Religious views of Adolf Hitler

The religious views of Adolf Hitler are a matter of debate, with a consensus of scholars agreeing that Hitler was not a Christian and was skeptical of religion generally. According to Alan Bullock, Hitler was a rationalist and materialist "who believed neither in God nor in conscience", but who opportunistically employed the language of "divine providence" in defence of his own myth. When young, Hitler was baptised and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church and raised by an anti-clerical father and practising Catholic mother. In adulthood, he became disdainful of Christianity, but retained some respect for the organisational power of the Church. Although he was prepared to delay conflicts for political reasons, according to Kershaw, Bullock, Evans, Fest, Phayer, Shirer and others, he eventually hoped to eradicate Christianity in Germany. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials submitted that Hitler engaged in a slow and cautious policy to eliminate Christianity. Historians such as Fischel and Dill have written that if the regime could not eradicate Christianity, it hoped instead to subjugate or distort it to a Nazi world view. Steigmann-Gall interprets Hitler's language to mean that Hitler held Jesus in high esteem as an "Aryan fighter" who struggled against Jewry, but notes that, over time, his Nazi movement became "increasingly hostile to the churches".

According to Kershaw, Hitler was "a very private, even secretive individual", able to deceive "even hardened critics" as to his true beliefs. His anti-Christian world view is evidenced in the Goebbels Diaries, the memoirs of Albert Speer, and transcripts of Hitler's private conversations recorded by Martin Bormann in Hitler's Table Talk. Richard J. Evans wrote that Hitler repeatedly called Nazism a secular ideology founded on science, which in the long run could not co-exist with religion. Goebbels wrote in 1941 that Hitler "hates Christianity". Speer wrote after the war that Hitler had "no real attachment" to Catholicism, but that he never formally left the Church. Although personally skeptical, Hitler's public relationship to religion was one of opportunistic pragmatism. He saw Christianity as a temporary ally against Communism. When a Bavarian politician rejected anti-Semitism as being un-Christian in 1922, Hitler claimed in a speech in Munich that his "feeling as a Christian" led him to believe Jesus was anti-Jewish. In the semi-autobiographical Mein Kampf (1925/6) Hitler makes some religious allusions, but declares himself supportive of separation between church and state and presents a nihilistic vision of a universe ordered around principles of struggle between weak and strong. His speeches referred to belief in a "Creator". According to Max Domarus, Hitler had fully discarded belief in the Judeo-Christian conception of God by 1937, but continued to use the word "God" in speeches. Rees concludes that "Hitler's relationship in public to Christianity—indeed his relationship to religion in general—was opportunistic. There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church".

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