Hitler’s War on Christianity (Quotes)
Posted by Tony Listi on December 14, 2008
Hitler was NOT a Christian. He hated Christianity. If he made any public remarks in support of Christianity, that was because he was in public and would lie or obfuscate to appease a crowd at times. Hitler was opposed to atheism because he was a spiritual man: “atheism… is a return to the state of the animal…” (Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 59). But opposition to atheism doesn’t make anyone a Christian. Nazism was his religion, an authentic religion of his own creation (yes, life is SO much better when people create their own personal religions in a search for “authenticity,” ha).
Hitler’s Table Talk is a compilation of sayings by Hitler in private conversations that were recorded by other Nazis. It is a good source for what Hitler really thought.
“…the only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 61
“It’s Christianity that’s the liar. It’s in perpetual conflict with itself.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 61
“In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 6
“Kerrl, with the noblest of intentions, wanted to attempt a synthesis between National Socialism and Christianity. I don’t believe the thing’s possible, and I see the obstacle in Christianity itself.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 145
“As far as we are concerned, we’ve succeeded in chasing the Jews from our midst and excluding Christianity from our political life.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 394
“There is something very unhealthy about Christianity.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 418
“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. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 75-76
“When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who are immunised against the disease.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 145
“Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar. We are entering into a conception of the world that will be a sunny era, an era of tolerance.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 343-344
“Pure Christianity—the Christianity of the catacombs—is concerned with translating the Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 146
“Christianity is the worst of the regressions that mankind can ever have undergone, and it’s the Jew who, thanks to this diabolic invention, has thrown him back fifteen centuries.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 322
“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. Bolshevism practises a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its key-note is intolerance.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 7
“But 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. A negro with his tabus is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in Transubstantiation.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 144
“It took fourteen centuries for Christianity to reach the peak of savagery and stupidity.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 314
“Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 7
“We must recognise, of course, that, amongst us, Christianity is coloured by Germanism.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 46
“We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 62
“Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 51
“By nature the Duce is a freethinker, but he decided to choose the path of concessions. For my part, in his place I’d have taken the path of revolution. I’d have entered the Vatican and thrown everybody out—reserving the right to apologise later: “Excuse me, it was a mistake.” But the result would have been, they’d have been outside!” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 145
“So it’s not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that’s left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 59
“But, even so, it’s impossible eternally to hold humanity in bondage with lies. After all, it was only between the sixth and eighth centuries that Christianity was imposed on our peoples by princes who had an alliance of interests with the shavelings. Our peoples had previously succeeded in living all right without this religion. I have six divisions of SS composed of men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn’t prevent them from going to their deaths with serenity in their souls.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 143
“Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 667 (Talk about Islamo-fascism!)
“The priests of antiquity were closer to nature, and they sought modestly for the meaning of things. Instead of that, Christianity promulgates its inconsistent dogmas and imposes them by force. Such a religion carries within it intolerance and persecution. It’s the bloodiest conceivable.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 322-323
“One cannot succeed in conceiving how much cruelty, ignominy and falsehood the intrusion of Christianity has spelt for this world of ours. If the misdeeds of Christianity were less serious in Italy, that’s because the people of Rome, having seen them at work, always knew exactly the worth of the Popes before whom Christendom prostrated itself.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 288
“With what clairvoyance the authors of the eighteenth, and especially those of the past, century criticised Christianity and passed judgment on the evolution of the Churches!” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 88
“When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 59
“The fact that the Japanese have retained their political philosophy, which is one of the essential reasons for their successes, is due to their having been saved in time from the views of Christianity.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 393
“This terrorism in religion is the product, to put it briefly, of a Jewish dogma, which Christianity has universalised and whose effect is to sow trouble and confusion in men’s minds.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 393
“It may be asked whether concluding a concordat with the churches wouldn’t facilitate our exercise of power…. I’m convinced that any pact with the Church can offer only a provisional benefit, for sooner or later the scientific spirit will disclose the harmful character of such a compromise. Thus the State will have based its existence on a foundation that one day will collapse.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pp. 58-59
“It is to these private customs that peoples owe their present characters. Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that’s why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.” -Hitler’s Table Talk, pg 60
More links:
Jesse Murray said
‘Hitlers Table Talk’ has been largely discredited for misrepresentation and wholesale fabrication of what Hitler said. I don’t think using this book as a reference, especially as a stand-alone source of one of the world’s most researched figures, is an honest depiction of his position.
Tony Listi said
Prove it.
Tony Listi said
Was there a reason you couldn’t have just provided your proof? Was it necessary to be rude?
Hitler was a propagandist, no? If you just want to study the public writings and speeches of a propagandist, you aren’t going to get an accurate picture of his views, are you? Or was Hitler just very frank and sincere whenever he spoke?
Dale Toy said
Prove it’s reliable.
Here’s a few Hitler quotes that are easily provable. All you need do is get hold of a copy of Mein Kampf.
“The anti-Semitism of the new movement (Christian Social movement)
was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.”
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf", Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 46]
“And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his
estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove
those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.174]
Then there’s his speeches :
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty
Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
“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
against the Jewish poison. Today, 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. And when I look on my people I see them work and
work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only
for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning
and see these men standing in their queues and look into their
pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very
devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two
thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people
are plundered and exposed.”
[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a
political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on
his personal Christian feelings. Published in "My New Order", quoted
in Freethought Today April 1990]
Here’s the thing. I, personally, wouldn’t question whether Hitler was ACTUALLY a Christian or not. He certainly wasn’t in thought and deed, no matter what he claimed. That puts him right in line with somewhere between 70-90% of those who currently refer to themselves as Christians, however. So, the point is, if you’re going to make an argument, quote reliable sources or frankly, shut up. In your case, I believe the latter would be more appropriate regardless.
And by the way? This well-researched site is your proof. : http://www.nobeliefs.com/HitlerSources.htm
Volmire said
Ummm…Mein Kampf is propaganda, lol. Are you going to be sucked into Hitler’s propaganda too? Anything before the war that was public is pretty much dumb to believe.
Wake up and smell the scholarly opinions:
In Hitler: A Study in Tyranny Alan Bullock, wrote that Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist with no feeling for the spiritual or emotional side of human existence: a “man who believed neither in God nor in conscience (‘a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcission’)”
——————–
According to Max Domarus Hitler promoted the idea of God as the creator of Germany, but Hitler “was not a Christian in any accepted meaning of that word.”
Max Domarus (1 April 2007). The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary
——————-
According to historian Laurence Rees, “Hitler did not believe in the afterlife, but he did believe he would have a life after death because of what he had achieved.”
——————-
Historian Richard Overy maintains that Hitler was not a “practising Christian,” nor was he a “thorough atheist.”[69]
Overy, R. J. (2004). The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia
——————-
According to Robert S. Wistrich Hitler thought Christianity was finished but he did not want any direct confrontation for strategic reasons
Robert S. Wistrich (1 May 2007). Laboratory for World Destruction: Germans and Jews in Central Europe
——————-
Samuel Koehne, a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, working on the official Nazi views on religion, answers the question Was Hitler a Christian? thus: “Emphatically not, if we consider Christianity in its traditional or orthodox form: Jesus as the son of God, dying for the redemption of the sins of all humankind. It is a nonsense to state that Hitler (or any of the Nazis) adhered to Christianity of this form.”
Koehne, Samuel, Hitler’s faith: The debate over Nazism and religion
——————-
Richard Evans concluded his statements on Hitler’s religious views by suggesting that the gap between Hitler’s public and private pronouncements was due to a desire not to cause a quarrel with the churches that might undermine national unity.
Evans, Richard J. (2008). The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis led Germany from conquest to disaster
——————-
Richard Steigmann-Gall argues Hitler was religious at least in the 1920s and early 1930s, citing him expressing a belief in God, divine providence, and Jesus as an Aryan opponent of the Jews. However, he admits that by holding this position he “argues against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed to it.”
Steigmann-Gall, Richard (2003). The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity.
====================================================================================================
Quotes from the Nazi party:
[Martin] Bormann took charge of all of Hitler’s paperwork, appointments and personal finances. Hitler came to have complete trust in Bormann and the view of reality he presented. During one meeting, Hitler was said to have screamed, “To win this war, I need Bormann!” Some historians have suggested Bormann held so much power that, in some respects by 1945, he became Germany’s “secret leader” during the war.
“Our National Socialist ideology is far loftier than the concepts of Christianity, which in their essential points have been taken over from Jewry…”
“When we National Socialists speak of a belief, we do not understand by God, like naive Christians and their spiritual opportunists, a human-type being, who sits around somewhere in the sphere….The force of natural law, with which all the innumerable planets move in the universe, we call the Almighty, or God. The claim that this world force…can be influenced by so-called prayers or other astonishing things is based upon a proper dose of naivete or on a business shamelessness.
As opposed to that we National Socialists impose on ourselves the demand to live naturally as much as possible, i.e., biologically. The more accurately we recognize and observe the laws of nature and of life, the more we adhere to them, so much the more do we conform to the will of the Almighty.”
Internal letters from Bierkamp to the Reich Main Security Office, part of the Bormann decree.
——————–
“A German religion, bit by bit, will present in the churches transferred to it, in place of the crucifixion[,] the spirit of fire – the heroic – the highest sense.”
Alfred Rosenburg, Commissar for Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education of the Nazi Party, The Myth of the 20th Century
——————–
Joseph Goebbels Reich Minister of Propaganda wrote in his diary of Hitler:
“The Fuherer is deeply religious but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish Race.”
- Adolph Hitler: The Definitive Biography
——————–
Albert Speer quotes Hitler stating, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
Albert Speer (1971). Inside the Third Reich.
——————–
The Nazis were nothing like Christians and actually hated them.
Lrn2History
Volmire said
“Hitlers Table Talk’ has been largely discredited…”
By who? Youtube atheists?? Well, I don’t know about you, but I prefer professional historians opinions who consider the book to be “authentic, but unsure of which translation is most true” according to wikipedia.
Konrad Rhodes said
Trevor Roper’s translation was entirely based on the Genoud French translation. The Genoud-Trevor Roper translation of the German original of Hitler’s Table Talks are decent but anyone who knows German can see pretty clearly that the same way the Mannheim translation of Mein Kampf was purposely mistranslated so too were the Table Talks whenever Hitler talks about Christianity. Why? I can only speculate but again if you know German or even want to get a German English dictionary look at the German original and in some cases it is obvious that the section/s dealing with Christianity and the Churches were purposely mistranslated to make HItler appear Anti-Christian. Beyond that, Martin Bormann was the recorder and Bormann was well known to be a serious Atheist with a Rationalist mindset. I can’t help think that may have influenced his records but again I can only speculate. If you want to know about Hitler’s views on other areas the rest of the Genoud-Trevor Roper is okay with a few exceptions. I really marvel that seventy years later we are still see Hitler and Nazi bashing as if WWII was yesterday. When was the last time you saw this kind of thing with Stalin? who was responsible for far more death and destruction and in peacetime no less!
Amanda said
The man killed Jewish people in deliberation. Believers in God. Is that not proof enough?