User:Drogo Underburrow/The Holy Reich

p.26: "These were among the voices of the Kampfzeit that displayed an attachment to Christianity and its meaning for the Nazi movement. But what did the top Nazi, Adolf Hitler, have to say? Much is already known through the "Bible" of the Nazi movement, Hitler's Mein Kampf. In its pages Hitler gave no indication of being an atheist or agnostic or of believing in only a remote, rationalist divinity. Indeed, he referred continually to a providential, active diety:"'What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race...so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission alloted it by the creator of the universe....Peoples that bastardize themselves, or let themselves be bastardized, sin against the will of eternal Providence.'" Whereas reference to a vague providential force bears little resemblance to belief in the biblical God, elsewhere in Mein Kampf Hitler intones more than a naturalist pantheism devoid of Christian content. Again, it was in the question of race and race purity in which Hitler most frequently intoned such a God: It was, in his view, the duty of Germans "'to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created.'" Even as Hitler elsewhere made reference to an anthropomorphized "Nature", and the laws of nature that humanity must follow, he also revealed his belief that these were divine laws ordained by God:"'The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For Gods' will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will.'"The reference to God as the Lord of Creation, and the necessity of obeying "His" will, reveal a standard Christian conception. As we shall see with regard to his antisemitism, Hitler would return to religious themes in Mein Kampf and, in particular, the person of Jesus."

Other sources of Hitler's religious views in this period confirm a Christian element. As early as 1919