Print Subscriptions. Deseret News homepage. Filed under: Faith Mormon Times. Was Adolf Hitler religious? Reddit Pocket Email Linkedin. Grid View. In this Dec. AP, Associated Press German Chancellor Adolf Hitler stands in the front car of a motorcade upon his arrival at the chancellery in Berlin on July 6, , after returning from Compiegne, where France surrendered to Germany. Associated Press. Regnery Publishing.
Sign up for the newsletter Morning Edition Start your day with the top stories you missed while you were sleeping. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. The dictator subscribed to an aggressive, Aryan-oriented social Darwinist position whereby anything that advanced the Nordic race was morally good and whatever led to biological degeneration was reprehensible.
His approach of eliminating possible religious options is a reasonable way to proceed, but it does lead to fair amount of overlap and repetition. Surely, Hitler was a demonic, hate-filled opportunist. And those beliefs, we all know, had utterly horrific consequences. Donald A. Please read our policy on commenting. All Rights Reserved. ISSN X. Skip to main content. Search Term.
Link to Publisher's Website. Washington, D. ISBN In this eminently readable and insightful book, Richard Weikart investigates Adolf Hitler's personal beliefs. Questions about Hitler's religion continue to animate and divide scholars, not least because Hitler frequently lied about his religious convictions to mollify and mislead his supporters and gain political advantage.
Not surprisingly, Hitler was much preoccupied with Christianity and the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany. Weikart takes to task scholars, most notably Richard Steigmann-Gall, who, in part based on Hitler's early conciliatory tone toward the churches, concluded that Hitler was "a sincere Christian, at least until " p.
Weikart instead contends that "the evidence is preponderant against Hitler embracing any form of Christianity for most of his adult life" p. Aside from his vicious private condemnation of the churches and "Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness," a careful reading of Hitler's speeches that are often cited as proof of his Christian faith reveal such a distorted conception of Christianity that few would recognize it as such p.
Hitler endorsed a kind of Kampfchristentum Christianity of the sword that cast Jesus as "a pugnacious antiSemite" in order to persuade Christians to join in his persecution of Jews p. Although Weikart acknowledges the role of Christian antisemitism in "preparing the soil for the Holocaust," he nonetheless posits that Hitler's antisemitism "had little or nothing to do with Christianity or religion" p.
Some scholars no doubt will bristle at this assertion, which is consistent with the author's conclusion that Hitler rejected Christianity in its entirety and, in the long-term, sought to destroy the churches. In this discussion, Weikart closely follows the extant historiography on the topic, and many of the arguments and evidence he presents will strike scholars of the churches as familiar. This is the case because the author did not conduct archival research for this monograph but relied on published primary and secondary sources.
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