Reply #50: Hitler capitalized on his Christian population, but he wasn't Christian.

[Xithras]

He held many pagan beliefs and apparently saw Christianity as an invasive religion. He encouraged nordic paganism in the SS, he banned Christian references in wedding ceremonies (replacing them with "pagan" references to mother earth and father sky), he banned Christianity from schools and government institutions, and put the Bible on a list of books that weren't permitted to be in schools.

People tend to forget it nowadays, but much of Hitlers popularity in Germany was based on his heavily modified version of Germanic history. He told people that their Aryan ancestors had been one of the finest civilizations on the planet, and that they had been destroyed by allowing foreign influences to erase their original culture. His actions, according to him, were taken to "restore" the borders of the original Germanic homeland, to eliminate the influences that had destroyed their society, and to return the German people to their ancient glory. He did see restoring the original Germanic pagan religions as part of the plan, but apparently understood that it would take a very long time to achieve that goal.

Hitler used the churches simply because they were there and most Germans were Christian. If Germany had been a muslim nation, he'd have used mosques.