Reply #213: A different author on "Was Hitler a Christian?"

[kwassa]

http://kevin.davnet.org/essays/hitler.html

"Christianity is an invention of sick brains," Adolf Hitler, 13 December 1941.
"So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death," Adolf Hitler, 14 October 1941.

http://kevin.davnet.org/essays/hitler.html#experts

Conclusions of Biographers and Historians

excerpts:

Hans Küng
"the great figures of terror in our century—Hitler, Stalin and their deputies—were programmatic anti-Christians"

Alan Bullock
Alan Bullock is a journalist and biographer of Adolf Hitler.

"In Hitler's eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle, and the survival of the fittest. 'Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.'"

Ian Hershaw - Historian

"Apart from the organized sectors of the working class, the Nazis had greatest difficulty, as is well known, in penetrating the Catholic sub-culture, where the dominant image of Hitler provided by Catholic 'opinion leaders' was equally negative. The main attack was levelled at the anti-Christian essence of the Nazi Movement and of its leader's philosophy. Publications sought to demonstrate that Hitler's ideas stood in direct contradiction to the teaching of the Christian catechism. Especially in Bavaria, where Catholicism was dominant and extreme anti-Marxism widespread, he and his Movement were seen as a variant of 'godless Bolshevism'-an association which was frequently to recur after 1933 during the 'Church struggle'. Though Catholic anti-Nazi polemics generally concentrated on attacking the anti-religious, and especially anti-Catholic, thrust of Nazism, some publications did offer a devastating assault on the entire Nazi doctrine."

"Hitler was himself well aware of the need to counter his anti-Christian image if his Party were to break through in Catholic areas. He was keen even in the early 1920s not to antagonize unnecessarily the Catholic Church. And during the rise to power the NSDAP made particular efforts-largely in vain-in Catholic areas such as the Rhineland and Bavaria to emphasize its 'positive Christianity', to deny the slur that it was an anti-religious party,"