Religious Identity and the Rise of National Socialism.
Pseudo-history is very popular these days. Pseudo-history is a species of pseudo-knowledge, i.e., things that everyone knows is true but which are not. Dan Brown has sold millions of copies of “The Da Vinci Code” by satisfying a pre-existing popular belief that original, pure Christianity was corrupted by Constantine as a cynical effort to shore up the faltering Roman Empire. Most Americans have no idea about the situation of Christianity prior to Constantine, but they do have a cultural sense that Constantine did something wrong in making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire and any story that fits that preconception gets fitted into the store of pseudo-knowledge that people carry around with them, such as the “pseudo-fact” that Constantine made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire, which he never did. That honor would belong to Theodosius approximately 70 years after Constantine defeated Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.
Another area prone to pseudo-history involves the religious identity of the Nazis. There has been a constant drum-beat during the last fifty years that the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII, in particular, have some special relationship with or responsibility for Hitler and National Socialism. The New Atheist militant Christopher Hitchens, for example, makes it a point of explaining to audiences that Fascism was simply “right wing Catholicism” and that “Hitler was, of course, a Catholic.” Likewise, there has been a cottage industry of books that argue that Pius was “Hitler’s Pope” that cash in a meme which originated as part of a Communist disinformation campaign.
Pseudo-history is popular because it is easy. It appeals to the vanity of people who want to think they are smart by being told that they things they know only vaguely is right. It also appeals to the desire that people have for a simple story with a clear line between “right” and “wrong.” If we pin Fascism on Catholicism, we have a story that is easy to remember, and one which feels right to the American psyche, which has been nurtured on stories of Catholic conspiracies going back to the Jesuit infiltration of England under “Good Queen Bess.”
But this is a “comic book” version of history; the interesting, and educational bits are in the details, which is why we are fortunate to have several new books that look at the religious identity of the Nazis and which disclose the complex relationship of National Socialism to Christianity, and, more importantly, of modernity to Christianity. Moreover, these books take a largely independent look at the religious identity of National Socialism for two period of time and come to overlapping and compatible conclusions.
The first book I read was
“The Holy Reich: Nazi Conception of Christianity, 1919- 1945” by Richard Steigman-Gall. Over the course of his work, Steigman-Gall shows the movement of National Socialism from an attempt to incorporate a form of Protestant Christianity into the National Socialist movement to a decision to abandon Protestantism and Christianity altogether. Steigman-Gall begins with a description of the religious identity of National Socialism that is compatible with a thread of German Protestantism, but a thread that ultimately can’t pull all of Protestantism into the National Socialist orbit.
Steigman-Gall’s methodology is to look exhaustively at the personalities and groups that provided the interface between the Nazis and Christianity. The names and acronyms fly fast and furious, which is why I eventually started a list of names and the page numbers of their appearance so that I could keep strait who the DC, DBG, BK were and what side they were on.
According to Steigman-Gall, the Nazis positioned themselves religiously under the rubric of “Positive Christianity.” Under Steigman-Gall’s description, “Positive Christianity” was a Protestant German project. The leaders of the attempt to unify the division of Germany into often antagonistic Catholic and Protestant “confessions” under the heading of “Positive Christianity” were themselves Protestants who did not find a conflict between their Christianity and their German nationalism. Catholic contribution to this movement is essentially missing in that Catholic members of the National Socialist party were either “nominal Catholics,” such as Hitler and Goebbels (See “The Holy Reich”, p. xv) or openly apostate, such as Himmler. The “Catholic” Himmler expressed his hatred of the temporal power of the Catholic Church and stated his belief that “to be Protestant was to be German and to be German was to be Protestant.” (Id., at p. 234 – 235.) Protestant Nazis were prone to “display far less anticlericalism toward their church than did Catholics who regarded their confession its temporal message as innately antithetical to their politics.” (Id., at p. 27, 125.) Herman Goring remained a practicing Lutheran throughout his Nazi career. (Id., at p. 120.)
Positive Christianity had its roots in a theological movement that identified the nation and the race – the Volk and the state – as God-ordained. This movement was called the “theology of the orders of Creation (“Schopfungsglaube”) and was advocated by influential Lutheran theologians. (The Holy Reich, p. 34 – 36.) The “orders of creation” theology was a reason that eventually there was no Protestant active protest against the euthanasia of the disabled, despite the fact that there was such an active protest by Catholic clerics. Another movement that suggested a possible marriage of National Socialism and Protestant Christianity was “liberal Christianity.” Liberal Protestant theologians, including Adolf von Harnack, engaged in a hostile anti-semitic rhetoric which reached the point of arguing for the removal of the Old Testament from the Christian canon. (Ironically, this position has also been expressed by the New Atheist debater Christopher Hitchens.) With such scholarly cover, Nazis eventually appropriated Christ as the original anti-semite and socialist by appealing to Christ’s scourging of the money-lenders from the Temple as the laudable original act of anti-semitism.
Throughout his book, Steigman-Gall points out the disparately unfavorable treatment of Catholicism as compared to Protestantism. For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler opined that Protestantism was a better defender of the “interests of Germanism” because of Protestantism’s roots in German nationalism. Hitler was willing to recognize Martin Luther as a “volkish hero equaled only by Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great.” (The Holy Reich, p. 63.) Hitler’s attitude toward Catholicism was more ambiguous, but many in the National Socialist movement unambiguously equated Catholicism with Judaism as a “supranational power” that the Nazis were fighting against. (Id. P. 64.) Hitler was recorded in private moments as expressing his belief that Catholic allegiance to Rome was inimical to the independence of true German character; Nazi leaders publically expressed their belief that “ultramontanism” – Catholic allegiance to an authority “over the mountains”, i.e., the Pope – was a threat to German national interests. (Id., at p. 65 – 66, 70.) As Nazi entrenchment in power continued after the so-called “Seizure of Power” (“machtergreifung”) in 1933, Nazi antipathy to the ultramontane nature of the Catholic Church became more open. ( Id., at 119.) In 1934, Catholic civil servants were expelled from the government. (Id., at p. 120.)
Nazis attempted to court Protestants into joining a “national church” which would become the “established church” of Germany. However, despite the willingness of Protestant churches to accept much of the Nazi program, many Protestants found that attempt by Nazi sympathizers in the “German Church” to remove the Old Testament was a “bridge to far.” This attempt led to the formation of the Pastor’s Emergency League by Wilhelm Niemoller and others. (The Holy Reich, p. 164.) The Pastors’ Emergency League eventually became the “Confessing Church”, which gradually took a more oppositional stance toward the Nazis. Eventually, Hitler gave up on the idea of integrating Protestantism into the Nazi state, although he expressed his disappointment to Niemoller by saying “inwardly stood closer to the Protestant Church” and that he had expected a different attitude from Protestant pastors than from Catholics. (Id., at p. 168.)
After the turn from Protestantism, Hitler and the National Socialists began a movement against Christianity. (The Holy Reich, p. 259.) The chief architect of this movement was Martin Borman. Under Bormann, there was a mass exodus of Nazis from the churches and expulsion of clergy – which meant Protestant clergy – from the Nazi party. (Id.) With respect to Hitler, Stegman-Gall concludes that “even though he never converted to paganism, Hitler nonetheless became increasingly opposed to Christian institutions, and on the face of it, to the Christian religion as well.” Interestingly, Stegman-Gall notes that Hitler never turned against “Jesus,” or at least his conception of Jesus as the “original anti-semite.” In this regard, Hitler remained to a form of liberal Christianity that permitted Christ to be removed from history.
The second book is chronologically prior to Stegman-Gall’s “The Holy Reich.” The book is
“Catholicism and the Roots of Nazis: Religious Identity and National Socialism” by Derek Hastings. Hastings’ book covers the period prior to that covered by Stegman-Gall. Like Stegman-Gall’s approach, Hastings is an in-depth analysis of the personalities and movements that supported or gave rise to National Socialism.
Hastings covers the little known time period between approximately 1918 and the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. According to Hastings, the National Socialist party during that time period was an essentially, and quintessentially, a movement that appealed to a particular strand of Catholicism found in Bavaria. That strand might be called “liberal Catholicism” or “reform Catholicism.” The essence of this form of Catholicism was “nationalistic and non-ultramontane.” In other words, it appealed to Catholics who wanted to minimize their allegiance to the Pope in Rome in favor of their German identity.
Bavaria had long had a tradition of anti-ultramontanism. German Catholic theologians such as Ignaz von Dollinger, who was excommunicated after Vatican I,” had urged German Catholics to shed the “yoke of ultramontanism.” (Catholicism and the Roots of the Nazis (“CRN”), p. 20 – 21.) Bavaria had a tradition of “political Catholicism” whereby various political parties sought to represent the interests of the Catholic Church. Countering such political Catholicism were anti-clerical, anti-ultra-montane parties. The founding members of the National Socialist party came out of the anti-clerical, anti-ultra-montane tradition.
After Hitler joined the National Socialist party, the membership expanded by appealing to this tradition and offering Catholics an opportunity to participate in a movement that seemed to combine patriotism with Catholic piety. The nascent National Socialist party wrapped itself up in the traditions of Catholicism, including having its members attend Mass in uniform and having Nazi standards blessed by Catholic priests. However, running through the early Catholic version of National Socialism was an opposition to “ultramontane internationalism” while maintaining “the purity of both their Catholic faith and their German nationality.” (CRN, p. 95.) In 1922, as part of this movement, Hitler gave a speech describing his own religious convictions at the time. Hitler offered his view of Jesus Christ as the original anti-semite who was a warrior when he “seized the whip to drive out of the temple the brood of vipers and serpents.” (CRN, p. 103.) Hitler’s view was that Christ shed his blood on the cross as an act of anti-semitism. (Id.)
This phase of National Socialism ended with the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Prior to the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had formed an alliance with the virulently anti-Catholic former German General Erich Ludendorff. After his imprisonment for the failed putsch, Hitler repositioned the National Socialist party away from its Catholic roots in favor of a broader Protestant orientation. After this repositioning, many of the original Catholic supporters, including various priests who had provided some respectability to the movement, found themselves excluded from the National Socialist party, and the Catholics who remained either became nominal Catholics or fell into open apostasy.
These two books are useful for pointing out the salient fact that a political reality confronting German politicians was the confessional divide between Catholics and Protestants. Protestants comprised more than half of the German population; Catholics comprised around 30 to 40 per cent. These populations had a history of segregation and antagonism. Any German political leader who wanted to lead a mass movement had to find some way to negotiate this fact.
The religious twists and turns that Hitler made in his rise to the top demonstrate that Hitler’s religious commitment was ultimately to himself. Perhaps his phenomenal success derived from his unlikely position as leader of a minority position in a minority confession. Although there was a continuing strand of anti-papal, or ultramontane, Catholicism in Bavaria, the ultramontane was going to be necessarily the “orthodox” position in Catholic Bavaria. On the other hand, Bavarian Catholics also wanted to be good Germans as well as good Catholics, and a movement that promised both was going to be attractive. Moreover, as a minority position, Hitler wasn’t going to face the same level of competition he would have faced if he had been competing for leadership in a party that had a real shot at political power. It was Hitler’s good luck to find himself in a position where could exploit these factors into becoming the big nationalist fish in a Catholic ultramontane pond.
On the other hand, being the head of the largest Volkisch Catholic party in Bavaria was a lot like being the best hockey player in San Diego; there’s not a lot of competition, but not a lot of upward mobility either. Hitler had exploited the Catholic position as far as it could go in making the National Socialists one of the biggest regional Volksich parties in Germany, but if Hitler wanted to transition to the national scene, he couldn’t get there by identifying the Nazis as a Catholic party. His alliance with Ludendorff gave him the opportunity to reposition the Nazis as a national, non-confessional party.
However, this meant jettisoning the Catholic roots of the Nazis. It seems that it was obvious to Hitler that Catholicism was never going to provide a stable base for a nationalist party. Catholicism is inherently international because of its allegiance to a non-German entity. Protestantism, on the other hand, can be nationalistic in a way that Catholicism can never be. After 1923, Hitler and the Nazis made the shift by favoring Protestantism and becoming hostile to Catholicism.
Nonetheless, there are limits to the ability of Protestant Christianity to accommodate an alien program, and for German Protestants – committed as they were to sola scriptura – that limit would be reached when altering the Word of God was put on the table.
Through it all, it seems that Hitler viewed religious organizations as legitimate expressions of Christianity so long as they were willing to embrace his view of Christ as the warrior anti-semite. Ultimately, Christianity for Hitler was essentially a warrior, nationalistic anti-semitism.
Does this mean that Hitler was Christian? Hitler wasn’t Christian in any orthodox meaning of the word. At best, Hitler’s approach to Christianity was the same approach as that adopted by modern “liberal Christianity” we see too often today where a theologian or social critic finds an all-encompassing-theory-of-everything which he uses to interpret the world. If one sees the world through feminist lenses, one reads the bible and finds a feminist Christ. If one is a Marxist, one finds a Marxist Christ. If one has a theory of “queer politics,” one finds a “gay Christ.” Hitler was an anti-semite, so he found that the Jewish Jesus was an anti-semitic Christ.
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