Well I extracted it too, well before I read Operation Ripper’s post. Could you explain how I am meant to interpret this:
in order to clear up any ambiguity.
A -> B does not imply B -> A
Logic 101
Some of the inner circle perhaps, especially Himmler, but not Hitler. He was just yer basic Fallen Catholic. Not even one of the mystical ones! 
Like any other historical figure, Hitler is whatever people want or need him to be to further their own cause or argument.
That’s a wonderful one-liner, Liberal, but I think the OP is rather more curious as to what the man himself thought, not what other’s thought of him.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve read that Hitler had to avoid meat in his diet the majority of the time, not because he didn’t like some meat, but because it caused him many digestive problems like nausea and unpleasant and embarassing gas.
Yeah, but that’s already been hashed out, hasn’t it? “He was!” say some. “He wasn’t!” say others. It seemed like the proper time to put it all in perspective.
Besides, people have already moved on to his vegetarianism. Next will be his love of puppies and young female cousins.
And whether he was Jewish, of course.
Looking for consistency in the sayings and opinions of madmen is often a futile exercise.
Except his statements were NOT those of a madman. What he said was truth–to those he was speaking. Hitler was not a madman but a supreme politician: someone who was putting into words the fears and aprehensions of his audience. THEY wanted a simplistic answer to their problems. THEY were willing to place that blame on the Jews because THEY saw an easy fallguy. Hitler was simply the guy who gave them what they wanted. Hitler was NOT NECESSARY for the Holocaust to occur. Hell, look at Polish politics before 1939 and see it in light of the ease of Polish cooperation with the rounding up of the Jews—the problem the Poles had with him was to a great exent that he wasn’t THEIR fascist.
Actually, it always seemed fairly clear to me. Hitler worshipped himself. Not as a narcissist does, but he came to demand fealty almost as a living God. All other religions were competition. He wanted to turn Germany itself into a monument to his greatness- or his tomb, in a similar fashion to the Japanese leaders who were willing to burn their whole country to the last man in order to save their skins.
Whatever he started out as, and whatever his cohorts were, and whatever his country was, he worshipped himself.
Stalin, and most other fascist and communist leaders, were the same.
Which, to me, brings up a related question: were the guards and administrators and others who were directly responsible for enslaving, torturing, and murdering the millions of Holocaust victims generally Christians? And, were the civilians who supported Hitler and the war generally Christians? If so, did they consider Nazism to be Christianity?
My guesses would be yes and yes, but I’ve heard people say that Christians in Germany were a minority in the first half of the 20th century. This sounds unlikely to me, but hopefully some of you know more.
“Nazism to be Christianity?” In what way? There was a pro-Nazi movement within Protestantism that wound up selecting a strongly pro-Nazi hierarchy in 1933, (to the point where they even got their leader named “Reichbischoff”), but I am not sure that that set Naziism the same as Christianity.
However, I would agree with your basic point. To the extent that Germany was a “Christian” country in the 1920s, it did not suddenly become a “non-Christian” country in 1933. Catholics and Protestants continued to see themselves as good Catholics and Protestants as well as good Germans and the National Socialists were their ruling party. I suspect that claims that the Germans (including the camp guards) were “not really” Christians is an act of special pleading by some Christians to distance themselves from the fact that Christians can be led into acts as deplorable as anyone else.
(It is possible, of course, that while the typical soldier in the Wehrmacht was Christian, those who joined the SS and similar outfits were more inclined to have beliefs in the old pre-Christian paganism or the occult or in a sort of secularism that supported no beliefs. Certainly, some of the internal beliefs and practices of the SS would have encouraged something other than Christianity. Still, I have seen no evidence that the nominal religious beliefs of the SS translated into the actual religious beliefs of its members and I suspect that they were typically Christian in the way that their pre-enlistment neighbors were Christian.)
Hitler is a slightly different matter in that he had stopped attending church (except for puiblicity and propaganda purposes) years before the NSDAP became a serious political force in Germany. His roots were clearly Catholic, but he had not actually practiced any religion in a very long time.
Sorry, dropped a couple words there thanks to a malfunctioning mouse and keyboard. Before they got deleted, it said “Nazism to be compatible with Christianity,” not “to be Christianity.”
Well, that’s what I was wondering: to what extent Germany was a “Christian” country in the 1920’s (and the 30’s and 40’s, too). It seems unlikely that it would be anything other than Christian, but I’ve heard claims that it wasn’t, and that Christians were minority by the time the Nazis came to power. I don’t really think that’s likely to be true (I suspect it’s special pleading, like you say), but I’m not anything like an expert on early-to-mid-20th-century Germany…
The vegetarian story was in newspaper articles as early as 1930 in the U.S.
IIRC, Hitler used the phrase Christian Navy as a derogatory term to describe the Kriegsmarine who weren’t all hardcore Nazis themselves.
In the link to Cecil’s column there’s a note about the SS buckles with “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) written on them. This may not be religious but a reference to the German Empire that ended with the close of WWI. Many Germans, Hitler of course included, had quite the bee in their bonnet about this, so it could be simple nostalgia of sorts.
If a person self-identifies as a Christian, as Hitler undeniably did, for our purposes he is one. The existence of a scolding third party declaring him “not a *real *Christian” doesn’t disqualify him; nobody since the First Century has been universally regarded by all self-identifying Christians as a “real Christian.” A substantial number of Catholics don’t think Protestants are the genuine article, and plenty of Protestants feel the same way about all Catholics.
My calling Howard Metzenbaum “not a real Democrat” or George Allen “not a real Virginian” doesn’t make it so.
Nonsense. A Devil worshiper doesn’t transmute into a Christian because he calls the Devil “Jesus”.
Ordinarily, I’d agree with you. But I think that it has to be honest self-identification. If he thought of himself as lying about being a Christian in order to deceive the public, then it makes sense to say that he wasn’t a Christian. Deciding whether he was honest in his professions of Christian belief is tricky, but it is not the same as trying to pass judgment on whether those beliefs themselves count as “really” Christian or not. There is actual evidence, in the form of private statements disparaging Christianity, his attendance at church on public occasions only, etc., that can be brought to bear on the issue. The evidence is inconclusive, so there will still be debate, but it is objective, evidence-based debate, not theology.