What is Hitler's religion?

Answer 1

He was brought up as a Roman Catholic and was an altar boy. Later he lapsed but was still much given to talking about 'providence'. === === === === Like all Austrians, Adolf Hitler was raised in the Roman Catholic Church. When he left his native Linz and moved to Vienna in his late teens, he fell in with a crowd of German nationalists who, because of their rabid Judeophobia, insisted that Christianity was a Jewish invention designed to enslave the Aryan race. Because of this influence, Hitler renounced the faith of his childhood though he continued to utilize Christian imagery and vocabulary in his speeches and books. While it is true that the Nazis attempted to revive Germanic/Norse Paganism as the official religion of the state, Hitler himself was never actually a believer like Himmler and other leading Nazis. Nonetheless, Hitler regarded the Catholic Church as his principle ideological foe and ordered attacks on it several times throughout his twelve years in power; this policy was the opposite of the one taken with Protestant (Lutheran) churches in Northern Germany, which Hitler viewed as more flexible to the tenets of Nazism than the institutional Church of Rome. These policies, if anything, reveal that near the end of his life, any affection or solidarity Hitler felt towards the Catholic Church or Christianity in general had long since vanished. Though it is not accurate to say that Hitler was a devotee of any particular religious ideology after he left his childhood home, he did have an unshakeable faith in his own destiny and that of the German people.

Answer 2

Adolf Hitler was Roman Catholic: he was not excommunicated from the church, and he died a Roman Catholic. Hating Jews and protestants (among others!) he replaced the worship of Christ with worship of the Fuhrer, where pictures of himself replaced those of Christ on the walls of people's houses, and he was actually worshipped as Germany's Messiah. He also created the SS together with their rituals from a mixture of Teutonic and Indian legends and history, suitably chosen and embellished. Hitler was definitely religious.

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1. Most of the rituals referred to above were developed ('created') by Himmler.

2. Encouraging people to adore one as some kind of national saviour strikes me as a form of substitute religion. 'Being religious' surely involves believing in something higher than oneself.

3. Hitler's frequent references to 'providence' and 'the good Lord God' may be evidence of residual or rhetorical religiosity rather than religion.

Answer 3

Adolf Hitler was raised as a Roman Catholic. However, we can safely say that he was not a very good Catholic.

You can probably find many claims as to what he was or wasn't. Here are some of the areas where he sounds like he is at least using Christianity to fight his battle.

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.

-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

Quotations from Mein Kampf

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

He was not an atheist...

In one 1933 speech, he said that "To do justice to God and our own conscience, we have turned once more to the German Volk." In another he said: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."

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Two things are clear. One is that before he took power, when he still needed the support of German voters, Hitler was careful to sound as if he shared their religion.

He was very clear about why he didn't take the churches head-on: "the main thing is to be clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided," and "it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches."

The other is that his personal views about Christianity were scathing. Hitler called it ""the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate, pity-ethics". There are dozens of quotes, like this one:

"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."

Hitler was very clear about what he had in store for Christians: "Christianity is an invention of sick brains....The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem…For the moment I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them."

It gets even simpler when you look at his actions. Hitler had Christians murdered, kicked out of public jobs, and jailed, while he confiscated church property, closed religious schools, shut down Christian organizations, censored or shut down Christian publications, and had their editors murdered.

Answer 4

He was a Roman Catholic by birth, but rejected Catholicism and Christianity utterly.

His public statements were meant to appeal to German voters, who were overwhelming Christian, but in private, he didn't hold back:

"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."

Hitler closed religious schools, shut down Christian organizations, confiscated church property, and ordered the murder of priests and the German leader of Catholic Action.

Answer 5

Being a southern German, Hitler was Catholic. South Germans and Austrians are mostly Catholic because of the Italian influence, and the North is mostly Protestant because of Martin Luther.

Answer 6

Christian, and he used to hate Jews a lot( by the way, the way he acted made him a Christian by name and not by action.)