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Was
Hitler an atheist as some Christians say he was? Hitler's own words make
this claim rather dubious. Scholars are still unsure whether or not Adolf
Hitler was a believing Christian or just a politically cunning theist,
but what is certain however is there is no evidence he was an
atheist. This page documents some of his religious views, as he personally
described them. Articles which examine the evidence in further detail can
be found at the bottom of the page.
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“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”
(
Adolf Hitler, from John Toland [Pulitzer Prize winner],
Adolf Hitler,
New York: Anchor Publishing, 1992, p. 507. )
“The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own
denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and
actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will
gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His
work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 562. )
“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,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 65. )
“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as
a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few
followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against
them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless
love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord
at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of
vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after
two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before
the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian
I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for
truth and justice. And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does
not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world
some two thousand years ago — a civilization which was driven to its ruin through
this same Jewish people.
“Then indeed when Rome collapsed there were endless streams of
new German bands flowing into the Empire from the North; but, if Germany collapses today,
who is there to come after us? German blood upon this earth is on the way to gradual
exhaustion unless we pull ourselves together and make ourselves free!
“And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are
acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a
duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil
and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and
misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and
look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil,
if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn
against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a
speech
delivered at Munich, April 12, 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1942, pp. 19-20. )
“For this, to be sure, from the child's primer down to the last newspaper,
every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard,
must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until the timorous prayer
of our present parlor patriots: ‘Lord, make us free!’ is transformed in the brain of
the smallest boy into the burning plea: ‘Almighty God, bless our arms when the time
comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom;
Lord, bless our battle!’”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, pp. 632-633. )
“I may not be a light of the church, a pulpiteer, but deep down I am a pious man,
and believe that whoever fights bravely in defense of the natural laws framed by God and
never capitulates will never be deserted by the Lawgiver, but will, in the end, receive
the blessings of Providence.”
(
Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered on July 5, 1944; from Charles Bracelen Flood,
Hitler: The
Path to Power, Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989, p. 208. )
“I say: my Christian feeling tells me that my lord and savior is a warrior. It
calls my attention to the man who, lonely and surrounded by only a few supporters,
recognized what they [the Jews] were, and called for a battle against them, and who,
by God, was not the greatest sufferer, but the greatest warrior. . .
“As a human being it is my duty to see to it that humanity will not suffer the
same catastrophic collapse as did that old civilization two thousand years ago, a
civilization which was driven to its ruin by the Jews. . . I am convinced that I am
really a devil and not a Christian if I do not feel compassion and do not wage war, as
Christ did two thousand years ago, against those who are steeling and exploiting these
poverty-stricken people.
“Two thousand years ago a man was similarly denounced by this particular race
which today denounces and blasphememes all over the place. . . That man was dragged
before a court and they said: he is arousing the people! So he, too, was an agitator!”
( Adolf Hitler, in a
speech delivered on April 12, 1922; from Charles Bracelen Flood,
Hitler: The
Path to Power, Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989, pp. 261-262. )
“And now Staatspräsident Bolz says that Christianity and the Catholic faith are
threatened by us. And to that charge I can answer: In the first place it is Christians
and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany. I do not merely
talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties
which destroy Christianity. If many wish today to take threatened Christianity under
their protection, where, I would ask, was Christianity for them in these fourteen years
when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal
damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically
Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a
speech delivered at Stuttgart, February 15, 1933; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 240. )
“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have
therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely
with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a speech
delivered in Berlin, October 24, 1933; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 378. )
“Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits
sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the
expulsion from paradise.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 383. )
“We have experienced a miracle, something unique, something the like of which
there has hardly been in the history of the world. God first allowed our people to be
victorious for four and a half years, then He abased us, laid upon us a period of
shamelessness, but now after a struggle of fourteen years he has permitted us to bring
that period to a close. It is a miracle which has been wrought upon the German
people. […] It shows us that the Almighty has not deserted our people, that He received
it into favour at the moment when it rediscovered itself. And that our people shall
never again lose itself, that must be our vow so long as we shall live and so long as
the Lord gives us the strength to carry on the fight.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a speech to
the 'Old Guard' of the Party at Munich, March 19, 1934; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 406. )
“The anti-Semitism of the new [Christian Social] movement was
based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 119. )
“Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of
the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the ‘remaking’ of the
Reich as they call it.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 375. )
“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. A fight for freedom had begun
mightier than the earth had ever seen; for once Destiny had begun its course, the
conviction dawned on even the broad masses that this time not the fate of Serbia or
Austria was involved, but whether the German nation was to be or not to be.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 161. )
“As far as this variety of ‘folkish’ warriors, are concerned, I can
only wish the National Socialist movement and the German people with all my heart: ‘Lord,
preserve us from such friends, and then we can easily deal with our enemies.’”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 565. )
“It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but
the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 436. )
“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,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 214. )
“Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious,
moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished
the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a speech at
Reichstag, Berlin, January 30, 1934; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 383. )
“The advantages of a personal and political nature that might arise from
compromising with atheistic organizations would not outweigh the consequences which
would become apparent in the destruction of general moral basic values. The national
government regards the two Christian confessions as the weightiest factors for the
maintenance of our nationality: their rights are not to be infringed.”
( Adolf Hitler,
in a speech at Reichstag, Berlin, March 23, 1933; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 371. )
“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no
religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious
foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion
must be derived from faith.”
( Adolf Hitler, in 26 April 1933 in a
speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933; from Ernst Helmreich,
The German Churches Under Hitler. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979, p. 241. )
“[T]he world has no reason for fighting in our defense, and as a matter
of principle God does not make cowardly nations free…”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 622. )
“This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical
existence of a religious belief.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 152. )
“While we destroyed the Centre Party, we have not only brought thousands of
priests back into the Church, but to millions of respectable people we have restored
their faith in their religion and in their priests. The union of the Evangelical Church
in a single Church for the whole Reich, the Concordat with the Catholic Church, these
are but milestones on the road which leads to the establishment of a useful relation
and a useful co operation between the Reich and the two Confessions.”
( Adolf Hitler, in his New Year
Message, January 1, 1934; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 382. )
“National Socialism has always affirmed that it is determined to take the
Christian Churches under the protection of the State. For their part the churches
cannot for a second doubt that they need the protection of the State, and that only
through the State can they be enabled to fulfill their religious mission. Indeed,
the churches demand this protection from the State.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a Radio Broadcast
July 22, 1933; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 375. )
“I know that here and there the objection has been raised: Yes, but you have
deserted Christianity. No, it is not that we have deserted Christianity; it is those
who came before us who deserted Christianity. We have only carried through a clear
division between politics, which have to do with terrestrial things, and religion,
which must concern itself with the celestial sphere. There has been no interference
with the doctrine of the Confessions or with their religious freedom, nor will there
be any such interference. On the contrary the State protects religion, though always
on the one condition that religion will not be used as a cover for political ends.
“There may have been a time when even parties founded on the ecclesiastical
basis were a necessity. At that time Liberalism was opposed to the Church, while
Marxism was anti-religious. But that time is past. National Socialism neither
opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the
ground of a real Christianity.
“The Church's interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight
against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against the
Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our
struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of
hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of
strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a speech delivered
at Koblenz, August 26, 1934; from Norman H. Baynes, ed.,
The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942, p. 386. )
“It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world
if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither
desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity
that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor
little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give
birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the
rest of the world.”
( Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York: Mariner Books, 1999, p. 403. )
“At the head of our [National Socialist] program there stand no secret surmisings
but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as
the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and
hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance
of a divine work and fulfill a divine will—not in the secret twilight of a new house
of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a
speech
delivered at Nuremberg, September 6, 1938; from Adolf Hitler,
My New Order. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 500. )
“May God Almighty give our work His blessing, strengthen our purpose, and
endow us with wisdom and the trust of our people, for we are fighting not for
ourselves but for Germany.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a
speech
delivered at Berlin, February 1, 1933; from Adolf Hitler,
My New Order. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 147. )
“The judgment whether a people is virtuous or not virtuous can hardly be
passed by a human being. That should be left to God.”
( Adolf Hitler, in a
speech
delivered at Wilhelmshaven, April 1, 1939; from Adolf Hitler,
My New Order. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 621. )
