There was a very comprehensive report on the matter, then at the end, they went and blew it :smack: “Do you know what? Hitler was a vegetarian!” and in one line they buy in to another Hitler urban myth.
As good a concept as it is, Hitler’s biographers and those who knew him well are all agreed that Hitler liked Game pie, Bavarian sausages and stuffed pigeon. He was never a vegetarian and the origin of this myth is unknown.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, doodinthemood, we’re glad to have you with us.
When you start a thread, it’s helpful if you provide a link to the staff report on which you are commenting. It helps keep us all on the same page, and saves search time for other readers. No biggie, you’ll know for next time. In this case, I presume you’re responding to: Was Hitler a Christian?.
The author of that report, SDStaff David, is no longer working with the SDMB (alas), so probably won’t be commenting. He hasn’t been seen around here in a long time. My own reading, frankly, is that he was being sarcastic. The context of the discussion was the way that Hitler is used as the ultimate comparison in almost every discussion. But that’s just my reading.
Again, as I say, welcome.
My understanding was that Hitler wasn’t a Christian ,was a veggie and was anti hunting.
The Brits mischeviously started the rumour during the war that he was a house painter rather then a painter of the artistic variety. 
ISTR reading in Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich that Hitler was a vegetarian. But the only line that I can vaguely remember so many years after having read it is something like ‘They prepared his vegetarian meal.’
Yes, I agree with C.K. that whatever the Report’s author’s degree of belief or not in Hitler’s vegetarianism, the statement in the report’s context seems made in a mock tone; his real point sems to be that “Hitler was a [insert normally mundane or mainstream descriptor]” is pointless.
As to the actual issue of Hitler’s religion, you could say that like millions of people around the world he was a “cultural christian”, that is, his frame of reference for looking at the world was one that someone would absorb growing up in a nominally christian society, when speaking of religious or mystical themes he used christian terminology, and when in the presence of polite society he’d proclaim his christianity, but in practice he lived his life in disregard for the nominal precepts of the church in which he was raised, acting like he considered himself the Messiah of the Aryans.
Whether he personally actually DID have any sincere faith in Jesus Christ as Savior or considered JC’s teachings worth emulating – however twisted to accommodate his own criminal conduct – that’s impossible to determine categorically.
The rumour started out of respect.
In the UK it costs more to get a house painted than it does to buy an Old Master.
The Nazi inner circle was neo-pagan, with Christianity regarded as just one more part of the Great Jewish Plot Against “Aryans”. But Hitler knew then just as well as Bushmeat does today that the word “Christian” still has brand-name value.
An example of this is the ambivalent attitude that the Nazis had toward Charlemagne. On the one hand, he united France, Germany, and (theoretically) Italy into one strong state, and the Third Reich was named in reference to the Holy Roman (first) Empire, that Charlemagne founded, and the German (second) Empire created by Bismarck. On the other hand, Charlemagne had accepted his authority from the Pope.
It seems to me that if one calls oneself Christian – as Hitler apparently did on more than one occasion – one has to be taken at one’s word. Once we get into defining whether one acts Christian, aren’t a lot of modern self-defined Christians in danger of losing that title?
Sailboat
It’s not a question either of whether Hitler claimed to be a Christian or “acted” Christian, but whether he actually assented to any set of propositions that can be sanely defined as “Christianity”, and the plain fact is that he didn’t. Indeed, given his beliefs about Jews, he couldn’t believe in Christianity.
Yes, I know that there’s such a thing as anti-Semitism in Christians; it is real and it is deplorable, not only morally, but doctrinally, as well. But there is a difference between the more vanilla sort of anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and a firmly held belief that Jews are hereditary subhumans, on the other. Modern American neo-Nazis, who are even more obligated than was Hitler to keep the “nice” word “Christian” as one of the cards in their stacked deck, get around the problem by proclaiming that Jesus was not Jewish, basing their claims on the phantasies of the British Israelite cult, according to which the Anglo-Saxons are the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel (the remaining not-lost tribes being burdened with all the “badness” these madmen see in Jews and Judaism). For whatever reason, the original German Nazis don’t seem to have thought of that particular dodge.
My understanding from Toland and other biographers as well as Speer, Shirer and various others who knew him is that Hitler was mostly vegetarian, which may sound like being “mostly” pregnant but actually is logically consistent. The vast majority of his meals in the course of a year were meat free, but he would occasionally have sausage and other German meat dishes. The same was true of his alcohol consumption: he was a teetotaller most of the time but drank an occasional beer during Oktoberfest or an occasional (German) wine when (before the war) hosting dignitaries. He was also a heavy smoker during his bohemian days but manically despised the use of tobacco in later years and forbade it in the Bunker and his private homes. (Even Geli & later Eva Braun had to smoke outside.)
He saw alcohol abuse as a very great sign of moral and physical weakness. Bormann’s alcoholism probably kept him from rising even higher before the last days of the war, while his irritation with Göring’s all around sybarism and vast wine cellars and liquor collections became nearly manic by the end of the war when Göring was falling further from favor. No idea how the chain smoking Goebbels’s kept on his good side.
Fuck no, a true Christian doesn’t murder people, despite those who claim to be Christian and do. Nor does a Moslem, Hindu, Buddisht, etc. Jesus Christ. :rolleyes:
Well, no, that really won’t do, either. You can say that a Christian (Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist, etc,) is not living up to the ideals of his religion if he commits murder, but argue that way, and you might as well say that Richard Nixon wasn’t an American, that Carlo Gesualdo wasn’t a musician, or that O. J. Simpson wasn’t a football player. Let words be words, and leave the contradictions to humans.
Could you elaborate on that a bit? Not getting it. I think I’m on pretty firm ground arguing mass murderers can’t be holy men.
Ah, but you can be a follower/believer of a religion without being a “holy man”. Heck, it’s supposed to be the norm. The question is not “was AH a Holy Man”, it is “was AH a Christian” (or more accurately, “do we give credence to AH’s claim to be on Christianity’s side, or do we consider it mere demagoguery”)
You seem to be making a case that “Christian anti-Semites” is an oxymoron. This is obviously contrary to all of history. Jews have been blasted by Christians in every possible term of derogation, and Hitler’s Nazis were merely out on the far end of the curve, not any kind of an exception or deviation. The German anti-Semitism was long ingrained in a segment of the population and had deep philosophical roots.
Hitler probably was a Christian by any standard definition we use for Christianity today, his beliefs notwithstanding. That he couldn’t believe what he did about Jews and still be a Christian is a whitewash of history.
No, that interpretation cannot possibly be extracted from my words.
Except that that is NOT what John W. said. What John W. said was that AH’s beliefs about Jews were different enough from those espoused historically by Christian antisemites, that they would seem incompatible with his following any “sane definition of Christianity” (John W.'s words), by which I assume he means the classic Christianity in which in which Jesus is the culmination of the Messianic promise and Christianity is the heir to the Israelite religion.
Now, sure, this does NOT preclude following his own personal brand of Lunatic Christianity, where he was the Next Big Thing… But neither does it preclude his being just a plain lunatic who at the same time identified himself as a Christian in his community (In his particular sociohistoric circumstances, just being Austrian and not Jewish meant you would be presumed a Christian “just because”).
…just so I make myself clear, I am of the position that we cannot just “excommunicate” AH, just observe that his actions are contrary to the precepts of just about every brand of “classic” Christianity. Yet, we must be aware that a whole lot of other people have ALSO engaged in major crimes while considering themselves “Christian”, just because they grew up with it as part of their cultural identities (for a lot of people, that is the whole extent of how come they consider themselves Christian).
Hitler occasionally posed as Christian in order to garner public supprt, but he was contemtuous of that faith.
Now, we wouldn’t consider Hitler to be a Vegetarian. But then, he’d fit within what dudes would call a “Vegetarian” but he was more of what we’d now call a “Pescatarian”.
I’m not going to talk about his actions: I am going to talk about the beliefs he supported. In his private talks with other Nazi officials, Hitler sometimes supported a weird neo-paganism; he admired what C.S. Lewis called the “dark gods in the blood.” Nazism was openly based on the writings of Friedrich Nietzche (sp?) He was quite contempuous of Christianity and considered its adherents pitiful and weak.
His actual religious views, if any, seem to have varied over time. Sometimes he talks about Aryan super-spirits, sometimes about reincarnation, sometimes about following an older, savage religion like Odin-worship. He did, however, seem to believe in some sort of supreme power, which he thought of as a very-German force.