Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (review)

Derek Hastings carefully analyzes how the totalistic, secularizing messianism that was portrayed during the Third Reich had a fascinating prehistory in Catholic Munich, which the Nazis tried to obliterate as they achieved control of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Between 1919 and 1923 Catholics in Munich played a decisive role in the development of antisemitic Nazism. Following the Beerhall Putsch (1923), the nature and composition of the Nazi movement abruptly changed into an anti-Catholic phase. In its Catholic phase, however, the party was able to develop political momentum and to transcend its marginalization as merely a rightist, radical, propagandistic association. This book also delineates how the Nazi movement developed a different trajectory after the Putsch that led to a political religion—one that left little room for the more doctrinaire Catholic orientation present at the party's inception and early years.

The historical gap filled by Hastings is to provide a monographic study of the local roots of Nazism rather than a focus on its ideological roots and late-Weimar voting patterns. Revealing the Nazi party's early Munich years is a significant accomplishment, since it can help explain some of the adaptation dynamics used by Catholics after 1933. This authoritative monograph has incorporated archival and printed sources to show how the Nazi movement and Catholic identity were intertwined in Bavaria. The documents illustrate the roles of individual Catholics and do not concentrate on the Church as an institution. Hastings's study provides the background that can help scholars analyze the pro-Nazi priests who countered the somewhat ambivalent anti-Nazi ethos of the institutional Church.

His book also reveals the negative connection between the Nazis and Reform Catholicism that eventually helped nourish the renewal launched in the Second Vatican Council, since Hitler disconnected the party from the Church and so made space for a communio ecclesiology to emerge after 1945. Hastings's story is nuanced as he traces the early Catholic influence that evaporated after 1923 into a movement with a more Protestant and neopagan veneer. Pre-1923 Catholics in Munich differed from the broader Catholic milieu, since in Bavaria there developed an opposition to ultramontanism and to political Catholicism. To add to the complexities, in southern Germany a Catholic could also mix identities and so could be a Social Democrat and a Nazi, since boundaries were more permeable.

Chapter 1 outlines how a nationalistic brand of religious Catholicism took root in the early-twentieth century. Chapter 2 sketches out the interaction between the antisemitic responses to the chaotic Weimar conditions that characterized the early Nazi and Catholic circles. Chapters 3 and 4 trace the birth of the Catholic-Nazi synthesis and explicate the Nazi drives that targeted Catholics to gain their support. Chapter 5 shows what led the Nazis to split from Catholicism as Hitler tried to imitate Mussolini and to link his movement with nationalist organizations such as that led by Erich Ludendorff.

Hastings's book handles the complexities that shaped the early Nazi Party history with a very sensitive attention to the interaction between Nazi and Catholic interests. Munich Catholics were striving to achieve a legitimate Catholic identity by helping to spread early Nazism, but Hitler's own messianic ambition destroyed the link between Catholicism and Nazism. This study nicely explores the gray areas of the political and religious nexus that nurtured the formative years of Nazism and poses some legitimate questions concerning its theological dynamics that scholars of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany will have to answer.