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The religious beliefs of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, have been a matter of debate. His opinions regarding religious matters changed considerably over time.
While a small minority of historians accept these publicly stated views as genuine expressions of his spirituality, [36] the vast majority believe that Hitler was skeptical of religion and anti-Christian, but recognized that he could only be elected and preserve his political power if he feigned a commitment to and belief in Christianity, which ...
It was Hitler's belief that if religion is a help, "it can only be an advantage". Most of the 3 million Nazi Party members "still paid the Church taxes" and considered themselves Christians. [179] Regardless, a number of Nazi radicals in the party hierarchy determined that the Church Struggle should be continued. [180]
Hitler and several other key Nazis had been raised as Catholics but they became hostile to the Church in their adulthood; Article 24 of the National Socialist Program called for conditional toleration of Christian denominations and the 1933 Reichskonkordat treaty with the Vatican guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics, but the Nazis sought ...
According to Speer, Hitler believed that Japanese religious beliefs or Islam would have been a more suitable religion for Germans than Christianity, with its "meekness and flabbiness". [389] Historian John S. Conway states that Hitler was fundamentally opposed to the Christian churches. [390]
On positive German God-belief (1939). In Nazi Germany, Gottgläubig (lit. ' believing in God ') [1] [2] was a Nazi religious term for a form of non-denominationalism and deism practised by those German citizens who had officially left Christian churches but professed faith in some higher power or divine creator. [1]
Hitler himself disdained Christianity, as Alan Bullock noted: [14] In Hitler's eyes, Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle and the survival of the fittest.
Positive Christianity (German: positives Christentum) was a religious movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity.