Hitler's Religion. The Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third Reich by Richard Weikart (review)

In this eminently readable and insightful book, Richard Weikart investigates Adolf Hitler's personal beliefs. Questions about Hitler's religion continue to animate and divide scholars, not least because Hitler frequently lied about his religious convictions to mollify and mislead his supporters and gain political advantage.

Not surprisingly, Hitler was much preoccupied with Christianity and the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany. Weikart takes to task scholars, most notably Richard Steigmann-Gall, who, in part based on Hitler's early conciliatory tone toward the churches, concluded that Hitler was "a sincere Christian, at least until 1937" (p. 71). Weikart instead contends that "the evidence is preponderant against Hitler embracing any form of Christianity for most of his adult life" (p. 105). Aside from his vicious private condemnation of the churches and "Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness," a careful reading of Hitler's speeches that are often cited as proof of his Christian faith reveal such a distorted conception of Christianity that few would recognize it as such (p. 96). Hitler endorsed a kind of Kampfchristentum (Christianity of the sword) that cast Jesus as "a pugnacious antiSemite" in order to persuade Christians to join in his persecution of Jews (p. 77).

Although Weikart acknowledges the role of Christian antisemitism in "preparing the soil for the Holocaust," he nonetheless posits that Hitler's antisemitism "had little or nothing to do with Christianity or religion" (p. 171). Some scholars no doubt will bristle at this assertion, which is consistent with the author's conclusion that Hitler rejected Christianity in its entirety and, in the long-term, sought to destroy the churches. In this discussion, Weikart closely follows the extant historiography on the topic, and many of the arguments and evidence he presents will strike scholars of the churches as familiar. This is the case because the author did not conduct archival research for this monograph but relied on published primary and secondary sources. What makes Weikart's work noteworthy and important, however, is his methodical and broad analysis that situates the familiar history of Hitler's complex relationship with the Christian churches within a wider discussion of myriad philosophical schools of thought and spiritual movements that may have influenced Hitler's beliefs.

If Hitler was not a Christian, what did he believe, if anything? Weikart shows just how difficult it is to connect Hitler to specific individuals and movements. Hitler, for instance, admired Friedrich Nietzsche with his emphasis on "the primacy of the will to power" (p. 23). Still, it is difficult to pinpoint to what degree Nietzscheanism influenced Hitler's beliefs, not least because Nietzsche was unconcerned with biological racism. Hitler's obsession with racism, antisemitism, and Social Darwinism at times has led to the popular conclusion that occult movements like Ariosophy shaped Hitler's religious views. Weikart offers a fascinating review of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Austrian occult movements that will be of great interest to many readers. But, like most scholars, he rejects the claim that Hitler was an occultist for the simple reason that the Nazis persecuted the occult. Moreover, the pernicious racist ideas the formed the core tenets of Nazism were in such wide circulation at the time that Hitler certainly had no need to look to the occult to learn about them.

Weikart concludes that most likely Hitler was a scientific pantheist, who equated nature and the cosmos with God. As a pantheist, Hitler believed that humanity had to bow to the brutal laws of nature that demanded "uninterrupted killing, so that the better will live" (p. 269). It is for this reason, Weikart argues, that elucidating Hitler's religion cannot be dismissed as a mere footnote in history, as a curious but ultimately unimportant piece of trivia. Rather, Hitler's religion, his "devotion to nature as a divine being had a grim corollary: the laws of nature became his infallible guide...