How many people did Adolf Hitler kill because of his religious beliefs?

Answer 1

Almost none.

Six million people were killed because they were Jewish, but Hitler did not care if they believed or not. People were classified as Jewish if they belonged to their faith, or if their parents or grandparents did. Peoples of other faiths were also killed, namely priests and Jehovah's Witnesses, but this was because of what they did, or did not do, not because of what they believed.

Answer 2

Hitler's targeting of numerous different groups, like Jews, Romani/Gypsies, Slavs, Communists, Homosexuals, dissidents, the Disabled, and numerous other groups were ethnic or racial targeting or targeting based on a physical or mental attribute. While Jews are considered to be an ethnoreligious group (e.g. they have certain ethnic characteristics as well as a common faith), Hitler's persecution of them was a strictly from a racial point of view. It is for this reason that Hitler murdered believing Christians who happened to have at least one Jewish grandparent.

The only group that Hitler clearly targeted because of their religious beliefs was the Jehovah's Witnesses. You could also make the case that Hitler targeted certain Christian religious leaders because of their beliefs, but the beliefs that caused Hitler to target them were not theological beliefs, but rather their defense of the other groups that Hitler targeted. (E.g. He tortured Lutheran Priests who argued for the humane treatment of Jews.) This would be a total of less than 10,000 people.

Answer 3

Hitler's religious affiliation has become a hotly debated subject. Hitler was baptized as a Catholic and made quite a number of public statements depicting himself as a believing Catholic. However, the way he dealt with the Church and the nature of those statements has led many to argue that he was only a Catholic in name only and actually believed in some Christian-Norse-Pseudoscientific Faith of his own-making or was an Atheist who was cloaking his Atheism because public support would have turned against him were he an Atheist.

Regardless of this confusion, Hitler's personal and public beliefs all support the Holocaust as an institution and the 11 million deaths it caused (6 million Jewish and 5 million Non-Jewish). The issue here is strictly whether these beliefs are properly classified as "religious" beliefs

Answer 4

It would be very harsh on Roman Catholicism to say that Hitler killed people because of his religion. It was his political beliefs that drove him.