Religion in Nazi Germany

The question, what role religion had in Nazi Germany is potentially controversial, as is the question of religion and politics in general. The argument is brought in the introduction of an issue on religion and public policy in the Journal of Policy History:

Leaving the question of the Christian opposition to Communism aside: Clearly, Nazism, with Hitler's plans for a magnificent new capital at Berlin (Welthauptstadt Germania), can be described as attempting to build a version of the New Jerusalem.^[2] Furthermore, the cult around Hitler as the Führer, the "huge congregations, banners, sacred flames, processions, a style of popular and radical preachings, prayers-and-responses, memorials and funeral marches" can easily be considered as the "essential props for the cult of race and nation, the mission of Aryan Germany and victory over her enemies."^[3] But the opposition of many adherents of traditional religions to Nazism is only one side of the issue. Within the Lutheran Churches in Germany, the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), whose most prominent members were Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, opposed Nazism. They were, however, (as of 1932) in the minority in the Evangelical Church in Germany, compared to the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), who supported National Socialism and cooperated with the Nazis.

Protestantism

Martin Luther

During the First and Second World War, German leaders used the writings of Luther to make Luther appear as if he would have been an active supporter of German nationalism.^[4] The prominent Protestant theologian Karl Barth used a different argument, when he stated in 1939 that the writings of Martin Luther were used by the Nazis to glorify the State and State absolutism:

In which Luther divided the temporal State from the inward focusing spiritual, thus limiting the ability of the individual or the church to question the actions of the State, which was seen as a God ordained instrument.

On February 1940, Barth accused German Lutherans specifically of separating biblical teachings from its teachings of the State and thus legitimizing the Nazi State ideology. ^[6] He was not alone with his view. A few years earlier on October 5, 1933, Pastor Wilhelm Rehm from Reutlingen, declared publicly, that “Hitler would not have been possible, without Martin Luther.^[7] though many have also made this same statement about other influences in Hitler's rise to power. "Without Lenin, Hitler would not have been possible." as stated by Historian Paul Johnson^[8]

Deutsche Christen

German Christians constituted the strongest Protestant movement in Germany after the 1932 Church elections, with the aim of synthesising Christianity with the ideology of National Socialism. There were various groups within the Deutsche Christians, some more radical than others, but united in the goal of establishing a national socialist Protestantism ^[9] Deutsche Christen abolished the Jewish traditions, some but not all rejected the Old Testament altogether. They rejected academic theology as sterile and not populist enough and were often anti-Catholic. On November 1933, A Protestant mass rally of the Deutsche Christians, which brought together a record 20 000 persons, passed three resolutions:

Adolf Hitler converted to Protestantism and joined the German Christians, according to the National Secretary Klundt on April 25, 1933 in Königsberg, Eastern Prussia ^[11] An official confirmation or denial was not issued by the Chancellor.

Reichs Bishop Ludwig Müller

Ludwig Müller (1883 - 1945 ) after his first meeting with Hitler was convinced that he had a divine responsibility to promote Hitler and his ideals,^[12] and together with Hitler, he favoured a unified Reichskirche of Protestants and Catholics. This Reichskirche was to be a loose federation in the form of a council, but subordinated to the National Socialist State.^[13] Ludwig Müller headed the German Christians which increased to about 600 000 members in the mid-thirties and won all Church elections since 1932, after dissenters were silenced by expulsion or violence.^[14] However he could not deliver on conforming all Christians to National Socialistism, and Hitler’s condescending attitudes toward protestants increased: "Protestant clergy, don’t believe in anything except their well-being and office".^[15]^[16] However, the personal relation between Reichsbischof Müller and Hitler remained cordial and good to 1945, when both committed suicide. Of lasting value of Bishop Müller's efforts was the recognition of the National Socialist State of "The German Evangelical Church" as a legal entity on July 14, 1933, al law which promised a melting of State, people and Church into one body. ^[17]

General views

The level of ties between Nazism and the Protestant churches has been a contentious issue for decades. One difficulty is that Protestantism includes a vast number of religious bodies many of whom had little relation to each other. Added to that, Protestantism tends to allow more variation among individual congregations than Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which makes statements about "official positions" of denominations problematic. Still, many Protestant organizations or denominations were solidly opposed to Nazism after the nature of the movement was better understood. Many Protestants including Rev. Martin Niemoller, who was imprisoned in 1937 under the charge of "misuse of the pulpit to vilify the State and the Party and attack the authority of the Government."^[18] resisted and some even died because of their efforts. The forms or offshoots of Protestantism that advocated pacificism, anti-nationalism, or racial equality tended to oppose in the strongest terms. Prominent Protestant, or Protestant offshoot, groups known for their efforts against Nazism include the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Confessing Church. Many of their members died in the camps or struggled fiercely against the Nazis.

Yet Lutherans voted for Hitler more than Catholics. Different German states possessed regional social variations as to class densities and religious denomination;^[19] Richard Steigmann-Gall alleges a linkage between several Protestant churches and Nazism,^[20] the main aspect being Hitler's citing anti-Semitic pamphlets by Martin Luther and accusations that the Lutheran establishment supported Hitler. The small Methodist population at times was deemed foreign; this stemmed from the fact that Methodism began in England, while it did not develop in Germany until the nineteenth century with Christoph Gottlob Müller and Louis Jacoby. Because of this history they felt the urge to be "more German than the Germans" to avoid suspicion. Methodist Bishop John L. Nelsen toured the U.S. on Hitler's behalf to protect his church, but in private letters indicated that he feared or hated Nazism, and so retired to Switzerland. Methodist Bishop F. H. Otto Melle took a far more collaborationist position that included apparently sincere support for Nazism. He felt that serving the Reich was both a patriotic duty and a means of advancement. To show his gratitude, Hitler made a gift of 10,000 marks in 1939 to a Methodist congregation to purchase an organ.^[21] Outside of Germany, Melle's views were overwhelmingly rejected by most Methodists. The leader of pro-Nazi segment of Baptists was Paul Schmidt. Hitler also led to the unification of Pro-Nazi Protestants in the Protestant Reich Church which was led by Ludwig Müller. The idea of such a "national church" was possible in the history of mainstream German Protestantism, but National Churches devoted primarily to the state were generally forbidden among the Anabaptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and in Catholicism.

During the 1930s Hitler tried to nationalize Germany's churches (German Christian), with restrictions allowing only German membership. Some Protestants resisted by forming the Confessing Church. A common Nazi song replaced the words to the German carol Silent Night with the following lyrics:

After a failed assassination on Hitler's life in 1943 which involved Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and other elements of the Confessing Church (a Protestant organization), Hitler ordered the arrest of Protestant, mainly Lutheran clergy. Catholic clergy were also suppressed if they spoke out against the regime.

Catholicism

The attitude of the Nazi party to the Church ranged from tolerance to near total renunciation.^[22] Many Nazis were anti-clerical in both private and public life. ^[23] The Nazi party had decidedly pagan elements.^[24] One position is that the Church and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic wetanshauungen" claiming the whole of the person. ^[22]

Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anticlerical, they both understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, being put off while they dealt with other enemies. ^[25]

Bernhard Stempfle

A certain priest called Father Bernhard Stempfle is credited with having helped editing Mein Kampf during his imprisoned days in the state prison at Landsberg am Lech together with Hitler.^{citation needed} However, in 1934, after the Night of the Long Knives Stempfle was found dead in a wood near Munich, with his heart pierced and three bullets through his head. Stempfle is said to have been a member of the Hieronymites, and sources mention that the reason for his assassination was probably secret, private knowledge about Hitler. Allegations that Stempfle was the confessor of Hitler must however be firmly dismissed, as Hitler no longer received any of the sacraments after he had left the Austrian family home many years before the First World War.^[26]

Church hierarchy

The nature of the Nazi Party's relations with the Catholic Church is also complicated. Before Hitler rose to power, many Catholic priests and leaders vociferously opposed Nazism on the grounds of its incompatibility with Christian morals. Nazi Party membership was forbidden until the takeover and a policy reversal. At his trial Franz von Papen said that until 1936 the Catholic Church hoped for a Christian alignment to the beneficial aspects he said they saw in national socialism. (This statement came after Pope Pius XII ended Von Papen's appointment as Papal chamberlain and ambassador to the Holy See, but before his restoration under Pope John XXIII.)

In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemning Nazi ideology, notably the Gleichschaltung policy directed against religious influence upon education, as well as Nazi racism and antisemitism. The encyclical Humani Generis Unitas however was never published. The massive Catholic opposition to the euthanasia programs led them to be quietly ended in August 28, 1941, (according to Spielvogel pp. 257-258) but the German Catholics only at some occasions actively and openly protested Nazi anti-Semitism in any comparable way, except for several bishops and priests like bishop Clemens von Galen of Münster; this might have been due to the restrictions imposed upon the small, remaining Catholic press by the Nazi government after the 1941 debacle about euthanasia.

In Nazi Germany, all known political dissenters were imprisoned, and many German priests were sent to the concentration camps for their opposition, including the parson of the Berlin Cathedral Bernhard Lichtenberg and seminarian Karl Leisner. Hitler was never directly excommunicated by the Catholic Church and several Catholic bishops in Germany or Austria are recorded as encouraging prayers of support for "The Führer"; this despite the fact the original Reichskonkordat (1933) of Germany with the Holy See proscribed any active political participation by the priesthood.

Criticism also arose in that the Vatican pontificate headed by Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII had remained circumspect about the national-scale race hatred before 1937 (Mit brennender Sorge). In 1937, just before the publishing of the anti-Nazi encyclical, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli in Lourdes, France condemned discrimination against Jews and the neopaganism of the Nazi regime. A statement by Pius XI on 8 September 1938 spoke of the "inadmissibility" of anti-semitism, but Pius XII is criticised by people like John Cornwell for being unspecific. Pius XI may have underestimated the degree that Hitler's ideas influenced the laity in light of hopes the Concordate would preserve Catholic influences amongst them. The evolution of the Vatican's understanding has faced criticism of weakness, slowness, or even culpability. On culpability this is perhaps clearest with regards to the German hierarchy as after the Concordate there was a radical reversal of the former episcopal condemnation of Nazism, according to Daniel Goldhagen and others. It is less certain in other cases. From the other extreme the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the Netherlands officially and formally condemned Nazism in 1941 and therefore faced violence and deportation of its priests, along with attacks upon monasteries and Catholic hospitals, and, the deportation of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, who were hiding in the Catholic institutions, among them the famous Saint Edith Stein. Likewise, the Polish Roman Catholic hierarchy was violently attacked by the Nazis and saw thousands of its clerics sent to concentration camps or simply killed, a famous example of this being Father Maksymilian Kolbe. Most nations' hierarchy took a mixture of the two positions, oscillating between collaboration and active resistance in order to save as many lives as possible.

Tangential to the more extreme of collaborationist accusations is the characterisation that Nazism actively based itself on a similar pontifical structure and corps of functionaries. For example the special clothing, ghettoization, and badges demanded of Jews were once common or even began in the Papal States. Also that the Nazis saw themselves as an effective replacement of Catholicism that would co-opt its unity and respect for hierarchy. Hence attempts were made to unite other religions, as in the earlier example of the Protestant Reich Church.

In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in the German Reich, many of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the Allgemeine SS under Himmler. However, on July 30, 1941 the Aktion Klostersturm (Operation Monastery) was put to an end by a decree of Hitler, who feared the increasing protests by the Catholic part of German population might result in passive rebellions and thereby harm the Nazi war effort at the eastern front.^[27]

The Christian Churches were amongst the first victims of Nazi war crimes in the rise to power of the Nazis, and detailed plans were made to eliminate them after power was secured.^[28]

Nazism and Christianity

Nazi Attitudes towards Christianity

Hitler and other Nazi leaders clearly made use of both Christian symbolism combined with indigenous Germanic pagan imagery mixed with ancient Roman symbolism and emotion in propaganda for the German public and this worried protestants.^[29] Many Nazi leaders subscribed either to a mixture of then modern scientific theories^{citation needed}, as Hitler himself did^{citation needed}, or to mysticism and occultism, which was especially strong in the SS. Central to both groupings was the belief in Germanic (white Northern-European) racial superiority. The existence of a Ministry of Church Affairs, instituted in 1935 and headed by Hanns Kerrl, was hardly recognized by ideologists such as Alfred Rosenberg or by other political decision-makers.

Some Nazis promoted Positive Christianity which attempted to replace traditional Christian beliefs with those agreeable with Nazism, which many German Christians accepted.^[30] Even in the later years of the Third Reich, many Protestant and Catholic clergy within Germany persisted in believing that Nazism was in its essence in accordance with Christian precepts.^[30] Typically those who persisted were considered a threat to Nazi ideology and marginalized or censored. For example:

^[31] In 1941, Martin Bormann, a close associate of Hitler said publicly "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable"^[32] In 1942 he also declared in a confidential memo to Gauleiters that the Christian Churches 'must absolutely and finally be broken.' Thus it is evident that he believed Nazism, based as it was on a 'scientific' world-view, to be completely incompatible with Christianity^[33].

Other members of the Hitler government, including Rosenberg, during the war formulated a thirty-point program for the "National Reich Church" which included:

Nazi party leaders viewed Christianity and National Socialism as competing world views (even though some Christians did not see a conflict) and Hitler planned to eliminate the Christian churches after securing control of his European empire. The churches were permitted some self governing and allowed to remain because Hitler did not want to risk strong opposition until other more pressing issues were dealt with.^[36]

Christianity and Nazi Anti-Semitism

According to American historian Lucy Dawidowicz, Anti-Semitism has a long history within Christianity. The line of "anti-Semitic descent" from Luther, the author of On the Jews and Their Lies, to Hitler is "easy to draw." In her The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, she contends that Luther and Hitler were obsessed by the "demonologized universe" inhabited by Jews. Dawidowicz writes that the similarities between Luther's anti-Jewish writings and modern anti-Semitism are no coincidence, because they derived from a common history of Judenhass, which can be traced to Haman's advice to Ahasuerus. Although modern German anti-Semitism also has its roots in German nationalism and the liberal revolution of 1848, Christian Anti-Semitism she writes is a foundation that was laid by the Roman Catholic Church and "upon which Luther built."^[37] Dawidowicz' allegations and positions are criticized and not accepted by most historians however. For example, in "Studying the Jew" Alan Steinweis notes that, "Old-fashioned antisemitism, Hitler argued, was insufficient, and would lead only to pogroms, which contribute little to a permanent solution. This is why, Hitler maintained, it was important to promote 'an antisemitism of reason,' one that acknowledged the racial basis of Jewry."^[38] Interviews with Nazis by other historians show that the Nazis thought that their views were rooted in biology, not historical prejudices. For example, "S. became a missionary for this biomedical vision... As for anti-Semitic attitudes and actions, he insisted that “the racial question... [and] resentment of the Jewish race... had nothing to do with medieval anti-Semitism...” That is, it was all a matter of scientific biology and of community."^[39]>

Future plans of the Nazi government

Historian Heinz Hürten (professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Eichstaett) argued that the Nazi party had plans for the Roman Catholic Church, according to which the Church was supposed to "eat from the hands of the government." The sequence of these plans, he states, follow this sequence: an abolition of the priestly celibacy and a nationalisation of all church property, the dissolution of monastic orders and religious congregations, and the influence of the Catholic Church upon education. Hutzen states that Hitler proposed to reduce vocations to the priesthood by forbidding seminaries from receiving applicants before their 25th birthdays, and thus had hoped that these men would marry beforehand, during the time (18 - 25 years) in which they were obliged to work in military or labour service. Also, along with this process, the Church's sacraments would be revised and changed to so-called "Lebensfeiern", the non-Christian celebrations of different periods of life.^[40]

There existed some considerable differences among officials within the Nazi Party on the question of Christianity. Goebbels, is purported to have feared the creation of a third front of Catholics against their regime in Germany itself. In his diary, Goebbels wrote about the "traitors of the Black International who again stabbed our glorious government in the back by their criticism", by which Hutzen states meant the indirectly or actively resisting Catholic clergymen (who wore black cassocks).^[41]

Other religions

Jehovah's Witnesses

Esoteric groups

Also, some Nazi leaders had an interest in esotericism. Rudolf Hess had an interest in Anthroposophy. Heinrich Himmler showed a strong interest in esoteric matters, too, although as Steigmann–Gall points out, Hitler and many of his key associates sometimes still attended Christian services of the nazified Reich Church.

Messianic aspects of Nazism?

There has been significant literature on the potential religious aspects of Nazism. Sometimes it is even asked whether Hitler and the Nazi leadership were about to replace Christianity in Germany with a new religion in which Hitler was to be considered as the messiah. The strongest hint in this direction comes from Wilfried Daim, who, in his book on the connection between Lanz von Liebenfels and Hitler, has brought a reprint of a document on a session on "the unconditional abolishment of all religious commitments (Religionsbekenntnisse) after the final victory (Endsieg) ... with a simultaneous proclamation of Adolf Hitler as the new messiah."^[42] This session report was preserved in a private collection and could, very likely, be fake, although Daim holds towards the authenticity of the document.^[42] Connected to this is the question if Hitler personally saw himself as the messiah of the German people; see Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs. Other evidence that Hitler was occasionally compared with Jesus, or revered as a savior sent by God is a prayer recited by orphans at orphanages. It runs as follows:^[43]

Prayer to Hitler

Contents

Religion and Politics