“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 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]
“I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the
character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has
never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred
years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its
amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been
rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be
built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or
irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long
as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.”
[Adolf Hitler, from Rauschning, _The Voice of Destruction_, pp. 239-40]
“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]
“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 46]
“What we have to fight for…is the freedom and independence of the
fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission
assigned to it by the Creator.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 125]
“This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the
practical existence of a religious belief.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.152]
“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]
“Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another… while the
enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.309]
“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so”
[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]
“Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be
wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in
a fanatical outlook.”
[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, p. 171]
“I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn
splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the
abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my
father, the highest and most desirable ideal.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 1]
“I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from
time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At
all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man
and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna’s destinies: Dr.
Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 2]
“…the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party… was to
assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people
fulfilled their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether
Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, both together and particularly
at the first flare, there really existed in both camps but a single
holy German Reich, for whose existence and future each man turned to
his own heaven.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long
as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and
ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the
scheming of political parties.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of
his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be
in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was
wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and
well-planned.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale
propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological
instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]
“If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked
among the great minds of our people.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 3, about the leader of
the Christian Social movement]
“Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy
enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an
overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted
to live at this time.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]
“I had so often sung ‘Deutschland u:ber Alles’ and shouted ‘Heil’ at
the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of
grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the
eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]
“Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very
first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always
and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence
which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering
and uncertain.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]
“I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art
which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only
the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger’s time achieved
a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its
success.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 6]
“Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along
the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord’s grace
smiled on His ungrateful children.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 7, reflecting on World
War I]
“The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be,
the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it
continues to depend on human beings… If this were not so, the
founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of
this earth… In its workings, even the religion of love is only the
weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance,
however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a
universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 8]
“To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other
great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin
Luther as well as Richard Wagner.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 8]
“The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution,
against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general
views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles. The
first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is
the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In
late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution
which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to
humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who
with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the ‘image’ of God.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
“Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the
poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like
a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of
fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will
hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food,
particularly for the youth…Theater, art, literature, cinema, press,
posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations
of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political,
and cultural idea.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10, echoing the Cultural
Warfare rhetoric of the Religious Right]
“But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought
to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from
now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to
profane the Almighty.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
“While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in
order to win new followers for their doctrine– an activity which can
boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the
Mohammedan faith in particular– right here in Europe they lose
millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all
religious life or simply go their own ways. The consequences,
particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
“The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely
for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral
attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from
the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful
replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine
and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional
authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all
efficacy.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]
“Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a
religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks
idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely
foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined
which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form.
Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter,
but only for a practical and profitable life in this world.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 11]
“The best characterization is provided by the product of this
religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world,
and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his
nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the
new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude
toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to
drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who
then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his
business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while
our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for
Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles
with atheistic Jewish parties– and this against their own nation.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 11]
“….the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil
assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 1, Chapter 11, precisely echoing
Martin Luther’s teachings]
“Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to
change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the
impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times
consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than
in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which
drove them forward.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
“The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this
world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which,
fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its
will against all others.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
“The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations
for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient
world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for
its own doctrine.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
“All in all, this whole period of winter 1919-20 was a single
struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the
young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can
move mountains.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 1 Chapter 12]
“Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable
stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the
fight for the ‘remaking’ of the Reich as they call it.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
“Of course, even the general designation ‘religious’ includes various
basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the
soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being,
etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be
for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this
individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until
emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of
apodictic faith. This, above all, is the fighting factor which makes
a breach and opens the way for the recognition of basic religious
views.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
“Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord
commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and
contributes to the expulsion from paradise.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 1]
“A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the
level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the
consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images
of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
“It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in
this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes
with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly,
but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where
parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on
a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother,
than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring
unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
“That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy,
obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church.
Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is
replaced by the admonition finally 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?”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
“For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have
been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes,
hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and
order.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
“It doesn’t dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is
positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to
keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a
lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-
race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin
against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by
the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in
the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are
trained for intellectual professions.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
“It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life,
but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher
god.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 2]
“Christianity could not content itself with building up its own
altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the
heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its
apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute
presupposition.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 5]
“For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of
a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant
changes in its outward structure? …Here, too, we can learn by the
example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in
part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and
research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one
little syllable of its dogmas… it is only such dogmas which lend to
the whole body the character of a faith.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 5]
“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 God’s 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.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 10]
“In the ranks of the movement [National Socialist movement], the most
devout Protestant could sit beside the most devout Catholic, without
coming into the slightest conflict with his religious convictions.
The mighty common struggle which both carried on against the
destroyer of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them
mutually to respect and esteem one another.”
[Adolf Hitler, “Mein Kampf” Vol. 2 Chapter 10]
“For this, to be sure, from the child’s primer down to the last
newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising
pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this
one great mission, until the timorous prayer of our present parlor
patriots: ‘Lord, make us free!’ is transformed in the brain of the
smallest boy into the burning plea: ‘Almighty God, bless our arms
when the time comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now
whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our battle!’
[Adolf Hitler’s prayer, “Mein Kampf”, Vol. 2 Chapter 13]
“The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral
purification of our public life, are creating and securing the
conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life”
[Adolph Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933]
“ATHEIST HALL CONVERTED
Berlin Churches Establish Bureau to Win Back Worshippers
Wireless to the New York Times.
BERLIN, May 13. – In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi
resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers
League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau
for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to
win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously
belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership.
The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national
revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had
about 500,000 members …”
[New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 2, on Hitler’s outlawing of
atheistic and freethinking groups in Germany in the Spring of 1933,
after the Enabling Act authorizing Hitler to rule by decree]
“I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a
sleepwalker.”
[Adolf Hitler, Speech, 15 March 1936, Munich, Germany.]
“The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost
duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation. It
will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation
has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation of our
national morality, and the family as the basis of national life….”
[Adolf Hitler, Berlin, February 1, 1933]
“Today Christians … stand at the head of [this country]… I pledge
that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy
Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian
spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in
literature, in the theater, and in the press – in short, we want to
burn out the *poison of immorality* which has entered into our whole
life and culture as a result of *liberal excess* during the past …
(few) years.”
[The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford
University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872]