Hitler’s Religion | Richard Weikart
Adolf Hitler is long dead. Nevertheless, his name is still uttered endlessly every day as a rhetorical smear. By drawing usually dubious connections to Hitler and the Holocaust, partisans charge their opponents with guilt by association. This unfortunate cultural twitch has even been canonized as Godwin’s Law or reductio ad Hitlerum. At the top of the list, Hitler’s supposed Catholicism is often used as a smear against Christianity. But was Hitler a Christian? When you get down to the bottom of it, what’s the truth? Was Hitler in any meaningful sense a “Christian”? The author of Hitler’s Religion, Richard Weikart knows more about the answer to this question than just about anyone.
Show Notes
Timestamps more closely approximate the audio than the video.
- 02:45 | Was Hitler a Christian?
- 03:00 | Did Hitler attribute his anti-semitism to Luther or Catholicism?
- 03:45 | Hitler’s views on the influence of the Jews (Paul specifically) on Christianity.
- 04:25 | “Turning the other cheek” versus making war
- 04:45 | Hitler’s Catholic upbringing
- 05:20 | Did Hitler attend Mass, go to Confession, etcetera?
- 06:00 | Hitler’s puzzling admiration of Jesus
- 07:00 | The fabrication of an Aryan Jesus
- 08:25 | Hitler’s pandering to a religious body politic
- 09:20 | The Christian Germans who resisted Nazism
- 09:57 | Georg Ritter von Schönerer, Los von Rom!, and Hitler’s caution in taking on the Church
- 12:12 | What was Hitler’s involvement in occultism, if any?
- 14:15 | Did the Nazi’s bring Tibetan monks to Germany during the war?
- 14:50 | What was the influence of Nordic mythology on Hitler’s thinking?
- 15:40 | So, not pagan, not occult, not Christian … What did he believe about a just God?
- 16:30 | Hitler’s pantheism or personification and deification of nature
- 18:20 | What in our own time might be an echo of Hitler’s religious worldview?