Setting The Record Straight - What Was Hitler’s Religion?

What Was Hitler’s Religion?

Adolf Hitler was one of the most evil figures of the 20th century. His ideology of war and racism led to millions of deaths.

What was it that drove him to adopt the abominable policies he did? Did his views on religion play any role in this?

There’s a startling lack of information on this subject in the public sphere—and much of what you hear is wrong.

So let’s set the record straight.

Ideologues Have Ideas

I’ve looked into the question of Hitler’s religion for decades. I remember being in bookstores back in the 1990s, leafing through the indices of biographies of Hitler, searching for information on the subject.

Yet the biographies I checked said little, and it was hard to find concrete information. They discussed his persecution of Jews and—to a lesser extent—Christians, but they didn’t devote much space to what he, personally, believed.

It was as if Hitler either didn’t have religious views or they weren’t important.

That never struck me as plausible, because of the kind of figure Hitler was.
It isn’t just that he was an authoritarian dictator. I can imagine someone who has no particular views on questions like God and the afterlife ending up in political power and then doing cruel things to maintain it. Such a person would simply be an opportunist.

He might have a personality disorder that leads him to do extreme things to maintain his hold on power, but that wouldn’t mean he had strong views on religious questions.

Yet Hitler wasn’t simply an opportunist. He was an ideologue.

His rabid anti-Semitism was an illustration of that. So was his Aryan master race ideology, his plan to build a “Thousand-Year Reich” for Germany, and his belief in an overarching destiny for his movement.

Ideologues are obsessed with ideas, and that means they inevitably have views on the Big Questions. Is there a God or not? What does he want? Is there an afterlife? What’s our ultimate destiny?

Ideologues don’t have to be favorable to traditional religions. Since the nineteenth century, Communist ideologues have fiercely opposed belief in God and the afterlife.

However, that just replaced traditional religions with a new one: atheism. Further, instead of seeing a divine plan behind history, they saw the laws of the material universe providing an inescapable triumph of Communism over other systems.

It thus seemed inevitable that Hitler would have some kind of views on religious subjects—views that would have inspired his ideology of war, racism, and destiny.

The question was: What were they?