Was Hitler a Christian? Historical evidence reveals his hostility toward Christianity and helps answer a common objection raised against the faith.
Despite the fact that Adolf Hitler had a Roman Catholic background, he became adamantly anti-Christian and believed in evolution. As other dictators have done, he took over the churches and used their organizational structure to influence the citizens—though the teachings allowed were anything but biblical. William Shirer, who chronicled the Nazi regime, stated that “the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany” and substitute paganism.
Hitler’s vision for Germany was defined in a thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church,” which “categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich.” Some of the points of the program include the following: The National Church is “determined to exterminate irrevocably the Christian faith”; churches have no pastors or chaplains but only National Reich orators may speak in them; publishing and dissemination of the Bible must immediately cease in Germany. The National Church declared that “the Fuehrer’s Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents” and “embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.” Therefore, churches must remove all Bibles and crucifixes, only Mein Kampf may be on the altar, and all crosses must be replaced by “the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika” (W. L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 240).
The following quotes by Hitler reveal his true personal views (taken from Hitler’s Table Talk):
National Socialism and religion cannot exist together…The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity…Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (pp. 6–7)
The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. (p. 75)
Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery…Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease. (pp. 118–119)
There is something very unhealthy about Christianity. (p. 339)
I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors—but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity… My regret will have been that I couldn’t…behold [its demise]. (p. 278)
