He was born and brought up a Roman Catholic. But he lost faith early and he attends no religious services of any kind. His Catholicism means nothing to him; he is impervious even to the solace of confession. On being formed his government almost immediately began a fierce religious war against Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike.
Why? Perhaps the reason was not religion fundamentally, but politics. To Hitler the overwhelming first business of the Nazi revolution was the "unification," the Gleichschaltung (coördination) of Germany. He had one driving passion, the removal from the Reich of any competition, of whatever kind. The Vatican, like Judaism, was a profoundly international (thus non-German) organism. Therefore -- out with it.
The basis of much of the madness of Hitlerism was his incredibly severe and drastic desire to purge Germany of non-German elements, to create a hundred per cent Germany for one hundred per cent Germans only. He disliked bankers and department stores -- as Dorothy Thompson pointed out -- because they represented non-German, international, financial and commercial forces. He detested socialists and communists because they were affiliated with world groups aiming to internationalize labor. He loathed, above all, pacifists, because pacifists, opposing war, were internationalists.
Catholicism he considered a particularly dangerous competitive force, because it demands two allegiances of a man, and double allegiance was something Hitler could not countenance. Thus the campaign against the "black moles," as Nazis call priests. Several times German relations with the Vatican neared the breaking point. Protestantism was -- theoretically -- a simpler matter to deal with, because the Lutheran Church presumably was German and nationalist. Hitler thought that by the simple installation of an army chaplain, a ferocious Nazi named Mueller, as Reichbishop, he could "coördinate" the Evangelical Church in Germany, and turn it to his service. The idea of a united Protestant Church
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appealed to his neat architect's mind. He was wrong. The church question has been an itching pot of trouble ever since. All through 1936 and 1937 it raged.
It was quite natural, following the confused failure to Nazify Protestantism, that some of Hitler's followers should have turned to Paganism. The Norse myths are a first-class nationalist substitute. Carried to its logical extreme, Naziism in fact demands the creation of a new and nationalist religion. Hitler has indicated this in a speech at Nuremberg in September, 1935. "Christianity," he said, "succeeded for a time in uniting the old Teutonic tribes, but the Reformation destroyed this unity. Germany is now a united nation. National Socialism has succeeded where Christianity failed." And Heiden has quoted Hitler's remark, "We do not want any other God than Germany itself." This is a vital point. Germany is Hitler's religion.
One of Hitler's grudges against God is the fact that Jesus was a Jew. Another is a nationalist grudge again. The basis of the Nazi revolution was the defeat of Germany in the War. Thus religion had to be Nazified because no God who permitted the French and any other "inferior" races to win the War could be a satisfactory God for Germany.
Hitler's attempt to unify religion in Germany may lead to one danger. He himself may become a god. And divinity entails difficulties. Gods have to perform miracles.
Vividly in Mein Kampf Hitler tells the story of his first encounter with a Jew. He was a boy of seventeen, alone in Vienna, and he had never seen a Jew in his life. The Jew, a visitor from Poland or the Ukraine, in native costume, outraged the tender susceptibilities of the youthful Hitler.
"Can this creature be a Jew?" he asked himself. Then, bursting on him, came a second question: "Can he possibly be a German?"
This early experience had a profound influence on him, forming the emotional base of his perfervid anti-Semitism. He was provincially mortified that any such creature could be one with himself, a sharer in Teuton nationality. Later he "rationalized" his fury on economic and political grounds. Jews, he said, took jobs away from "Germans"; Jews controlled the Press of Berlin, the theater, the arts; there were too many Jewish lawyers, doctors, professors; the Jews were a "pestilence, worse than the Black Death."
No one can properly conceive the basic depth and breadth of Hitler's anti-Semitism who has not carefully read Mein Kampf. This book was
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written ten years ago. He has changed it as edition followed edition, in minor particulars, and refuses to allow its publication -- unexpurgated -- abroad. Recently he sued a French publisher who tried to bring out an unabridged translation. In all editions, the implacability of his anti- Jewish prejudice remains.
Any number of incidents outside the book may be mentioned. For instance, in the winter of 1934-35 he is supposed to have seen a play called Tovarich, recounting sympathetically the plight of aristocratic Russian émigrés and sneering at the Bolsheviks, four times. Before he first attended it, it is said, his secretaries telegraphed to Paris to ascertain if the author, Jacques Deval, was Aryan as far back as his grandparents. It would have been unthinkable for Hitler to have witnessed a play by even a partly Jewish author.
Long before he became chancellor, Hitler would not allow himself to speak to a Jew even on the telephone. A publicist as well known as Walter Lippmann, a statesman as eminent as Lord Reading, would not be received at the Brown House. An interesting point arises. Has Hitler, in maturity, actually ever been in the company of a Jew, ever once talked to one? Possibly not.
How do I respond to ignorance and messages of hate?? (OP)
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