jews just happens to be more or less dogmatically established.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people fulfilled their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, both together and particularly at the first flare, there really existed in both camps but a single holy German Reich, for whose existence and future each man turned to his own heaven.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Verily a man cannot serve two masters. And I consider the foundation or destruction of a religion far greater than the foundation or destruction of a state, let alone a party.
-Adolf Hitler speaking like Jesus in Matthew 6:24 (Mein Kampf)
Heaven will smile on us again.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political parties.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
*For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!*
0 -Adolf Hitler [the original comes in italics] (Mein Kampf)
In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people.
-Adolf Hitler speaking about the leader of the Christian Social movement (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 4, Munich
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But the people on top made a cult of the 'ally,' as if it were the Golden Calf.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(The Golden calf occurs in Exodus 32:1-4)
Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
We must, therefore, coolly and objectively adopt the standpoint that it can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
...a man does not die for business, but for ideals.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 5, The World War
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Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
I had so often sung 'Deutschland u:ber Alles' and shouted 'Heil' at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Indeed, nearly all attempts to exterminate a doctrine and its organizational expression, by force without spiritual foundation, are doomed to failure, and not seldom end with the exact opposite of the desired result...
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 6, War Propaganda
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I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian-Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Certainly we don't have to discuss these matters with the Jews, the most modern inventors of this cultural perfume. Their whole existence is an embodied protest against the aesthetics of the Lord's image.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 7, The Revolution
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More than once I was tormented by the thought that if Providence had put me in the place of the incapable of criminal incompetents or scoundrels in our propaganda service, our battle with Destiny would have taken a different turn.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on His ungrateful children.
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
...we must pray to the Almighty not to refuse His blessing to this change and not to abandon our people in the times to come.
-Hitler recalling a priest's speech after the defeat of WWI (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 8, The Beginning of My Political Activity
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As soon as the theoretician attempts to take account of so-called 'utility' and 'reality' instead of absolute truth, his work will cease to be a polar star of seeking humanity and instead will become a prescription for everyday life.
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea...
-Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I (Mein Kampf)
The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to depend on human beings...
If this were not so, the founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth... In its workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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Volume 1, Chapter 10, Causes of the Collapse
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Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of the heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Hastily and indifferently, people tried to pass by the unpleasant truths, as though by such an attitude events could be undone. No, the fact that our big city population is growing more and more prostituted in its love life cannot just be denied out of existence; it simply is so.
...it is said with such terrible justice that the sins of the fathers are avenged down to the tenth generation. But this applies only to profanation of the blood and the race.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
(Avenged to the tenth generation appears in Deuteronomy 23:2-3)
Blood sin and desecration of the race are the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles.
The first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the 'image' of God.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...
Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
-Adolf Hitler sounding like the Moral Majority (Mein Kampf)
But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The works of Mortiz von Schwind, or of a Bo:cklin, were also an inner experience, but of artists graced by God and not of clowns.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
How widespread the general disunity was growing is shown by an examination of religious conditions before the War. Here, too, a unified and effective philosophical conviction had long since been lost in large sections of the nation. In this the members officially breaking away from the churches play a less important role than those who are completely indifferent.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine-- an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular-- right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply so their own ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Also noteworthy is the increasingly violent struggle against the dogmatic foundations of the various churches without which in this human world the practical existence of a religious faith is not conceivable.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all efficacy.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
The attack against dogmas as such, therefore, strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state, and , as the latter would end in a total anarchy of the state, the former would end in a worthless religious nihilism.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them."
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
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