Locrian:
“Hitler was an atheist.” – WHAAA???
I hear this much more frequently now that we have more tea-partying history-rewriting people with a microphone. Clearly they’ve never read Mein Kampf or noticed the SS belt buckles with “God With Us” engraved in German on there.
It’s probably an unresolved question what Hitler truly believed. Anybody claiming Hitler was an atheist should probably cite some evidence (and maybe also tell what meaning they’re ascribing to the word “atheist”), but there’s nothing inconsistent between truly believing God doesn’t exist and using references to God or religion to further one’s own ends.
From the thread on Was Hitler a Christian? :
Hitler once remarked that the strength of his economic plan was that he had no plan.
The Nazis were like that in many ways - they often had quite contradictory policies, going with whatever appeared to “work”, or whatever the last Nazi party bigwig had to say.
Their policy on religion was no different. Hitler was fully capable of appearing to his supporters as the defender of Christian civilization against the barbaric hordes of undermen, while at the very same time condemning Christianity as a Jew superstition and turning a blind eye to or encouraging Germanic neo-paganism.
My “take” is that Hitler was perfectly happy to support the facade of Christianity - the order, symbols, hierarchy and rituals side - as long as it was useful and convenient to himself; unwillingness to support these things would be punished, just like any other form of independence and rebellion - unless of course it orgininated from the Nazis themselves. Similarly, he was perfectly willing to invoke Christian history as part of the ethno-nationalist ideology he supported. However, he most certainly had no use for the theology or morality of Christianity. Those priests and other convinced Christians who opposed him on moral grounds found themselves in the death camps just as quickly as non-Christians who opposed him. Had he won, no doubt he would have gradually replaced explicit Christian hierarchy, symbols and rituals with Nazi ones.